Slouching towards induction🚶‍♀️‍➡️

Notes on my third trimester

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Mom Blog is going on parental leave after this post. I’ll be back in the spring! Miss you already!

artwork by Caroline Corrigan

A woman in my pregnancy workout class admits that her feet stink, like really bad, all the time. “I’m sure the doctor can smell them at my checkups,” she says to the rest of us, as we struggle back into our sweatshirts after class.

“No way,” I assure her. “It’s just your super-sensitive pregnancy nose. Don’t worry!” This is what I’ve been telling myself, anyway.

Later that evening, putting Rosalind to bed, she rolls away from me bellowing: “Mommy you smell so bad!”

**

“Where are all the captions,” I demand of my family.

“What?” asks Jimmy.

“Ugh what are they called,” I say, trying to find somewhere to set down my moisture-condensed jar of water.

It doesn’t come to me until I find one: the word is coasters.

**

Talking to a friend’s mother at a kid’s birthday party the other week, she asks about our small house. “Do you have enough room for another kid?” she asks.

“No,” I say, and we sit there in silence for a few moments as children scream in pleasure around us.

**

There is so much to get done, and an unclear amount of time to do it in. I will either make it to my induction date—or I won’t. I will either need to go early, go early on my own, or make it to the finish line. Right in the middle of all of those times is Christmas, a holiday for which nothing needs to be ready. Ha ha. I sit here, staring at my to-do list, paralyzed.

**

I’ve been thinking of one of our favorite books, This Is How We Do It, which shows a day in the life of kids all around the world. In India, the whole family sleeps in one bed. Pinterest keeps showing me the same two Apartment Therapy articles about how a family of 5 in Brooklyn lives in a 1-bedroom apartment. I click on it every time. Every time, the solution is the same: throw out everything you own and get a murphy bed. We have two bedrooms, which is probably enough, but only one toilet, which might not be enough.

**

Every time I call Rosalind over to feel baby kicking, the baby stops doing it. She is either soothed into silence by the presence of her sister or maybe alarmed into quietude by the volume of the shrill screaming: It’s me, Rozzy! Your sister!

Rosalind doesn’t let this deter her from experiencing kicks. “I feel it, Mama!” she exclaims, as nothing happens inside me. “I feel her! She loves me!”

She does, I agree. She does.

**

The worst thing about this pregnancy so far—and I can say this now as I am no longer (usually) nauseous—is the blood pressure readings. I am supposed to do one reading at home per day, just in case. Anne lent me her state-of-the-art home blood pressure cuff and the sight of it makes my palms start to sweat. The sound of the velcro cuff ripping open makes my face flush. The noise of it cranking into gear increases my pulse. So far the readings are normal or normal-ish, unless I’m having a panic attack, in which case they are high.

**

Everyone is doing that thing which drives me insane: glimmer in their eye, they say something like: “get ready” or “just you wait.” “You’ll be pretty busy in January,” they might say, unable to stop themselves. “Two kids is a lot different than one,” they instruct me, as though I am an idiot who can’t do basic math, a person who already can’t get a single thing done when one child is at home.

**

Driving home from work, a big lumpy cloud blocks the sunset. All I can think: it looks like my placenta. This pregnancy I have an “anterior” one, meaning it’s at the front of my belly, blocking family members from feeling her kicks. I drive on, experiencing everything around me as body, my body, body.

**

Sarah makes a special effort to send me cute sibling content: her son and daughter holding hands, walking through the woods, or her son lifting her daughter up in a big bear hug. I feel the sweet gesture of friendship more than I feel the intended message; right now it still feels impossible, impossible, unreal. The challenge of imagination is huge even as the longing is so tangible.

**

The only thing that calms me down for blood pressure readings is a white man singing Hindu devotional music and the Carmen Christopher Live From the Windy City standup special. I refuse analysis of this evidence.

**

Jimmy got me two pairs of shoes for my birthday, each one more horrible than the next. I had complained about the struggle of bending over to put shoes on, but I would rather bend over a thousand times than wear these alien carapaces lol. They have been returned. Love u baby.

