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yesterday morning, about 4:15, i woke up with a start.

heartburn.  pee break.  adrenaline.  chomped down a few Tums, had some water, tried to quiet my mind, to plump the pillow and slide back into sleep.  no chance.  got up and watered all my plants instead.

nesting?  nah.  first day of a week-long writers’ conference.  Ann-Marie MacDonald, live and in the lovely,  sardonic, talented, like-to-go-drinking-with-her flesh.  Carol Bruneau and Anne Simpson leading faculty workshops, in intimate groups; real live agents and publishers sharing advice.  peers - or rather, People Who Are Not Really My Peers as They’ve Already Written Novels - to share work and consort with.  all at a gorgeous resort, twenty minutes from my house, with fantastic food.   basically, candyland for anyone who aspires to be a wordsmith.  or who likes chocolate cake and good vocabularies.  since i found out in late July that i’d been granted a bursary to attend this shindig, i’ve been drooling…and intimidated, but mostly drooling.  looking forward to this has given me a focus other than the coming baby to set my sights on, to fantasize about.  and so yesterday morning, i was just all atwitter with anticipation.  i figured.

the first day of the conference saw me away from my house from 8 am to 10 pm, a first since long before the whole bedrest epoch began.  i came home exhausted but delighted, full of ideas and stories and a dessert so rich and high in my gorge i considered writing it its own poem.  i did jot out a few scenes on my actual topic, and fell into bed weary and richly pleased, grateful for this opportunity.  proud of myself for pushing myself to actually try such a bold thing as running in these heady circles.

about 4:30 am, i woke up with a start.

heartburn.  pee break.  adrenalin.  and a weird, non-rhythmic dull ache in my lower belly.  swallowed the usual suspects, tried the whole sleep thing again, gave up.  got up, did a couple of loads of laundry, folded all the baby sleepers, organized our finances.  no longer all atwitter with the first-day jitters, i forced myself to actually take stock of my state of being.

nesting?  um, i think so.  i am not a morning person.

i was hanging curtains - quietly - in our bedroom at 5:55 when Dave turned a bleary eye on me and muttered, “that’s a sign of labour, you know.”

yep.

33 weeks, 4 days.  still too early, but not so early that there’s significant long-term risk to her if she comes…just a rough start, wee thing, and possible complicated weeks in the NICU.  they will no longer stop labour if it starts in earnest.

the dull ache subsided about 9:30 am, in the midst of the writing workshop’s group feedback session.  i had to skip a session of the conference later in the day for this week’s appointment with my OB; cervix short, soft, thinning.  it appears ye olde cerclage stitch is letting go…or at least a loop of it has already.  and if i have any contractions or further aches at all, from here, i’m to go in and we’ll take just take it out.  i may be fishing-line-free sooner than i’d imagined.

or not.  the way my body’s been cleaning itself out, the way it feels like it’s gearing up without me, i’d guess yes.  except i’m usually wrong.

oh world, you clever little trickster.  sure, this is the only week out of the past six months when i’ve actually got other plans that don’t revolve around gestating.  is it really necessary to remind me of my small, snivelling place in the universe by threatening my still rather itsy-baby baby with imminent arrival when we’ve come this far?  is it truly that entertaining to deprive me of sleep right when ye olde brain is actually on call for regular all-day usage for the first time since, um, March?  must we play this little maybe-we’ll-go-to-the-NICU game when Oscar’s sitter is actually on holiday all next week and Dave’s dad’s in the hospital, rendering Grandmaman unable to come to babysit?  seriously?  you’re funny, world.  i get it.  i don’t run the circus ’round here.  you’re the boss, and i salaam to your charming sense of humour.

but could we just wait ten more days, or so?  September is such a lovely month for birthdays, i hear.  and Ann-Marie MacDonald has a reading Thursday night at the library.  it’s gauche to break your water at the library, world.  got it?

please. let her stay safely put.  or at least let me sleep, while i practice trusting my body to do what it needs to.

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this whole nesting thing - which goes waaaay beyond my usual OCD issues regarding tidiness - still appears to be having its wanton way with me.  i just sorted a bunch of outdated files.  my recycling?  you could eat off it.

i’ve never had this before, not really.  for those of you who have been similarly possessed by forces of frantic evil…is there any truth to the rumour that this is a harbinger of things to come soon?  what was the time lapse for you between the onset of Stepford Wife symptoms and the arrival of bebe?

somebody tell me a month, ‘kay?

