Life on The Farm: The Not Fun Part

Hi. It's been awhile since I've written anything for a few reasons--one, my mom has been here to talk to when Matt is working so I'm never full of words with nobody to speak them to. Two, my days have continued to be boring. I wrote a blog three days ago but never posted it because it was insufferably boring. It was like, we went to the store, I napped, we cooked dinner, we watched some episodes of Friends, I worked on sewing an initial on a onesie. The end. I mean, my days are generally awesome (to me) and just what I need, but I feel like I've gotten the point across already that I am not doing too much of importance, and that's just the way I like it. No need to keep recording the details.

But, not every day is awesome. Friday was hard. I cried all day because I was scared and hormonal and overwhelmed. Then Saturday and Sunday were fantastic again, Monday was quite good considering that it was my "due date" (I hate that term), but today has again turned out to be a rough one. Because to be honest, as much as I have this ideal situation and I'm so incredibly lucky to be getting everything exactly how I wanted it (a baby. a birth at The Farm, wonderful quiet time with people I love the most), I'm still really scared sometimes.

And to continue to be even more honest and make myself look like a huge jerk, I'm not like every other mom-to-be in the world right now. I'm not like every Facebook friend I've ever had who's been like "I can't wait to meet my baby, I'm so done being pregnant, I'm so ready to hold him, I'm sooooo excited!" I feel like screw this. This is big and scary and I have no idea what I'm doing or what I've gotten into. I've limited my own options which makes it even scarier, and I'm full of self-doubt and this baby that I worked so hard for and waited so long for barely seems real. But then I know that he is, and all I can think about is that when he comes I'm going to be swollen, sore and bleeding from all of my most sensitive body parts, I'm going to be delirious from sleep deprivation, I'm going to be a total newb, my life as I knew it will be over forever, and I'm afraid I'm going to fail at ALL of it.

My midwife took me on a long walk through the woods today, up and down hills, and I was scared. I didn't really want to do it because what if it made labor start? I'm afraid I'll never go into labor and I'm afraid that I will. I feel so uncertain in my own body that everyone says knows what it's doing but maybe not quite because as the other side of everyone says, first babies are tricky and most of them do something wrong like coming out crooked or backwards or dangerously late.

Then the second I start to talk about any of this I dissolve into a total mess of guilty, guilty tears because I remember infertility and how much I resented anyone who complained about anything about being pregnant or having a newborn, and all I can think is that by saying and even feeling this crap I am not honoring the pain of every woman who can't have it at all.

I can't conceptualize ANY of the good stuff about this mom thing right now, and that's really hard. I can't bring myself to be excited today. I can't really believe that I'm not a huge wimp and a loser and I'll want to punk out as soon as I'm actually confronted with really birthing this baby, and then the worst part is I know I'm being so hard on myself and it's so unfair and I should be more gentle and then I get EVEN MADDER at myself and the cycle continues. Sound fun? Wish you were me? (If I were me reading this a year ago, I'd be like actually, yes bitch. I do.) It's not that I'm not endlessly thankful, it's just that sometimes my emotions don't follow my intentions. And that's just reality.

So there's the truth about the side of these days that is not all fun TV shows and home cooked meals, sewing and sunshine and fall leaves. I had to get it out. And people who wanted me to keep this blog wanted to know the truth about my time here, and this is a big part of it. It's not all bliss and baby dreams and confidence in myself and nature. Some hours of some days, it just sucks.

To thank you for reading this not so nice stuff and (I hope) loving me anyway, here are some nice pictures to look at:

A sunset silhouette Matt took on my due date:

Me and Mom on a bench:

Life on The Farm: Some Things That Are Not Connected To Each Other At All

We have a chipmunk and Matt named him Alvin. (Startlingly original, I know.) Alvin lives in an old hollow stump just outside the downstairs floor-to-ceiling picture windows and every day we grow more and more attached to him. Often these days I wake up, burning hot at 4:30 AM, and can’t go back to sleep. Today I gave up trying shortly before 6 and went downstairs where it’s warm (we keep the heat up downstairs, the air cool upstairs) to read and have some breakfast. I finished reading the thoroughly readable and amusing The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place and then got myself some cereal. I walked to the windows and noticed Alvin was also having his breakfast, standing on the edge of his stump munching contentedly on a nut while he gazed out over the woods. (He doesn’t like to eat indoors; he pops out for his snacks and then dives back in to go back to sleep.) I stood behind him eating my Honey Oaties and did the same. We contemplated the leaves and the rising sun together. There is no profound moral to this story, it was just a lovely moment I didn’t want to forget.

