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when mairin was a wee infant she had a sleep issue: she would only sleep in my arms with her mouth attached to my breast. this worked for her a lot better than it worked for me, so i started reading about the various schools of sleep-training and waded my way through the cacophony of ideologues: do NOT let your baby cry herself to sleep, ever, or she’ll never learn to trust you. train yourself to let your baby cry it out or you’ll never get any rest and your child will grow up to manipulate you and everybody around her. buy a vibrating bouncy chair — it’s the only thing that will work. buy a swing — it’s the only thing that will work. always swaddle the hell out of your child to help her feel that secure, tucked-in feeling she had in the womb. never ever ever swaddle your child because it hampers development of the muscles in her arms.

and then i read the best advice ever: do what works. if you’re not happy, and your baby isn’t happy, then what you’re doing isn’t working and there’s no point forcing it. so i quit trying things and just started watching mairin. not only did we eventually figure things out (she liked to be swaddled, she loved the swing, and if she fell asleep nursing she needed to be left alone for a full sleep cycle — and then, when she entered deep sleep the SECOND time (NEVER the first), shannon could take her from me and put her to bed)), soon mairin was sleeping through the night. all on her own.

still, when her nursing times started to naturally reduce i started reading all about weaning and how to do it. but i caught myself early in the crazy-making process and realized i could just follow her cues and all would be well. and it was: by 10 months she was nursing once at night and once in the morning; by 11 months she wanted only her morning nursing-snuggle time; and by her first birthday, when she woke up eager to test her newfound legs by tearing around the house, she was done nursing entirely. all on her own.

so i decided with potty training just to let, well, nature take its course. i bought her a potty several months ago and put it in the bathroom so she could get used to its presence, but i only talked about it with her when she brought it up. usually those conversations went something like this:

me: mairin, where’s your juice?

mairin: scheuzz! scheuzz!

me: that’s right, honey. can you show mama where your juice is?

mairin, pointing at the toilet as if i were an imbecile: SCHEUZZ! SCHEUZZ!

me, lifting the little bowl out of the seat to see the (apparently designed as storage) space underneath it: oh! THERE’s your juice. you put your cup of juice in the potty!

mairin, grinning: scheuzz! scheuzz!

occasionally she would also sit on her potty, fully clothed, reading her books. but other than the potty serving as a reading seat or a cubby-hole, it hasn’t had much purpose.

i’ve been wondering whether i should push this. it would be nice not to have two kids in diapers at once. i also figure that if m gets potty-trained before gus arrives, she’ll just revert anyway — so what’s the point? and i kind of am drawn to mr. springfield’s philosophy of letting them run naked for a week during the summer and using that time to potty train them — sounds like prime tanning opportunity to me. but truth be told, i haven’t really done anything about my wonderings other than to wonder whether my indecisiveness is yet another sign of my terrible mothering skills.

then, last night, this:

mairin wanders into the kitchen, finds me, points to her diaper, and says: puuuuh, puuuuh.

me: hey, sweetie. do you need to go potty?

mairin, pointing at her diaper: puuuuh, puuuh.

me, leaning over to take a peak: well, let me check.

mairin: NO! then, pointing to her booster chair: puuuuh, puuuuh.

me: do you need to sit on the potty?

mairin: yes. (truly. she has quit saying “yieeah” and started in with a very grown-up sounding “yes”.)

me: okay, then, let’s go upstairs to the bathroom.

mairin: NO! then, pointing to her booster chair: puuuh, puuuh.

me, slow on the uptake as always: you, um, want to sit in your booster chair to go potty?

mairin, glad her idiotic mother is finally getting it: yes.

me: well, uh, hmmm, you see, you can’t go potty in your booster chair. (mairin starts to cry.) let’s go upstairs and use the potty, okay honey?

mairin: NO! NO! NO!

me, limply: okay.

