2 weeks

August is two and a half weeks old. We’re tired, anxious, and smitten. We sleep in little bursts, which can work for a few days and then you start to feel like you’re moving through life in slow motion. You start seeing double and you forget what day it is, not that it matters. In any case, there’s much that I don’t want to forget, but probably will if I don’t record it somewhere:

:: the first week was punctuated by bursts of my crying. I’d weep because I was afraid something might befall the baby. I’d cry because I was convinced that he’d stop breathing and I’d cry because I was quite sure that his being alert signified a life-threatening neurological disorder. I’d cry because I felt overwhelming love and I’d cry because I was afraid that love was doomed. And then, for no apparent reason, I stopped crying.

:: the crying was a symptom of a much larger feeling of utter vulnerability. Within days of Aug’s birth, I realized that I felt more attached to him than I had to any other being, which, of course, is nature’s intention. Nevertheless, this attachment felt (and continues to feel) more terrifying than anything I’d experienced.

:: august loves to study the light. A few times every day, I catch him enraptured by the light filtering through the windows. His eyes go wide and he doesn’t blink for a full minute. He seems transfixed in these moments, enamored by certain slants of light.

:: i haven’t been able to get anything done. Aug and I sit together all day and most of the night. I’m sure that I’ll figure it out soon, but I just don’t quite understand how mothers of newborns manage to cook breakfast or do the dishes. The most we can master is taking a walk in the spring sun. Thank god the weather is turning.

:: i’ve been overwhelmed by the generosity of others. For the last week, friends have been bringing dinners over for us. This has saved us the burden of cooking when we’re exhausted and J is back at work. Mom and Don have also helped tremendously: taking Homer for hikes with his true love, Lucy, cleaning my house, doing my laundry, making sure my cup is full of hot tea. My sister, Molly, also swooped into town last week and made everything work for four days. J’s parents were here too and we enjoyed introducing them to their newest grandson.

The first 48

Scenes from August Emanuel's first two days. Language to come...

the yucks

I had such high hopes for spring break. I planned to race around for a week and tie up all sorts of pre-baby loose ends. I wanted J and I to go out to dinner and maybe even a movie. I wanted to cook and freeze meals. I wanted to finish my knitted blanket and do a bunch of grading. Instead, I’ve spent the last seven days bedridden. A week ago, I started to cough. By Tuesday, I was feverish and at the doctor. Somehow I contracted a late winter flu (even though I did get a flu shot) that has left me completely incapacitated and with a cough that sounds like a tortured seal. So I’ve spent all week chugging codeine-laden Robitussin, sleeping in two-hour increments, and praying that I don’t go into spontaneous labor while I’m this sick. I trust that my body wouldn’t do that to me, but I’m worried about not being fully recovered by Thursday, when I’m scheduled for a c-section. Yesterday I read that this cough can linger for weeks and the idea of it with six-inch incision makes me queasy (and compels me to research belly binding). And don’t even get me started on my concern that I’ll infect the baby with my yucks during his first days of his life.

But there are bright spots, yellow ones. Yogi ginger tea with whole lemons and lots of honey. A curled up mutt who just wants to give love. A cozy, cotton, lace lovey from a talented sister-in-law. And well, there's also the bright spot of March Madness just as we're about to enter a house-bound phase...

Finishing

They say that you’ll never really be ready, and of course we’re not. We’re not ready for the sleep deprivation (though I’ve done some good training in that area for about six months) or the emotional demands. We’re probably not ready for the love or the worry or the joy. But we are ready in the way that older, bourgie parents can be ready. We have the stuff or at least enough of the stuff that we won’t need to make late-night Walgreen's runs to get a rectal thermometer or a snot-sucker. We installed the car seat yesterday and I’m determined to pack the hospital bag this week. Our taxes are about to go to the accountant and the car will get serviced this week.

I made a linen ring-sling this week following this pattern and got to set my first pleats. The knitted blanket, following this pattern, continues in fits and starts, though this is my latest distraction. The external version failed this week, but I did manage to learn something about my pain tolerance (it’s higher than I thought). This means that I’ll have a c-section two weeks from tomorrow or sooner if I go into labor naturally. Thinking ahead about the recovery and our staircase has meant readying a little cradle in the den with diapering supplies nearby. I should be able to perch myself on the couch during the day and have a place for the baby next to me.

Yesterday I made a quick foray into the world of rompers, following this pattern with some revisions. I think I’m in love. Josh thinks it a little "fruity," which is exactly my goal. I should have lined up the whales, but alas, this really was just a first attempt. There will be many more. So long athletic wear for babies; hello shortall. The yellow and teal quilt was a lovely gift from a Berea friend and artist. I love it, especially the binding.

