Early spring 2021 was a weird one. I’d had one dose of the Pfizer vaccine and felt the fizzy possibility of life being fun again. My kindergartener’s school went from two days a week in-person to four days a week. It was looking like day camps would be open to their former capacity that summer. I got a notification for cheap fare to Puerto Rico in my inbox and we booked tickets to go as a family for the long Thanksgiving weekend. I envisioned myself walking around candy-colored Old San Juan in a cropped Farm Rio top that would surely go on sale before November. It wouldn’t erase the past year of my life but it would help. Drinking a sweaty can of Medalla would help.
I emailed friends that I thought might be game: “Hey, we’re doing Thanksgiving in San Juan. You guys should come.”
I took a home pregnancy test mostly to will my tardy period to arrive. Nick was in Ohio still, taking care of his dad. Desi and the babysitter we couldn’t afford were building couch forts. My Outlook was going ding ding ding ding ding.
I’m a daydreamer, a fantasizer, a space cadet, a revisionist. I’m never not thinking of my life in terms of a fractal of alternate possibilities blazing out in laser beams of light, obscuring my current reality from view. But I did not once consider that the test might be positive. Then Polly’s spaceship crashed into the garage. Like Alf.
Still on the toilet and holding the pee-splattered test, I did the period math. This pregnancy, should it hold fast, should I choose to continue it, would result in a baby due November 22. The same day as our flights to Puerto Rico.
Within hours, I felt nauseous and my jeans became hostile. Third baby really pulls the ripcord. I would spend the next few months in bed when I wasn’t working. Twitter gave me anxiety, Instagram was boring. I downloaded TikTok to my phone. I flicked up to advance to the next video over and over and over again. Did you know that after a certain period of time, TikTok will scold you for being on the app too long? Don’t worry though, you can just swipe right past the admonishment and see more strippers getting ready for work and counting their earnings.
I spent so much time in bed on TikTok that the trending audio from that time period gives me a Pavlovian carsick feeling if I encounter it now:
cause I’m hopeful, yes I am, hopeful for today
Into the thick of it! Into the thick of it!
They’ll call me Freedom /just like a wavin’ flag
You want me, I want you, baby/my sugarboo, I'm levitating
“Levitating” especially colonized my brain. The family noted my absence. I tossed, between the sheets, clammy and miserable. I watched Dua Lipa grind up and down on her mic stand like a sexy carousel horse. I overexposed myself to the song in an effort to exorcise it from my brain. Nothing worked. It was braided into my bones.
The song was engineered to be a TikTok mega-smash and it succeeded. The music video was created in partnership with the app which is immediately obvious if you watch it. A glowing portal appears to her in the desert. She approaches it and is beamed up. The art deco spaceship elevator has a brass TikTok symbol where an antique dial might be. Dua is flanked by well-known capital-c Creators performing what we all recognize as TikTok dancing: small movements on a single axis that can be captured by a tripod-bound device in portrait mode. At one point the elevator appears to actually become a phone? with Dua and DaBaby trapped inside.
It’s a campy disco feast with light-up floors, metallic platform heels, and icy glitter makeup. I assumed that the video would end with Dua getting deposited back on her home planet, having completed a groovy, intergalactic journey. She isn’t. A hatch is opened up, emptying all the dancers into space. They levitate in the void only to land on a rotating halo-shaped interstellar dance floor. They are trapped in space, trapped in an infinite dance. They are trapped in Phone. So was I.
The first trimester eventually ended and I got out of bed. I wasn’t on TikTok as much. Not only because I wasn’t spending as much time in bed but because even the look of the user interface made me feel ill. I was freed from Phone. Feeling better gave me an opportunity to get excited about the baby. I was excited. I was scared.
It is science-fiction to create a new life and unfortunately my mind is not wired to world-build. Picture a person that’s never existed before….you can’t do it! You’re picturing a distorted version of someone you already know. I couldn’t decide which was going to be worse, giving birth to a clone of myself, my husband, or existing kids, or giving birth to a life form never before seen on this planet. Sometimes I would pray (to the baby? to God?) and say I was sorry but I never knew specifically what for. Just, like, all of it.
Polly was born last November in Maryland and not Puerto Rico. She is better than anything I could have invented even though I sort of invented her. We are trapped in space with her, trapped in love with each other, doing the hustle around and around the elliptical grind of caregiving and family routines. Am I wearing the metaphor into the ground? We never returned to our home planet. We met her at the perfect time.
yr mate,
Evie
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"Sometimes I would pray (to the baby? to God?) and say I was sorry but I never knew specifically what for. Just, like, all of it."
A not-your-first pregnancy distilled into a perfect sentence.
Evie, I loved reading this! Polly sounds like such a cute little Alf!