so shannon stands by watching while i unstrap the booster seat from its grown-up chair and put it on the floor. delighted, mairin starts to pull off her diaper. suddenly entertaining visions of a mess i do not want to clean up, i snap out of it.

me: mairin, honey, let’s take this upstairs.

mairin, pointing at her booster seat: puuuh, puuuh.

so i pick up mairin and the booster and try not to look at shannon because i KNOW the look he’ll be giving me, and i trudge upstairs to the bathroom where i set down first the booster and then mairin. mairin tugs off her diaper and sits happily on the booster. i am still half-convinced something might happen and i won’t like it, so i try to persuade her to move herself to the potty seat. for her part, she knows all too well that she’s got me where she wants me and so she sits, quite happily, in her booster. where, as it happens, nothing happens.

so i figure — well, maybe she’s a little confused by the plethora of kiddie-sized seats and maybe she’s just having a bit of fun with her old mom and this was probably a one-off experience, y’know?

but then this morning mairin walks into the bathroom, tugs her diaper off, and sits on the potty. nothing happens, of course, but clearly the kid knows what she’s doing.

when i dropped her off at school i asked misses katherine and raven whether they were working on potty training. they looked at me a little sheepishly and said no, but they could if i wanted them to. i told them what had happened, and they told me that mairin had done the same thing at school on monday, and that she sat on the potty for the longest time, looking for all the world like queen victoria.

could it be that this kid will sleep-train herself, wean herself, and potty train herself? could she really be that easy? and if she is, what sort of karmic retribution will visit poor, clueless me when mairin hits her teenage years and i need to have an inkling about how to make her do what i want?

used to be, most saturday mornings, i’d roll out of bed around 6:45, down a cup of coffee, and roll out on my bike for the saturday am club ride in st paul, aka the weekly world championships: full of strong guys, a fair amount of posturing, and speed. i haven’t found an exact equivalent here, and although the tuesday night ride i’ve been going on the past few weeks comes close, there’s something about the saturday morning ride: you’re not working out your frustrations from the workday, or worried about getting home in time to help with bedtime, and if you’re lucky and you started early enough, you’re just waking up about the time the first sprint point comes around. and you realize your heart is hammering, and your muscles are feeling it, and the sun is out, and you feel good, and you’re doing this thing you love to do and it’s like you just woke up into a good dream… let’s just say i liked those saturday am rides.

so i had some hope this past saturday, as i wheeled off toward lunken for a group ride into kentucky. sure it started a little late for my tastes (9:30), but the day was beautiful and the ride promised some 70 miles of rolling roads. we were slow getting started, going here and there to pick up additional riders (and lose a few to mechanical issues), getting clogged up with the tail end of a 5K wrapping up (and holding a party) at the end of the people bridge in newport, and some folks needing to drain their morning’s coffee. But once we got rollin’, the riding was sweet and fast, the sun came off the river to our left, the group split into speed groups and regathered down the road, until finally four of us went a different way, losing the twitchier wheels and the surgers, riding through what i can only call a holler. we got chased by marmaduke (no really, a great dane taller than our bikes came out into the road to play) and a contact high riding past a couple stoners in cold springs. one of us faded hard, and we led him in nice and easy the last five or so miles. and 76+ miles later, feeling good, i rolled into the house to say hi to my family…

…and my heart dropped through the floor when carole quite calmly told me that we were going to the hospital and that my folks would be over in a minute to get mairin and before i even knew what the story was i turned toward the wall feeling my face crumple and wailed “NOOO!” and when i learned the story, that she (TMI alert) was producing more fluid that she couldn’t explain and when she called the doctor he told her that we’d best get that checked at the hospital but that she definitely had NOT had a gushing event like the ones that announced the ruptures of earl’s and ruby’s sacs, when i heard all this i calmed down some, and while i showered i started doing the math, the cold, calculating math about the possibilities for my son’s life ever continuing outside the womb: 23w 4d today, she’s just leaking so she’ll go on bedrest, and we made it 2w before infection with ruby and that was after a catastrophic break, so we’ll at least make it that far here and that brings us almost to 26w and that’s a real maybe but if we’re careful we might make it further and i wonder if we can get to 30w oh man that’s more than 6w away and bedrest? again? SO not fair but hey, if it gets gus here safely we’ll make it through right?