(and then shoot me when six weeks from now i’m still pregnant and eating my words AND my screen, and the world is cackling bwah ha ha ha ha.)

we left Korea for good that winter.

the fall beforehand was golden and rushed, one of those queerly vivid transition epochs where the body and mind are open and receptive, future utterly unknown and thus all changes possible answers in masquerade.  it is heady, that hurtle towards the break, and for me it was a productive time -i started writing professionally for the first time in years, took up jogging for the first time ever.  looking ahead, i tried to lay ground. looking around me, with eyes that knew i was leaving, i tried to store all that i could of the city and culture, the small apartment with its sliding glass doors, the autumn light pouring in, the sweet-sour tang of mokkoli and cheom-chi kimbap, the hectic market across the street, laden with strange fruit that had become familiar.

in casting ourselves upon the fates that fall, we went whole hog.  i threw out the birth control pills, had my cystic ovaries checked at Our Lady of Mercy Virgin Mary Obstetrics and Gynecology - the head OB had learned his English at a Catholic college in the United States, he informed me proudly - and one Monday morning in November, watched two clear blue lines materialize on a pregnancy test i’d had to play charades to acquire from the apothecary’s on the corner.  there is a lot of vocabulary that a life spent in classrooms and bars does not necessarily teach.

every season of life has its soundtracks.  this one was a single CD, a nothing-else-quite-like it literate and intimate collection of folky imagery-laden songs that a friend who lived in another city had brought one weekend in October, that we played all through that fall and early winter as we planned and packed and i threw up.  those songs, with their quirky rhythm and their haunting, non-linear stories, were burned on me in those months just as Korea was.  i was wax, taking everything in.  and all my hopes and anticipation sang in me to those tunes and words, lullabies to the little life inside around whom all the changes centred.

we brought the CD back to Canada, though the light was harsher here.  the last time i played it was in the hospital after my water broke too too early, headphones stretched across my belly.  i was still hopeful, the laws of inertia internalized to such an extent that continuing to hope was not so hard as it has been ever since.  i chose, the first night after my airlift, in the 3 am quiet of the hospital room, to tune in to the baby inside, to spend what time we had left together present to him or her.  i sang to him, spoke to her - we had been told girl, then boy, then girl again, that time ’round - played him music.  for that three weeks, i was tender and more in-the-moment than i have ever been in my life, connected and maternal in ways i hadn’t imagined i had in me.  until he died in my arms.  all those months of hoping and planning, all we’d tried to build toward, all the light and song packed into that period, dissipated into ash.

last night, Dave and i were watching back episodes of a tv show on the computer.  in the climactic moments, a song started up, a song neither of us had heard.  but he recognized the voice…the same singer whom, as if by unspoken, accidental agreement, we have not listened to in over three years.  my ears perked up, and just the familiarity of a single word, characteristically pronounced at the end of a line, assured me he was right.  the scene unfolded on the screen in front of us.  but i didn’t see it anymore.

i saw a small apartment with muted light falling over a sleeping mat, a huge desk rescued from the side of the street one evening.  i saw the campus-issue furniture and the pillows brought back as bounty from Thailand, the coffee grinder propped up against the yogurt maker and the funny little packets of bacteria bought at the same apothecary’s as the pregnancy test.  i saw ashtrays and ESL books, plastic tables set outside the neighbourhood corner store for drinking at, neon signs advertising singing rooms, internet cafes, chicken.  i saw rows and rows of persimmons, ripe to bursting, and crisp pears that look like apples, and packets of salty seaweed for snacking on.  i saw, though i had not known i remembered.  and i felt it all again, the hope and the shattering that followed, as if the episode we were watching were one from our own lives.

and i wept, because i knew the ending to all that risk and hope and openness.  because it was like watching a replay of my own personal train wreck, and i could not shout out a warning, could not do anything but sit and let the brokenheartedness of it all wash over me.  and because it was beautiful, too, to have it all come flooding back, to remember what it felt like to be in that skin and that mind, faithful for the last time to the belief that all will ultimately be right.

i like to think i’ve healed.  but not once in this pregnancy, or with Oscar, have i stretched headphones over my belly, unselfconscious, and sung to my child.  not like that.

i don’t even know if i should try.  i don’t know if i can.  i wish i could, though.  i realized last night that i wish i could.

your comments shine through my screen like benedictions.  the overflow of truth and thoughtfulness and humour, raw and warm, calms me, strengthens.  i bask.  i eat up ideas, cross-referencing, googling hungrily.  call answered.

i sit humbled, grateful.  you took me by surprise.  i did not know, not like this, that the well ran so deep and generous, that the collective wisdom of a mythological sisterhood could be tapped like this.  i feel as if i’ve wandered into a Little House on the Prairie stageset, into a quilting bee community of yore where i am mothered, friended, surrounded and held up.   my birth coaches, sixty strong.  your stories widen my horizons, my sense of the possible.  your stories make me less afraid.
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i have never known how to ask for help, before.

