Life On The Farm: Starr Andrew's Birth! (Finally!)

“It snowed on the day you were born.”

Great Grandma Grace. See? I look like her. It's weird.

When it started snowing early in the morning on November 17, Joanne, one of the midwives attending my birth, said, “That’s how your birth story will begin.” It’s a lovely line to start with, and I should have thought about it more at the time. Snow is one of my favorite things in the world, I was actually born during an Indiana blizzard on the day after Christmas, 1982. But after moving away from Pennsylvania when I was eleven I got to enjoy it more and more rarely, going from Washington to California and now to the deep south (with delightfully icy stays in the Midwest in between). We certainly didn’t expect it to snow here in Tennessee, and before Thanksgiving at that, so when the night’s rain turned to a light dusting that stuck to the now nearly-bare branches outside our windows, my mom said “It’s a sign from Grandma Grace, honey.”

November 17 was my Great-Grandma Grace’s birthday, and since my grandpa told me that last June I just knew it would be my baby’s birthday too. I never got to meet her, but we look eerily alike and I’ve surmised that she also struggled with her fertility…her only two children were born seven years apart (in the twenties) and she eventually died of ovarian cancer. I’ve always felt connected to her and wish that I could have known her.

I should have taken the snow seriously. I should have put a mental post-it on that moment: noted that it was a sign, that everything would be okay; but at the time I was floating in a birth pool, contracting and dilating as peacefully as I think is probably possible, with no reason to believe otherwise.

My water broke at 10 PM the night before; Sunday night, the 16^th. I was ready. I had been talking to the baby all day, telling him to come out, that we wanted to meet him now. I bounced on the birthing ball, I did laps around the bottom floor of the house (because it was FREEZING outside and I couldn’t hike, irony of ironies in this beautiful place!). I cooked tofu-mushroom stroganoff for dinner, played Uno with my family, then got on my hands and knees with the birthing ball in yet another effort to be sure baby’s head was in an optimal position. (Ha!) After ten or fifteen minutes in that position I straightened up. A gush of water immediately soaked my yoga pants; there was never any question of what it was. I looked up at my mom and Matt and just said, “My water just broke.” There was a little shocked silence and a few “Are you sure’s” as I ran to the bathroom, quite sure.

I wrapped a towel around myself as I absorbed the reality that this was it. The baby was coming. I had an overwhelming sense and an image of standing at the foot of a great mountain that I had to climb now, and there was no turning back. I started shaking and I couldn’t stop; my mom came in and I asked her through shaky tears, “I can do this, right? I’ll be okay, right?” And she held me and told me of course I could and she had no doubt. She reminded me that my baby was really coming and I would finally, finally, finally be holding him soon.

Matt’s sister Katy was still in the house with a now very nervous Simon, so we tried to reassure him as best we could and quickly sent them off. Thank God that Katy and Matt’s mom were there, and had just checked in at one of the home B&Bs on The Farm. I had been afraid of where we would put Simon if labor began on either of the two nights prior that they stayed with us. Thankfully, fate was on our side. (I should give Mom some credit on the date here; her guess was November 16 because I arrived 6 days past my due date…technically the process began on that date so I concede that we both win. J )

Matt called Deborah, my midwife, as I tried to calm myself and gauge if any contractions were beginning. There wasn’t much to notice in the first ten or twenty minutes, but after Deborah arrived and put in the hep-lock for my IV antibiotics (for Group B Strep) I began noticing mildly crampy waves of pressure. Of course we all quickly agreed that we’d better see if we all could get any rest before they picked up, so I had Matt start my Hypnobabies CDs and settled into bed. He laid down next to me and Mom dragged a foam pad to the other side of the bed and we tried to get rest. It seemed like contractions picked up fairly quickly from there, but I guess it wasn’t until about 1 AM that I was uncomfortable enough to want to get out of bed to pee. In the bathroom, standing, there was no mistaking that this was for real. I was still shaking, and at this point I was a little panicked. Never having done this before I was certain that the contractions were about to get way worse (*they didn’t) and that there was no way I would be able to do it. Matt and Mom both reassured me that I would and I could, and reminded me that I was doing it the way I had always wanted to.

