Kid Stuff: Training Wheels

Elinor Anna's bicycle has training wheels in the fourth dimension. She pedals up one side of the street and down the other before she squeaks through a crack in spacetime.

"Be careful!" Says her Dad.

"Be carefuller!' Says her Mom.

Even if Elinor Anna melted a whole box of crayons together she couldn't make the colors here. She gathers them in her arms like wildflowers: purgurple, azureal, magentish. She brakes in a puddle of worange to say hello to her fourth dimensional friend, a grinning girl reflected in an extrasolar wind.

"Hi!" Says Elinor Anna.

"Hi!" Says her friend. Their smiles are just the same.

When Elinor Anna chases a rogue comet, her friend does, too. When her handlebar streamers attract a host of galactic butterflies, they both try to catch them. She shares her tangerine, and they take turns throwing the rind into a baby black hole.

Through the crack in spacetime Elinor Anna can see that the sky is growing dark. A lightning bug has found his way through and she pockets him gently.

"It's time for us to go home," she says. But Elinor Anna isn't sad. Because in the fourth dimension, it's already tomorrow and tomorrow and yesterday, too. Because in the fourth dimension she's always already at play.

(Hot) Flash: How to Darn a Sock

Wait until he is asleep. The needle should be sharper than his tongue. Like a cat creeping under the covers for warmth your hand must be, fingers whisker tickling his toes before you strike. There. Pinning the biggest ragged nail to the biggest callused toe to the shred of trouser sock until he howls himself out of bed.

They don't call it whip stitch for nothing.

If you don't like his railing, consider anesthesia. Or a gag. Proceed in even stitches as small as you can make them, smaller even than his esteem of you, bigger than his heart. Machine knits will repair easily, but their absorbency is poor. Take care the thread doesn't become clotted with blood.

When the petty hole, so little compared to the one he tore in you, is closed, knot the thread and trim the ends.

Wash your hands.

Pack a bag.

Call the police.

A #baby Story

How can I begin to tell the story of my daughter's birth? With the end. After more than an hour-and-a-half of pushing and six-and-a-half hours of unmedicated labor, my eyes boiled shut as canning seals, the midwife said to me, "Reach down and take your baby." My baby. Mine. Reach down and take your baby. So I did.

And there she was, only, I didn't know yet that she was a she. I observed her slick head, plastered with dark hair, her roaming eyes and slowly pinking limbs.  So profound was M's wonder that he nearly forgot that we wanted him to announce her sex after waiting so long to find out, these last hours the longest. He lifted her leg, surprised, delighted, and told me, "It's a girl!" We'd been so sure we were having a boy. During my pregnancy I'd had only one dream where our baby was not a ravenously toothed animal, and in that dream, she was a she. It seemed this was the wicked smart and lovely gal I'd conjured in my sleep.

I lifted her from my belly to my chest and marveled at the little person we had made. We named her Elinor Anna. Already she is a passionate and pensive girl, sweet even when her howling mouth fusses at my breast or wordless wails to change and dress her as quickly as possible, please and thank you.

I find I miss her after a particularly long nap, that I need to see her face or risk mine running with tears only to begin to cry when she wakes anyway. I am overwhelmed by her existence. There are such depths in her steel blue eyes, darkening and deepening with every new day we spend together.

I really, really, really love her.

The Waiting Isn't the Hardest Part

I like mysteries. This isn't the answer I can give to the many questions I'm getting lately about baby (am I making any progress, how big is baby, will baby be late or early or emerge with just enough time to be enrolled in kindergarten), but it's the reason behind why I haven't got any answers. Contrary to the amount of preparatory reading I've done for labor and delivery and the number of sensory play activities and ways to manage challenging behaviors I've pinned in anticipation of being a parent, knowing less in this instance seems best. I don't want to spoil the surprise of baby's arrival, and I don't want to get myself wound up over nothing.

While I'm certainly and sorely tempted to ask at recent appointments with my midwives, I'm also a bit of a romantic. In novels and generally more interesting times, a woman had only her intuition and the stories of mothers and aunts and sisters to guide her, astray or otherwise. I imagine she awaited her baby's birth with only as much fear of the inevitable as is reasonable. I've wanted for the same things, and tried to experience pregnancy as naturally as possible and as woman-centric as possible, which isn't to say I don't enjoy the menfolk (and won't be relying tremendously on M, as I have and always will). But this is the place where our bodies are wondrous and strong and capable, when I'll know how to ask for what I need and when.

And I believe that what I need now is to find a little something to celebrate each day, to rest, to dream, and to let my body and my baby do what they already know how to do. Baby will be born whether I know what station he or she is in now or a week from now, whether I have weekly growth scans or whether I've scheduled my induction. I don't need to control this. And I like not controlling it, like not knowing in the same way I like not knowing whether baby is a boy or a girl, the way I like not having yet seen his or her face. We'll meet serendipitously, hopefully the way we were meant to, after so many months of strange intimacy.

First Comes Love

The buzz of your beard trimmer before we go to bed isthe closest I come to cricket song. The kind that kept me up at night when at eleven and twelve and thirteen years old I didn't dream of someday sharing my bed with an (extra)ordinary man, but an elf.

We read together, stealing half hours from sleep as I once bribed my mother, promising just one more chapter before lights out. This is a chapter in our own lives coming to a close: your breath white noise I follow soundlessly to sleep; our baby squirming in my belly between us when we try to make love, before us in every future we might occupy. Until your whiskers shake out sparse and gray, and I haven't the bone strength to make babies anymore.