Mad wrote a powerful post the other night about fear and walking at night and the Take Back the Night phenomenon that swept college campuses in the late 80s and early 90s.  that was my coming of age, that era, and i sang that song for years.

my mother’s spent her life more than usually mistrustful of the unknown, and she tried desperately to inculcate in me caution, wariness of all that the newspapers said i should fear as a young and vulnerable woman in a predatory age.  but, like so many, it was not the unknown that hurt me, that damaged my sense of my own worth and my right to inviolate status.  i did not even have words, at eighteen, for what happened.  but i had anger, at the misdirected fear that smothered without protecting, and shame, in buckets.  the shame kept me tongue-tied, unable to ask for help or support.  the anger made me defiant.  and in the mess of my fumbling attempts to find healing, i began to walk, at night, alone, alert…head high, keys spiked.  i walked and walked, for nearly two years, compulsively.  it was a way of refusing to wrap myself in the shroud of victimization and dependence that society held out as a false promise of safety.  it was a way of taking back my own body, as well as the night.  but mostly it was a way to quiet the deep, crippling sense of vulnerability and fear that ate away at me in those years, the panic that threatened each time someone came close.

it took, in the end, years and years and ultimately a conscious letting go.  but i walked my way out of that trauma, that damage…literally walked away from it, each step a blind, grasping effort to surmount fear.

i think i have been trying to do the same with the trauma of my children’s births.  except a waddle is not a confidence-inducing stride, and i have been unable to outpace myself, my fear, my history.  so i have had to face my shame this time, own it and voice it and say aloud, “i have been hurt.  i am frightened.  i do not know how to go forward by myself.”

the warmth of response has taken so much of the power from the shame and the fear that i wonder, sadly, what might have happened had i been brave enough to try this tack half a lifetime ago.
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i waited two hours to see my OB today, because half the practice is on summer vacation.  my fear and shame sat with me through the wait, despite all your words…i felt like a kid waiting to be called into the principal’s office, dreading humiliation and misunderstanding.  it’s not being my own medical advocate that intimidates me, but admitting my vulnerability, admitting how badly Oscar’s birth shook me despite his survival.  being supplicant and helpless is not my strong suit.  i was afraid i’d find myself tongue-tied, once again, unable to stand up for my need for agency and dignity with this impending birth…unable to admit how much i fear the panic that swallowed me last time, the panic i failed utterly to master.

i really like my OB.  she’s been with me through all four pregnancies, though never - by circumstance - for delivery or d&c.  i trust her.  she has looked me in the eye and said, “i’m sorry.  i made a mistake.”  she has always treated me like a human being.

and still i could barely meet her eyes as i unfurled the litany of facts and complications that have left me so afraid.  i hunched on the crinkly paper of the exam table, picked at the flannel blanket.  i didn’t want to overstate, be dramatic, have her write me off.  i trailed to a halt, handed over the list of questions i’d posted here the other night with all their what-ifs and maybes and stretches of what’s commonly done.  i looked at her and choked the obvious out.  i’m just…so scared.

she didn’t patronize me, or pat me on the arm and tell me not to worry my pretty little head.  she listened, and looked at me, and said, “i will come in with you, if i can.  i’ll put that on your file, right here.  i’d like to be with you through this birth, if that might help?”

they don’t do that here.  my mum has worked at the hospital for years, and i know they don’t.  there’s an agreement between the OBs that on-call status is respected, because the on-call docs have to be on site, away from their kids or their sick spouses or their beer or what have you, so having subs come in is frowned upon.  i looked at her warily, said “i’d feel guilty.”

she said, “don’t.”

and then tears welled up and streamed down my face and she handed me Kleenex and i felt six years old and like i’d just been rescued from the Kmart Lost and Found desk.

we talked.  plans for induction or c-section are tabled until i reach 37 weeks still pregnant.  we will try the delayed cord clamping, and a few other things both from her repetoire and your suggestions to try to minimize the likelihood of retained placenta and surgery.  we will aim for skin-to-skin and nursing right after birth.  she will work with Dave and the delivery nurses to try to do as much perineal support, lubrication, and stretching as possible.  we may try to break up any cervical adhesions upon cerclage removal at 36 weeks…or wait until labour depending on how imminent that appears at that point.  she’s checking on anti-anxiety options, and depending on how things present we may try an early epidural if that’s possible instead.  slowing things down a little, for me, might not be bad.  she approved of the advice i’d been given here to try to minimize prolapse.

and most important, she’s going to talk with the entire OB team about me, in case she can’t be there when i ultimately land at L&D.  and if at any point, with her or another doc, i panic and feel i just can’t confront another possible gong show, it’ll be on my file that i can ask for a c-section without any argument from the medical team.  not my first choice, but a choice i’m grateful to know is there.  i see her again next week, and we’ll talk some more.

tears are still close to the surface, tonight.  relief, gratitude, astonishment.  i haven’t given birth yet, obviously…the actual event is still ahead of us.  but the birth i feared, the panic i could not walk away from…i think its spectre has been largely deflated, weakened.  by you, with all your stories and your virtual hands in mine.  by one doctor stepping up to my side.

trust.  antidote to fear.

the longer this pregnancy continues with merciful uneventfulness, the more amazed i am.  and the more nervous.  a new and different low-grade panic wells up in my gut these days…not miscarriage, not genetic disorders, not uber-prematurity and brain bleeds and oscillating ventilators. just…birth.

there’s clearly got to be a birthin’ around here sometime soon.

