reprieve                                                         

An unexpected day off. Time enough to wash my hair. Dry it even. Put in product, remember that it shines. Time enough for a second (first) cup of coffee. An over-stuffed arm chair. Time enough for pages empty of words, so full up of write.

But there is no place to begin, having gone this far along. I've started something of another place, a place devoted only to that which I was intent on avoiding: mommyblogginess. It is one of the many ways in which I am salting my words, in effort to make them easier to swallow. There is much that needs to be documented, the mundane and sweet daily doings, the messy, complicated emotions, the excrutiating cliches, the insurmountable loneliness. 

But it's nascent. New. Newer than she is. Not ready yet to step lightly out into the bright glare of morning.

 place holder                                                        
There is so much. Yes, she's here. Yes, she's perfect. Yes, I'm exhausted. 

Somehow, there is no time. I don't know why I am so surprised. There are about ten thousand things that I have written, invisibly, so far. All of them lost, for now, into the recesses of my brain.

I will say this - I am newly, strangely, unexpectedly lonely. This is startling; I am no longer the easy creature of solitude I used to be. I miss my mother. I miss my friends. I am tired and bored of New Hampshire. I find myself seeking paved roads and placing to buy things. This is unexpected, too. Hurried as I was to leave the city. To live in the country.

This is the country. I'm trying. 

But there is too much, so much, to get out first. But not now. Some other time. Soon.

filler                                                                                           

A few have emailed, concerned, questioning, just wanting to make sure. Most have left. Occasionally, someone really cool stops by to say hello who I'd never met before, and that's always nice. So I'm posting this for now, a place holder, a trail of breadcrumbs, just in case I need to come back.

1. The baby has not been born yet. Best we know, everything is fine. Today is her due date in fact. Apparently she did not get the memo.

2. I am still sick but not nearly as sick or as continuously as before. Some days are almost okay. Some days I want to stick my head in a blender. It's like being in the wrong kind of Skinner Box. There's no way to predict what will happen: some times I am nauseous for hours; other times food just tastes wrong. Occasionally, mercifully, every once and a while, things are almost normal, making it all the more infuriating the next time I try to eat something and end up instead, hypersalivating and spitting up in the sink.

3. I don't know if it's lack of blood flow or volition or if I will ever return here the way I once was before. I do know that I refuse, on principle and practice and a rather unpopular aversion to all things Mommyblogger, that this will never, ever be a Mommyblog. That said, much in the way of Anne Lamott, I kind of need to chronicle things. 

We'll see what happens. Once it does.

village voice

I always thought I wrote to open the stop cock on the pressing, urgent overstock of inventory in my cluttered, disorderly, saturated mind. I always thought, in New York, that I wrote because I couldn't not write. My brain processed the world as a series of words, typed out onto a page. It never occurred to me that I needed the hard-pressed humanity, the the little sorrows, the accumulated enormous and tiny and bewildering moments in order to write.

Before New York I had bad boyfriends and big heart aches and an abundant, vaulting ambition. I worked long nights, late under the bright and flickering lights of blue buildings, tending to slow ailing and quick dying creatures--filled up behind their cages, eyes full of water and color--trying to breech the chaos and the calm of Emergency Veterinary Medicine.

Before New York I had a fierce and hard-beating heart full of sad ache for a boy who should have been a man, but wasn't. Before New York I'd run for miles and miles and miles along the green and golden ocean, trying to outpace my irrepressible insides. Before now there was much in my life that urged commentary, required compartmentalization, that I had to write it down,I had to place it some where else outside of me, in order to keep the sinew together, in order to quiet my unquiet mind.

What I am saying is that I am unaccustomed to such pedestrian complaints as the ones I have now. Sick from pregnancy and exhausted of the visceral constellation of maladies that seem to be unique only to me, causing incredulous speculation and vague disbelief whenever I try to explain them. Bored and tired of a job that reminds me daily that my talent and ability and ambition is disappointingly untended to. Facing the same redundant and thread bear sacrifices so many women have already suffered: careers for children, professional success for personal satisfaction. There is no new territory here, for me or for anyone. I embarrasses me almost to even give voice to it.