(deep breath)

and at the hospital we were tense for a little bit, especially at intake (”oh, honey, you think your waters broke?”) when we tried to explain that no we didn’t think this was the same as the other times, but that we wanted to make sure. and the nurse was hilarious and kind, and the doctor was efficient, and pretty soon we learned that carole was NOT leaking amniotic fluid and we high-fived and whooped a bit and got a prescription for the minor bacterial infection they did find and i tried to pinch myself because we just don’t get good news when we come in for scary stuff, we just don’t. but we did. when i called my parents my mom asked if it was okay now to cry with relief and i said yes.

later, as we sat on a restaurant patio basking in our luck with a beer and a burger (me, starving after a 4-hour ride) and a pizza and an arnie palmer (carole & gus, ravenous with relief) i learned that carole did try to reach me on my cell about twenty minutes before i got home, but we had a headwind coming back and i couldn’t hear the phone ring. now that we’re here, on the other side of scary saturday, i’m kinda glad i didn’t hear the phone, glad i finished my ride oblivious to the fear, glad i didn’t ride those last few miles under that cloud.

mostly, however, i’m glad to say that gus is 24 weeks today, and doin’ fine.

so you know how when someone you care about is sick and they don’t want to call the doctor because they think it’s minor, you make them call anyway? but when you’re the sick one you know damn well you don’t need no stinkin’ doctor, thank you very much? yeah, well, welcome to week 23.

there are many joys of pregnancy. the heartburn. the stomach smashed upward against the lungs. the bladder-turned-trampoline. and the fluid. oh, the fluid.

if you believe the gazillion baby’net sites, the fluids start early: at first, maybe you’ll puke, or maybe you’ll run to the bathroom a few dozen extra times an hour. eventually your blood volume will increase by approximately 50% and your uterus will fill with that lovely combination of baby pee and dead skin cells otherwise known as amniotic fluid. there’s just a lot of extra juice around, you know? and sometimes, some of it comes out.

now, some of it might come out when you sneeze or cough or the baby kicks your cervix and — oops! — there’s a little trickle of urine. or some of it might come out if your membranes rupture and you start to leak. and if you aren’t the type to pee on yourself, and if you haven’t experienced little itty-bitty amniotic fluid leaks, it just might be hard to tell the difference.

i’d noticed, oh, about six days ago now, an increase in some unnamed fluid. it wasn’t really a trickle and it certainly was not a gush. it was just a kind of glup, which tended to glup-glup its way out at wholly unpredictable times. so i didn’t think much of it at first. after it continued for a few days i started thinking to myself “huhmmm,” and when shannon asked me how things were going i told him there were some, um, differences in what was exiting my body, but i didn’t find things worrisome. i was willing to believe — partly in recognition of my poor body’s exhaustion, partly in preparation for my dotage – that i was leaking urine. i thought it was kind of icky and didn’t really feel like sharing the info, thank you very much, but i figured it was something that a few weeks of kegels should fix. no biggie.

about three days later – saturday last – i noticed more glupping than usual. shannon was on a bike ride and mairin and i had spent the morning wandering around our neighborhood. after she went down for her nap i decided to tackle some yard work. nothing strenuous, mind you – i was not about to confront an angry partner when he finally came home — but my work did involve a lot of wandering around, bending over, crouching, squatting, and pulling weeds (and a little bit of extra fun with a hacksaw and a dying honeysuckle). every so often i would sit myself down on the porch, drink some water and gave a good think or two to these noticeably-increasing glups. i knew s would not be happy about them. personally, i thought they were probably still ok, and that there wasn’t any need to call the doctor. i mean, obviously my water hadn’t broken. and i felt fine. no contractions, no fever — i wasn’t in labor and didn’t have an infection. what was there to worry about?