I wondered if it was too soon to get in the birthing tub, since I knew the warm water would at the very least help me fend off the shakes, which felt like they were making everything much harder to handle. Mom pointed out that Deborah was going to have to give me another dose of antibiotics in an hour anyway, so they agreed to go ahead and wake her up and ask to start filling the pool. I laid back down on the bed while I waited, and from this point forward the details of the night go very hazy. I remember thinking that Hypnobabies wasn’t working, that the contractions were definitely painful and not just “pressure waves,” no matter how hard I told my brain to process them that way. Still, the voice was soothing and I was used to it; the cues absolutely helped me stop my body from tensing up and reminded me to breathe in the way I’d been practicing for months: 4 slow counts on a deep breath in, 8 counts down on a slow breath out.

Finally the tub was ready (finally? I still have no concept of time in this memory, or how long it seemed to me) and Mom and Matt helped me downstairs, still shaking and I think moaning through contractions at this point.

Another thing I remember is making the sound “oh” when I was moaning, and this is the part where my language nerd kicked in and joined my subconscious. Knowing that my body would respond to the cues that I was giving it, I really did not want to say “ow”. Just saying “ow” makes me tense up and flinch; my brain processes it as a response to a threat. “Oh,” on the other hand, is a word of understanding and accepting, and saying it kept my mouth loose and open and prevented me from clenching my jaw (and tightening the rest of myself up in turn). I processed all of this on some semi-conscious level and was determined to never say “ow” through the entire process. When things got a little tougher and “oh” wasn’t enough, I switched it up to “open, open, open” (as Hypnobabies occasionally reminded me) to tell my body that I was okay with what was happening and to keep going, or “oh, baby” to reconnect with my baby and feel like we were working as a team. Both of those things helped so much.

Like I said, time is so hazy in this portion of my memory. I don’t remember at all when I started needing to moan through contractions. Mom says it was pretty early, after the first hour or so. My lack of consciousness of time is partly due to Hypnobabies, I now believe, and also partly due to another conscious decision I had made prior to the onset of labor, which was that I didn’t want any numbers in my head, ever. I had asked my midwife to not tell me how many centimeters I was when she checked me, and I’d asked Matt to be sure all clocks were covered and phones out of my sight. I knew that I could easily get psyched out by doing math (‘it took me x hours to get to y centimeters, at this rate I’ll be at z when…etc. etc.) and I didn’t want that at all. My goal was to stay present in each moment and not allow myself to be overwhelmed by the task ahead or get worked up wondering when I would be complete. I was also very afraid of “transition” and if I had been told I was at a 7 (at transition’s front door) it would have been very hard to let go.

I got in the pool and immediately relaxed. The warm water was so perfect and the shaking, the worst part really, stopped right away. I noticed my contractions seemed to slow down and become weaker, so I was worried I’d gotten in too soon. I asked Deborah if I should get out until I was further along and she told me to wait and see; often it’s just a temporary effect of the relaxation. I could soon tell that she was right; contractions picked up and were stronger than before, but much easier to get on top of and handle while floating weightless in the warm water and not shaking. Deborah said after some time (20 minutes? 30?) that she noticed my birthing sounds had stopped and maybe it wasn’t time to be in the pool yet. She asked if I was still feeling contractions and I told her yes, and they were stronger, I was just better able to handle it now and didn’t need to make noise for now.