And yet, I still have this space. Am half-heartedly nursing it. Which is odd. This space that was so necessary to calm the chaos I urgently abandoned. This space that existed because of the hard and heavy heft of medicine and New York. And here I am now, in the quiet and the calm, empty and restless and wistful, wondering if I needed some of those small disasters to distract me from the echo and edges and dust in my heart.

 dyspepsic                                                
I have nothing, I'm empty, full up of space and distance, so out of practice I barely know where to begin.

Last week we went home, to Santa Cruz, where we no longer live. I stood along the steep cliffs in the hot sun and the thick air with the seals barking and the green ocean and the tiny waves crashing and the chattering pelicans, feeling as if I will never be so complete as this, that I will always be missing an entire chamber in my heart.

I did not ever want to be a mommy blogger. I do not ever want to be a mommy blogger. Lately, as I stare vacantly at the various entries of some of the more formidable mommy bloggers who populate the momm-o-sphere I feel as if I have never been so alone in my life. As if I am certainly an alien being, as if I am certainly out of my guano mind. I can't relate. To any of them. Well, maybe this one and this one. But neither of them are mommy bloggers and both of them are equally and separately stunning. I look around and see so little that centers me, so few women who anchor me or make some kind of semblance of sense.

Lately I have been sick. Again. Almost, if not as bad, as before. My heatburn is so bad it forces the food back up again after I eat. On all fours and sobbing I crouch in front of the toilet, coughing and gagging every bit of it back up. When it stays down it hurts so much sometimes it takes my breath away. It comes on like a spasm, out of nowhere, a full frontal attack. I can feel the little bit I manage to eat in a day forcing it's way back up again, ripping up the delicate skin of my body as it works it way backwards, up and out, punishing. I feel like a mental patient, like some deranged person that no one believes, or understands. People just look at me, cross-eyed, and say still? Aren't you supposed to be done with that stuff? I makes me want to kick them in the teeth.

And I'm still nauseous. Always. Tums makes it worse. Almost nothing is worse than trying to eat Tums. Even barfing is a better alternative. Nothing tastes so foul as those little round chalk chucks from hell. I've tried Maalox but my nausea was so extreme that I gagged it right back up again, into the sink. Food is a total fucking nightmare. Nothing tastes good and everything, everything, leaves me with an aftertaste so excruciating I can't tell what's worse, the heartburn from not eating or the nauseating, hyper salivating aftertaste mixed with the heartburn from eating.

People ask me how I am doing. I am supposed to smile and glow and say, just lovely. The nursery is all done and everything is painted in garish fucking pink. I'm fucking ecstatic. That's what they want me to say, what they expect me to say and what I do not, almost ever, actually say to them. Ever. I want to say, this fucking sucks. It fucking sucks. I'm miserable and sick and every single moment of my life is consumed by the complete revolt and failure of my body to do this the way it was supposed to and I can't eat and my chest is going to cave in from being eaten inside to out and no one seems to understand or even believe me and no really, I can't "just eat" to feel better. Everything I put into my body causes me pain or makes me vomit and even water tastes like hell so no, I don't love being pregnant, fuck you very kindly.

Instead, I walk around like an escaped mental patient, clutching at my chest and mumbling, heart racing and breathless, wondering why it is my body is failing so miserably at the one thing it's supposed to do right now which is feed itself.

