Past Due

Every month we get a bill from the reproductive biology lab at the hospital in town.  It is a bill for storage:  they are housing five vials of sperm that belong to us.  We bought six vials shortly after Grace was born, hoping that six would be enough to grow a sibling.  It turned out to be enough and then some, hence the storage.

Storage is $35/month, although the bill is usually for $70, or $105, because I often forget to pay the bill.  Or just don’t pay the bill, because keeping that sperm cold is so very low on my list of priorities these days.

“We should do something about the sperm,” I say to Chris every few months.

“Already?”  she always asks.  (This is a woman who has unopened mail from 2003 and can’t bear the thought of throwing away her textbooks from Brandeis which she attended circa forever ago.   I know that she is going to be of no help to me here.)

I don’t want another child.  I value my sleep and my marriage (not to mention my pelvic floor) far too much to put that sperm to its intended use.  But I keep paying the bills.  Straight friends have asked me if letting the vials go is the equivalent of getting a vasectomy and it might be, although thawing the sperm doesn’t mean we can’t have more kids, it just means we can’t have them with this donor.

Perhaps it’s more like giving away the pram June used to sleep in, or the Petit Bateau kimono-style sleepers that we bought in New York the summer I was pregnant with Grace.  And while there was a time when I would have said that I wanted no reminders of all the uncertainty and stress, the tortured decisions we made about which bank and which donor and who is available and who is in quarantine and who is identity release and whose grandfather has Parkinson’s, much of my suffering has faded in the persistent glow of our daughters faces, and I find myself left only with my affection for #5437 and all his attending logistics and details.  Perhaps this affection is why I keep paying the bills.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I got a bill for $70 and instead of paying it I called the lab and asked them to send us a request for disposal form.

I would love to say that a deep feeling of calm came over me when I opened the bill, that a clear and true voice spoke to me when I saw the tell-tale blue envelope in the mail and  I knew that the time had come.  But the truth is that the bill came a few days after I bought an iphone and I had been trying to figure out what I could cut from the monthly budget to cover the $30 plan increase.

This is the truth:  when you buy sperm to make a child, when you read on-line profiles of potential donors and make phone calls to reserve vials and make phone calls to release said vials on ovulation day because you and the person you love want to grow a human being in your body and you can’t do that without the sperm, well then the sperm has both a preciousness beyond all known value and a fair market price.  And you must let it have both.  The sperm and its donor are the essential second half of your dream’s beating heart, but they are also a man you do not know and a frozen vial of jizz.  They just are.

This does not mean that I don’t adore our donor, or that when he comes to mind (conjured by a storage bill or bad habit that one of girls has developed that most certainly must be something they inherited from him) I don’t want to drop to my knees in gratitude for the alchemy of generosity and science and commerce that make our uncommon bond possible.  It means that in using his sperm to fertilize my eggs I have had to enter into one of the most absurd and holy and frustrating relationships I will ever have with another human.  It also means that I have to know when to think with my ovaries and when to think with my checkbook.

On the day that June was baptized, a older congregant approached me after the service to offer his congratulations.  “I am so lucky,” he said as he reached for my arm, “to be alive in a time when these girls could be born.”

I think I was holding onto those vials as a way of holding onto our bumper crop of luck, as a way of extending all the blessings that have been bestowed on us during these years of wishing and growing and  tending our children.  But I can see now that our luck and our blessings have traveled far from their icy origins and that those origins were never meant to be more than just that: beginnings.  And we are not beginning anymore.  We are on our way.

June in Winter

June Harper was born at 2 a.m. on March 4th after a long 10 days of waiting and a fast and furious labor.   Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine she would be so lovely.

A picture, and a story, soon.

The Due Date

. . . has come and gone. By just two days, of course, but I like being dramatic about it. I like being dramatic about most things right now. And I have plenty of material. A foot of snow fell on Friday. Then, Chris woke up at 3 am on Saturday with such acute back pain that it took her nearly two hours to get from the bedroom to the living room. Luckily, we have good friends who span the eastern-western medicine spectrum, and in the last 24 hours she has had a pu-pu platter of pain relief including acupuncture, narcotics, herbs, and homeopathic remedies, not to mention a steady supply of hot water bottles and and tea. All this for a woman who has taken a total of six Advil in the 10 years I have known her.

