My pregnancy-oriented writing has been taking place in three separate modes and spaces: this blog, which I'm now attempting to write on (in?) daily; a Word Doc called "Baby Notes", where I just write and write with no real rules or structure; and a small brown notebook, where I write letters to Ivy, and sometimes to myself. I think I'll start folding the non-blog writing into the blog...
February 12
This. This changes everything. I am new and very much the same. In the mirror my body is mine but I’ve never seen it before—brick-colored nipples at the ends of full real breasts; a gliding swelling curve out in front. And how I think about language—suddenly three letters I know very well that make a word I’ve said who knows how many times, suddenly that is everything, our future: I V Y. Hello.
When she kicks me I imagine her twirling weightless, a tiny astronaut in the footage of the shuttle that they show on the news: flipping around, laughing, floating orange juice escaping from the glass, sailing in bright globs across the room. Bouncing off the walls, the ceiling, her ceiling now is past my bellybutton, two or three fingers above it, and this is all occurring as I sit still in a chair and write this. This is happening within me. She is spinning and spinning with the smallest fingernails one could imagine, with a downy coat of soft soft fur, wee mammal that she is, a face we will soon know.
We’re waiting to know you. The anticipation is wonderful and strange and like most significant new phases you can think and imagine and envision and guess, but you cannot know what it is like until you are absolutely and purely in it. And this time right now is the faraway past, the part where you just didn’t know. The part where you can just sit on your aunt’s comfortable chair and eat cheese and crackers and green apples slices and write and write and wonder. You can lounge in your soft warm bed and ease out when you please and make a leisurely breakfast for one, two if he’s not off to work right away. The part where your breasts were still milkless, your stomach still stretched tight, your instincts still waiting, crouched in the wings, ready to jump in and play themselves out.
February 12
This. This changes everything. I am new and very much the same. In the mirror my body is mine but I’ve never seen it before—brick-colored nipples at the ends of full real breasts; a gliding swelling curve out in front. And how I think about language—suddenly three letters I know very well that make a word I’ve said who knows how many times, suddenly that is everything, our future: I V Y. Hello.
When she kicks me I imagine her twirling weightless, a tiny astronaut in the footage of the shuttle that they show on the news: flipping around, laughing, floating orange juice escaping from the glass, sailing in bright globs across the room. Bouncing off the walls, the ceiling, her ceiling now is past my bellybutton, two or three fingers above it, and this is all occurring as I sit still in a chair and write this. This is happening within me. She is spinning and spinning with the smallest fingernails one could imagine, with a downy coat of soft soft fur, wee mammal that she is, a face we will soon know.
We’re waiting to know you. The anticipation is wonderful and strange and like most significant new phases you can think and imagine and envision and guess, but you cannot know what it is like until you are absolutely and purely in it. And this time right now is the faraway past, the part where you just didn’t know. The part where you can just sit on your aunt’s comfortable chair and eat cheese and crackers and green apples slices and write and write and wonder. You can lounge in your soft warm bed and ease out when you please and make a leisurely breakfast for one, two if he’s not off to work right away. The part where your breasts were still milkless, your stomach still stretched tight, your instincts still waiting, crouched in the wings, ready to jump in and play themselves out.
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