She seemed content with this and I stayed in this exact place until the sun came up: floating in the water, the dimmer lights in the room turned low, staring at the ceiling beams and light fixtures and occasionally noticing the level of darkness out the windows without much concern. I noticed the endorphins buzzing around my body in between contractions, making me feel light and high and kind of drugged. I appreciated this. Sometimes I noted with mild surprise that it was getting lighter much sooner than seemed right; I’d begun this process at 10 PM and morning was definitely drawing near. Hypnobabies played on and I think I continued to think it wasn’t really working, that labor still hurt and this lady was so full of shit; still I kept it on. Her voice was soothing and I’d been listening to it in preparation for this every night for months, she was a welcome presence even if she was a liar. J In hindsight, Hypnobabies was amazingly effective and I truly believe that using it in combination with the tub is what ultimately got me through to the end. If I had been trying to wing it, without the water and the relaxation cues, I think I would have gotten tired and scared much, much sooner than I did.

Mom says that we all drifted in and out of sleep from our various perches on couches, chairs and in birth pools. I certainly don’t remember sleeping but maybe I did and that’s what made the night seem surprisingly short.

When it was still very early in the morning I think my moans got loud enough to prompt Deborah to check me again. I was discouraged every time she checked me; though as promised she didn’t give me any numbers, I always feared from her words that I was progressing really slowly. She seemed to emphasize that I was thinning more than dilating and that that was really important too, but from where I was floating I wanted action. I wanted to move through this at a quick-but-not-too-quick pace, a ten hour or so labor sounding ideal in my head. So I was frustrated when she told me that to dilate the rest of the way I needed to relax (I’d thought I was!), that tensing up was going to keep my body from doing the work it wanted to do. I didn’t know how I could relax any more than I already was! At least this is what I remember; and I don’t totally trust my memory at this point. I was in such a weird state of in-between (in-between what, I don’t know) and overall I was okay, more okay than I thought I’d be, except for when I was afraid that I was progressing really slowly and things were still going to get much worse.

I must have been further along than I feared, because Deborah called in Joanne, the second midwife, around this point. (Matt thinks it was about 4 or 5 AM.) I knew that if she didn’t think I was progressing well she wouldn’t do that yet, because Joanne was coming to assist with the birth itself. So then I felt a little better.

Then it started snowing (I think), and I watched it falling and felt more at peace. I noticed that things had seemed to slow down a little. I said that out loud and Deborah said there were peaks and valleys and that was to be expected. So I decided to let it be and the rest of the morning is lost to me. It picked up again and my memory fails me again. I remember Joanne coming in to the house and sitting on the couch and knitting. (Matt thinks Joanne actually arrived at maybe 7…remember the clocks were covered so this is all very loosely estimated.) It got intense enough around 10 that I was hanging over the side of the pool hanging on to Matt and Mom, and one contraction was intense enough that my moaning turned to sobbing. It hurt but it also felt good to get it out; like I was getting out my fears of what the worst would be like, getting them out of where they had been living for the past few weeks in all of my muscles and deep in my brain.

In the birthing pool, late-ish morning.

But then Deborah came over and told me I was going to have to stop being so tragic and I immediately felt ashamed and went silent. It didn’t feel good to be admonished when I was feeling so good about going with my flow and not letting any inhibitions make things harder for myself. It felt like I was being told I was doing something wrong and that made me feel like a sad little kid, but then, it did actually feel good and relaxing to go silent at that point. In hindsight, I wonder if I was heading into transition and my body just stopped when told I was doing it wrong. She told me a few funny things that got me laughing a little bit, and reminded me that my body was never going to give me more than I could handle—it would push me to my very far edge, but it would never be more than I could handle. Then she gently suggested that I move position to help change my state of mind.