**

The name we have picked out did not resonate with Rosalind at first. “I guess,” she said. “If the baby is fat,” she said, using her own cryptic logic as usual. “Or if the baby has black hair when she’s born, because that’s a Chinese name.”

**

Woken up by a sex dream about a certain handsome political candidate

Woken up by a rage dream that I hit Jimmy over the head with a cucumber, knocking him out, because of something he did wrong (in the dream)

Woken up, frantic and frustrated, by a nightmare that a senior colleague assigned everyone in her class the job of writing their own Mom Blog, even giving them the very title I had come up with in the dream: On Pointelle. “Just because you and I have the same cotton shirt from J Crew,” I wanted to scream, but didn’t—

Woken up blissful from a dream that the baby turned out to be twins: now I can use all the middle names we have picked out, I thought, thrilled. The dream skipped over birth and cut right to both girls latching easily and sucking hungrily at my milk. Easy! I thought, radiant and happy. Easy!

**

The name we have picked out is not what I think anyone else would describe as a “Chinese name,” but Rosalind's idea does represent a great fear of mine, more irrational than rising blood pressure, but not totally impossible. What if the baby is born and is clearly, visibly, not made from our genetics, a mixup at the IVF clinic, and we have to give her back. It’s happened before.

**

In the shower last week I realized why I hate the “just you waits” and the “you’ll be busies.” This type of comment also made me mad when I was pregnant with Rosalind but this time they make me sad, too—sad, I realized, because after two miscarriages I thought I’d already have two kids. I thought I’d know it all already, and wouldn’t need to be told. The memory of those alternate timelines extend even into my imagined futures, haunting them, too.

**

Sometimes I Google “babies born at 33 weeks” or whatever week I’m at just to see what’s really going on inside me. The What To Expect app’s illustrations and comparisons are so useless and, frankly, terrifying:

Why does it look like this baby is about to cat-call me

Right now the app says she is either as big as a butternut squash or Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates or a Windows 95 box or a swim fin or a party-size bag of chips. Crunch crunch.

**

Things that have made me cry recently: the government. How tired I feel. Taking my blood pressure. The Emily Oster chapter on preeclampsia, read several times in advance, just in case I get it. Verizon’s customer service that has been charging me for months on the cell phone we cancelled, the cell phone my mother no longer remembers how to use.

The fear that my love for each daughter will be somehow different: that I will love Rosalind more because she came first or that I will love this baby more because I worked so hard for her. The Ariana Grande song “One Last Time,” which is actually very sad if you really listen to the lyrics.

**

Last time it felt pretty embarrassing to be pregnant, the shape of my body evidence of my erotic activities. Walking belly-first into the classroom felt like being forced to say out loud, “yeah, I fuck.”

This time, perhaps because it was IVF, or perhaps because I am 41, already a mom, I feel no such way. Android pregnancy. Un-sexual. Workman-like.

**

Trying to remember that this birth will be different. Of course it will, the whole pregnancy already is, but specifically: it won’t be March 2020, during the topsy-turvy grief and loss of the early pandemic. Our doula will be with us this time. Jimmy will be able to leave the hospital room and come back, hopefully with an entire turkey-provolone-lettuce-tomato-onion-oil-and-vinegar sub from Ragonese Italian Imports. When we arrive to deliver, there won’t be a folding table blocking the staircase to L&D with a worker asking you to sign a form attesting that you have not recently been to Wuhan, China.

When I arrived at St. Peter’s last time I was already 8cm dilated. The woman at the table stood up to hand me the clipboard but was stopped by the shouts of a man behind her—who he was I’ll never know—worker, patient, father, grandfather, hero. He came to my rescue, shouting: “Let that woman GO. She ain’t been to no Wuhan, China.”

He was, of course, absolutely right and I was quickly swept off my shaky feet into a wheelchair, to cross the threshold, in a few short hours, into motherhood.

