pregnancy observations: 33 weeks
I can’t believe how short the time has grown and how slowly it still feels like it is moving. Seven more weeks until our due date, though the baby could come well after or before that, like a gigantic question mark hovering over a full month of my life. The third trimester is very weird because you really can’t be low-key about it anymore – not that I ever have been! It’s not very low-key, I guess, to write public journals about pregnancy and mark each week with a poem that you hope someday to publish in a book people could buy! But, still, a big change. Before, I still felt like my pregnancy was a secret that I could keep – from others certainly, strangers passing by – but also from myself. I used to be able to forget that I was pregnant, even just for five minutes, focusing on something else.
Not anymore. Now it is thoroughly unforgettable, to me and to everyone who sees me. I walk like a pregnant person, sort of waddling with my arms cantilevering my hips. I wear strange combinations of clothing, ill-fitting. I can’t make it through the night without waking up multiple times because my legs hurt. I can’t finish a task. I find myself walking into the baby’s room and standing in the middle of the floor, looking at the crib, the changing pad, almost like there’s something I should be doing in there. There’s nothing to do but wait.
I never forget that I am pregnant now. Not only because of my body’s discomfort and the baby’s movement, but also because (probably due to a mounting rush of hormones) I’m beginning to want the baby to be born. I’m not sure I felt that way before. Hypothetically, sure, but not so viscerally as I do now. I want to see him alive and breathing. I want to see him realized, actual. I read the word “stillbirth” and I’m horrified that it’s even a word. Before, I could conceive of loss, of things going wrong. I had to keep that possibility held in one hand. Every woman does it – counts the weeks until her baby has a good chance of survival outside the womb – “viability” like a deadline. Now that I’ve made it well past that point, taken that exhale, I don’t know how to do anything but demand a living baby. It must be this way. It will. Of course, I can’t know that, but my hope feels so much more insistent than before. Pregnancy is nine months of held breath, the suffocation growing more urgent as the time goes on, the relief closer but more unimaginable. That’s how it’s felt for me, at least. I feel myself beginning to turn blue.
But all seems well! The baby moves all day long, responds to a gentle pat on the stomach with a little swish as if saying, “don’t worry, I’m still here!” So considerate! Will he keep that quality, that call and response, outside the womb? Likely it will reverse – he will call, I will respond, like a strange liturgy.
I’ve been eating ice cream each evening. I’ve been drinking more water than before, and tracking the ounces in an app. I feel a little less like I’m always failing, but maybe that’s because I can’t fathom anymore what failure would mean. I eat bread with butter, apples, asparagus, pasta, nuts. Cereal with milk. I’ve found a way to get through, not perfectly, not even well, but we’re making it. I take a walk with the dog each day. I sleep beside my husband each night, wedged by pillows, uncomfortable. I have drawers filled with washed onesies, a bassinet. If this baby were born tomorrow, we could make it work. The carseat waits. I wait too.
We’ve been taking childbirth classes through the birthing center via zoom – each session is so overwhelming that I feel thoroughly quieted by it for hours afterward. Watching videos of women in labor, completely vulnerable, completely beyond their selves – I begin to feel vulnerable too, viscerally. I wept after one such video, my husband sitting beside me. Not fear, just overwhelm, and acceptance that I will walk through somewhere mysterious and difficult, that in that place I will be completely alone. I know the only way out is through. I’ve heard and read all of this information now multiple times from multiple sources. I’m so thoroughly saturated. I scribble notes in my journal, as if that will help me move through it with grace. I was talking to someone who gave birth recently, and I asked her: “Did you remember anything that you learned in advance when you were in labor? Did anything come to mind and feel helpful?” She said, “no, not really. I was just there. It was pure experience.” For all the preparation, I’ve known all along that this is true. There is no preparing. Knowledge helps me feel some sense of power amidst powerlessness, but, as in everything, the only true path forward is the path of descent – of unknowing, humility, trust. If I expect anything, I expect pure experience. I expect to be swept away. I practice hope like hope makes me powerful. Maybe it does.
The timeline of my pregnancy has almost perfectly aligned with the Covid-19 pandemic, and with this surreal election year. I’ve been watching the country spiral into chaos and madness, unimaginable. I just filled out my mail-in ballot, will take it to a drop box soon. That’s all I can do, the tiny action I have. I don’t know what to say about all of this except that things are so much worse and more complicated than I ever imagined them being, and to try to absorb it all in the midst of my first pregnancy, in the midst of feeling more vulnerable than I ever have before, is too much. The stress of the pandemic alone has irreversibly colored this time for me – that’s a loss, that’s something to grieve. I caught myself the other day imagining taking our newborn to church on Christmas Eve, the dream of seeing his new face bathed in candlelight and quiet hymn, standing quietly, swaying, in the back – before remembering that there will likely be no safe church service on Christmas Eve, that nothing is like it was before, everything unpredictable and strange. So many things like that. We have been protected and kept safe throughout this time in so many ways, but that doesn’t undo the fact of living through it anyway, seeing it unfold in an parade of evil choices made by terrible leaders, mass confusion and hysteria, mobs of people whose actions I can’t comprehend, and a general ongoing uneasy sense of not-right-ness.