then i thought about all the times i read the blog of another pregnant woman — most especially those who have suffered through losses — and she’ll describe having symptom “x” or “q,” and the accompanying feeling that she shouldn’t call the doctor. it’s one of the (many) strange ways we tend to have lost our perspectives on pregnancy: we worry immensely about every little thing, and then partly because we spend so much time worrying we are afraid to voice our fears. it’s not just — although it is partly — that if we give voice to our fears they might be realized; it is also that we fear if we speak our fears aloud we will (i think — i think i’m not overgeneralizing by extrapolating from my own experience) sound like neurotic hypochondriacs and people will think we’re crying the pregnancy equivalent of wolf. so we shut up. but even as we decide to shut up, the people we confide our worries in tell us — insist, really — that we need to call our doctors.

i thought about all this and i knew that shannon would join that chorus of voices. after all, what the hell do i really know, despite my bravado and endless googling for information, about what’s ok and what’s safe and when in what context? so i thought i would call the doctor. but then i realized that my neighbor was within earshot and i suddenly felt immensely sheepish about discussing the possibility that i’m peeing my pants all day long when he might hear. and then i thought about how stupid that was, and that i could just go in the house to make the call. which i did.

i told the doctor that i was leaking something and i thought it was probably urine but i figured i should find out if there was any way for me to tell the difference between leaking urine and leaking amniotic fluid. oh, yes, he says casually. if it’s urine, you’ll have “an event” and you’ll get all wet, and then you’ll clean up and put a new pad in, and you’ll be dry and you’ll stay dry. if it’s amniotic fluid you’ll just stay wet all the time.

oh, i said. well, that’s what’s happening.

he was quiet for a minute. which one?

the second one.

more quiet.

well alright, then. you need to come in so we can check you. how quickly can you get to the hospital?

so i explained to him that mairin was asleep and shannon was gone but he should be back in the next half hour. that’s fine, he says. just come in when he gets home. okay, i said, and hung up.

i kept sitting on the porch in kind of stunned silence. i was pretty sure, really, that i was not leaking amniotic fluid. but what if i was? and what if this had happened with earl and ruby and i just hadn’t noticed? if they put me on bedrest before i had a good-sized rupture, would the sac heal? could i have saved ruby by simply paying better attention? and oh shit, was i going to go on bedrest starting NOW? if so, could gus hang on for 10 more weeks? or hell, two? or even just a few more days, long enough to get to 24 weeks so that he could be resuscitated?

by the time shannon got home and we got to labor and delivery we were genuinely freaked out. at the intake desk the nurse asked me why i thought my waters had ruptured. i wanted to yell at her, scream that i *didn’t* think they had ruptured would she please PLEASE not say that. (it reminded me of being in l&d at 5 am when ruby’s waters had broken and the intake nurse told someone else that i thought my waters had ruptured and i wanted to yell at *her,* tell her not to be so damned condescending, that i’d been through this before and i knew full well that my water had broken and just to treat me, dammit.) but now i stood i quietly at the desk told this nurse that we weren’t sure and that my doctor had sent me in for a ferning test.

i’ll spare you the details, gentle reader, of the inverted bedpan and the ice-cold speculum and what may very well have been the most uncomfortable and unpleasant exam of my life. shannon kept squeezing my hand and our really great nurse kept cracking jokes and the first thing the resident said to me was “wow, well, there sure is a lot of fluid in here but it doesn’t appear to be amniotic fluid” which sort of relaxed me except that it made me want to yell WELL THEN WHAT THE HELL KIND OF FLUID IS IT? but then three minutes later we had our answer.

not amniotic fluid, but a simple bacterial infection. which, according to nurse funnybone, explained my leaking. “i can see why you came in,” she said. “there’s a lot of goop down there. but don’t worry,” she added. “you just have a leaky cootchy. we can fix that right up with an antibiotic.”