Even though getting out of the tub sounded like the most miserable idea imaginable just then, I agreed. Matt urged me to walk with him to the window to look out at what had stuck of the snow, and with what seemed like more willpower than I’d ever possessed in my life, I got out of the tub, let them dry me off, and slipped a loose nightshirt over my head. I was surprised that instead of getting worse, things got immediately better. The contractions seemed to ease again, and I was getting breaks of about five minutes in between. Walking felt good and normal, and the snow on the trees was so pretty. I remember this part pretty well. Talk turned to pushing and what to expect, and I started to feel downright cheerful, and like all of this wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared it would be. I think this was maybe around 11 AM, 13 hours in. As I stood at the window I began to have bloody show, and Mom encouraged me that meant that pushing was very close now. They told me to let them know if I got the urge, and I told them I was afraid I never would. I certainly didn’t at that point. So they suggested I get on the futon and get checked again.

I agreed very reluctantly, knowing this was going to hurt. Deborah seemed fairly optimistic this time when she checked and asked my permission to push me a little bit, saying it would hurt but it would also save me a lot of time. I agreed even more reluctantly. I was starting to really get excited about meeting my baby, whatever it took to get there. She wasn’t kidding about it hurting when she opened me up more; I definitely made some pretty primal noise in response to that! But it was over quickly and she said if I wanted to I could try pushing on the birthing stool while she held the lip of cervix that was left out of the way in the hopes that we could get it to disappear. The baby’s head had been quite low from the onset, so I hoped that pushing would not be too drawn out. (Ha!) I was elated to hear that I only had a lip of cervix left…if I had experienced transition, I certainly had not recognized it for what it was. I suspect I was pretty much pushed through it, which I have mixed feelings about.

I got on the birthing stool around noon, and this was when the hardest, scariest, most transcendent five hours of my life began. (It’s also when my hate-hate relationship with that damn stool began!) I pushed for an hour, dealing with the extra pain of having the rest of my cervix manually held out of the way as I did. It’s not usually a great idea to push with a lip of cervix in the way, but I found out later that the baby’s head was crooked, which was  why my cervix was dilating unevenly. Uneven pressure equals uneven dilation. So I pushed, but it wouldn’t budge, and neither did the baby. Or at least any budging that occurred was minimal enough that after the hour was up, Deborah decided I needed a break, and that maybe relaxing through some contractions was what my body needed to get that lip of cervix gone.

Following directions. :) 

So I went through another hour or so of contractions back in the birthing pool, and they were really tough ones. I think Deborah and Joanne said some more funny things, and I laughed. (I never did lose my sense of humor throughout this entire experience, which fascinated me. I did, however, lose my ability to answer any questions, which also fascinated me. My response to everything was “I don’t know.” Except which flavor of coconut water I wanted; I was very adamant about that! J) They told Matt and me to kiss, which he really enjoyed and I really did not. I am not used to kissing my husband being associated with such unpleasant sensations, and I think it did make the contractions stronger. So that was tough.

I got frustrated with dealing with the contractions and not doing anything to move things along. Deborah reassured me that I was doing something; she checked me again and said she barely felt anything left now and what was left was just swollen and that we should try again on the birthing stool. Feeling daunted by the prospect of both doing that and not doing it, I got out of the pool starting to feel shaky and uncertain that I was going to be able to do this.

Joanne reminded me that being a mother takes a lot of patience, and sometimes becoming a mother requires that of us as well. This was comforting to me, and I felt connected to every other mother who had gone through a birth that was harder than she’d hoped for. I didn’t know what time it was (it was probably around 2), but I knew it had been bright daylight for some time now, and my personal ten hour hope had long since come and gone. I remember thinking that wasn’t so bad in and of itself; time had actually gone by shockingly quickly. But not knowing how much longer it was going to be was making me feel more tired and miserable than I had ever felt in my life.

We tried for a little while back on the stool, but I was getting really frustrated with its structure. It felt too small for my body, any time I really needed to feel braced to push it seemed to rock forward or backward and the back kept reclining right when I needed it to stay put, which was making me really mad. I couldn’t direct my pushing where I knew it needed to go while feeling so unstable. I tried to articulate some of this but I’m not sure how clear I made it that I really hated it…maybe I was bound to hate whatever was happening at that point. I knew that once the baby’s head made it past the cervix I would get the urge to push, and I still didn’t have it. This was continuing to make that overwhelmed feeling bigger.

