Last night was hard, until it came to the actual work.
The hormones - you wouldn't believe. There's no logic behind it. I logged on to WoW, said hi to Levi (meet Levi, by the way, at levimichaels.blogspot.com - kick ass kid), and couldn't handle anything anymore. I just laid down on the bed and cried. No reason.
Mr. Aran had to handle it. He turned off the computer, turned out the lights, put the kid down, tucked me in, and held me until I was quiet. Then, the kid woke up, and I was in action.
Once I'm in action, I'm usually okay. And when I'm handling the kid, I'm really okay, very patient. I'm not going to drown anyone in the bathtub or anything. I joked with the nurses, during some painful stuff in the hospital, that if he weren't so beautiful I'd throw him out the window. These are the only people in the world that would laugh at that. Everyone else would tell me to consider adoption.
He is fiercely, stunningly, beautiful. More than the pictures show. I can't believe I made him.
I can't speak without choking back tears. Even if I'm just talking about online banking.
***
I ask my inlaws how the baby is doing, if he's okay, because I think that's what I'm supposed to do. When I ask, I don't know if I care.
***
Then I have these nightmares. In the most recent one, I'm still pregnant. My mother and I go to a new gym with nice facilities. We are impressed that the bathroom has sitz baths. These are bath-like things, but you sit in them with your legs out like a chair, in hot water. I took sitz baths in the hospital. They feel good on stitches and lacerations and what-all else I have down there now.
So in my dream, I sit in the sitz bath and I leave, but I've forgotten something, and when I go back to find it, I go through lines and lines of these sitz baths looking, and one of them is clogged. I'm annoyed that someone would clog up a sitz bath. It looks like a big bundle of toilet paper. But then when I pass it again, I see that it's my baby floating in there. And I grab him out, knowing he's okay. And I check for his breathing, and he isn't breathing, and I say, "He isn't breathing," and I say, "He's ----."
***
When I try to tell Mr. Aran this last part, he stops me. Don't even say it, he says.
***
While he was being cleaned up and whatever on the other side of the room, I watched the doctor pull out my placenta and stitch me up. He is a kind man, very patient. Everyone else was over with the baby, who was screaming up a storm. The doctor and I did our thing. He looked at my saddest bits, intent, concerned. He explained that I had a laceration that would hurt, later, when I peed. I watched him pull the string up and thread it back through. It seemed to take a long time. He said there were layers to it.
***
Melanie, my lamaze teacher, said the pain would be like nothing I'd ever experienced before. So I was expecting something altogether new, like I'd grown whole other parts and nerve endings during pregnancy specifically for the purpose of this new pain.
When it came, though, it was just like menstrual cramps. Except altogether different. I try to come up with adjectives, like "intense," but they aren't right. I have to use more words.
It's like being in the ocean. Trying to stay on top of the waves. Every muscle tenses up, no matter what you do, no matter how you breathe. If you turn your back on it, you'll drown in the pain. All the breathing does is keep you barely above the wave.
At one point, my epidural machine, not yet hooked up, started beeping. In all the sound, I couldn't concentrate, and I drowned.
MakeitstopMakeitstopMakeitstop I cried.
***
I can't think of people holding him without picturing him falling. How he'd look, in pieces, on the floor. The noise I'd make. The rest of my life without him. It's impossible. I can't even think of the pain.
He's not breathing.
He's ----.
***
On his second morning in the world, my son and I watched the sun come up together. I explained it all to him: what the earth is and what the sun is, and how earth moves in two different circles, and why it was getting lighter outside, and how it would get dark later.
I'm puting this picture up out of sheer tiredness. I don't like having pictures of myself online, normally. I don't like the way I look in photos. But in this one, I have an excuse for looking like hell, and it was a good moment.
I guess I want you to see that there are some good moments, before you read the rest of this sob story.
***
Postpartum depression and sleep deprivation are two really good excuses for crying while doing laundry, I guess.
***
I feel like I'm babysitting for that nice Filipino family down the street. Any minute now, the real parents are going to come home, pay me five bucks, and take me home.
Mr. Aran says the kid belongs here. He does. It's just me who doesn't. I'm the odd one out, the one who doesn't speak the language, the one-of-these-kids-is-doing-her-own-thing one. It's hard. It's hard when you're not weaning yourself off the Vicodin and dealing with hormone shifts and sleeping in bursts of twenty minutes every few hours.