And in case you needed proof of my full-term girth, here it is.

Slow

36 weeks and 4 more to go. I have found myself slowing down considerably in the last few weeks. I seem to be able to handle one major—or minor—activity a day and then I’m pretty well ready for bed. Homer and I spend hours upon hours snuggled up. He seems to relish my laziness because it means more ear scratching and belly rubbing. I've taken to pleasure reading (imagine that!). Occasionally we waddle out for a walk, though he quickly grows impatient at my pace. I try to explain to him that almost 50 extra pounds hasn’t been so easy on my joints (nor my psyche). Note to self: if there’s ever a next time, LAY OFF THE BEDTIME CEREAL.

This weekend my Berea friends gathered for a lovely celebration for the baby. The members of my knitting circle gifted me terrific creations: felted moccasins from this talented lady (oh my are those incredible!), leaf green overalls (coming home from the hospital outfit?), a striped pull-over that needs some last minute touches, those dear stitched giraffes. We feasted on delectable treats and watched the three babies from last year attempt their first crawls. It was intimate and lovely and I felt blessed to have found such a remarkable group of new friends. And Armistead drove in from Nashville and Mom from Michigan, so old and new were able to come together for the first time. Mom and Don will be back in a few weeks and hopefully they'll find their perfect winter nest in Berea.

My to-do list has shifted and shrunk for the coming weeks. I’m still feathering the little guy’s nest, but now I need to think about birth plans and hospital forms. We need a dog-sitter and I’ve promised myself to clean the closets before labor begins. Next week I’ll know if I have to schedule a c-section and if so, that will be two weeks later. And I suppose that I should stop teaching at some point, but who knows, maybe I’ll just keep showing up until the very end.

Turn, baby, turn

“Pretty please turn.”

“Turn, damn it.”

“Please, please, please turn.”

“I’ll send you to the best college, no questions asked, if you’ll just turn.”

“I’ll give you anything you want if you agree to go head down right now.”

I feel like I’m making a deal with the devil. But I’ve reached that point. Total desperation. For weeks, my existence has been dominated by my efforts to flip my baby from the breech to the head-down (vertex) position. I lie inverted on an ironing board propped on the couch (often trying to simultaneously read for class and coax the stubborn boy to move). I take over the incline bench at the gym and do the same thing (looking like a  surfacing whale). I drive to Lexington every other day to visit a chiropractor who uses her magic and produces all sorts of promising sounds in my spine. But alas, he doesn’t move. On Monday she said that she doesn’t think there’s any more she can do. My sacrum is happy, my pelvis aligned. Each night last week J and I burned compressed mugwort next to my little toe. I nearly got smoked out, but I told myself it was totally worth it. I’ve been listening to a self-guided hypnosis track that is supposed to help me visualize his turning. None of it is working.

I haven’t shined a flashlight between my legs. That’s where this WASP draws the line.

This little guy has been breech for at least eight weeks and he’s been wedged on my right side for nearly the entire pregnancy. His skull is lodged in my ribs and he expresses no interest in finding a more suitable position. If he doesn’t flip in the next two weeks, I’ll be forced to schedule an external version, and the going success rate for that procedure around here is 50%. That glass is definitely half empty in my estimation.

If the version doesn’t work, I’ll be required to schedule a c-section for week 39, about March 20th or so. I won’t die and neither will the baby. Many women would probably greet the idea of a planned, scheduled c-section with delight. Not me. I’ve spent the last eight months thinking about what kind of birth I want. I’ve spent the last ten years reading and thinking about natural childbirth. I hired a doula. I took a hypnobabies course. I’ve read everything Ina May ever published. I’m ready to go. Bring it on.

And for as long as I can remember, I’ve thought about childbirth as a kind of fundamental rite, an essential part of being a woman. Part of this belief arose from my ravenous consumption of birth narratives. I first stumbled on the websites exclusively devoted to birth stories during my post-doc, when I was forced to sit in front of a computer for nine hours a day. I’d take editing breaks by reading half a dozen stories of unassisted, crazy-ass births. I carefully doled them out over several months. Before long, I realized that I had read more than a thousand birth stories. For awhile, I was reading stories and listening to a podcast with even more.

I found these narratives utterly captivating, which on the surface is a bit strange, right? I mean, they all have exactly the same narrative arch: a woman begins labor with baby inside her and ends with a baby outside of her. There is rarely a dramatic plot twist; the denouement offers only the slightest variations. And yet, as a genre, I find them deeply compelling. They satisfy my desire for confession and revelation, and collectively, they suggest that telling one’s birth—or birthing one’s story—is as urgent as delivering one’s child.