The midwives encouraged Mom and Matt to press on the sides of my hips as I pushed, performing a “clothes pin” maneuver to help my hips open from the inside. I was shocked that I needed this; the mention that my hip opening might be too narrow inside was very disheartening. Of all the things I’d feared about labor, the width of my hips was not one of them! Pushing on my hips did nothing though, nor did getting on my hands and knees.

Lunges. Ugh.

They finally had me stand and try some ‘lunges,’ putting one foot up on a kitchen chair, bending the other knee with each push. This SUCKED. That’s all I remember about it. It may have done some good, though. Mom and Matt took turns being the support pole that I was hanging from for these pushes.

As all of this was going on, the intermittent monitoring was showing some decelerations in the baby’s heart rate immediately after pushing. It was recovering quickly, but being 35 minutes from the hospital, talk turned to how much longer we were going to do this before agreeing to transfer. Joanne explained that if we did transfer me they wanted baby and me to both still be in good shape for a vaginal delivery—what she didn’t have to say was to give me my best chance of avoiding a c-section. This was my low, low, low point. I was in total despair, thinking that I just couldn’t do this, nothing was working and I had come all the way here and gone through all of this only to end up in a car for a miserable eternity and in surgery in a hospital; that I was actually going to be in that unlucky 2% of Farm moms that end up with a c-section.

Finally, Joanne pointed out that I hadn’t emptied my bladder in some time and that if it was full, it could be taking up space that the baby needed for his head. At this point I was miserably submitting to all instruction, but not really believing that any of it would help.

When I sat on the toilet with my feet butterflied up on a stool in front of me, though, I realized that I finally had an urge to push. I said as much and Joanne told me to go with it and do whatever felt right. I had a flicker of hope at this point, and the thoughts streaming through my head ranged from “You HAVE to do this, do ANYTHING to end this,” to “How does that Sponge Bob bath toy on the floor EVEN EXIST right now?!” And I pushed, and I knew it was finally doing something. I could feel him moving. However, the midwives were checking his heart rate often and he was continuing to dip when I pushed. Though it was still continuing to go back up between pushes, they decided to give us a both a little extra help and put an oxygen mask on me for a few pushes. That worked really well; or else I had gotten him past the trouble spot, or maybe it was a combination of both. I was so sure I was making great progress that I asked if he was moving and they said they couldn’t be sure. Though the toilet was an excellent spot for me, it didn’t give them any room to involve themselves and check my progress. After feeling like I’d made significant progress and the baby’s heart rate stabilizing, they got me to go back into the main room so they could check me on the birthing stool.

I don’t remember getting any confirmation or update that I understood, but at this point I knew I was doing it. As I walked out of the bathroom I could feel the baby’s head between my legs, and I knew then for sure that it would be okay then and I was going to get him out. I was relieved, but the pushing contractions were still powerfully painful, mostly the part where I had to breathe in and out at the beginning without pushing, and then the first five seconds or so when I had to push his head right into my stretching pelvic ligament. That ligament pain was so intense that under any other circumstances I would have just quit. But that is the awesome and incredible thing about my birth: quitting was simply not an option, and so I found the strength I never in a million years would have believed I had and pushed past it, many, many times in a row, praying to God to end this soon and get my baby in my arms.

Right before he came out...

I did a few more chair lounge pushes before sitting back on the &%@*ing birthing stool and I knew then the end was finally near. The burning sensation was intense and so, so, so welcome. Mom and Matt and my midwives were cheering me on, telling me they could see his hair, and that it was dark, that I was doing it and I was going to do it; I could feel myself making real progress with each push at that point. I don’t know how many pushes it was at this point, but it wasn’t very many, when he finally came so close that I popped a band of tissue and began bleeding kind of a lot. I remember the midwives seemed a little concerned, though Deborah said she suspected it was likely just that I tore a blood vessel in the tissue band, but I really could not have cared less at this point. I asked “Am I going to be okay?” as I continued to push and Mom reassured me that I was, and I said loudly, “I’m just so glad that I’m close enough to tear!”