**

For a few weeks, my appetite was relentless. I could eat anything and everything and wanted more of it. Now nothing sounds good except: bagels with cream cheese, Amy’s Frozen Mac & Cheese with Cauliflower Bowl, peach Sour Patch Kids, and I guess fried eggs. It tastes, again, like a bird flew into my mouth and took a shit there.

Jimmy goes to my parent’s house to help my dad take out his last air conditioner. I ask him to check, again, if he can’t extricate my childhood dresser, no longer being used for my mother’s things, to bring it home for us. Rosalind has the smaller one in the set, but if we can move her clothes into this bigger dresser, the baby will have somewhere for her tiny, precious things to go. All the drawers of this dresser are already in our basement, but my parent’s hallway is cluttered with my mother’s bookshelves, her extensive used mystery series collections, and Jimmy is certain the frame of the dresser won’t fit.

I find similar ones on Facebook Marketplace but everything is difficult, terrible. A woman sends me a snide comment after I ask for measurements: “the yardstick is in the photo for a reason,” she writes, and when I go back to look, yes, there is a vintage, wooden one in the photo but if I zoom in all the numbers are blurred to invisibility.

I picture the barren dresser in my parents bedroom, where now only my dad sleeps, tossing and turning, worrying about my mom not sleeping in her nursing home bed. I decide I don’t want this woman’s bad energy in my house, so I ignore her replies, ignore the laundry, ignore the to-do list.

**

I text Amy and Beatrice when it happens: at work one day, leaning over in the bathroom stall, I realize I can’t really reach to wipe my own ass.

No one appreciates the indignities of pregnancy, or responds with more fervor, than two women who have not had children of their own. I am grateful to them for their horrified replies.

And even the disgusting is somehow joyful; evidence that life keeps growing inside of me.

**

Jimmy, my hero: the dresser DOES fit. He brings it home in the trunk of my dad’s SUV and I set to work wiping it down and moving Rosalind’s extensive tutu collection to the bottom drawer. The little dresser is in our room now. The laundry churns in the basement, flipping and spinning the miniature clothes we have saved for years. The house hums with its vibration, with anticipation.

**

A lady at church—my mom’s age—stops me to ask if there’s an “exciting surprise” coming, pointing to my stomach. This is exactly what you are not supposed to do but I am grateful for it, grateful to be seen.

“Oh, I just know you’re going to take such good care of her,” she says, “and give her so much love.”

It is the perfect thing to say.

**

Visiting my mother this weekend she placed her hand on my belly. “Is this ok,” she asks me, knowing me, but not totally sure of our relationship. It’s a joyful surprise every time she sees my belly.

My father, operating in her world while we’re there, is constantly reintroducing me to the nurses, as though I’m the one who can’t remember. Yes, I remember Latasha, I will never forget Latasha, who has told me twice now how much I look like my mother, that she’d “recognize me anywhere.”

“It’s the eyes,” she explains.

I have never looked like my mother, who is tall, thin, and blonde. I have always looked precisely like my father, round-faced and freckled. Latasha sees a lot that I can’t see, that much is obvious.

“I feel something,” my mother says, hands on my belly “it’s very faint.”

I don’t feel the baby moving at all—this time of the morning she is usually asleep inside of me, but just like with Rosalind, I nod in agreement.

“She knows you’re there,” I say, and bite the insides of my cheeks to stop from crying. “She loves you.”

Untitled by Joan Semmel, seen at the Whitney on a recent trip. Somehow this is exactly what pregnancy feels like

**

The urgency to pee is now completely divorced from the amount of pee in my bladder. It strikes me, unrelated to amount: teaspoon, tablespoon, pint; it all feels the same.

Everything is big now. Every amount is a lot. Everything is heavy, looming. Everything is expectant.

Thank you for reading mom blog. 💖Like💖 this post if you liked it.

Comment below any oxytocin-releasing shows you can recommend me as I prepare a postpartum list of things me and Jimmy can binge: top of our list is a re-watch of Girls5eva. Bonus points if it will lower my BP.

I hope you sleep all night long (through the whole winter! I know I won’t!)

xo
Olivia