It was frightening to be so close to labor and to have the person I consider my birth plan unable to sit down on the edge of the couch. I spent much of Saturday in tears.

But today is Monday, and Chris is much, much better. My father flew in late last night, so our ratio of those who can help to those who need help is getting much better. I have a feeling that this very accommodating baby is just holding tight until things are a bit quieter around here. All day I’ve been telling the wee one to just come on out. It’s not going to get much quieter than this.

This Morning at the Post Office. . .

End Thoughts

I have wanted (and tried) to post so many times in the past week or so. I have wanted to say something funny and true about what it feels like to be at the near end of this pregnancy. But everything I write feels somehow too thick, or too serious. And when I try to lighten up (if Chris is reading this, she is thinking, “She’s been trying to lighten up? When? Where was I?”) what I have to say doesn’t seem relevant or remotely funny.

I started writing something about voting last Tuesday, and how hopeful it was to stand at the table in our drafty town hall with Grace pulling on my coat and this baby kicking around inside me as I struggled–right up until the last moment– with a decision whose profound significance will not be understood by my children. But I could not capture that moment. And I could not tease it from the icy day, from the fact that Gracie refused to leave the town hall when we were finished, from how hungry and tired I was, from how hard I pulled her arm and forced her down the wheelchair ramp and out to our car, how enraged and powerless I feel when she defies me and her unborn sibling prevents me from simply picking her up making her do as I say.

I also started writing about the careful plans I made for Gracie in case I go into labor this week, this week before my mother arrives and becomes the plan to end all plans. I wanted to say something about how I finally understand why people schedule inductions. But as soon as I typed those words I realized that they weren’t true– that I would rather suffer inconvenience and drama and even a stressful goodbye than give up the chance to feel that first contraction or the flood of breaking water or whatever it will be that will transform me from a pregnant to laboring woman.

And then there were all the ideas about work swirling around in my head, ideas about my perennially unfinished book and my just-budding freelance life that will now have to go without tending for who knows how long. There were recollections of a recent visit with a writer friend who just had a baby but was smart enough to finish her book first, and how, driving away from her house, I let myself forget (as I like to do) that I wanted a child more than I wanted a finished book, and that I was willing (and still am) to live with the consequences of that fact.

The truth is that I am adrift. If I were feeling more empowered or more energetic, maybe I would say that I am on a precipice. But that word, that image, seems to suggest motion and exertion and hiking boots, and I’m pretty still these days. I am slow.

There are bursts of frantic energy when I do things like draft elaborate charts that explain how to pack Grace’s lunch box so that my mother can do it without us (as though the woman can’t figure out how to pack a lunch). And there are hours of lethargy and fog that seem to pass in just a few minutes– when I sit down to rest for a moment and suddenly it is Grace’s bedtime and I haven’t yet made her dinner.

There are moments when I look at myself in the mirror and I think, my God, I have been pregnant forever. And there are moments when I look at myself in the mirror and I think, my God! I’m pregnant! How did that happen?

There are moments when I think that being able to fasten the bindings on my skis and kick out across our meadow without fear of falling or contracting or doing some kind of damage to this baby is all I want from this life, and moments when my chest clenches tight against the truth of what will be lost when this body is solely mine again.

There are days when I hardly see Grace, days when Chris gets her up and makes her hot chocolate, gets her ready for ballet or The Creamery, or whatever else they have planned for the weekend. Days when the two of them go out into the world without me and return—Grace clearly relieved and revived by her time with a parent whose endurance and availability do not falter as mine do. And there are days when Grace and I are never far from each other’s sight, and those are the days when we seem to miss each other the most.

I was not this tired when I was pregnant with Grace. There are many reasons for that, the most significant being that I did not already have another child. It was also summer, and I wasn’t working at all, and I was doing lots of yoga and eating and sleeping well, and I wasn’t the teeny bit anemic I am this time. And I was naive, which I have come to believe grants you a certain energy. I am not so naive this time (or at least I hope I’m not). I am also, I would venture to say, more alive. My heart and my body have been tested, and so has my marriage, and so has my mind. And these things, all of them, have been proven. These things have bent and wavered and endured.

