i spent the morning today home with Oscar, a rare treat for us, his sitter off travelling, we two in the morning sunshine wandering to the thrift store for a serious pants-hunt (one pair of elastic-waist chinos, size 2T, check!) and to the coffee shop for some mother-son lollygagging and discussion of world events and trucks going by outside the window. O took to this grown-up social milestone like he’d been to the cafe born, and sat up on the chair as if he were about to expound on post-modernism or call for a revolution. he waved to every single person in the place and my heart puffed up dangerously and left me blinking back tears.

and then we visited the kittens at the pet store and walked home and i did exotic, housewifely things like vacuum and add soil to my long-suffering houseplants, and we tried exploring the wonders of Play-Doh for the very first time and all the while all i was trying desperately to keep my brain turned off, my internal monologue at a low thrum.

i do not have what, for want of a better term, one would call a maternal instinct. not that i am not maternal towards Oscar, licking his cowlicks back with spit and ever-nimble fingers…or even towards Finn, in the paltry ways available to me…but i lack a pregnancy maternal instinct, the one that enables people to just “have a feeling” that their baby is a boy or a girl or a turnip or what-have-you, the one that keeps them serene and calm and certain in their sense that everything is alright there inside the mystery of the uterus.

this is not entirely a side-effect of my history, either. even the first go-round, when all was innocent and fresh and i was shocked and delighted to find myself easily pregnant, i still had no sense about what was going on with the miracle of life inside me. bleeding bad, heartbeat good. in between evidence of either i existed mostly in the surreal in the early days of that pregnancy, a suspended state of hyper-awareness to what - when nausea was not having her way with me - felt mostly like not much at all, or at least nothing i knew how to interpret.

when one assumes that all this surreal nothing is likely to end okay, it’s still weird. my second go-round, with Oscar, i assumed only that pregnancy was a cruel, brutal joke bound to backfire on me at any minute, so it was weirder. i had no morning sickness to boot, so instead spent the first trimester grieving both Finn and what i continually assumed was the imminent loss of the clearly-nonviable second child i so longed for. only when i began to feel him kick did i begin to believe that he was even alive, no matter what the ultrasounds said. only when i brought him home did i truly, fully believe he was more than a figment i’d conjured from the proverbial broken heart.

with my third pregnancy, two years later, i’d done a lot of work to try to overcome that raw fear, that despair. i thought positively. i felt crappy, and rejoiced in what i assumed were signs that all was well. i was utter hubris; never saw it coming til it hit me square. i had a missed miscarriage.

so this time, freshly raw all over again, i am chastened, hapless. i trust neither my body nor my instincts to tell me if something is wrong. i know i am pregnant, i’m well aware of the myriad of symptoms riding bareback on my hormones, acutely conscious of each twinge, each surge of my gorge. but i have no faith that these symptoms mean anything. and hope? my hope is like this precious, skinless thing that cowers in the crook of me, shivering, waiting for the other shoe to drop and flatten it. some days i am brave enough to dress it in feathers…other days, i cannot even look at it, though i keep it close and warm and pretend i do not feel it shudder.

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they called me back to OB’s office Tuesday to re-do some swabs and talk about last week’s ultrasound. there are some things, they said, but they’re probably not a problem, they’re probably nothing to worry about…the techs here don’t do first-trimester ultrasounds as a rule, so they wrote these up as markers for early loss, as additional risk factors…but we talked to your perinatal in Halifax and she says they’re really quite common, no big deal likely, and you see her in only three weeks so, so long as you get that far we may find that both have resolved themselves by then in any case. you know, that or Dr. Google says they’re signs of chromosomal abnormality if they don’t resolve and they do increase your chances of just having that strong little heartbeat simply stop out of nowhere sometime over the next couple of weeks…but they’re pure flukes either way, unrelated to any of the other problems you’ve had so, um, all we can do is hope.

in the three days between then and now, when my bless-her-heart OB stayed after her shift at L&D so i could come out for another one of those under-the-table ultrasounds because my tilted uterus renders mere dopplers useless, all i wanted was to be living in another part of my life, a time when things are quiet and i have come to terms with whatever happens to me and this fool dream, when the brutality of acceptance is done and this thing with feathers does not hold so much of me vulnerable in its tiny hands.

the heartbeat was still there.

heartbeat good. no bleeding good. tealeaves foretell stress ahead.