so that’s my official diagnosis: a leaky cootchy. already showing his delight in the absurd, gus has been  practicing his gymnastics since we returned home, in tact and still gestating. 

when i was pregnant with earl in 2005 i didn’t look it. i had gained only eight pounds by the time she was delivered and had only been wearing maternity pants for two days. if i was at all ugly then, it certainly can’t be blamed on the pregnancy.

a year later, pregnant with mairin i was, i am told, cute. adorable. all belly. my doulas were kind enough to tell me at 39 weeks that i didn’t even look pregnant from behind. (s concurred, but then he had to live with me, so he’s slightly less trustworthy.) if i was ugly then, everybody had the grace not to tell me.

a year later, pregnant with ruby, i was tired and stressed and harried. and a little, um, plusher than usual. add to that the month when i inexplicably gained eight pounds. my very kind sisters-in-law told me i was an adorable pregnant woman, but then i was visiting from out of town and there’s a chance they were just being kind. my water broke four days later and then none of it mattered anymore as i lay in bed slowly deflating.

and here it is 2008, and i have to say i am not the cute pregnant woman of my glory days. i’m still mostly belly and haven’t gained very much weight (10 pounds to date), but i started with a major deficit: a tired, aging, saggy body. since earl’s death i have been “forbidden” to exercise strenuously — even during non-pregnant times if those times coincided with trying to conceive — and given that in the past four years i’ve been not pregnant for approximately 27 minutes, well, you get the picture. while my weight didn’t change dramatically after 2005, my body composition did: lots less muscle, lots more fat. and sadly, since muscle is heavier, i get to carry around more fat than ever but still be close to the same weight.  so everything to start with was, well, bigger. and  is just continuing to grow. add to that my status as “geriatric mother” and suddenly i have age working against me as well. hideously swollen veins — that HURT, as if the aesthetic demise of my gams were not enough. a few extra stretch marks — with more coming, no doubt. pain in my back — dear nurse cheryl pronounces it either a pulled muscle or sciatica — that has me half-limping, half-waddling every time i move. and a frightening lack of strength in both my lower and upper body that has me wondering how truly sedentary people do it. i mean, having this sort of body — the kind that doesn’t want to stretch, that strains with every move, that gasps and wheezes after a flight of stairs — is really lousy. how do people manage?

panting and groaning, i make my sluggish way through every day grateful that my body, such as it is, is holding things together (literally). i love to feel gus move and i’m trying not to hold my hideousness against him. (there’s plenty of time for that later.) but mostly, i am trying not to be over-eager to get my non-pregnant self outside in some new running shoes and work up a sweat. but that day is (insert superstitious action here) a long way off. i just hope that when it comes it doesn’t kill me.

as many of you know, my sense of geography is not that keen. i attribute it growing up out west where the states are BIG and the borders are STRAIGHT LINES and nobody really cares about what goes on with those witty urbanites all the way out on the east coast. so ask me questions about geography west of the rockies and i’m golden. anywhere else and i’m mostly guessing.

part of the problem is that my sense of geography has come to depend less on physical boundaries than on local characteristics; i’ve come to rely on my ability to identify behaviors as regional. this was easy enough after spending 13 years in the upper (more or less) midwest. for example, there are some easy-to-get differences between a ’sconnie and a gopher, and if anybody appears to be super interesting, well, odds are they’ve spent a lot of time somewhere else.

but when you think about the world this way you’re bound to be wrong. a lot. and i’ve been wrong — a lot — since moving to cincy. where the hell are we? i really can’t tell. if i close my eyes and point to the spot on a map of the u.s. where i know we live, i end up pointing at indiana. i cannot wrap my head around ohio being as far east as it is. and i know cincy is pretty far south because, hey, i can look across the river into kentucky. and everyong KNOWS that’s the south.

but every now and again this place strikes me as supremely midwestern.

