Still, Life

~ February ~

It is February, and I am humming with future tense. 

I am 15 weeks pregnant today. 

There is an alchemy inside me happening all of the time, yet unknowable to me. I could read all of the literature to try and understand it (I won’t), but even still, it would remain mostly unfathomable, just beyond my field of vision. I joke about how intangible this all feels, but the truth is that it is so viscerally hard to trust. Are you still in there? Are you sure? What will our lives — our life — be together?

I refuse to think in absolutes and can only articulate hypotheticals: “If we have this baby.” Underneath all of it is a brimming yearning — I want so badly to believe in you. 

***

For three months I’ve kept you tucked away, outside the realm of spectacle. You are becoming known to joyous, loving family and friends, but I’m not always so good at sharing. 

You are here with me now, still a secret to most, a well-hidden stowaway. I still feel overwhelmed telling those with whom I’m close, and so I practice by telling those with whom I’m not. My grandmother and a few of my closest friends don’t know about you yet, but my piano teacher, a bartender at a pizza restaurant, and a publicist I’ve never met all do.

Next weekend, Dane and I will open the sealed envelope that will tell us, just from a drop of my blood, whether we will have a son or a daughter. We’re quick to assure people that we don’t care, that all we can hope for is a healthy baby. What I usually don’t tell people is that I am aching for something concrete to hold onto, to take this ever-shifting kaleidoscope and rearrange it into something that looks like a life. 

~ April ~

Some women say that the physical experience of pregnancy makes them feel more in tune with their bodies than they’ve ever felt before. I feel like my body and I are two strangers colliding on an unlit path.

Each morning I wake up to my body, which is always a little more foreign than the day before. Each morning, within moments of becoming conscious, I hear about the other bodies. The clock rolls over to 7 a.m., and the radio journalists dutifully report the time, the day, and the death toll. Last week, I woke up knowing how many Americans had died from coronavirus practically before I realized what day of the week it was. 10,000. 12,000. 16,000. 20,000.

I’m six months pregnant, and we are one month into lockdown. In some ways, life is unchanged — I work from home, just like I did before; I cook dinner every night, just like I did before — but mostly, life is unrecognizable. Piano lessons happen on FaceTime, therapy appointments on Google Duo.

Meanwhile, I remain pregnant. I look a little bit pregnant, too. Last week, I gave up the ghost on my normal jeans. Sleep is fitful. The other night, Dane and I both watched my belly twitch as he — yes, he! — kicked. I can’t think of many other experiences so deeply physical yet foreign as watching your own body move that way, not even of its own accord but of someone else’s.

On March 16, the very first week of lockdown and my 21st week of pregnancy, I went to an ultrasound alone. I surprised myself that morning by breaking down in tears after hanging up with the maternal fetal medicine office, which had called to tell me not to bring anyone with me. In the room, I watched the four chambers of his heart, a four-leafed clover in perfect motion. I was always really good at finding those. 

***

We say it to each other like an incantation: “At least the weather’s nice.” In week 5 of isolation and week 26 of pregnancy, spring in Atlanta is flagrant in its beauty. The backyard smells like damp soil and jasmine. Maybe it’s just our own starved senses, but beauty seems more present than ever — the trees aggressively green, the jasmine touting its fragrance. Was the regrowth on the pecan tree always so floridly green? And did it always happen quite so quickly? Or has isolation warped our sense of time such that the cadence of trees moves like the hour hand on a clock? 

It’s growing season, both mine and the plants’. Seedlings muscle their way through dirt to reach the sky. Radish seeds have sprouted. Six-inch-high tomato and pepper plants are settling into their containers, and the arugula has taken over the bed — we eat some nearly every single night. Native perennials — black-eyed Susan, echinacea, blazing star — are putting roots down in the front yard. Blueberry bushes, so scrawny yet somehow already bearing tiny, green, unripe fruit, line the backyard fence. 

Last weekend, at the end of the day, I sat on the couch, bone-tired, and ordered a dozen packs of seeds I surely don’t have space for: two types of kale, squash and cucumber, and, for the first time, flowers — zinnia, calendula, snapdragon, chrysanthemum. I’ll plant some of them this year, share others with friends, and save the rest for next year. It must be nice to be a seed, in that way — suspended in time and space, kept safe until all of the outside world’s mechanisms align in perfect welcome. You simply stay tucked away until the world is ready, when you can then stretch your toes to the groundwater and crane your neck to the sun.