Then his head was crowning and I asked if I could touch it; they said that I could (why did I ask? I wonder now!) and I reached down and remember being really surprised by how soft and spongy it was; his skull, apparently, came after the rest of his head! It was just a couple more pushes after that that I felt more of his head come out and with one big push his head and half his body were OUT.

I was elated and thrilled and trying to understand and suddenly realized I would have to push one more time to get the rest of him out so I did it, and the rest of him actually came out and they put him face up on my belly and I couldn’t stop saying “Oh my God,” over and over. I could not and never will be able to understand or begin to articulate how I could feel so many different things so intensely all at once. Relief and exhaustion to a point that I had never known existed, unending joy, total disbelief in what I had just done, love that completely consumed me. I saw how perfectly beautiful his face was, I couldn’t believe he really had a face, and I said “Oh, look how wide set his eyes are!” and I grabbed him and held him to me as they suctioned his nose and mouth. I looked at Joanne and said “I can do anything, ever, in the whole world!” and she told me something about how I would always know that now, but still I couldn’t really believe what had just happened. I was delirious and the high was something no chemical substance could ever reproduce.

My face the minute Starr was born. <3

I asked about three minutes after he was born what time it was; nobody had looked! It was 4:52. We all settled on 4:49, nearly five hours after I was told I could try to start pushing.

The two great loves of my life.

Though I had asked to not have the baby taken from me at all in the first hours after birth and to not cut his cord, my significant bleeding and his meconium staining knocked that part of the plan off the rails a bit. They had to cut the cord after three minutes or so…it could have been five or six, I don’t know, time was a warp for all of us at that point. After his cord was cut Joanne took him for just a few minutes to thoroughly suction and dry off. There was also the matter of stopping my bleeding and making sure it didn’t get any worse. (It didn’t.)

Joanne handed the baby to Matt at some point while Deborah knelt in front of me and reminded me that I had to deliver the placenta still. That sounded like the worst joke ever. “It’s the easy part,” she said. “I know, I know, it doesn’t have bones,” I finished, quoting Ina May on the placenta delivery part of labor. Still, I didn’t want to push ever again. I was so tired. Deborah said I may not ever feel the urge, or if I waited fifteen minutes or so I might. But then she said with one good push I could just get it over and done with so I figured what the hell, and gave it a good shove. It hurt coming out, but it was just a quick jolt of pain and it was over and I was officially done. It was enormous, which explained why.

Once the bleeding was slowed and we were reasonably sure I wasn’t going to pass out, I had to make my way across the room to the futon to get stitched up. This was the best part of the whole day…I finally got my baby boy laid on my chest while the hour passed looking for tears and sewing them up. Considering that we now knew my almost 9 pound boy had a 15 inch head circumference and a weirdly tiny fontanelle that just wouldn’t mold much, I expected to hear worse news than I did. One second degree tear and a few skid marks here and there, but other than that I was in not-as-awful-as-one-might-expect shape. I thought it was really funny as Deborah was stitching me and she asked if I could feel it. Sometimes I could, but I was like, “Really? Nothing will ever hurt again!” (Still, I admit I flinched when she gave me the lidocaine injection before sewing up the largest tear. Funny how life is.)

But mostly all I noticed in that hour was my baby and how perfect he was, and how unendingly thankful I was to not be having contractions anymore. I was a little sad when he started rooting around, obviously wanting to nurse, but I couldn’t get in a good position to let him. He found his fist and sucked on it while I fretted a bit that now our breastfeeding relationship was forever doomed. (I get dramatic like that. Breastfeeding has actually been blessedly easy for both of us.)