I still wish I had something more to say. I still wish I could capture this day, one in a string of freezing cold days of snow and wind and waiting, one I will look back on in just a few weeks and marvel at the idea that there was ever, ever a time when we were not four.

The Obligatory Preg Mama Blogger Tummy Shot

I know I’m supposed to lift up my shirt, and that I was supposed to be doing this every month for all 9 months, but this is what I’ve got to offer. Me and Glinda (Gracie’s newest name for the baby, even though she’s never seen The Wizard of Oz) at 37 weeks.

A real post is eminent. I promise.

Falling

I fell on Sunday.

I fell while walking down a perfectly clear sidewalk on a perfectly clear day next to my friend Patsy on our way to brunch with three other mama friends. There was a tiny crack in the sidewalk, and I was wearing Dansko clogs (which, as Patsy pointed out, are a good footwear choice only during those times in life when you can actually see your feet) and I tripped. For a moment it seemed I wasn’t going to fall, but then there I was, smack down on the pavement. My hands broke my fall, but because the distance between my outstretched hands and my belly is currently about 2 centimeters, my belly broke my fall, too.

So we called the midwife, just to be safe, and she said I had to come down to the hospital and be monitored, just to be safe. Just then our friend Dor drove by on her way to meet us at the restaurant. She and Patsy decided we would all go to the hospital together. We drove by the restaurant to share the good news with Karen and Mary, who decided they would also come to the hospital, in a separate car, with food.

An hour later, there we all were: me in a hospital bed, my shirt open, a fetal monitor strapped to my belly, my friends crowded around on chairs and stools in our corner of the triage room. We ate bagels and fruit salad and laughed when Mary–whose partner spent 10 days in the birth center last year, first trying to convince their baby girl to come out and join them in the world, and then recovering from a c-section–embraced all the nurses and circulated pictures of baby Lily. We laughed when Patsy had to fess up to the reason that her name was so familiar to the midwife on call (Patsy plays racquetball with the midwife’s partner and, just a few days ago, mistakenly hit her so hard with the ball that she fell over).

We laughed so much that the nurses kept having to come back in the room to adjust the monitor on my shaking belly.

Eventually Dor and Mary and Karen had to leave and then it was just Patsy and me. She had brought her ipod for me, and had found a stash of People magazines at the nurses’ station, but mostly we just talked and talked about the 10,000 things we had been meaning to tell each other in the past week.

Around 4:30 the nurses said we could go home, that they had a good long strip on this baby and everything looked fine.

On Sunday I tripped and almost, almost caught myself. But I couldn’t. Turns out I needed my friends for that.

Happy Thanksgiving

While I have had to buy nine tubes of chapstick in the last nine days because I can never remember where mine is, the one thing that never seems to leave my mind is lines from books or poems I haven’t read in years. Lately, it’s this haiku: While in Kyoto listening to the cuckoo birds/I am longing for Kyoto. I even remember the day that I heard Robert Haas recite it, how he explained that the poem is about how as humans, we are more comfortable in a state of wanting than we are in a state of being. “We are constantly,” he explained to the perennially dense Teri Gross, “trying to rehabilitate our longing.”

This would be my version of the haiku: I am 27 weeks pregnant, longing to be 27 weeks pregnant. While this might seem like an odd sentiment for someone who has done a fair bit of complaining about her physical state, I seem to have reached that elusive moment of gestational equilibrium when the baby needs just as much from my body as my body can (fairly) happily offer. I’m not terribly uncomfortable or tired or Tums-dependent. And because this is most likely the last time I will be 27 weeks pregnant, I feel myself wishing that this time was still be on the horizon, waiting for me.

When I was pregnant with Grace, I loved feeling her move. Loved her kicks and squirms. I loved how eventually I could tell the different between her feet and her butt and her head as they pushed against my skin as though it were a tent whose door she couldn’t find in the darkness. Every kick was an occasion for “feel, feel! It’s moving!” and with every kick the reminder: you’re having a baby. You are going to be someone’s mother.

