The Wonder

A long time ago, I was born, and I was a baby.  Then I was a kid, and I rode my bike around the neighborhood with the neighborhood kids.  Then I went to high school and had boyfriends and took the SATs and played sports and got obsessed with bands and boys.  I went to college and learned to learn, and then I got another degree and a job, and I lived as an adult for a while.  I met and married my mate.  We found and maintained shelter from the weather.  We worked to sustain ourselves.  We talked about having a baby and talked about having a baby and planned to have a baby and planned to have a baby.  Then we had a baby.  She's here.  She's asleep in her cradle while we eat our breakfast.  She wasn't here last week.  But she's here now.  And she's hungry.  

The Bomb

As predicted, my cervix is still as tight as an asshole.  So, here's the plan: I have a non-stress test on Wednesday to make sure baby is ok, then Monday I'll have a biophysical profile, which is a sonogram, to see if baby is happy, then next Wednesday or Thursday, I'll be induced, all contingent, of course, on baby not appearing on her own.  The doctor said there is no rush to induce me, since baby seems fine, and because my cervix is "unfavorable" it is unlikely that an induction would work. I'm not happy about these things.  I mean, I'm glad that modern medicine is able to monitor the health and safety of my baby, but my imagination is taking me to bad places.  Let me explain.

I used to think that a "non-stress test" was called that for euphemistic reasons, that is, the medical community didn't want to stress moms out by calling the test a stress test so they call it a non-stress test.  Not so.  A stress test is one where they would hook you up to electrodes and make you run on a treadmill or have Thanksgiving dinner with your alcoholic father.  A non-stress test monitors your baby at rest.  So, on Wednesday, if baby is not stressed, then we will continue to wait.  However, if baby is stressed, doctor might see a reason to induce.

An induction means I get hooked up to a Pitocin drip.  Pitocin is the synthetic form of Oxytocin, which is a hormone my body is supposed to secret to start labor.  Oxytocin can also be secreted during good sex and nipple stimulation, which is why both these activities are recommended to naturally induce labor.  Pitocin is a hell of a drug; it causes strong contractions, stronger than during a normally started labor.  Women who attempt a vaginal birth after a c-section are not allowed to have Pitocin because the strength of the contractions can tear the c-section scar.  Pitocin is terribly effective.  Anecdotal evidence: at the end of her pregnancies with both my sister and me, my mom's water broke before any contractions started.  When water breaks, the docs will induce to prevent infection.  She got her Pitocin, and 5 hours later, babies.

As effective as Pitocin can be, it does not always work.  Sure, it will make a girl contract strongly, but that does not always translate to dilation and progress toward birth.  More anecdotal evidence: the wife of Husband's coworker started on a Pitocin drip sometime after her due date.  After twelve hours of painful labor, her cervix was no more dilated than when they started.  The doctor gave her the option of going home and trying again in the morning, or having a c-section.  Rather than subject the old fetus to further stress, she opted for the section.  If baby isn't ready to come out, baby isn't ready to come out.  When Pitocin doesn't work, it is c-section city.

C-sections were named after Julius Caesar, who was allegedly the first to be born that way.  I don't know if that is true, I wasn’t there.  People think the Caesar Salad was named after the same guy, but it turns out the salad was named after a Mexican bar owner who had a handlebar mustachio.

I want to avoid a c-section if at all possible.  For one thing, the recovery period is about six weeks, which means I won't be able to exercise, and I will be an elephant for the rest of my life, one of those women who had kids and just let herself go and wears huge pants with elastic waist bands and tye-dye shirts and orthopedic shoes because her circulation is shot from inactivity.  You see her in the grocery store buying twenty-five Lean Cuisine pizzas, and you think, “shame.”  We would only have one child, because Husband would not want to fuck me anymore, unless he was drinking, and now we have a fat wife and and a drunk husband.  Add this to the chickens we are planning on raising in our yard, and we may as well move back to Arkansas.  More importantly, while I would get to see the baby right away, it takes 45 minutes to stitch a bitch up after a c-section, so I wouldn't get to hold her or talk to her or introduce myself.   Through my research and preparation for this birth, I've also come to believe that if I'm not able to give birth drug free and hold the baby and breast feed right away, she will inevitably grow up to be a sociopath who is unable to bond with other human beings and never learns to talk, like those Romanian orphans from the cold war.  We’ll call her Nell, and I will have failed in my duty as a woman.