case #1: lunch with coworkers last week. a colleague has taken a job elsewhere and asked some of us to go to lunch with her, one last time, to her favorite restaurant: the grand buffet. this place advertises itself as chinese, but i’m dubious since the first buffet table to greet eaters has french fries, mashed potatoes, tater tots, and other fried white food of distinctly american nature. but always game for adventure, i agreed to go. so picture this: ten of us at a long table, plates piled high with (ahem) chinese. i am six months pregnant. i am fifteen pounds heavier than usual and cannot pull my chair in all the way into the table because the guster is in the way. and by every measurement — girth, weight, you name it — i am the skinniest person at the table. by a loooooooooooooooooong shot.

case #2: mairin and i trekked to the suburbs on saturday for some big-box-type shopping. (i know: shame on me.) we loaded up our cart at costco (when did we become a family who actually benefits from buying 30 rolls of toilet paper at once?) and headed to the register. where i found that MY DEBIT CARD WOULD NOT BE ACCEPTED. “we can take a check, ma’am.” checks? wtf? WHO THE HELL WRITES CHECKS ANYMORE? i think the last time i lived among checkwriters i was living in — oh, yes, minnesota.

so my brain needs to do some stretching. i’ve been able to stretch like this in the past — for example,  to grasp chicago as midwestern, primarily because it’s urban enough to be an anomaly. but i’m having a hard time figuring out in which direction my brain should stretch now. i live in a semi-eastern, kind of urban, sorta-southern, check-writing city. which makes this place we live in…what? a little more, and a different kind of, midwestern than i thought.

several months after earl died shannon and i marked our first “days” as a mother and father. s’s father’s day card from that june says “my dad loves bikes!” it was about all we had, in those days — not his cycling per se, but our non-parental identities and activities — and we clung to them and projected them outward (and backward, i suppose) onto our daughter. we imagined her loving us for the things we did that made us who we are, since we were not able to imagine her loving us for the ways we were taking care of her.

several mother’s and father’s days later, mairin is kindly acceding and loving those parts of us that have nothing to do with her. (that assumes, of course, that she has mastered the mirror stage and understands that there are parts of us that have nothing to do with her — a huge and most likely wholly inaccurate assumption.)

but to the point:

mairin’s dad loves bikes and mairin knows it. and her knowing this, and her own growing fond attachment to bikes, looms large as one of her (currently) more endearing characteristics.

i’ve been shopping for outdoor ride-on toys to augment our outside playtime. i’ve found what i want online but really wanted to see some of these beauties in person. so we headed down to our neighborhood toy store (yes indeed, we have a glorious, independently owned toy store within walking distance — and near an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor! it’s a sunny saturday’s heaven). i was hoping they had some pedal-free contraptions, since m’s coordination and leg-length are not in her favor when it comes to pedalling. stoopid, stoopid mama. mairin found, straightaway, a small trike, insisted on climbing on and refused to get down. the whole time she was on it — barely moving unless one of us pushed her — she screeched at the top of gleeful lungs “baiwk! baiwk!” yes, honey, it’s a bike. “dada! dada!” yes, honey, daddy has a bike, too. “dada! baiwk!” shaking the handlebars and kicking her legs, she continued in this vein for the better part of 15 minutes before we dragged her, flailing and sobbing, away from her beloved baiwk.

mama was looking for something in the $30 range; clearly mairin’s first choice would not do. so we grudgingly went to the car, got on the highway, and headed to toys r us, where despite a wider range of pedal-free ride-on toys, mairin headed straight for a pink trike, climbed on, and we repeated the whole damn scenario. as i left her in shannon’s care in the bike section and wandered back to the pre-school section i could still hear her delighted squeals, punctuated by manical toddler giggles: “baiwks! baiwks! dada! baiwks!”

unhappy with the quality of our options at the big box store near the mall, and really not certain that the kiddo is ready for pedals, we all headed back home, talking about bikes (”about” being used loosely in this case) the whole time. we got home and mairin wanted to see her daddy’s bikes. we talked bikes all night long.