Andy looks at me and frowns, be nice to her, he reminds me. And I crumple and die inside, because clearly I am already an unfit parent, unable to put aside my own visceral discomfort, waiting for this mystical love to arrive, waiting for the moment, as promised, when I will recant and cave and believe, somehow, that it was all worth it.

bookmark

Jesus, I still suck. I've been meaning to, and meaning to, sit down--full up of write--and do some vital space maintenance, cleaning out some of the biggest, bulkiest bits of crap in my brain. But first there were friends in town, and then it was beautiful with much snowshoeing to be done, and then there is work, which is terrifyingly real and official and I can no longer hide under the guise of student but am now, quite suddenly, trusted practicioner. And. And I lay awake at night thinking jesus fuck did I document that I saw such and such in so and so's file, good god what if the eight year old with the belly pain who got added in as my last patient of the day has some whopping intussusception and the xrays I sent her for will essentially be worth nothing but a law suit since I won't be back in the office again until the end of the week and by then she'll surely have perished or had her entire intestines emergently removed? Or oh fuck me I swear I did that PAP smear all wrong and I'm going to have to call her and tell her to come back because the lab report will essentially say You Suck at Finding The Cervix. Please Try Again.

And then again today, which is so snowy and lovely and I fell back asleep this morning in my bed, dreaming of being back in Brooklyn--when half of my days were spent in sleep, fitfully recovering from itchy, achey 36 hour shifts in that tired, old, broke down hospital--such that I woke up wanting bagels and my old neighbor to come down stairs so we could brew tea and sit in bare feet in my living room watching the snow fall and listening to the quiet and deafening roar of the city.

judgemental                                      

My, it has been a while. I've been toying with the idea of letting this space fade into oblivion. Life now is nothing if not quiet and uncomplicated; the deafening need to be here caused by the groundswell of New York is no longer and, without that, my need for catharsis is less pressing, absent, almost.

Or maybe it's just that I'm so deeply in between now that I don't even have my words yet. I was once a strident non-mommy blogger and I am unwilling, or unready, to enter into such an endeavor, despite my growing circumference. 

Or perhaps its that coming here creates a nostalgia of sorts that, after a while, grows tiresome. I miss New York a great deal and occasionally. I miss all the things that were slowly choking me -- the trash, the saturated humanity, the cruelty and the beauty -- although I do not think I will ever miss the screeching screaming loud loud loudness of it.

Or perhaps its that the most pressing part of my life right now is one that I am willfully, stubbornly trying not to make an enormous to do over. I am excited and terrified and mystified by the impending probability that I will shortly become a mother. I am in awe almost daily. Yet as I begin to tip toe into the outer reaches of motherhood, namely other mothers, I am horrified and frightened and flabbergasted. I don't feel like any of them, I don't really look like too many of them and I certainly don't sound like too many of them. I haven't chosen paint yet for the nursery and for the love of god and all things holy I do not, under any circumstances, want anything pink. I worry about how I will do this, bereft as I am of any kind of operating instructions. I watch other mothers and feel silently scornful, judgmental, so quick to think you're doing it wrong. As if I know. As if I had any concept.

I go snowshoeing about my backyard with my dog for hours. In the quiet of the packed powder it's hard to imagine how infinitely changed my life is about to become. As we trudge through the snow he steps on my shoe and I tell him back and go forward. He takes three steps back and swings wide to the side, bounding ahead of me three or four steps then turning towards me, waiting. I think to myself that I have such a good dog, and know that a great deal of that is because of me. I understand dogs, the way they think, how to affect good and bad behavior, how to be consistent and kind. How to reinforce, how to discipline. I have no idea about children. People love nothing more than to tell me that dogs and children very! very! different! As if I didn't know this. And yet I still encounter women all the time with unruly ill behaved dogs and screaming mean spirited children and it's hard, I'm sorry, to not make a connection. 

So I am currently trying to find where I connect and with whom. My family in New York is all nannies and baby nurses and I have to be honest when I say I still don't understand what the hell a baby nurse does for you that you can't just do yourself with a boob and your own mattress. I've looked for the natural parenting people around here and, while I share their views on wanting to at least try cloth diapering and home baby food making, I don't so much share their unironic Full Moon worshipping and placenta stewing. 

I miss California so much sometimes. I miss the kind of young surf mom in Northern California, walking around in jeans and flip flops, babies in slings and running strollers, alternately talking about the merits of possibly not vaccinating their children and waxing their vaginas.