My other thing is that I’m not sure that this baby is going to be born at all.  I think we missed it.  Everyone else has had her baby, but we aren’t going to have one.  We tried, but it didn’t work.  At forty-two weeks, the pendulum will begin its swing in the other direction.  She will shrink, and in nine months we’ll have sex, and the sperms will return to Husband’s body. 

Husband tells me that these fears are perhaps a smidge irrational, and that there is no evidence to support them, and there is, in fact, anecdotal evidence to the contrary.  Anecdotal evidence: Husband was born via c-section.  As to my concern that no baby will appear at all, Husband is choosing not to dignify this with the comfort of reason.  But this is where I am.  The parade of horribles Dixieland band is a-playin’ on my street, and I have joined the second line.  

Also, when I tell people that I'm forty weeks pregnant (strangers ask when you look like I do right now), they look at me like I'm a suicide bomber, which is appropriate, because I'm shaped like a cartoon bomb.  I'm going to start saying that I'm only five months, but there are a dozen babies in there.a

In summary: blerg.

Owning it.

           Down route 214 from our neighborhood, and across from Lou’s Country Store, where the residents of communities within a mile’s radius get their liquor and Cheetoes, are a number of small businesses.  South River Flooring is in a trailer on a gravel lot.  Watercheck inhabits half of a one story brick office.  The other half rents back hoes.  Next to Watercheck is a shabby red brick house on a quarter acre.  Although I drive by at least twice a day, I have not been able to discern the structure of the family that lives there.  Sometimes there is an old man smoking a cigarette on the porch.  Sometimes there is a punk ass teenager smoking in the yard, preparing to jay walk to Lou’s.  The brick house is one of a line of run down eyesores along Central Avenue.  While the neighborhoods branching off Central Avenue offer homes at a variety of prices, from modest ranch houses, to luxury estates on Cadle Creek and the Rhode River, the houses right along 214 are uniformly decaying.  Many were farm houses before Edgewater became a Baltimore and DC bedroom community, and before 214 evolved from a country road to a two lane thoroughfare. 

            The first year we lived in Edgewater, the red brick house did not decorate for Easter.  Decorating for Easter is not much of a tradition, but some of our neighbors would put an inflatable bunny in the yard, or fly a flag with a purple crocus on it.  There are sometimes one or two “He is Risen” signs.  Easter isn’t a decorating holiday.

            The following year, the red brick house was decked out in inflatable bunnies.  There must have been a hundred bunnies, in pink and blue and yellow, hanging from the trees like Christmas ornaments, and stuck into the ground.  It looked like an amusement park.  In addition to the bunnies, there were at least fifty inflatable Easter eggs of various sizes.  I thought it was curious that someone would put so much effort into decorating for Easter.

            Our neighbor, who knows everything, told us that it was a prank.  I thought it was a funny prank, and wondered if it was friends of the teenage punk, or just a random act of pastel.

            Then, the following year, the bunnies reappeared.  Who is the phantom prankster who covers this house with bunnies?  Is this the same person who puts a rose and a bottle of liquor on Edgar Allen Poe’s grave?  I have another theory.  The infestation of inflatable bunnies started out as a prank.  The brick house found it so cheerful, that it decided to continue the tradition on its own.  Now, the bunnies sprout every year around Easter, just like the tulips.  