Everything from the point he was born through the end of the day was like this elated fog of perfection; I knew I was sore, I knew it was hard to walk, I knew blood vessels were busted in my eyes and the skin around them was puffed up in pillows, but I didn’t care about any of it. I had just given birth to a baby, and it wasn’t even a (relatively) easy birth by any stretch of the imagination, and I had done it anyway, and I just couldn’t believe it. I could hold him, do you understand?! I was done!

Less than two hours after he was born, when I was all stitched up and helped into a loose dress, everyone came streaming in: Simon, my mother and sister in law, and my friend Myriam from California had showed up with her two girls just in time to see me still flying high in the immediate post-birth glow—which was awesome, since she had three girls at home herself and I could say things like “I kicked so much ass.” And not worry that she felt like I was judging her. She was the perfect person to have there with me, passing the night helping with the baby so I could get a little sleep, listening to me rambling about my memories of the day and totally getting my glee and disbelief and mildly traumatized shock.

The weeks that followed were the best babymoon ever, but that’s another post. This one is long enough for now.

I had obviously hoped that I wouldn’t have to go as deeply into the valley of serious doubt in myself as I did; I pictured myself as the typical birthing woman announcing that I couldn’t do it right as I was minutes away from doing it. I feared that I wouldn’t be able to do it for hours. I really had to face that fear and deal with the very real possibility that things might not have gone as planned. I’ve never felt more helpless in my life. But there is nothing like going there to that dark place of self-doubt and fear and then having the opportunity to climb back out.

I will never be able to express my gratitude for my husband, my mom and my midwives who stood by me with just the right support and encouragement. I needed to feel totally uninhibited and they gave me that freedom. They were my literal physical and also my spiritual support, without which I never would have made it through. I didn’t mention Mom and Matt much because my experience was so incredibly internal; I remember having the wherewithal to look into Matt’s eyes maybe two or three times through the entire experience. But I felt them there, and that was everything to me.

And that’s how I became Starr’s mama.

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. 

Life on The Farm: Letting Go

Today was a very low key and nappish day. I watched a couple of movies, read a little bit, took some naps, and Matt and I cooked the most delicious peanut noodles for dinner together. Such a delight. It was gray and windy out, so I didn't take a walk, but it sounded just perfectly perfect, with rain coming down intermittently and the wind blowing those dry leaves around. It's been so luxurious to just let go of everyday life and stress and just focus on the fine art of waiting. Speaking of letting go, I spent a lot of time today wondering how long it will be before all of those ripe red and yellow leaves fall, and how long it will still be beautiful, and if I'll be able to get any good outdoor newborn photos in the leaves. As in, which will drop first, my baby or the leaves?

I had some cramping today that I took as an opportunity to practice relaxing and breathing through. I've been doing the Hypnobabies home study course, borrowed from my wonderful doula back home in Jackson, and it has been a huge help in drilling relaxation tools into my brain. It's five weeks of what is mostly daily audio tracks that are listened to repeatedly, followed by review until you reach your birthing day. The woman's voice on the CDs is like the voice of the Angel of Calm, Comfort and Ease, and I can easily conjure it up in my head whenever I want to. It was actually incredibly helpful in letting the minor discomfort fade into the background and I wasn't even sure when it finally stopped. I guess I found my way to let it go. (See the theme here today? Because I just found it!)

As for what I still need to let go--the baby moved position again and it drives me nuts when he does that because I can't quite figure it out and it seems to be my fixation, having him in a good position for birth. I told Deborah yesterday that because I can't relax and let it go he'll probably be transverse and inside out when I go into labor. She laughed. It was silly. (A baby can't be inside out.) Now I feel limbs on my right instead of left side, yet it feels (I think?) like his body is still on the right. And his movements though frequent were not as large today as usual, which of course always worries me as well. He's moving now, and I'm stopping what I'm doing to obsess over figuring out exactly where every body part is and which way its facing.

