60 Days Pregnant and Resting My Hand on Mystery
I’ve arrived at 60 days pregnant! I’m slowly feeling more energy and less nausea. I’ll hit the second trimester in a few weeks. I’m feeling optimistic. My stomach is slowly getting fuller and tighter. I find myself sometimes resting my hand on my belly. There’s a tiny, lime-sized baby in there.
Spermpop jokingly asked me, “Why are you doing this again?” and my laughing answer is, “My god, I don’t know.”
My serious answer is something like……
Last Sunday, I got caught in another nausea cycle and couldn’t stop throwing up until close to 1 am. My dad came (on Father’s Day!) and washed my dishes and swept my floor, and my mom folded all my clothes.
Or this exchange with my sister when I was feeling particularly lousy:
And: I went for a second ultrasound to check on that bleeding I was having. Everything looks great. (If you like the nitty gritty, it was a subchorionic hemorrhage, which is very common and usually resolves on its own, as it seems to have done in my case.) Baby was very awake and waving all their hands and legs. Just floatin’ around in that amniotic fluid, having a great time.
I hate every doctor ever. But I have a long-term primary care doctor whom I’ve seen for a few years. (She always wants to meet in November to check on my mental health meds before winter hits, and then she goes, “no wait you’re my summer depression girl” and we have to change it to May.) She told me she’s stopped delivering babies, but she is willing to deliver mine.
(My dad cried when I told him that story.)
The other day, I stood in the hallway at work talking to other mothers, swapping stories about our own first-trimester horrors. I DM with my hypnosis friend in Japan, my old high school pal; my good friend’s girlfriend. We’re all pregnant, and it’s like a thread connecting us through time and space. Yeah, I remember when I wanted to die. I remember how it got better after a while, and then it got worse, and then it got better. I went to my church’s weekly service project, and the grandmas and the moms and me, we all swap these stories. No advice, no tidy morals to our endings. Just a conclusion: Motherhood is not for the faint of heart.
Why are you doing this again?
I recently added a Mary, Mother of God pendant to my necklace. I birthed god into this world, and I did it in a dirty stable, with only a scratchy manger for my baby’s bed. You make do with what you have. It’s like that sometimes: the lows and the less-than-ideal. Regardless, the angels gather round: my friends, my doctor, my sister, my mom. The women and the ancestors. Mary, Mother of God. Pray for us, now and at the hour of our death. Turn the eyes of mercy towards us.
We are in awe of you and the mystery of life under your palm, waving and wiggling in your belly. True sovereignty — willing to go to the depths and lows of our earthly experiences — so you know first hand what it’s like to be directly involved in the creation of new consciousness.
this is why you are doing this.
I've watched you yearn to understand the full measure of being female in this world, so much so that you had to flee the patriarchy at the core of our experience as humans in this world, so much so that you have walked through fire barefoot and crawled on your knees through your own Via Dela Rosa … I've watched with awe and grief and joy as you pushed and pulled and pounded and bent your life until it was a true partner for you on this earthly journey and when you couldn't find a yang to your yin you said (as you always did) “FINE, I'll do it myself”, even though you said for the longest time that you could be happy being the world's best aunt because your sister is almost you, heart and soul, and so her kids are almost your kids but like everything else you've done you want want want to UNDERSTAND, to KNOW, to TASTE and now, with this step, you can begin, finally, to reach the full measure of being female…the echo of NanBarbaraLoisHarrietAHarrietEHarrietElizabethElizabethAnn ringing all the way back to Mitochondrial Eve calling and calling… this is how you answer.