But this time I don’t need to wrap my head around the idea that I am indeed having a baby (that is going to come out of my vagina) and I am already someone’s mother. And this time, the kicks don’t surprise me and they don’t get much of a mention. What they do is remove me–for an instant–from whatever I am thinking or saying or doing and bring me to that planet where only the baby and I live, that closed system of heating blood and evaporating hormones, of the baby’s elongating limbs and sprouting eyelashes, my shiny hair and darkening nipples. The planet where each of our psyches occupies an opposite pole: the baby’s, which knows me but does not yet love me; and mine, which loves the baby and does not yet know it. The kick holds me there for just an instant, and then sends me back to unloading the dishwasher or folding laundry or unwrapping fruit leather with my teeth while I drive. But it sends me back altered, ever so slightly altered. And it is the alteration I will miss. It is the alteration I would rather look forward to than look back on, would rather anticipate than experience.

It is the alteration that I am trying, really trying, to just be grateful for today, this cold and snowy day before Thanksgiving when I am nearly 27 weeks pregnant with my second child.

The Hormones Made me do it

(alternate title:  the post only a grandmother could love.)

Yesterday I was transferring photos over from our old computer and ending up spending far too much time looking at them, especially the ones from Grace’s birth and the moments after. This one in particular makes me think having another baby is just about the best idea we ever had.

Lessons

In his book The Rural Life, Verlyn Klinkenborg writes: “winter is the only season that has to be relearned.” His words have been with me through much of this past week, like when I was trying to find wool socks for Grace to wear under her rain boots or when I was trying to remember if we have any long underwear that might fit me or when I was trying to bury my nose in the top of my fleece jacket to keep warm on my morning walk, convinced that I have never, ever been this cold. It is hard for me to imagine that soon I will trade a morning walk for a morning snowshoe and it will be 30 degrees colder and I won’t really mind.

In this past week of falling temperatures, minor fiascoes, and illness, winter is not the only thing I have needed to relearn. Grace and I spent lots and lots of time together at home last week, lots of time I had slated for other things, like writing and exercising and paying bills and getting our house ready for this new baby. Some of the time we had together was lovely, and much of it was not. One afternoon, when we had fought over what she would eat for lunch and I had given in and prepared what she wanted, she refused to come to the table to eat. She was lying on her stomach, coloring, and when she said, “I don’t want lunch,” I yelled so loud that I saw her little body jump. My anger was spinning so fast by then that even the sight of her fear didn’t stop me. I slammed around the kitchen as Grace made her sniffling way to the table. I took a breath, sat down next to her, and watched her as she slowly picked up a forkful of food and started eating. She was trying very hard not to cry, and it was the sight of her holding back that finally brought me out of myself and back into the room. For the first time in hours I really looked at her, and I could see how she was struggling with the tightness that comes with trying to eat when your throat is full of sobs.

“I am very very sorry that I yelled,” I said.

She leaned toward me. I pulled her off her chair and onto my lap. She started crying.

“I was frustrated,” I said, stroking her hair. “But I should not have yelled so loud.”

I wanted to weep now, too, wanted to ask her to please forgive me. But forgiveness is not her job. Forgiveness flows but one way in our relationship, at least for now. Which is why getting so angry at her, getting so out of control, can only end badly and without catharsis. Getting angry with her is a mess I must clean up by myself.

Soon enough (February, to be exact) an entire week at home will be the norm, not the exception. I will go days without any significant time to myself. I will be short on sleep and our house will be messy and the washing machine will always be on. I’ll forget to blow out my hair before it’s too dry and too curly to matter; I’ll leave mug after mug of tea on the counter, cold and steeped beyond drinkability. What I must relearn, I realize after this week with Grace, is that these facts, however frustrating they might be, are the repercussions of a life I have chosen for myself and for my child(ren). In the past year I have wandered outside the world of full-time mothering and I love what I have found here. But there’s a baby coming soon and it will probably be my last and I will be damned if I spend its babyhood feeling angry and resentful and stressed about all the things I’m not doing.

Chris lights a fire in the wood stove every morning now. A hard frost is no longer worthy of warning, or even comment. And the kicks I feel below my ribcage are the kicks of a real live baby, not those early flips of a being that’s more tadpole than human. Winter is here, and before it ends I’ll be a mother twice-over. Before it ends, I have a few things to learn.