On pregnancy and planting seeds during this great pause.
Story & Illustrations by Martha Park
April 29, 2020
On the first day of the new year, I hiked five miles with my husband, trying not to think about the pregnancy test I’d left in its shrink-wrapped package on the ledge of the bathroom sink. There were no signs of spring, then, a chilly gray day, and at the end of the five miles I felt so tired they might as well have been fifty. On the second day of the new year, I took the test, watched two faint pink lines appear side-by-side.
At the doctor’s office a week later, as nurse after nurse asked if I was excited, I began to suspect I was letting them down. I wondered how to seem more excited, how to perform the kind of joy they must witness in pregnant women every day, but mostly I felt unmoored from myself, as I often do in times of transition, when other people seem to see the new life I’ve walked into more clearly than I can. It reminded me of the days following our wedding, when coworkers I’d known for years asked what they should call me. I’d never considered changing my name, and this unexpected question made me feel like I’d been erased from their memories, from my own life.
Now, on the edge of spring, clouds move constantly overhead. When the sky goes dark before a storm, it resembles nothing so much as the roving darkness I saw on the ultrasound screen, revealing the inside of my body and the stranger growing there, heartbeat already tumbling. He looked so far away, he could have been pulsing on some other planet, some distant moon. I never thought pregnancy would feel so alien; this new world growing inside me, without stopping to let me know.
When I find out I’m pregnant, I immediately look ahead in my calendar and schedule two weeks off work to write. I feel an intense need to protect the life I’ve had, the life I want to have, before my life transforms, becomes unknown to me. But by the time spring arrives, I’m at home, watching the internet as a new, unknown virus sweeps its way across the globe. Cancellations arrive in my inbox; first the residency, then a reporting trip, then a reading at a small college. I feel the life I’d hoped for slip away, leaving me alone with the life I have.
Pregnancy moves me into a higher risk category, so I don’t leave home. When my husband goes to the store, he wears a mask and gloves. He unpacks the groceries on our screened porch, wipes down each box of cereal, each can of beans or tomatoes, before stacking them in the pantry. He disinfects each day’s mail. Our dry hands smell constantly of soap.
Restless, I walk laps around the backyard, digging tiny trenches and tossing handfuls of seed at the saturated ground—zinnias, sunflowers, marigolds, as well as flowers I’m certain can’t grow here—delphinium, bells of Ireland, hollyhocks. Every morning, I can’t help but check to see if there are any over-zealous seedlings, the way I check my own body for the signs of life I’ve seen and sensed only on the ultrasound screen, or in the steady heartbeat I hear, whirring, as the doppler sweeps across my skin.
At my first appointment, when the ultrasound technician asked if my husband and I had been trying to conceive, I realized this word still seemed relegated to the world of thought, to concepts I could or could not grasp. Conception itself seemed like a far-off idea I hadn’t quite wrapped my mind around.
I’ve always compulsively dated all my journal entries, but in the weeks after I found out I was pregnant, I stopped, suddenly, without any reason I could articulate at the time. Looking through my journal entries from those early weeks, time is muddled and confused, and the world is drained of detail. I didn’t seem to see the world, much less make note of it. Now, five months pregnant, I know I should feel him soon, our baby moving inside me, and part of me is newly hungry for evidence, proof of the new life that each appointment confirms is still with me. It’s that part of me that I sense, in these early weeks of spring, noticing the world around me again.
I watch the internet as the virus sweeps the globe, but also as my friends learn to knit, bake rhubarb pie, play music, dance, tell each other we will be okay. I collect eggs from our chickens to leave on friends’ porches, and on the short drive, a rare excursion, I marvel at the redbuds, dogwoods, and cherry trees erupting in sudden blooms. I find deliveries on our own doorstep: new books, bundles of green and purple kale from a friend’s garden; banana bread still warm from my sister’s oven; a baby blanket from our neighbors who’ve just heard our small piece of good news.
The world seems far away, and closer than ever. When I lie down at night, I sometimes sense a new motion in my own body, sudden and insistent, not at all conceptual. In the backyard, tiny green shoots appear from the wet ground like a miracle, like something totally mundane. All these small signs of the world yet to come.
Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. Her work appears in Guernica, Granta, Ecotone Magazine, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