A planned c-section, you see, dramatically forecloses the possibilities for my own narrative. What will I be able to say: we scheduled the section for 9 am and by 9:52 our son was born. Full stop. That will be it. Don’t try to tell me that this will be a compelling story to tell. My chance of living that long narrative will be gone before it could have started. I will join the ranks of the surgical birthers, not clique that I’ve been courting.

I recognize the perversity of this sorrow, that somehow I’m mourning the loss of a narrative that I’ll never have, when in the end, I’ll have the baby instead. How silly. A year ago, when I was losing a pregnancy, I would have spit in the face of a woman like me. I should still probably spit in my face.

And yet, narratives of all sorts are important, essential to our being human. If they’re not, I’ve wasted the last fifteen years of my life studying and teaching them.


p.s. Yes, I am hoping that publicly exorcising this angst will be the necessary psychological step to liberate this baby to turn. I’m repressing nothing. You’re free, baby, so turn!

Prettying up the Poop

When J and I were preparing to get married a few years ago, I spent an ungodly amount of time and energy thinking about the way that everything looked. I committed that common sin of thinking about the wedding instead of preparing for the marriage. Fortunately, it turned out mostly fine on the marriage front. I mean, I have every day to think about that. I probably spend too much time thinking about that. In any case, I spent all this time—as people in my cohort tend to do—thinking about table settings and escort-cards. I believed that if I chose the perfectly representative escort-cards, they would signify “Anneness” so much so that I’d hardly have to be physically present. I remember earnestly wanting to strike this balance between outdoor ease, casual refinement, and crafty, DIY elegance. You can imagine why I spent the week of the wedding popping Xanax and why J and I still have never looked at all our wedding photos. My aesthetic desires collided with pressures of time, budget, practicality, and reason. But at the time it felt so important...

And so as I approach all of the preparations for the birth of our first baby, I’m trying to force myself to remember this lesson: that there needs to be some sort balance between aesthetic desire and pragmatic need. But it’s more complicated than that. At this point I’ve spent far, far more time thinking about the baby—reading about the baby, journaling about the baby, talking to the baby—than I have spent thinking about the way child preparation and childrearing appear. Maybe I’m maturing...

But still, I backslide. Take, for example, my project of the last couple evenings: sewing cloth diaper wipes. [I suppose I should preface this whole discussion by noting that we plan to cloth diaper the wee one. If you’re grossed out by the idea of poop in our washing machine, best to skip to the next paragraph]. I decided that if we were going to devote time to cloth diapering, we might as well cloth wipe as well. So I went to the fabric store on Monday and bought a few yards of cheap flannel, cut it up, and began stitching around the perimeter of each wipe to prevent fraying in the wash. This was supposed to be a grossly utilitarian product. These wipes will become, of course, poop-stained before too long. And yet...well, I couldn’t just leave it at that. So I found myself changing the thread and bobbin every few wipes. I told myself that I was doing this to stave off the boredom of sewing squares of fabric, but as my pile began to resemble a rainbow, I knew I had deceived myself. This was intentional. I knew what I was doing. I wanted my damned diaper wipes to look just right. How nuts is that?

And then there was the matter of the crib bumper. Bumpers are no longer, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2011, recommended. They have been potentially, loosely linked to SIDS and suffocation. I found this out in the middle of my bumper-sewing weekend a couple months ago. Any reasonable, sane person would have received this news with glee and thought to herself, “great, one thing off my list.” But not I. Instead, I almost mourned the news and then decided that as I was nearly finished with them, I might as well complete the job. I used the same logic when I put them in the crib last week: I might as well see what they look like. Frankly, I’m worried what this logic might turn into: I might as well see what they look like during the day and remove them each night for sleeping. [I have to admit, by the way, that I’m a little confused about the suffocation threat for a baby who cannot even roll over, but why go there?]. In any case, here again aesthetic desire trumped practicality...and maybe even medical science.

There’s also the list of 22 more things that I want to make or finish before he arrives. Instead of getting shorter, the list keeps growing and growing. Sometimes I think about just breaking down and buying some of the things instead of running a continuous one-woman-sweat-shop in my off-hours. But somehow each time I search etsy or amazon, I get this queasy sensation in my stomach and feel like I’m doing wrong by my child, that lump of flesh and bones who will, in all likelihood, never notice my efforts, at least not for half a dozen years. And so I’m left to reason that I’m doing all of this inane stuff not for the baby, but for myself, in order to continue to tell myself a particular story about myself, one that is just now translated into the setting of childrearing. It’s the wedding all over again.