(me and my pet Volkswagen and an - uneaten - magic mushroom, three weeks ago at 29 weeks…by the lovely and talented Kate)

everything’s dandy with the bambino, and the weeks of crisis delivery prognoses are creeping past, therefore…the more my razor-sharp neuroses get to hone in on me.

it’s not the fear of the unknown, but of a three-peat.  experience says i deliver fast, and early, and my babies have big heads for their gestational ages.  i have a scarred cervix that tends to resist dilation, then tear.  my placentas don’t detach properly, causing retention once, hemorrhage the second time ’round.  and my body - this time, as each time before - is weakened at its core from extended bedrest.

i feel silly about my fear…ashamed, even.  but it is real and grows bigger as i do.  birth has marked me in ways i do not like.  i do not want to dwell on those wounds, or give them power…i’d like to get beyond them.  but i am not sure i can until this baby is born and this third birth confronted and endured…and hopefully celebrated.  my fear is that the birth will add to the sum of baggage i need to unpack, rather than - perhaps? - being healing.  i’d like healing. i’m just afraid to ask for what seems like so much.

i had what was pretty much a post-traumatic stress reaction in labour with Oscar.  flashbacks, full-blown panic attack.  on top of that, i had complications that knocked out my pelvic floor: some clitoral tearing, a vaginal and bladder prolapse, an unwanted fourth-degree epiosiotomy that went straight through my perineum and then tore four inches up.  i was stitched three layers deep, stem to stern, and then had to be torn open again when they whisked me off to surgery to retrieve the hemorrhaging placenta.  barely a quick photo with my newborn before being rushed off for the d&c, then three hours alone and shaking, still panicked, in recovery…that, after having lost Finn only hours after his birth, was probably worst.

i had a birth plan for O’s delivery…written to try to remind myself that once we passed 35 weeks the birth needn’t be the powerless, frightening, emergency event that Finn’s had been.  it wasn’t a complicated plan…my only caveats were to avoid episiotomy and to be with baby after birth for at least an hour, for bonding and an attempt at breastfeeding.  neither worked out, though in the first case no one ever explained why, despite my shouts of “no!”.  the whole thing still turned out to be a powerless, frightening, emergency event.  had any of it been necessary to safely deliver Oscar, my sense of violation wouldn’t have mattered worth shit, to me…but he was fine through the whole blessed mess.  i felt like a piece of meat, ravaged and dismissed.

i do not have the powers of self-delusion to simply compose another birth plan and assume it’ll go better this time.

i see my OB Wednesday, for the first time since Halifax released me.  i want to talk about birth…about what options are reasonably open to me, about what factors are controllable and what odds i have of a different type of birth than the last two.  we haven’t talked about it yet because until last Friday there was an assumption i’d deliver in Halifax…though the Halifax team were hoping to get me past 32 weeks and so didn’t want to talk about it, either.  but now i’m set to deliver here.  with whoever’s on call, because that’s how the system works.  and i wake up at night sweating.

i know my own fear is my worst enemy.  i also know that i can’t think myself out of a post-traumatic stress reaction, especially if this labour comes as fast and strong as the last two.  i’ve played with the idea of just asking for a c-section, except i doubt the likelihood of me making it to 38 weeks without going into labour.

i plan to take Evening Primrose Oil from about 35 weeks - orally at first, to help break down scar tissue, then vaginally after 37 weeks.  the cerclage, according to Halifax, will come out at 36.

i’d also - if i have a vaginal birth - like to try delayed cord cutting in hopes of preventing placental retention and getting to actually hold this child and be with her for the period following her birth.  it’s the one thing i ever really invested in, in terms of having my babies come into the world…the skin-on-skin of that first hour or two, reprieve from the work of birth.  if the baby has any issues, obviously that dream flies out the window, but if we can get to 35 or 36 weeks it’s far more likely to be me and my complications that lessens that possibility.  and thus i’d like to do what i can to help the placenta separate cleanly.  but there’s resistance here towards delaying cutting the cord, particularly with an early-ish baby.  my OB might respect my wishes, but the other docs?  i haven’t been overwhelmed with some of their listening skills.  thus i wonder if an induction - so as to be sure i’m with my own OB - might be wise, despite my aversion to the idea?

