Everything Happened | vol. 201

Chicken shit

With Des waiting inside for my second shot

Everything smelled like chicken shit that week.

Poultry manure contains all 13 of the essential nutrients that plants need, which sounds like a cereal commercial but which I actually pulled from a soil science journal just now. They call it “litter,” which for some reason makes me gag more than “manure,” and it is essentially a fitfluencer’s branded green superfood smoothie but for crops. The best way to administer this health slurry to your crops is by “broadcasting”, and broadcasting fertilizer is pretty much what it sounds like: ambiently misting your acreages with liquefied poop.

As you can imagine, the poop mists do not burn off like the morning fog. They linger on, in the form of….it really really smells like shit. Hershey, Pennsylvania smells like chocolate, and Provençal towns smell like lavender in July, and every time I opened my front door in late March, a wall of chicken shit smell accosted me and spiked my cortisol. I wondered why we use “chickenshit” to mean fearful, when they should use it more accurately to describe the kind of crockery-smashing anger I felt when I smelled it.

Anyway, I don’t know if the eau de “litter” was especially bad this year or it was just my (then-unknown) condition. All I know is that I spent the week that I was solo with the kids, a week that was otherwise fine, raging about the smell. Mostly to myself but also to others. On work calls. In therapy. It was how I began all conversations, the way you would if there had just been a crazy storm the night before.

I had to tell my college roommate’s little sister that I was pregnant before I told my husband. Colleen, despite (I’m sure of this) still being seventeen years old, is a board-certified OB/GYN and I needed someone to tell me it was okay to get my second vaccine dose as an, apparently?!!! pregnant person. Because I was scheduled to get my second dose the next morning and I wasn’t going to tell Nick while he was en route home from Ohio in the dark and risk him passing out from shock and driving his rental Nissan over a cliff.

It was a tight timeline I was trying to work with. That Friday morning, Nick drove his dad to his radiation appointment in Cleveland, burned rubber back to his dad’s house an hour outside of Cleveland to teach his three courses via his dad’s anemic wifi. Then he had to submit midterm grades, and drive back home to us on the far eastern edge of Maryland’s butt crack. Saturday, first thing in the morning, we’d pack the kids up and drive back west an hour and a half to get our second vaccine inside the Ravens stadium, which probably has an Idiocracy-style corporate name that I refuse to acknowledge.

There were only about 16 hours between me peeing on the test I had bought solely to will my late period to arrive and us needing to be in the stadium for our second dose. I had not bothered previously to learn anything about vaccination in pregnant women, as a woman who was not going to become pregnant.

So I texted Colleen, and she told me to get the vaccine. A relief. I didn’t have to come up with a different plan. I could avoid thinking about the alternate universe I’d somehow plunged us all into until after I was good and Pfizered.

I had spent the last two years tortured by the question of additional children. I wanted someone to tell me that I can still have a peaceful, fun marriage with more kids, that I could still create and stretch myself and have thoughts in my head beyond school pick-up schedules and TikTok songs. That we would be able to afford vacations, that we would be able to afford retirement, that we would able to expand our hearts and selves instead of dividing them.

When my sister was in multi-organ failure last spring, my therapist told me to stop looking on the internet for answers. Her disease was so rare and her situation so unique, there was nothing for me to learn. “You won’t find your sister on the internet.” She was right.

The more I looked for someone to tell me to go ahead and have the third kid and it would all work out fine, the more I realized how eager I was to assign authority to anyone but myself. I wouldn’t find my family, my marriage, my personality on the internet, among my friends, or in therapy. It was always going to be a risk but that didn’t mean any outcome was pre-written. It would still be my life. And you can’t find your life on the internet.

My second pregnancy was so difficult that no part of me was wanting to repeat the experience, but I felt sure that I would regret not having more when I was older. Unlike my previous two children, conceived from a brain stem place of NEED BABY NOW, a third baby felt more like a calculation. And when Nick told me he felt that our family was complete, it was this difference that made the information easy to accept. You can’t grab every pickle in the jar and still retain the ability to pull your hand out. You can leave some pickles in the jar.

Maybe being chickenshit is actually noble, I thought. Maybe listening to my fears meant I had a backbone. That I was in tune with myself.

Getting the first dose of the vaccine in late February was a thrill like the last day of school as a kid or like arriving at the airport for a much-anticipated vacation. A day where I participated in some administrative drudgery with anti-gravity glee because of what it all means. We also sailed through the process, and were in and out within twenty minutes of arriving.

The second dose felt more like the errand that it was. It was late March, and the crowd, absent before, now looked like airport security. The stadium loomed like an ark and we slowly wound ourselves through the rope barriers in its cold, sunless shadow. The kids weren’t sufficiently bundled for the weather, and we’d not brought snacks or toys with us from the car, expecting an experience like the first dose when we had jogged through the line.

All told, we spent two hours there. It was fine, obviously not fun but we managed. At least Baltimore didn’t smell like noxious fertilizer. The injector stuck me while I wasn’t looking, while I was trying to herd Jane out of people’s way. I felt a little cheated, like I had missed my opportunity to intensely lock eyes with this masked healthcare worker and commit the historic event to my long-term memory. But then, also, it was over, and a football stadium full of people were waiting to be next.

There were not other children there that we saw, and mine made an impression by being 1. extremely cute duh and 2. extremely loud, their treble laughter swelling to fullness like the concrete stadium was an opera house built for this purpose.

As the four of us moved from the injecting stage to the spaced-apart seating for the 15-minute waiting period, our human calamity was clocked by a uniformed National Guard reservist working the event. She motioned to us and we walked over.

"Was this your second shot?" she asked.

"Yeah, for both of us."

"You all are free to just leave if you want, and skip the waiting period. You know, give the kids a break."

"We’re allowed to do that?" I asked. This was incredible news.

Her smile was hidden by her mask but I watched her eyes turn down at the corners as she laughed at me.

"I can’t actually make you do anything. So you’re allowed to do whatever you want."

yr mate,
Evie
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