But that explanation feels somehow insufficient. I think it feels so because on some core level, I believe in the therapeutic benefits of carefully constructed environs. Our home, of course, is truly modest. Our decor is, to say the least, humble. Our rooms are not the spaces of design magazines or interior blogs. I often look at them and fantasize about what I would do with $5000 or even $500. As simple as they are, though, they convey a certain feeling of comfort to me each evening when I get home and each morning when I wake up. I see their flaws, of course, but I also take pleasure in their small triumphs. This is, I know, one of the most elementary facts of homemaking. I’m not breaking any new ground here. But nonetheless, this simple lesson feels urgent in the context of child preparation. I neither want to abandon the commitment I’ve made to my own aesthetic environment nor do I want my child to inhabit a space that feels wrong or haphazard.

I don’t kid myself that what’s happening here is anything but a kind of bourgeois rejection of the accoutrements of mainstream child-rearing in favor of a different, but no less culturally-constructed, aesthetic.** I don’t want plastic in my house. I don’t want battery-operated flashing lights in my living room. I don’t wants chemicals and crap littering my spaces. I don’t want that stuff because somehow it feels like a violation of the environment that I’ve spent so much time cultivating. It may be wasted time, but it’s time nonetheless. The question is why don't I balk at wooden dollhouses, felted balls, rough-hewn play kitchens, homemade mobiles.

Everyone seems to suggest that once the baby arrives, I’ll no longer have the luxury of having these boxing matches in my brain. That may be so. But it doesn’t seem totally wrong to try to establish some sort of organizing principle for myself in terms of the aesthetics of child rearing here in the middle of Kentucky. Any advice?

**This starts to get at a much larger question/problem that’s been kicking around in my head for the last half dozen years about embedded class and cultural implications and assumptions of aestheticized childrearing on mommy blogs. A problem that I’ll surely inhabit in coming months and years...

Together

For the first time in fourteen or fifteen years of teaching, I’m doing it with someone else. That someone else also shares my house, my dog, and the baby currently crowding out my internal organs. J and I have talked for a few years about wanting to teach together, but this semester, we’ve finally taken the plunge, and I wanted to be sure to leave a record for myself about how this has worked and what it feels like on most days.

We’re teaching a class on the Civil War and the American imagination. It looks a lot like a course I would teach without J and it also looks a lot like a course he would teach without me. We’re reading novels, poems, autobiographies, and other primary sources. We’re also looking at movies, engravings, and photographs.

So far we’ve met four times as a class, twice to talk about Uncle Tom’s Cabin and twice to talk about Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic. The class is lively; all of the 23 students have been vocal and they actually talk to one another, instead of just to us. We’ve already contended with the rebel flag, “southern pride,” Uncle Tom, hardcore reenactors, and the general seepage of white supremacy in the South. We’re not moving in chronological order, which has J crawling out of his skin, but me feeling liberated from historiographical norms.

In just four classes, I’ve already had a chance to observe just how gendered our individual styles can be. After the first class, J observed that I seem to be “obsessed” with conveying my own authority. Damn straight. He also observed that I needed larger clothes to cloak my whale-like form from our students. Recovering from the punch to his midsection, he conceded that he has male privileges in the classroom. He doesn’t have to think about how his body is on display nor does he have to convey authority in order to forestall critiques of female intellectual incompetence.

It was during our meeting on Tuesday when I watched—during a particularly heated conversation about racial violence—as he knitted his brow and repeated, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I just don’t know what to say about that.” He then dramatically fell back into his seat, whipped off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and loudly whispered (his choice mode of sounding smart and urgent), “I just don’t know how to respond to that.” It was, of course, all for effect. He did know how to respond, but he could recur to this rhetorical ploy because he is not liable to be considered an airhead or insufficiently mature. If I were to try it, I can only imagine the titters of students, “Does she know anything?” He can exercise a full range of approaches: the fool, the doubter, the dunce, the devil’s advocate. I, on the other hand, do indeed feel the need—but perhaps not the obsession—to convey authority.

I’ve also noticed that male students pose questions directly to Josh, but that’s an issue for another day....

Holiday Scenes 2012

We’re back in Kentucky and have begun another semester of teaching and writing. Our holiday travels were long and refreshing; we drove to Michigan and then flew to California for J’s Dad’s 70th birthday celebration. Homer enjoyed two uninterrupted weeks of pleasure with his pal Lucy in Traverse City. I flirted with various unfinished projects and finally put the final stitches in a pair of felt elephants (doesn’t every child need felt elephants on the bookshelf?) and a hooded sweater for a friend’s boy born Monday morning. We walked the beach and stared at the unending Pacific. J and Homer traipsed through the northern snow and we decorated cookies late one night in December. Now we’re settling in for ten more weeks until the little man makes his appearance.