this story should lead up to the purchase of a bike for mairin, and it probably will, but not this week. in the meantime we’ve been watching her growing awareness of bikes and daddies. it used to be that when shannon went on a bike ride in the evening mairin would look at me quizzically and ask “dada?” “where’s daddy?” i would ask her. “scheuzz” she would say, making the ASL sign for sleep. “no, honey, daddy’s not sleeping. (he damn well better not be, i would mutter to myself.) he’s on his bike.” “yuuueawh. dada. baiwks.” five minutes later we would repeat the full conversation.

this morning, however, shannon and mairin were comparing jammies (they had both slept in red t-shirts). m’s t-shirt says “OKI” on it — a gift from auntie janice and uncle antony at the beach in oak island last year. s’s shirt says “chippewa falls” on it — a memento of a truly-wisconsin-style type bike race honoring beer (leinenkugel’s, to be specific). but — aha! — daddy’s red t-shirt sports a human figure on a bike. sitting on the bed, mairin pointed at the pedalling figure on her daddy’s chest: “dada! baiwks!” i got all warm and goopy in side. shannon almost started crying.

so we’ll keep taking her to local bike races (assuming they don’t keep getting cancelled) and we’ll eventually buy her her very own tricycle. meanwhile, we’ll both continue dreaming of the day when she climbs atop her 10-speed tucking her hair into her helmet and adjusting her racing shoes. in my version of this dream mairin and her dad are wearing the same team kit, mairin races with the juniors while shannon races with the, um, masters, and gus and i stand at the roadside, cheering them on and doling out fresh water bottles. ‘cuz mairin’s dad loves bikes.

for some bizarre reason we are no longer able to add images directly to a post. but for pics of the handsome devil and his life in utero, visit our flickr site.

in this episode: shannon’s an emotional spazz, in more ways than one; mairin suffers for it. carole is calm, quietly supportive of the quite possibly emotionally unstable father of her children, and expanding quite maternally; gus continues perfecting his gussitude on schedule and without fanfare.

scene i: from yesterday morning, just before going to the doctor…

two weeks ago we passed gus’s 20-week mark, and i pointed out to carole that we’d only ever passed that milestone with an intact amniotic sac once, with mairin. it may seem like a relatively abstract, or even tortured, way to think of a gestational milestone, but as i tell carole: the inside of my mind is not a pretty place.

tomorrow marks 22 weeks, and there’s nothing tortured about this thinking: in our history, only mairin has lived beyond this gestational age. and live she has done, arriving at 39 weeks with a full head of black hair and an amniotic sac so strong that it had to be manually broken six or seven hours into labor, and now turning into a toddler who, just last night, discovered the joys of telling her little cousin “NO!” for every little move he made.

so, tomorrow comes and i breathe easier, right? well, sort of. i mean, everything has looked so good, and gone so uneventfully, and been so monitored (we see the perinatologist in an hour, carole’s nurse comes here this evening, and we see our ob tomorrow morning), so yeah, i’m allowing myself to be hopeful. we’ve made a deal that when we get to 24 weeks we can begin buying outfits for the little fellow (i’ve got a very cool one picked out already). we’re talking sleeping arrangements (get gus a new crib and convert mairin’s to a toddler bed or hand down m’s crib and get her a new toddler bed? fwiw, we’re leaning toward the former). we believe gus will be fine and will arrive sometime in late august or (preferable) early september.

i told you my mind wasn’t a pretty place, though, right? because in my mind’s peripheral vision, just out of focus, just out of reach, i keep thinking i see the other shoe falling. i’m scared, i’m on edge, and (as usual) there’s nothing i can do. there’s nothing any of us can do, except more of what we’ve been doing. and these milestones we pass successfully, glowingly, with flying colors — sometimes each one feels like one more step into some karmic cobweb, the spider of fate drooling slightly in anticipation, watching our progress, biding her time, waiting to pounce. my conscious mind believes that every marker we pass uneventfully is a very good thing and increases the likelihood of dandling gus on my knee this fall, a big smile on my face. but this superstitious caveman part of me, my animal brain, tries to explain things in a world where everything is controlled by a not-so-benevolent energy, something probably a lot like job’s god, testing and testing and pushing the limits of human endurance for renewed hope and pain and suffering and loss …