Domo

Last night was our last hypnobirthing class.  We met in the lobby of the Clatanoff Pavillion, which is also the labor and delivery waiting room.  There were fifteen people waiting there, chatting.  They seemed to be there together, probably all waiting for the same birth. 

After our guided meditations and birth videos, after we practiced laboring positions, we took our tour of the labor and delivery ward.  The second floor is labor and delivery; the third floor is recovery.

The ward looks like a Comfort Inn and Suits, but with a nursing station and wider doors.  We five stood outside one of the doors, and our teacher explained how the ward was designed, where triage was, and how the staff encourages laboring mothers to walk the halls. 

The large door we were standing by opened.  A boy that looked like a frat boy walked out.  He was wearing madras shorts, flip flops, a white hat, and a Domo tee shirt.  He had scruffy brown hair and flushed cheeks and a big smile.  He could have been strutting into the Tombs with his bros.  As the door shut behind him, he looked at our group and put his fists in the air.  “It’s a boy!” he told us.  He had a few cigars in his hands.  We said congratulations as he strutted toward the ward door to tell his large family.  

Fire!

I had turned off the light around 11:00pm, but I didn’t expect to sleep. The juices digesting the grilled chicken I’d eaten for dinner had backed up into my esophagus, and the Pepcid wasn’t working yet, and I had to pee already, and I’d taken a nap that afternoon. Sleep was at least an hour off, but I was bored with my book, and the dogs and Matt were already snoring, so I closed my eyes and heaved onto my left side with the big pillows tucked up all around me and I tried to lay still and count the baby’s kicks. There should be at least ten in an hour. There were ten in five minutes. She was poking me in the ribs with her little fetus feet and almost making me giggle out loud.

I was just boarding a train of thought about how I’d never seen the movie Alien, but I had seen Space Balls, when the dogs started barking and doing that “woo woo WOOOOO” thing. I thought I’d heard a clatter, but the dogs bark at everything, and at nothing. They woo at an imagined intruder nightly. Yet, when there was a stray dog sitting on our porch last year, they made not a peep. When, on one of our nightly walks, we encountered the chickens, who had escaped from the dirty house down the street and around the corner, the dogs didn’t even notice them. A squirrel on the back fence will give them an aneurism, but an ax wielding murderer gets kisses. We live on a lively street; our neighbors often sit on their front porches at night, smoking menthols and drinking Bud Light, so there are lots of little noises all the time. Most of them are white noise to me, but the dogs have those sensitive ears. Someone probably tossed a beer can into a recycling bin, or toppled a stack of firewood.

Matt uncovered himself and got up and looked out the front window, claiming he heard a siren, but Matt, not unlike the dogs, hears things in his half sleep. Matt says things in his sleep, too, like “I keep blowing the whistle but Flagler keeps running down the field.” Flagler is the elder pug. Matt went out to the living room. He came back in and put his Alabama sweatshirt on. He said that the house down the street had exploded, and that he was going to check it out. I reminded him to put on pants, closed my eyes, and returned my attention to monitoring our alien baby. Matt is prone to exaggeration and overreaction. When we got into that car accident on our way to Disney, we had drifted off the pavement, hit a patch of mud, and he overcompensated by jerking us back on the road. The back of the car went faster than the front, and we did a half a turn, ending up on the other side of the road, trunk facing west in the westbound lane. When the fire truck came, Matt told them we had spun out “at least three or four times.” He believed it, too. As an aside, I thought the more exciting part of that accident was how we clipped a speed limit sign in half. A six foot piece of metal with a big metal square that said 45 on it flew just a few feet past our heads, and as it passed, I dropped my peanut butter smoothie. We could have been decapitated. We have five flashlights in our eight hundred square foot, one floor house. He’ll check to make sure the burners are off and the candles are out five times, even when no one has used the stove that day and we don’t have any candles. It’s just how he is.