i did perineal massage when i was pregnant with Oscar and am willing to do it again, but don’t know what impact the significant epiosotomy/tear scar has on its effectiveness, especially when it so clearly did sweet f#ck all last time?

i want to know what you know.  i’m going to end up making what decisions are open to me based on odds…odds of a joyful, peaceful, non-brutalizing delivery, however it comes about.  the more people’s experiences i become familiar with, the better sense i’ll be able to gather of what those odds really are.  Dr. Google isn’t really helping.  so please.  no holds barred.

have any of you ever had a fourth-degree tear or episiotomy that didn’t open or need to be opened again in a subsequent birth?  if it did, how did the healing go the second time around?

did any of you who’ve had a cerclage try Evening Primrose Oil (or something else?) to help minimize scar tissue on the cervix?  do you think it helped?

any experience with delayed cord cutting, or with retained placentas and other methods of trying to minimize the likelihood of that happening?

has anyone who’s had a prolapse not have it happen again in a subsequent delivery?  were you able to do anything to impact how that turned out, one way or the other?

anybody able to compare a prolonged transition-type labour (contractions a minute apart for an hour or more) with an induction?  i know the latter are supposed to be really hard to tolerate, but i’m wondering if my own labours aren’t perhaps already on that track already?  would pitocin intensify that?

any general advice regarding planned c-sections vs. induction vs. taking one’s chances with the on-call docs?

is it common in many places to be allowed to hold your newborn for the stitching period after a c-section?  (it is in Halifax, not here.  policy.  bah.)

does anyone know if ativan or some other anti-anxiety medication can be safely given during labour if panic and PTSD symptoms set in?  i know it’s safe (or at least given) during pregnancy, but i’m curious about whether it’s usable so close to delivery.

i know birth is not a controlled event.  i also know that nothing matters more than taking home a healthy baby.  but i am still hoping, nervously, that maybe i can come out of this birth able to focus on that baby and not on my own mental and physical damage.  i’d like to ask for a positive, empowering, affirming experience…but i’ll happily settle for less than wretched.  so…keeping in mind that i live in a province where midwives are not certified and where the doula i met with told me that with my history she might not be able to do much to mitigate the physical repeat of past complications…tell me what you think makes sense for me.  and tell me what you can about what’s been positive for you, in birth…please…no matter what the circumstances.

(just…pretty please…don’t tell me just to relax and it’ll all be fine.  i will personally chew your arms from your body so that you can never, never type again.  )

pssst.  i have a secret.

i think i’m having a fabulous summer.

yeh, i’m more or less unemployed, with legs as weak as paper matchsticks and a belly the size of a Volkswagen.  yeh, laundry is frequently my most impressive daily accomplishment.  and stool softeners and Tums are my dearest, most beloved companions these days.  i am a glamour queen beyond measure.

but…with all this time off it’s been the first summer since we moved back here to this island vacation destination that i’ve actually had any time to spend with the myriad of people who descend on the place in late July and early August.  i had coffee with a girl i haven’t seen since high school, spent an entire afternoon taking up space in a restaurant with some fabulous women i don’t see often enough, discussed life, the universe, and everything with old friends from Korea, visited with aunties and a bunch of other people passing through in the seasonal glut of tourists and homecomers.  i’ve had time to pay attention, to linger, to collect myself between visits.  turns out working is hell on the social life.  i suspected as much.

tonight, Dave & Oscar & i are going out to a friend’s cottage for the night.  i’m not a lay-in-the-sun girl, but the beach at night?  some part of me was made for the beach at night.  dunes and cool night sand under my feet, stars, the crash of waves a few metres hence, a bonfire.  we’ll put O to sleep and then, with a few other parents, take turns minding the store while the rest abuse some old guitars down on the shore.  singing, maybe.  the mutter of side conversations and laughter.  but mostly just the licking, crackling flames and the ancient wonder of a fire…the first tv, the first happy hour bar, the first church of the human soul.

i’ll probably be the only one sober, and i’ll get tired first and lay my head down on Dave’s lap and worm myself into a little nest in the sand and become quiet, but my eyes will be open, rapt and locked on the glow of the little sparks dancing up into the blackness, until i waken cold and shivering when the party ends.

with the release from bedrest and my fledgling return to civil society come privileges.  i can walk…slowly.  i can dance…sorta.  i can march out at any time of day or night and procure my own Nibs cake (insert favourite heartburn-inducing poison here).