As you may have gathered by this point, I kind of love that I’m having a baby right at the turn of one season into another. (It goes without saying that I’m also loving being somewhere where you can actually see and feel this happening.) It’s soothing to join the rest of the natural world in the waiting for a force beyond any control to sweep in and do what it will. The wind blew pretty furiously the other night and the trees were noticeably nakeder when morning arrived. Fall will soon be winter, and my party animal baby should be here just in time to show off his good looks at all of the holiday parties he’s hoping to be invited to. I hope it snows before we leave.

Matt and I attempted to teach ourselves a ye olden card game last night. It’s called Piquet, and though once considered the granddaddy of all card games, most people have never heard of it these days, much less know how to play it. It seems deceptively simple but actually is somewhat like chess, you realize as you wade in deeper—it requires a ton of forethought in strategizing, planning ahead several moves, and an excellent memory. No wonder it’s fallen out of fashion—it’s hard. People these days prefer Spoons and Slapjack for obvious reasons. Piquet is so hard that it led to a whole discussion about how much dumber people have gotten. Back in the fifteenth century people didn’t have iPhones, laptops, Netflix, cable, Xbox, or even very many books. All they had to do all day was use their brains, for everything, fun and profit, all the time. So they all played this game like crazy over their mutton chops and ale and had a madcap good time of it and you didn’t have to be considered a genius or a scholar to play it, either. I was ashamed and exhausted by the realization of how little I actually use my brain when I’m not in school being forced to do so, so naturally my solution was to put the game away and go watch The Wedding Planner on Netflix.

Another thing we (and by we I mean Matt) did was put together baby’s little newborn bed, the Rock N Play sleeper. I wanted it to have plenty of time to air out, and it’s fun to look at, sitting in wait next to my side of the bed.

I’m officially one week from my “due date” and finally my belly is satisfyingly large. It still looks weirdly small when I look down, but the profile doesn’t lie. There is very definitely a small human living in there. See this iPhone self portrait here.

However large I may appear, my belly button ring is still hanging in there, and my belly button itself remains unpopped.

The baby continues his hard work at scooting further and further down, giving me cramps and sharp round ligament pain as he digs his little feet into my ribs for traction. It scares me because I don’t want my water to break before labor begins and I always wonder how on earth it doesn’t when he pulls this circus trick, but that amniotic sac is stronger that you would think. He just has to hold on for about 30 more hours for Grandma to get here, and then he can do whatever he wants. I have no idea what to expect anymore, given the various stories you all have shared with me about your first spontaneous labors and the fact that I have never done this before. I could go tonight, I could go three more weeks. I have no clue. I’m hoping for at least another week so I feel more ready, but as my friend Myriam wrote to me after my last blog, there is no such thing as “ready” anymore. That was surprisingly comforting. It’s good to have friends who know you well enough to know what you need to hear.

Tomorrow we are venturing into Nashville for a day trip before picking my mom up at the airport, so probably it will be tomorrow. My water will break dramatically in the middle of Broadway in front of Taylor Swift or Toby Keith or someone like that.

My grand plans of learning to use my sewing machine before giving birth have been thwarted by my failure to remember to bring any fabric with me. My grand plans of making baby a beautiful scrapbook baby book have been thwarted by my laziness. And still, the time here is flying by. This last month of pregnancy has been anything but slow. Of course, I could still have three weeks to go, and if that’s the case I bet it will start to feel slow.

Also, Matt and I are watching our way through The Office (his first time, not mine), which is a great stress and anxiety reliever.

I’m reading Althea and Oliver by Cristina Moracho now, and it’s extremely good which is a huge relief since I only like about .5% of the YA I’ve read since graduating from VCFA and the rest just pisses me off and I quit. The only way to explain it is that the writing is either too much or not enough. This book is just right. When Matt read the jacket he asked me warily, quoting one of the blurbs, “Dazzling prose?” And I said, “Don’t worry, not that kind of dazzling prose. Not like the glitter that gets trapped under your eyelid and cuts your eyeball.” Side note: the jacket also calls it a “whip-smart” debut. Matt pointed out recently that “whip-smart” or "smart as a whip" are actually kind of really sexist terms. It implies condescension, a shock or surprise at the intelligence. I propose that 99.9 % of the time it is only used in reference to pets, women and children. Something to think about.