… but i get this way every time we’re going to the doctor’s, so i’ll just shut up now.

scene ii: yesterday afternoon, after a successful visit to the doctor…

oh man, did you see him jumpin’ around, and opening his mouth like that? i’ll bet he’s just guzzling that amniotic fluid and building up those lungs and did you see his measurements? he’s measuring right on his gestational age or even as much as a week ahead especially his head and the placenta looked great and wasn’t it great when the tech was looking at his heart and aorta and kept saying how beautiful they were? he’s going to be just fine isn’t he i just believe it and feel it and i don’t know why i get so worried or superstitious or dark i just do i get nervous before we go to the doctor it’s like i have the energy to make it almost to the next appointment but then i run out just before but then i go and it’s great and the pregnancy is so uneventful and that’s great and wow. wow.

scene iii: several hours later…

i. am. so. f*#!ing. tired.

scene iv: today…

still tired, but that’s more to do with the big kid, who had One of Those Nights last night. what’s OoTN, you ask? it’s a night during which she wakes up crying for her mama repeatedly and (uncannily) right when one or both of her parents just begin to drift off, so that not only is your night sleepless and filled with toddler tears, it’s a yo-yo experience of sleep being tantalizingly dangled before you and rudely jerked away. She has OoTNs every few months, so it’s not like she’s a regular at this, and she has always slipped right back into her regular schedule pretty easily (ah, the elasticity of youth), but OoTNs have a memorable quality, especially in the haze of the day after.

gus, unaffected by his sister’s shenanigans last night, is doing great at the start of his 23rd week. heartbeat: strong; movements: regular, and increasing in strength; measurements: on or ahead of average; stomach: still below the diaphragm (this one threw me a little when the tech looked at the ultrasound screen and pointed out the diaphragm: “here it is, see, and the stomach is below it, which we like to see.” um, yeah we do.); kidneys: sure, if you say so; legs: two; arms: ditto; fingers and toes: twenty; and so on. in fact, every measurement is good, and as you’ll see later today or tomorrow, wrapped up in a very handsome package.

one of my favorite things about blogging is having friends in the computer who understand me. i don’t know anybody IRL who has been through what i have (well, except shannon, and it’s not that he doesn’t count, but it’s not quite the same, you know…?) but there is a sad and yet relieving number of women out there who have been through it — or through something close to it — or in some cases, even worse things. i have spent every day since september 27, 2007 being grateful for them.

but it’s been a scary week for some of these women and their families. cheek was just put on full bedrest, although she’s far enough along that her baby would be premature now but would still probably be well enough to go home with her. geohde is suffering from painful contractions that are scary for her 24-week-old fetii — and i can barely stand to remember what it means to contemplate the possibility of birthing such young babes, and the wonderful and terrible things that can result from the doctor’s efforts to resuscitate them at birth (24 weeks being the marker for that particular intervention). i spent two long weeks last september contemplating those things and my eyes well up with missing ruby if i even think about it now. and now vamplita’s baby’s heart has quit beating and mine is breaking all over again, just for her and F and their Lollipop.

sometimes i am amazed that our species even continues. true, plenty of women never have problems with pregnancy, and plenty of other women have problems that others of us would laugh at (sorry to hear about your stretchmarks, honey-pie, but those don’t really count. you know?). good for them. i guess. but plenty of women have genuine problems, life-threating — even life-taking — problems.  i’m so glad to know some of them. and as terrible as it might sound, i’m tired of being one of them.

that’s it from me today. just hard.