So I’m letting my focus be on waiting for this baby right now. Something hopeful. A distraction, maybe, but a worthy one. I think of that one part of Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” (an anthem for life! for motherhood!) – lines that always stood out to me as being wise beyond my understanding:
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
“Will this disturb the sleep / of a woman near to giving birth?” That question was stuck in my mind for so many years, and now I am living it. Now, as I am near to giving birth, my sleep is disturbed by news of mass death that could have been prevented, news of my own health insurance being in jeopardy when I need it most, news of the very earth being endangered, news of rich men getting richer, news of lies being told and people being neglected, so, so much bad news.
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts (!!!). It’s all I can do to try!
I’ve been thinking a lot about something I’ve been reading in lots of the books about birth I have stacked around the couch – that a woman in labor will stop progressing if she feels her safety threatened, if she doesn’t feel secure and protected. Ina May Gaskin calls it “the sphincter law” – you can’t open up unless you can relax. I know what fear feels like – I’ve been feeling it for my whole life. I know how it clenches me up, how the tension fills my body and disturbs any normal processing. How I stop digesting food, stop breathing air, stop seeing clearly, stop hearing what is being said. A woman in labor needs to be able to relax completely, to feel supported and upheld by everyone around her. Even one new person in the room who the woman doesn’t know, who she doesn’t feel safe with, can stall labor dramatically. The fight or flight response, the mind being frozen in a fearful choice, is the opposite of the gentle, difficult forward progress of labor, an unknowing, a letting go.
Where will I feel safe? How can I create for myself this place where I can labor without fear, when each day there is so much reason to feel fearful, angry, worried, aghast? I feel myself instinctively retreating into some calm center that I have to create, a suspension of disbelief. I find myself demanding a world that is safer than this one – a world where I can labor and birth my baby in peace. That need has never felt so vivid as it does now. I am not absorbing the news as I once did. I am willfully forgetting. That’s a privilege, but also a necessity. I feel myself seeking out dark, quiet places, my bedroom like a cave. I am retreating. I hope I have permission to retreat. When so much is needed, I want to stay aware. But I can’t, not right now. I have to become internal, fierce. I’ve been using the word “self-protection” a lot. I feel like a tiger or a wolf, a snarl ready to say “do not come near me or my baby,” to any who would threaten, to even the news itself, its terrible drone. I grieve for women who have given birth to babies in the face of much more pressing danger and terror – how many millions? How did they do it? We survive somehow, I guess. We find that safety somewhere, and inhabit it just long enough to get our babies out. I don’t know how.
And even now my baby moves. He hasn’t known the world yet. He will love it more than I do – exactly as it is. It will be given to him as a gift. Do you give your children a stone when they ask for bread, a snake when they ask for fish? No. I believe the world is still good, that it can be. I refuse to give my baby a stone – but I don’t give it to him. The world isn’t mine to give. There’s relief in that. And also powerlessness. In so many ways, my work is always to let go. To let my baby go even now, even before he is here. I can’t control what the world will be like on the day he is born. I know it will be more beautiful than it is terrible, against all odds. It always is.
briefly, just a few recommendations:
The Shame by Makenna Goodman – probably my favorite novel I’ve read this year, and I’ve been reading a lot. a motherhood book for the ages.
The Leftovers on HBO – Isaiah and I just finished this series and we can’t stop talking about it together. The best kind of tv show, thoroughly poetic and thoughtful and deep and wide. Really extra poignant in a pandemic year.
here’s a playlist, if you need one. going to make a playlist for labor/birth soon (yikes!), let me know if you have any song recommendations for feeling powerful + calm!
really fun to watch this instagram account for really nice secondhand kid clothes, etc. haven’t bought anything yet but have been tempted more than once!
Want to chat about pregnancy, birth, motherhood, writing, poetry, spirituality, sewing, or anything else? I can’t guarantee that I have the bandwidth to respond to every message right now, but I really love to hear your experiences and when things resonate. You can always comment or send me an email at amybornman@gmail.com. I read and am encouraged by everything you send! And I’ll try to respond when/if I can! Much love.