sure, the price is high.  anyone who’s ever been pregnant will attest that with the whole going out in public thing comes…well, the public.  other people.  who note one’s advanced maternal state, and feel obliged to comment upon it.  or to touch it…it, of course, being me.  i don’t mind the belly rubbing…though it makes me feel vaguely like a shi-tzu being cooed over, however pleasantly…but the boob-petting is perhaps just a touch too familiar for me.  i shit you not, a middle aged woman patted my left breast last weekend and said, oh honey, they fall down after this.  i gave her my best Maidenform smile and tried to claim mine’ve bounced back smashingly, thank you very much, but i mostly succeeded in drooling lemon water down the front of my offendingly obvious cleavage whilst trying NOT to look like a member of Junior Prudes of America.  shock tends to send my wits packing for awhile, but the desire to impress the weirdos with my cool?  alas, that never leaves me.

coming off four months of bedrest and relative seclusion has left me vulnerable and awkward in the interchange of niceties between people in public.  i am too honest, too eager.  i’m so astonished by my good fortune at actually being out and about and still pregnant to boot that i feel like a kid on a blind date, all aw-shucks awkward in my own stretched skin and yet horny as hell, bubbling over with Too Much Information the moment the subject of the pregnancy is broached.  far, far too many people who do not read this blog now know about my pesky cervical issues, friends.

two years and a bit ago, when i was first sprung from the hospital after seven weeks flat on my back gestating Oscar, i was shocked by the invasiveness being visibly pregnant seems to invite in others.  it hurt, then, the cheery throw-away barrage of is this your first? and what do you have at home? that i could not answer honestly without causing the faces behind the banal pleasantries to shrink away in mortification.  i didn’t enjoy their embarrassment, their discomfort.  on the other hand, i didn’t enjoy pretending i was some sort of first-time birth virgin, either, and thus subjecting myself to knowing lectures about how i couldn’t possibly imagine what was ahead…nor did i enjoy negating my firstborn’s existence just to make people feel better about having pried into my personal history innocently expecting to find only sunbeams.  i wasn’t sorry that i only spent two weeks negotiating the Big Wide World after bedrest that time around.

this time, i’ve already passed the two week mark of happy Out-and-Aboutness.  i’m not so raw, this time, nor so unprepared for strangers’ well-intentioned curiosity.  and since i have a living child, my short but honest answers to people’s questions don’t thud all conversation to a halt quite so brutally as they did two years ago…the crickets still chirp, but we all generally recover before the tumbleweeds blow in.

in other words, even the one thing i dreaded about assuming this belated mantle of A Normal, Blessed Pregnancy is going pretty well dandy…even if it does feel like a circus act.  i bumble and beam and accept the boob-groping with what i hope passes for grace…because awkward as i feel, waddling my way down the streets slower than the senior citizens, i am nonetheless aware, acutely, that this is a state of grace i’m in.  i look around me, wary, wondering who - infertile, babylost, recently miscarried - aches at the sight of my swollen belly.  i look into the eyes of the old ladies with their uninvited stories of labours and grandkids and see longing for a time forever gone, slipped past.  i look in the mirror and sigh at the size of my behind, and then give my head a shake and straighten up a bit and run my fingers over the old and new stretch marks and breathe deep and dare to grieve that this will - knock wood for safe arrivals - be the last time i do this, this crazy terrifying journey that i yet will miss and mourn the end of when the day comes and i have to face up to the reality that i will never again walk this particular tightrope of want and love and holding my breath.

how is it that memory can feel more vivid, sometimes, than the present?

i am in Halifax, but not in the hospital…i am on a vacation of sorts. it feels more like time travel. i wander here in a soup of memories, bright and disconcerting and surreal, expecting to encounter former selves around every corner. these conjunctions of days and years all jumble together, knocking me off balance. the disequilibrium keeps catching me by surprise.

i am here alone. or not alone - my college roommate and i are crashing here together - but without O, without Dave, without responsibilities…just me and Susie, painting the town red. nineteen years i’ve known this girl, this woman, this friend i seldom see anymore. she’s a doctor now, which is promising if this now-31-week bebe gets any saucy ideas, but she still makes me feel seventeen again, goofy and light. and known. we pick up the common threads between us easily, gracefully, as if the time lapsed is only stories to tell. we are here for the wedding of another college roommate, entertainingly scheduled eleven years to the day after my own wedding, in this city i lived in during that marriage. i was packing to move from this city - packing up that marriage - when i first sat with Dave on my kitchen floor eight years ago yesterday and realized, hell, i am in trouble.

