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.