Matt went outside to the porch and came back a minute later. The house down the street really was on fire. When I looked out our bedroom window, which faces the street, there were flashing red and white lights and a hose and a pilgrimage of neighbors drifting toward the end of the street.

There are three houses between us and the on-fire house. Jim is right next to us. He allegedly lives with his mother, although I’ve never seen her, and doesn’t seem to have a job, although he is always working on his car or a home improvement project. I tend to think he’s a serial killer, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. Next to Jim, there’s a couple with children. The night of the fire, I found out the couple’s names are Jenn and Eric. He does something blue collar, and she runs a doll and dollhouse business. The next house I don’t know about, I think they were on vacation. Then there was the house that exploded.

Shannon is our sometimes-next-door- neighbor on our other side. She and her two kids have been staying with Kelly, her mom, since she (Shannon) and her husband broke up. Sometimes she stays with her boyfriend. Shannon confirmed that something had exploded. Shannon and Kelly were drinking blush wine on the porch when it happened. Now, there was an explosion and sirens, and I hadn't heard either of them, and I was wide awake. Maybe I should reconsider the sensitivity of my family’s hearing, and start to consider that my own is deficient. Shannon said the guy didn't have gas or oil heat. According to Shannon, he woke up because he was choking on smoke. He ran out of the house in just his boxers, no shirt, no shoes. Shannon gave him pants, shoes, and a sweatshirt. His wife and son were not home, he left his cell in the house, and he didn't know their numbers, so he was sitting in Eric and Jenn’s house, while they were on the street drinking whatever they were drinking out of matching insulated cups. The cups were those clear plastic kind with two layers, and between the two layers was a logo for the dollhouse business.

There was one firetruck and one fire-van on the street. The hose stretched all the way to Cadle Creek, which is four blocks away, on the other side of 214. Another firetruck blocked 214 and the hose that stretched across the four blocks. Now, there is a pond immediately adjacent to the house that was on fire, and another pond just two blocks to the south. Maybe there was a reason why the firefighters went all the way to Cadle for water, but the four-block stretch of hose made everyone question the fire department’s competence. It was the primary topic of chatter among the gallery for at least two to three minutes.

So, Eric and Jenna from two doors down are out there sipping from their insulated cups with straws. Shannon has her glass of Chablis and ice. Someone was drinking whisky, I could smell it. The woman who runs My Girl Charters lives a block in the other direction, and she brought her three month old puppy, a chow retriever mix, who is going to be huge. You can tell because he has big paws. It was like a midnight block party barbeque. The smoke was still billowing out of the house, but the flames stopped shooting out of the roof. Some of the tall trees near the house had also been on fire, but they were put out first, so they wouldn’t set the neighbors and the state park ablaze, too. The front entrance area was still burning; you could see that through the front door. It didn’t seem too bad, and I, for the millionth time in my life, wished for an invisibility cloak so I could go check it out for myself. I’m certain I would have been safe. I took a few steps forward and bobbed my head back and forth like a chicken to get a better angel, but then we were all shooed further back up the street by a firefighter.

I was wearing my flip flops because of my swollen feet, but it was about forty degrees and wet out there. The snow was still melting, and there were rivers of icy water and dirt and salt streaming toward the pond. It was probably bad for the bay that we put all those chemicals on our walks and streets, but we can’t be falling down. The salt burned my feet, like it burned our dogs’ paws when we had taken them out during the blizzards. I didn’t want to miss the gossip about the cause of the fire or the extent of the destruction, but, after twenty minutes on the street, I figured I had gotten all the information I would get that night. I went back inside and dried my feet and put on socks. The dogs and I and the baby in my belly tucked up together on our couch, and listened hopefully for the burning house’s collapse.

SnOMG

Whole Foods: packed with hipsters stocking up on organic produce, imported meats and cheeses, and local fish - you know, the staples for the snowstorm. The discount Shoppers Food Warehouse: nearly empty.

And 'no' to sense...

There's a line of skin care products called "Yes to Carrots."