so i am seventeen and twenty-eight at once and yet very much the thirty-six-year-old mother and mother-to-be, as well, because the fact of this burgeoning body is not something i can leave behind for a weekend . and it is August now too and encroaching on what should have been Finn’s birthday three years ago had he not been born in this place and gone, all too soon, and so those shadows walk along the calendar with me this time of year, inescapably. and being on my own, sitting yesterday morning in the anywhere space of a Starbucks with no agenda but my journal to write in, called up all sorts of other echoes, other selves who’ve sat for hours with a black pen over an empty page, people-watching. lost in Vancouver, bewildered by the concrete and glass and the low, oppressive clouds, feeling alien and broke and hopeless. trying to make my way through weeks in Ireland on my own while i wished myself back in Korea with that troublesome Dave whom i looked for around every corner, no matter how many half-worlds separated us. Bangkok, Zurich, Istanbul. all places i’ve sat by myself in coffee shops and marked time and impressions on a page and tried to leave some trace for myself of a now i knew would never last.

i danced tonight, at the wedding, me who’s barely walked in months. When Doves Cry, Prince. because i could not stay in my seat. because when i was twelve this song was the first that gave me little flutters of what i’d someday understand as sexual awakening. because touch if you will my stomach, feel how it trembles inside brought different flutters now, as if that promise of twelve had come to full fruition and for the first time all weekend all those myriad, disconnected selves had consolidated into some, brief linear trajectory i could trace and own, and catch sight of myself in. it felt amazing to move, to rise. i was a sight, i’m sure. but i felt beautiful.

like Cinderella, i left just before midnight…to come back to an empty bed longing for the ghost of that boy who sat on my kitchen floor eight years ago to materialize, to make this vacation more than just a respite from the day-to-day our lives have become together and make the kaleidoscope whirl of all this memory less lonely, less strange.

weekend before last, in Halifax, we took Oscar and his cousins to the Public Gardens. sure, the place is a beautiful collection of Victorian arboreal exotica with rare trees, a few leafy survivors older than anyone i know…but those points of charm were of little interest to three boys under three. the Gardens is kewl because it has DUCKS, people.

free range ducks, the fearless kind.

my lumbering, slow-moving mother self was no match for ducks. Oscar was IN LOVE. or in glee, if glee is a state of being. fat fingers pointed and little feet stamped and there was squealing, and it wasn’t just me. when the ducks waddled off, Oscar chased them. with zeal. it became clear that if i did not figure out how to move faster, my son was going to topple headfirst into the murky water and come up baptized with green duck shit. luckily, his father materialized from parking the car and saved O from himself and from the excesses of duck delight, but still, the boy was twitterpated.

and he remains so. all week, in the bath, his yellow rubber duckie has been put through his paces, forced to bob and weave and lead O around the tub like a plastic pied piper, whilst cries of “duck! duck!” permeate the bathroom. O saw a pigeon yesterday, and wooed it with a plaintive “duck?!”…though i think he knew he was fooling himself.

i am becoming one of Those Mothers, indulgent and soft at the core.  or in the head.  i found myself wondering if we could keep a real duck in the tub.

he’s just so friggin’ infectious, that kid.  my kid.

out. Saturday morning in the zoo-like crush of the local farmer’s market. old ladies and old hippies sweep by me, children push past. all our bodies are just a little too close - and mine just a little too large to accommodate the dodging i attempt - but the thronging mass is cheerful, busily engaged with wax beans and homemade sausages and shawarma with tabouleh, please.

i am standing, Oscar in my arms, his hands snaking over my shoulder to swipe at the display of chocolate chip cookies behind us. i am balancing my market bag and the giant lettuce i’ve just purchased - from which i half expect a Cabbage Patch Kid to emerge, yellow yarn hair and all - when suddenly i realize that i am actually doing this, this perfectly normal, multi-task-oriented, socially and commercially engaged juggling act. that i am standing holding thirty pounds of squirming kid on one hip with thirty pounds of bedrest and more offspring spread across the general middle of me and juggling a wallet and organic lettuce and the cookie that i seem to have managed to buy and begin to nibble on without even noticing, and that i am carrying on three conversations at once, and that it is all, like an intricate act of magic, working. my legs are holding. my back has not collapsed. i have not dropped the child nor the lettuce nor - god forbid - the cookie. and despite having not been out in public for more than four months, despite having hardly made chitchat with anyone in the interim, i’m saying hi to an old acquaintance and babbling about tomatoes to a vendor and keeping Oscar from stuffing his entire half of the cookie in his mouth all at once, and it is easy. natural. sheer body memory.

until i pay attention. then my eyes grow wide and glazed and Oscar leaps from my arms and runs into the crowd whilst i trip over my own bags and lettuce tumbles around me. suddenly, mechanisms exposed, it is all too much, exhausting, this press of people, this exertion. this normalcy. and for a second i want to flee screaming from the market like a bat out of hell, and retreat to the safe predictability of ye olde couch, sanctuary.

