The first twelve weeks of our Peace Corps training we had fairly extensive language courses: some Spanish but mostly Guarani, the Paraguayan indigenous/national language of twelve syllables and Kermit the Frog-like inflections.
One day I was paired with my good friend Bill and a girl we’ll just call Gertrude. In typical random language class fashion—maybe we were practicing the subjunctive—our teacher asked us to describe a movie we’d write and direct.
There have been two times in my life I have heard the noise Kelly just uttered, an inimitable cry of surprise, wonder, and horror. The first was shortly after our return from the Peace Corps, when Kelly, lying on the bed after a shower, realized that a ten-inch translucent roundworm parasite had emerged from her anus. The second was just now, sitting at her desk on a nice spring day, when she realized that her nipples were leaking colostrum. Needless to say, this latter cry had a greater pitch of joy.
So we’re going for a “natural birth” at home, which essentially means we trust K.’s innate birthing abilities more than a hospital’s routine medical interventions.
Kelly, off to birth in Avalon.
My initial, uninformed, and thus reactionary attitude towards the “natural-birth” movement was to assume it was led by women of whom our doula seems the paragon example: sensitive owl-women who long for a Mists of Avalon past that never existed, who romanticize the druidic times of hard-packed dirt floors, straw beds, poultices, leeches, and, well, the occasional dead mother. Continue reading
Not that K. was unhappy with herself or her pregnancy or not a beautiful pregnant woman or not living up to my expectations of how she’d be as a beautiful pregnant woman, but at some point in the last month a line was crossed whereby the baby came into herself as a person and so too K. came into herself as a pregnant woman.
And for the first time in this pregnancy I felt the slight twinge of jealousy.
It struck me that I’ve been thinking too much of the future here; focusing too much on how this little parasitic humanoid will become a little girl and a strong woman (and, yes, possibly the iron-fisted goddess of the nuclear wasteland formerly known as Oregon.) This is a good thing, but the original point of this blog was to explore and celebrate this particularly unique time in my (our) life—the nine months of pregnancy purgatory.
So perhaps a little update is in order.
We were in a fairly useless “birth class” the other day and were subjected to watching a video of a man who has built a career out of quieting colicky babies. It may have been the best part of the class, actually, but something in the man’s eyes made me uneasy, and I couldn’t tell why, until it struck me: he reminded me of this guy:
Yeah, this guy.
Remember him? 1997, a small gated community in Southern California, Hale Bopp comet in the night sky, and this wide-eyed gnome having convinced 39 other men and women to dress in black, lie in their bunk-beds, and ritually overdose so that their souls could be carried off by the spaceship lurking behind the comet.
Heaven’s Gate.
I’ve been on a particularly intense Apocalyptic bent as of late. In the past month Kelly and I have watched Melancholia (planetary collision extinction event), Contagion (flu virus pandemic), and the second season of The Walking Dead (zombie apocalypse); I’ve reread The Road (nuclear winter); and been buttonholing more people than usual with my “the-thin-fabric-of-civilization-is-soon-to-be-ripped-asunder” litany of global climate change, peak oil, phosphate depletion, ocean acidification, and associated and wide-spread geo-political instability.
I’m a blast at parties, let me tell you.
But I’ve always had this dark strain. In my Grand-Canyon-Manuscript-That-Will-Never-Be-Fucking-Finished, I attributed this love for post-apocalyptic narratives to the San Andreas fault, which haunted my childhood as a sleeping-dragon-like force that could, at any time, unleash “The Big One”: the earthquake that will destroy LA.
But on the other hand, I can’t blame it on plate-tectonics: I don’t see how any rational human being who pays even infrequent attention to the news could not harbor the same fatalistic views. Perhaps he or she finds it easier to ignore such views. Perhaps he or she simply has more faith. My intrinsic lack of any such faith is a blessing and a curse, but seems especially unfortunate now that we are to bring a baby—a helpless babe!—into this doomed world.*
A nice woman. A self-proclaimed “cat person,” which is good, as upon entering our house she was immediately accosted by Dengue the Cat, about whom Kelly blurted out: “Her name is Dengue. Like the disease;” which is both true (yes, dengue fever, aka “breakbone fever,” is a horrible disease and yes, that’s where we got the name) and not true (I like to think it’s more of a cool name from a euphonic standpoint rather than that we were insensitive enough to name our precious little kitten after a disease that kills thousands of people every year…like, what, we’re going to name our next pet Syphilis?), but regardless it being maybe not the best thing to reveal, unasked, to a woman who practically burst into tears at the thought of circumcising a hypothetical male child.
Maybe it was when we came upon a crevasse on the logging road—a thin fissure where a creek cut through the ten feet of accumulated snow—and instead of abandoning our snowmobiles for our snowshoes and humping up the last steep mile to the survey-site, Kelly’s work-mate convinced us that if we shoveled more snow on the one narrow and slanted snow bridge that spanned the creek we could drive our snowmobiles over it. It was late afternoon with the snow coming down, there was no cell service, and we were many, many snowy miles from our vehicle.
The other night, squatting on a log on the beach, my back to the booming surf, my face to the bonfire, I was buttonholing my dear friend Joy with my belief in the mystical complexities of the world that some attribute to a God.
I was very drunk.
The gist of my ramble was this: the Southern California house I grew up in was but a mile from the beach, but between the two was the busy Pacific Coast Highway, drowning out the ocean’s sound. But on certain late nights I’d lie in bed with the windows open and across the distance would come the deep thrumming boom of big surf. To this day I can’t hear that sound without a wash of nostalgia not unlike the swash of the surf up the sand.
A Pregnant Husband 