first day of spring, and a holiday to boot. freezing rain. crocuses still nowhere to be seen on horizon.

on paper, twelve weeks today…though i suspect that auspicious jubilee won’t really roll around until Sunday or Monday, given what the ultrasounds have shown and my tendency towards longer cycles. silly, to be equivocating about a couple of days…but when you deliver preemies, accurate dating and even a few days extra gestation matter. or rather accurate dating and even a few days extra gestation can matter…they haven’t, in my own personal experience, but they can. so it’s more my doctors focusing on the discrepancy for the moment. my fingers are plugged deep in my ears, and i don’t really want to hear anybody.

maybe least of all myself.

i have been silent, absent. even in person, i find myself wanting to retreat, be left alone. Dave is living with a shell who repeats robotically, i’m tired, i’m hungry, i’m nauseous, shouldn’t that cat litter go out? i am unavailable, at any level below the surface. it’s not a lack of things to say, exactly, but a lack of things i want to say, want to hear myself saying, want to lay out on record. i remember now why i did not start this blog until just two weeks before Oscar was born…i’ve wondered, in the interim, why i hadn’t taken Dave’s suggestion months before, and blogged my way through all that bedrest? but now i remember. at some random point, i began to believe that O would really come to be…and only then was i able to construct any kind of coherent narrative to describe how i felt about him, about carrying him, about being pregnant again. until then, i felt like a balloon full with toxic waste and hope and love and fear and recoil all sloshing around together, and i never knew, if pricked, which would come pouring out.

and i am as reluctant to put my hope out there to be seen and made vulnerable, pitied, as i am to uncover the paranoia, the sludge, the scar tissue that puckers and pulls and mars my relationship to the whole concept of pregnancy.

i don’t want to hear myself when i wake at four in the morning, heart pounding, certain it’s over and this baby has died and that i will simply have to check myself into the psych ward this time because i just do not have the resources right now to adjust my sense of myself to accommodate loss and despair any further, as if that were something anyone could control or delimit by saying, um, no, no thanks, not now. and even more certain that even if i did turn myself, supplicant, on the mercy of the white coats, they cannot and will not help me there, that i will be left alone again, Humpty Dumpty, to put myself back together.

nor do i want to let my penchant for dates and seasons run away with me, and wax effusive about how the long season of advent and waiting after the miscarriage in November now culminates in my thus-far-safe arrival into something like a second trimester just at the beginning of spring, however much those treacly sentiments flit through my brain. they are there and in a sense most narratively pleasing, and yet they are false promise, all bedecked in Easter bonnets. they make me feel frivolous and foolish even for entertaining them. they make me rage at the blind innocence of the “out of the first trimester and you’re fine” discourse that makes those of us who bear its untruths into Medusas in a world where people are uncomfortable being reminded that 12 weeks is no guarantee of anything.

but oh, how i wish it were. just as i wish the snow would go, and it were really spring, and with the mud and the rains and the cruel rawness of April would come the promise of new life as sure as crocuses and the balloon man who whistles far and wee.

i want to know how to speak this. i am just waiting for the ashes in my mouth to turn to rich, red earth, waiting for time to tell. two more seasons, yet, to abide.