i mentioned to somebody early this week about how coming off bedrest is both exhilarating and discombobulating at first, because simple acts that you’ve taken for granted most of your life have, in the duration, become curiosities, foreign and unaccustomed. how they play themselves out in living colour, almost assaultive, because your protective filters have been turned off for so long. the response?

i’m sure it’ll be just like riding a bike.

i laughed, which i think confused my friend. but this friend has not known me so long as to realize that twenty-three years ago this week, at thirteen, i managed to fling myself over the handlebars of my bike on my way to work the very last morning of my very first summer job, a three-week all-day babysitting gig. i landed on my face. smashed the left side of my jaw into smithereens. split my chin open, and re-graded the gravel road with the lower half of my visage. knocked out a tooth that my just-removed braces had been working hard to align for years. bent the frame of my bike enough that it was unridable. spent three months with my jaws wired shut, carrying little scissors in my pocket to unleash the steel facemask in case i for some reason needed to vomit and wanted to avoid choking to death. had my first taste of the relief that is morphine, and the nastiness that is withdrawal. started grade nine looking like Bride of Frankenstein.

i have been on a moving bicycle exactly twice in the twenty-three years since. and both times, it felt both utterly normal and terrifyingly bizarre, all the intangibles of that delicate balancing act wrought vividly visible by the fear and cloistering that had separated me from the act in the duration between. i ride a bike like most of us would walk a tightrope; in a state of acute awareness and surreality.

this morning, i dusted myself off, caught my errant child, retrieved my enormous, slightly bruised lettuce, wiped some cookie crumbs from the shelf that is my belly, and headed back into the crowd, smiling to myself. i was nodding, noting internally, with great interest, heck, it IS exactly like riding a bike. it’s fun, and probably doesn’t look strange from the outside. but dude, it’s also crazy as shit.

as of 4 pm yesterday afternoon, i’m free.  the bedrest is officially over.

not only that, but i’m done with the IWK…that strange, cloistered otherworld where i’ve spent more than ten weeks of my life, where my first child was born and died, where Oscar and i spent our long, still wait together in ye olde Craftmatic, where this pregnancy was saved by a stitch in time.  at last count i’ve had at least twenty-four ultrasounds on the seventh floor of that hospital; Dave and i have made an almost equal number of four-hour drives to their doors and back.

it is finished, now.   barring delivery sometime in the next couple of weeks - which Miss Cervix Universe is giving no signs whatsoever of succumbing to - i get to spend the remainder of this pregnancy as a regular ol’ pregnant lady, waddling to my local doctor for checkups, getting my own water and groceries, picking up my kid and panting after him.  i get to relearn to sit up for long periods of time, get to train my poor calf muscles and enlarged carcass to walk around the block again without getting winded.  i get to carry my own bags.  i get to stop being dependent, stop planning every moment of my day around economy of movement and the boundaries of how far to push myself.  i get to stop asking for help all the time.  and i am profoundly relieved.  last night, at a rest stop on the trip back home, i was able to haul Oscar from the car and bring him into the washroom with me, lift him to the changing table, prop him up to wash his hands.  simple things, but it has been four months since i could do them for my boy.  walking back to the car with O on my hip, his legs wrapped around my awkward middle, my chicken arm holding him up, i felt ten feet tall and a hundred pounds lighter.

amd yet…and yet.  i hadn’t expected full release from bedrest until 32 weeks, another eighteen days away.  i had them counted; i was eager.  but i’ve spent the last seventeen weeks in an imaginary birdcage cobbled together of proscriptions and fear and uncertainty, and having it opened early has left me startled.  pleased, about all i can suddenly do,  but shaky.   i stood on my doorstep this morning, foot hovering above the step, blinded by the wide open space.  i froze.  for weeks, i have been sneaking tiny sojourns into my days, little walks halfway up the block, a drive to the pharmacy around the corner.  i’d become adept at balancing tiny tastes of freedom with my restrictions…took pleasure in responsible stretching of the boundaries. but having them melt away entirely leaves me feeling anxious, exposed, lost.  i feel pressured suddenly to revert to the normal person i have learned how not to be, and finding my way back is not so simple a matter as flipping a switch.  the who am i? of all this taunts me, shames me.  i have a little Stockholm Syndrome, friends.

i mourn not the reality of captivity, but the safety i had to convince myself it offered in order to abide by it.  they have freed me, declared that this baby no longer needs the birdcage.  this is success, i know.  this was the goal, and i am grateful beyond measure to have brought us both safe thus far.   but the panic that rises in my throat as i perch on my doorstep with the whole world open and dizzying before me reminds me that coming out the other side will be as complex and strange as the shutdown of accommodating myself to bedrest.  i am free.  i can do.  now i have to remember how to slip the bonds i’ve bought into, and free myself.