Tonight we made coconut rice, jerk seasoned broccoli and sweet potatoes, and cumin lime black beans. A surprisingly fast and easy Caribbean style feast.

And that’s all the news that’s fit and unfit to print today. Stay tuned for more of the cozy, the wondrous, the mundane, and eventually, the baby.

Life on The Farm: Halloween and Being Scared

It's November, which means it's baby month, one way or any other. This baby is coming out this month. So that's happening. 

Blogging every day is going to be too difficult, I can already tell. Days (and nights) here are turning out to be like a kind of meditation, repetitive yet mindful. On the surface, I spend my time sleeping, walking, enjoying the wildlife outside the windows, cooking and eating (a lot), reading, meeting with the midwives, making the baby’s baby book, watching movies, and just enjoying Matt’s company. I wake up every night at maybe 3 AM, really, really hot and sometimes crampy and can't go back to sleep for a few hours. So my sleeping schedule is naturally becoming 4 hour shifts. That’s really about it. So keeping a daily diary of what I’ve done would get incredibly boring.

I know a lot of my wistful Farm enthusiast friends from afar imagine me hanging out with tons of other hippy moms, gathering organic produce from a community garden, doing prenatal yoga (Kari, if you’re reading this. J )…but the reality is that you kind of keep to yourself in the quiet of the woods. Besides, I would suck at prenatal yoga right now. I so did not prepare my arms for the task of holding up my normal body plus forty pounds in over the course of about five months. There is one other mama-in-waiting here due a week before me, but she’s staying at her midwife Joanne’s cabin which is about five miles away, just off-site. Hopefully I’ll get to meet her, I’ve passed my number along via Joanne, but haven’t heard anything yet.

Yesterday was Halloween and it was pretty impossibly idyllic. It got freezing cold and windy all of a sudden, the weather was mostly crisp, and the kids around here were dang adorable in their costumes. The wind was blowing hard and leaves were flying every which way. Then we got cold and went home and settled in with some treats and Hocus Pocus on our makeshift home theater (projector, speakers, bed sheet). (Because I was worried anything worse would scare me into labor, and I've got enough anxiety to deal with right now!)

On the inside, I’m doing the same things as well. I’m imagining/wondering what this is going to be like, if I can handle it, if I’ll really be able to do it, if I’m completely crazy to come here without any real clue as to what I’m facing. I'm getting a little (sometimes a lot) more scared and then beating myself up for being scared because I know it's not helpful to be scared. I've been doing the Hypnobabies home study course, which helps me relax and release anxiety a lot, but lately it's been harder to focus on it and let it do its work. Maybe I'm just waiting for my mom to get here, I really don't want to do this without her and that scares me too.

But then on the flip side I’m feeling nervous sometimes that he’s going to be super late, since I’m 9 days from my “due date” and feeling nowhere near ready. Does that matter, I wonder? Do you have to “feel” ready for babies to come out? I’d always thought that everyone was like “I am so done being pregnant” and “Get this kid out of me!!” for the last month or so, but that’s just not me. I’d always thought it made a lot of sense to get increasingly uncomfortable as baby’s birthday drew near so that dealing with the discomfort of labor would seem like a fair trade off for it being over soon. It’s not that I don’t have a few minor discomforts, but for the most part being pregnant at almost 39 weeks is still pretty easy. So of course I have an irrational fear that he’s just never coming out. If you had an easy end of pregnancy and were surprised by labor coming out of nowhere, please do reassure me.

I’m also loving organizing things, looking at all of his tiny blankets and sleepers and imagining using them, looking at his little bed still in the box and imagining him sleeping in it. My brain is working hard at trying to wrap my mind around this invisible squirmer who keeps me up at night very soon becoming a visible, kissable baby who will have a name and a personality and not much hair if you go by the heartburn theory (and who will also keep me up at night). It seems so surreal. I know my stretching, nudging bulge so well, I still have no idea who my baby in my arms will be. I have my intuition and my feelings (extroverted, a lot like me, sensitive, high energy), but no evidence.

And that’s pretty much what every day here looks like. So when I’m inspired to write something else, I will, but if you don’t hear from me you can safely assume that I am continuing to do all of the above, over and over.

Here are some pictures:

Leaves, This picture makes me think of the Spanish term for giving birth; "dar la luz" or literally, "to give light (to)"

Here is a little leaf family:

And here is a snail who we spotted crossing the road. I insisted we help him get to the other side.