I’m growing, outside conditions be damned. My belly, more noticeable now, feels hard and taut, and even though it isn’t really that big, I’m so much more aware of how it, and I, move through and take up space. He kicks more, not just at night anymore. Dane has been able to feel movement more easily, though the baby still has a penchant for clamming up as soon as Dane lays a hand on my belly. He can also hear us, the apps remind me. I wonder if he listens to me practicing piano.

We have a registry now, which feels a little bit like play-acting our way through a different pregnancy in a different time. It’s not likely we’ll have a baby shower. But with pregnancy, some instincts, like nesting, prevail over tradition. The nursery really feels like a nursery now. Some nights, we unfurl our yoga mats on the rug and take a class on Zoom. The light that comes through the north-facing window is so quiet. 

~ May ~

Today is Mother’s Day. We spent an hour with my mom and siblings on video chat, bumpy with learning curves and accidental interruptions.

Zoom Call Conversation 

Gray’s sister: Happy Mother’s Day.

Gray: Oh, thanks!

Gray’s mom: I can’t see you.

Gray: You can’t see me?

Gray’s mom: No. How do I get everybody in?… I’m sorry. I’m still learning this thing, but y’all are like the size of a postage stamp.

On the cusp of my 29th week of pregnancy, and our eighth week of isolation, it’s a strange duality. Some things, like the kicks, the changes to my body, the near-constant need to pee, are the same things nearly every pregnant woman in history has experienced. Other parts — the masks, the forced convalescence, the news — are unlike anything most women, pregnant or not, could have imagined.

None of my family and very few of my friends have seen me since I was still fitting comfortably into my old jeans. I can’t remember the last time I hugged someone besides Dane. Even the idea of an in-person birthing class seems like a life jacket left at shore a long, long time ago. Instead, we post up on the couch with a laptop and listen to prerecorded videos of a midwife explaining labor pain coping mechanisms into a camera lens.

The nasturtiums sent out their first blooms this week, a couple of ruby and tangerine trumpets stretching toward the sky. The lemon tree is studded with blossoms. I have put so many different seeds into the ground over the last six or seven weekends, I can’t remember what went where. Our ongoing time in the garden since March means that now, every few days might bring a surprise as new life emerges, staggered — one morning, last week’s radishes; another, the calendulas and marigolds from last weekend. These little victories feel like clawed tally marks on a dungeon wall — I witness the passage of time not with dates or weekdays, but with the first yellow tomato flower unfurling, or the very first pod appearing on the garden peas, which are called “Little Miracles.”

~ July ~

Back in March, this month felt so far away — surely by then, I thought, things will be different. Now it’s here, and in so many ways, it’s felt like the world has cracked wide open. This summer brought more death in creeps and, later, surges; the ERs and ICU beds filled up, and the divide grew ever more stark — the careful, and the careless. The pandemic has claimed almost 150,000 American lives. 

And here, at home, we internalize all this news of death and violence while hanging sweet nursery art, folding tiny onesies, and adding Eric Carle and Dr. Suess to the bookshelves. It’s almost impossible to reconcile. But in some ways, life soldiers on. The little tomato seedlings we carefully tucked into soil in March now give us a rainbow’s worth of fruit each week. After what felt like ages of inertia, the sunflowers, zinnias, and morning glories all bloomed at once. A spring and summer darkened by unimaginable death — but still, life.

And, inside me, life! Kicking, punching, undeniable and unignorable life. A life that has felt more and more tangible with each passing week — the idea of pregnancy is less abstract when you can feel something, someone, pressing against your ribs like this.

Three days ago, we found out that the baby is breech: upside down, or right side up, depending on how you’re looking at it. With the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and no time to change course, he’ll have to be born in a scheduled C-section. I won’t have the birth I pictured.

But I’ll say it to myself over and over again, in hopes that one day I’ll feel its truth in my bones: You were always meant to be born like this.

We have spent the last four months — a third of a year — starved for joy, scanning the horizon for beauty, rooting for it in the dirt. Tomorrow, we will find it. Your lungs will meet air, you’ll crane your face toward the sun, and you will come home. We’ll see you in the morning.We’ll see you in the morning. We’ll see you in the morning. We’ll see you in the morning.