Everything Happened | vol. 154
On my walk home from work yesterday in the new inky-black reality of standard time, a neighbor raking his leaves in the darkness looked up at me, face obscured under his hood, and growled, “…….won’t be long now.” My winter coat doesn’t zip, obviously, so I walk around with it open, the bulbous surprise of my belly popping out of my long black coat. I laughed nervously, my kneejerk response to strange men commenting on my body. I mean, he’s not wrong! A bit menacing, what with the after-hours yardwork and the way the information was conveyed like a threat, but correct!! It won’t be long now.
I knew this but didn’t feel it until a few days ago. I think Nick is getting there, too. He gchatted me asking if he should track down a used Mamaroo (fancy baby swing). We had a Mamaroo once that we loaned to a friend in Ohio, and didn’t bother to repo before we moved. The notion of making a trip across town to collect MORE THINGS that we’d have to pay to move 500 miles to Maryland was preposterous to me this summer. “Are you getting in baby mode??” I asked him. It warmed me. He has not been in baby mode, not for lack of enthusiasm about the baby itself, but because we’ve been submerged in the dumbest year of our lives. Death, illness, illness, a dissertation, a disabling first trimester, mental health crises, moving admin, moving itself, selling the house, starting new jobs. To say nothing of the incarceration of migrant families, the kidnapping of migrant children, the stupid Supreme Court, the quiet?? receding of abortion rights fakjs;faskdjfa;slkdjfa;slkdjf;sk. But even just within the cozy walls of our house, it was garbage. This summer, especially, was SO DUMBBBBB
You: How dumb was it?
Me: IT WAS SO DUMB THAT
I was still first trimester sick even though we had crept into the second trimester. We ate takeout every night because the smell of food cooking felt like a hate crime. Besides, we didn’t have the bandwidth to plan dinners for the week or keep on top of grocery shopping. I would make specific, mystical demands about what type of takeout would be suitable each night, and then I might eat it and I might not. All of these demands would be issued from the couch, where I beached myself as soon as I got home from work. The fatigue was so potent that I felt simultaneously like I was vanishing from life like a fading photograph in Back to the Future, and like there were packets of lead sewn under my skin. I recused myself indefinitely from Desi bedtime because I could not handle the physical effort required to supervise teeth brushing, wriggle him into jammies, or sit upright on the floor by his bed to read stories. Most nights, I was asleep before my child was. So it was on Nick, who was desperate to finish his dissertation before we moved, before he started his job!!, to do all the bedtime stuff. The problem is that Nick needed the evenings to work, and that Nick, lol, has narcolepsy. Every night, he would be dispatched into Desi’s dark room with its soft nightlight glow and its womb-like sound machine, and he would have to try not to fall asleep or try to be effectively woken up by the alarm he set on his phone. If he did wake up or manage to avoid falling asleep, he would go to the grocery store and write using their wifi until 2 or 3 in the morning. If he fell asleep, he would lose that night of work. My hyperfocus on my own misery prevented me from accessing the experience of anyone around me. Nick was trapped in an untenable situation but what could I do but shuffle dead-eyed down the hall past him and into bed for the night, the daylight in our bedroom windows still hours from dimming.
On our wedding anniversary this fall, I declared this the worst year of our marriage. All year I’d wanted to rescue him from his responsibilities, but his voice was so faraway and drowned out by the roar of this pregnancy. I didn’t like or love him any less, more than anything I wanted us to run away together, go off-grid, ditch the pursuit of advanced degrees and the mortgage and the mouths to feed. Maybe after a few months in Nicaragua or whatever, we could send for Desi?
They say that second+ pregnancies move fast, which has not been true for me. I think it’s harder to wait this time, in part because the pregnancy has been much more challenging than my first, but also because I know first-hand what happens next and I’m greedy for it. There was a great Tom Scocca essay that went around last month, Your Real Biological Clock is You’re Going To Die , where he describes the grim calculus, upon becoming a parent, of how much time you might get to know your children. It didn’t read to me like a call to choose parenthood, or even a call to have children earlier in life necessarily.
More than anything, it read to me as a reassurance that having children earlier, if you are pretty sure you want to have children, has benefits that are difficult to grasp until you’ve already crossed the veil. Into parenthood. Not death. But a certain kind of death! You spend your adolescence and early adulthood fighting so hard to self-actualize, be the person you wanted to be as a teenager with no power and no money and a curfew and a crappy hometown! To move through the world as you want, as you feel you have always deserved! It feels outrageous to add the parent-child relationship to that hard-won freedom, to intentionally self-limit the world that is open to you. How are you to trust, to believe that a love more thunderous and immersive than you’ve ever known is the flip side of those limitations. That it’s like first love, where you want to hang out at their retail job while they’re on the clock just so you can breathe more of their air.
I can’t believe we get to do it again, for better or worse, the untidy melodrama of adding a new person into our hearts and our home. It’s hard to wait for, even though I know I have to go through labor and birth again to do it, and I know in my cells how much that suuuucks. There are no baby showers, no local friends to fill our freezer with casseroles, no registries. In our storage unit, there is a Rubbermaid bin of big brother’s newborn clothes that we will launder soon. We will be struck dead of the smolness of these clothes. It feels like we are going into this alone, but I don’t mind, because I don’t need the posse of hype-men this time around. I already know I’ll be obsessed with this baby. And not just because the baby is at least two years away from asking me if my pubes are poop.
yr mate,
Evie
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