***
He likes to be sung to. So far he's into "Landslide" and "Once Upon A Dream."
***
He doesn't laugh or smile yet. He can't see well. There's no personality. When I'm done feeding him, I usually hand him over to someone who's more excited about him than I am.
I type these things knowing what a horrible person I am. I would hide it, but I'm just too tired.
***
It was good, that moment when they first put him on my chest, covered in slime and blood. I've seen it done dozens of times. When you're pregnant, that damn "Baby Story" show on TLC is like crack. So I knew what it would look like and I even cried sometimes while watching it.
I didn't cry when I first touched him. My mother was a blubbering mess, enough for us all. I looked at his eyes and recognized him. And not because he looked like me, or Mr. Aran, or anybody. It's like running into someone you knew a long time ago, by accident.
***
My first sleepless night at home with him, I came to an ugly realization. My entire body belongs to him. It was made, inside my mother, for the express purpose of one day giving birth to this guy. I am not much, as a person, not all that interesting, and mostly without purpose. I truly believe that I was put on this earth to do this thing, and all the details that made it happen - from falling madly in love with Mr. Aran to moving his family in to getting thin and healthy just in time - happened just so he could make his way into the world.
This isn't a joyful discovery to make, especially when you used to think you were really goddamn special.
Done
So many people are here now, so I am always dressed. I have this feminist shit compilation book that I've kept for ten years or so, even though I'm embarassed of it, because of a few good pieces inside. There's a picture in there of a naked pregnant woman with her belly button sticking out, and hairy armpits. She's just all naked and joyful in her whatever, womanliness, I guess. Then in a couple of pages she's there again, this time with the weirdest most skewed look on her face, something between extreme pain and happiness, holding her kid, the cord still attached.
My mother and cousin are here, and my inlaws live here now. My mother-in-law has backed up a bit, stopped hovering so much, and that makes me mad at myself for being such a bitch, but truly, a woman nine months pregnant should not be trifled with. If she tells you she's okay, accept that. Don't ask again. And never, ever, under any circumstances, ask when the baby is coming, unless you know there's a scheduled C-section or induction. I mean, never, never. Fucking never. What you don't know is, every goddamn person she's encountered has asked that question, with that same I'm-so-cute concern, and you just might be the one who gets his head bitten off for asking.
If you can't help yourself, call up and ask how she is, ask if there's something you can help with, something you can clean, a freezable dinner you can make, somewhere you can drive her. If she says no, then tell her to call if she needs something. Then hang up, because what she wants is to be left alone, but with the reassurance that there is a safety net of loving people in case she needs them.
So I have a houseful of people now, people sleeping in every room except the baby's. He's doing his best to come out, I think. Rubbing his head against the opening, making it wider, thinning it out, trying to kick his way out. It just isn't time yet. I'm a week away from due but my ma and cousin can't stay that long. He has to come sooner. So the doctor gets all up inside me today, does some scary painful shit they call "stripping membranes" that I can barely breathe through.
***
My feelings about Ma are strange. I'm deeply in love with her and deeply ashamed of her at the same time. From abusive boyfriends to booze, cigarettes to food, inactivity to sunbathing, this woman is on a death trip. She's living like she's twenty, but it's going to come crashing down on her, hard, very soon. She surrounds herself only with enablers, but she loves me so she comes around anyway, then I break her heart by snapping at her for being so fucking irresponsible with her life. I need to chill out on her, I have every intention of chilling out on her, swear. This time, I say, I'm going to greet her with a massive hug, but then I look inside her car and it's overflowing with junk food, all kinds. It's like a cheap, ugly version of Willy Wonka's big main room. Everything is edible. There are candy-covered nuts stuck to the dash, Reese's Pieces, Whoppers, Cheetos, and Diet Pepsis. I should be grateful there is no beer. Maybe she drank it all on the way.
At the movie theater she buys Snickers Poppables and peanut butter M&M's. We can't pass a drug store without her stopping in for Diet Pepsi, orange soda, some new kind of chocolate thing that looks like a potato chip. She does not eat breakfast, but from about 10:00 AM on, the eating is endless. She loses her deoderant, and immediately grabs a handful of nuts before she goes to look. The bread she buys to go along with her heart-attack lasagne tastes like butter with a little bread and garlic in it. The smoke breaks, the cute comments when Mister Aran and I go to work out. It grates and grates on me until she demands a suntan lotion with a smaller SPF because she wants to get a tan - and that's when I snap, "What do you need a tan for? Really?"