Ass-Backwards

There are few spectacles more ridiculous at the community Y than a pregnant woman doing hand stands in the pool. Tread-tottering, I come up spluttering, my eight-months-gone belly over turning me before I can turn this baby. Aquatic acrobatics are only the latest in a wild list of things I've been willing lately to try. Balanced precariously on the edge of the couch earlier this week, I felt the blood rushing to my head and baby's lodged somehow more firmly under my ribs. Hips lifted on a stack of pillows, my shoulders grinding into the carpet, I wondered if I could read a book balanced on my breasts at this angle. An ice pack pressed against the top of my tummy as long as I can stand it; an iPod tucked into the elastic edge of my panties underneath my belly, crooning Fleet Foxes and Carolina Chocolate Drops. Come closer, baby.

It's not that I'm afraid of a c-section (my only option at the hospital, ass-backwards as my baby), which isn't to say I'm not. Because I am, big time. But it's more than my desire to avoid unnecessary surgery; I've realized that I want to labor. I want to work for it, want the euphoria that follows twelve hours (or much, much more) of the hardest and best work I'll ever have the privilege to do. I've surrounded myself with She-Ra midwives and doulas, the support of the best husband in the known universe, read a whole hell of a lot, all in hopes of being stronger than I've ever known myself to be. Despite being told over and over again that my birth would never go just as I planned, I psyched myself into a place where I thought that could mean I might eventually need an epidural, or baby would become distressed and I would need an emergency c-section. But the thought of scheduling a c-section before labor begins on its own? Picking baby's birthday? Depresses the fuck out of me.

I would and will do anything to cradle this healthy guy or gal in my arms. Still, we've got time. 25 percent of babies are breech at 32 weeks, only 3 percent at term. Let's conform just this one time, little one.

Crying Wolf

The steering wheel sweat-slipped across my palms. I followed the printed directions to the hospital with my eyes and the manic directives of my heart with everything else, wondering if what I felt in my belly was a thump or the road or my head playing tricks. In my prenatal care sessions we stand together in a circle and hold hands, we repeat after the midwives and the social workers when they tell us to: I love my body, I love my baby. But that wasn't what I told myself in the car on the way to triage after a day without a discernible kick or roll or five-fingered-punch. The word I used instead of love was trust. Trust is what I tell myself I need if I'm going to be a mother. Hell, to be a human. I'm real good at putting my faith in other people, but I wouldn't say I feel like I'm the most reliable, that my heart and head aren't in the business of betraying me and everybody else. My blood pumps an unpredictable bridge between choruses; my nerves cry wolf.

This baby is taking after mama, intentionally or not. The fetal monitor had hardly hit my stomach before the hum-thump of his or her little heart tidal-tugged a smile on to my lips, tears from my eyes. After the requisite twenty minutes without a single contraction, the nurse said she had enough, but left the monitor on all the same. We'd tuned in to a good channel. Why turn it off?

When the midwife waved her magic wand and brought baby up on the ultrasound, she wasn't surprised I hadn't felt much in the way of movement. Baby sat cross legged like a little Buddha in my pelvis, head snug under my ribs. I'm glad at least one of us is totally zen.

But I'm thinking of a quote my aunt shared with me recently, "Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever your heart go walking outside your body." I'm learning to be okay with that. I'm trying to trust this little person to take better care of it than I have.

A Little Less Conversation

My husband talks through my belly button, flared like the wide, wrong end of a megaphone. "Kick twice if you can hear me," he says. The baby does not oblige.

For weeks we've known our little one can hear us, can respond to music or sudden noises or the murmurings of conversation. I've tried playing clumsy Jenny Lewis and Bob Dylan, guitar hum-strumming against my belly, singing Johnny Cash or saccharine sweet classics when I'm lying in bed. Nothing. I apologize when I shout at reckless (or not reckless enough) drivers on the expressway, knowing I'm flooding my baby's ears as well as his or her little body with manic mama hormones.

M doesn't ease into it, though he's had the only response resembling success. With one hand he props his cell phone against my stomach, the other pressed to catch a kick as Cake crackles forth. They're followed quickly by Weezer, Beck, The Beatles and The Beastie Boys, shuffled through in a desperate attempt to wake or rock or roll the baby. The first notes seemed to be something of a surprise if the swift pressure I felt was any indication, but there was nothing like a rousing flip of approval and baby hasn't budged for repeat performances.

I'm not surprised that I want to communicate, want to work out some sort of elaborate hand signal or secret song we can share before we've met, properly. Baby is dreaming or doing already and I want in. And my husband, who has only the still (growing) expanse of his wife to contemplate, always hurried in too late for the infrequent and unprompted dance party, has just as much reason to want for a little conversation.

Maybe the baby is just a better listener. Or maybe we aren't speaking the same language yet.

How High's the Water, Mama?

We slopped into the flotsam and jetsam of discarded things, dead leaves and sewer silt and network cables looped as nooses. Water gurgled from the storm drain like bubbles from a half-open mouth, and it didn't matter how many curse words we filled ours with. It just kept coming. Only a few moments before we'd been filming the hail outside, crouching in the open doorway and scooping the chips of strange ice off of the porch. It was colder than I expected, even for ice. The water in the basement was cold, too, squelching through two pairs of shoes as we swept frantically, first, the books and computer equipment from the drowning carpet. Minutes dragged like trails of sand-thin mud down the drain, strange patterns that tried our patience as we waited for the water to recede, inch by inch.

You emptied drawers of fabric from a rotting-bottomed bureau and I boxed yarn, buttons, stamp ink pads. I carried spiral bound college textbooks, photo albums, paperback novels you'll never read again, and computer manuals up the stairs, emptying them from a water-logged bookcase into stacks I could manage. Twenty times too many I  hobbled up and down. I held my belly when my arms were empty, thinking, I'm not so out of shape for six months pregnant. Thinking, where does all of this crap come from? And can't we just get rid of it?

"This is why I don't like the sound of rain anymore," you say. We used to like storms.

I still try.