She doesn't answer. It isn't until later that I realize the answer in her head, that she never considers, is that it's slimming. It's one step closer to the supermodels. Like her fake-nail manicures and box-dyed roots, it's an easy, temporary beauty step that accomplishes exactly nothing in making her look and feel like she wants. That would take - I almost wrote work, but that isn't right - looking inside. It would take answering those questions, like "What do you need a tan for?" The answer being, I don't need a tan, I need vegetables and water and lean meats and exercise and to quit smoking and dump my loser boyfriend.
She isn't ready to answer. So she just weeps, silently except for the aggravating sniffling, all the way to the beach, with an SPF 6 in her bag.
***
It's just so fucking hard for me to be kind. Patience is another thing I do only with great effort.
***
I think, in order to change, you have to want to change. I don't want to change those things. They keep me from getting hurt. They keep me tough and independent. They keep me,
me.
***
Mister Aran will be in a wedding next month. The bachelor party is on the 30th: a morning of paintball followed by a night of strippers. This is a hurdle I haven't jumped yet. I have eleven days to get over myself in a big way.
Yeah, I make myself sound so cool, usually, but that's only in theory. I'm an in-theory cool chick.
And because he reads this, I'll stop there.
Because I want to be a cool chick, and not only in theory.
***
And I'm done.
Today I put my cinnamon roll on the dashboard to heat and drove North. Ended up in Portland. Knocked on Chuck Palahniuk's door, asked to be introduced to that own Geek Love chick.
"Chuck," I said, "and Katherine," (that's it: Katherine Dunn), "take me to your bar, your coffeehouse, your drag show, your writer's group. I could be good," I said. "Some of my shit is truly good."
This girl with the calf-high boots with the Doc Marten tabs out the top, she went with me aways. Not all the way. It was a sad parting, for both of us, in San Francisco. Left her outside Amoeba on Haight. She had black hair with a shock of pink. I was her first girl kiss. I did it out of the goodness of my heart. She was too skinny for me.
"Someday I'll go to Portland and find you," she said.
"I won't be there," I said. "Even if I'm there, it won't be me today. Go to Monterey, instead. Learn to fish."
She will. At least, she who is her today will, someday. She who is her tomorrow, who knows?
***
"Today," I told Chuck and his partner of many years and also Katherine Dunn, "Today I was supposed to pick up diapers, vaseline, and a thermometer."
Flanked by his ducks, making much quack quack about this stranger at the Palahniuk compound, Chuck said we could all go shopping for these things.
"No," I said. "Enjoy your coffee and beer. When I get home, those things will be there waiting."
Katherine said, "How? If you never went shopping for them, and came here instead with the girl, how will the things be waiting for you at home?"
"I who am me today did go shopping for them," I explained. "I am I who was not me today, sitting here now with your ducks."
There was a long quiet, then Chuck said, "I get the feeling the ducks don't belong to me really."
Katherine sank to her knees next to me and pressed her ear to my belly and I said, "I know what you mean."
This is just a picture I stole from the LiveJournal image generator. I guess it's the first on my blog. I like it a lot.
***
Everything is on hold. Blood and poo do not move. They sit where gravity puts them, like they're on strike. There's a lot of pain now, mostly at night and in the morning. Changing positions is a chore. Picking something up off the floor is only barely possible. Laying on my back feels wrong.
The kid is capable of hurting me now. I should get used to that.
What I'm waiting for, now, is rhythm. Some people freak when I tell them I'm having a fake contraction, which is what I call my Braxton-Hicks stuff. Say Braxton-Hicks to someone without a kid and they'll act like you sneezed without covering your mouth. I have to explain that they're fake, or practice, contractions. Just my body doing its thing to prepare. I know they aren't real because there's no rhythm. No way to time them, no crippling pain. Also, I have to believe that I'll know when it's happening. All this time, my mind has had trouble with this whole thing but my body has quietly done its work without my permission or help. I'm hoping the two converge during the labor.
I refuse to waddle when I walk or windmill when getting up from sitting. I'm stronger than that.