The fact is I can't control it. I can't know it for sure, not having a Plexiglas window into the womb, and while I can do poses and exercises to encourage a good position, at the end of the day, I have to trust my baby to know what he's doing. I have to let it go. And on that note, I'll leave you with a photo essay. The first photo is of the trees behind our house this morning.

Life on The Farm: Day One

I promised a few people who were dying to keep tabs on me during my days here at The Farm (really, there are a few) that I would blog every day about my experience here. It’s not at all selfless--as I am heading into my greatest life transition to date I of course feel the burning need to write anyway.

I started writing a “Why The Farm?” blog a few weeks ago, but honestly, that question is just too big to deal with here. I was sprawling and rambling and citing support every which way like an old growth vine covered in heavy grapes in September. (How’s that for a fertility metaphor, eh?) There are just so many reasons, but these words basically cover all of them up in their blanket of wisdom:

I’ll leave it at that for now because you won’t really care about the details unless you’re a birth nerd, and if you are a birth nerd you’ll already know. If you would like to be a birth nerd and are looking for proper training, I’ll refer you to Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. It pretty much covers it. If you’re not much of a reader but care enough to spend an hour and a half, the popular documentary The Business of Being Born works too. You can watch it for free on YouTube. These are just starting points that will lead you into into a wide new school of thought about birth if you fall down the rabbit hole like I did.

Anyway, I am here. In this beautiful house in these beautiful woods, resting and centering myself, being cared for by some of the most experienced and respected midwives in the world, waiting reflectively for my baby boy to make his way fully into the real world from the mystery beyond it, and generally being incredibly spoiled to have the most ideal situation imaginable as my reality. And I’m going to share my thoughts and experiences, and soon, baby pictures and new mama thoughts. My filter will be pretty minimal, so if you’re disgusted or annoyed by side notes on my round ligaments and milk production, or bored by the mundane (like what I ate for lunch) you may want to just check out now. This is my diary and I’m just letting you read it if you want.

So where am I today? What did I do? How am I feeling? So nice of you to ask.

I’m settled in my very comfy temporary bedroom, where I foresee spending a lot of time for the next month. I started out the day by sleeping until I woke up at around 8:30, to hear Matt on the phone with his boss dealing with emergency #1 of what are sure to be a string over the month that he works from “home”. I used what little phone reception I could get to check in with a few people who had asked if we’d arrived safely.

Then my midwife Deborah came over and we settled into the comfy couch for a long talk about risks, benefits and uncertainty in birth related choices, both at home and in the hospital setting. Matt sat in a chair nearby and listened attentively, asking a question now and then as well. Then we rode with her over to the clinic for a quick check on the baby and routine labs. Baby boy is still head down, butt on my right side. I expressed concern over the ideal position being the left, but Deborah seemed mostly unconcerned. Babies turn during labor (not surprising, since there’s a lot of action going on around them at that point), and she’s seen plenty of births with right-side babies go just as fine and dandy as any others. Since she’s seen over a thousand of them, I guess I’ll go with her relaxed attitude about it. He’s head down and anterior, both of which are more important. He’s also very strong, though he measures a bit small. Takes after Dad. ;)

Then we walked home from the clinic and enjoyed the beautiful weather and falling leaves…as well as acorns, which fall and hit tin roofs around here with what is apparently the velocity of bullets. We discussed options for taking walks with the baby that wouldn’t involve a newborn sized hard hat and Matt pointed out which trees were the offenders. All I have to do is avoid walking under them.

Our house completely empty of groceries, we then hopped into the car for lunch and grocery shopping in Franklin (home to the stars, none of whom we spotted at Whole Foods, I’m disappointed to report). Lunch was a quick and really delicious affair at the P.F. Chang’s new “good food quickly” chain, Pei Wei. We so need one of these in Jackson! While packing both our Teriyaki and our Sweet and Sour leftovers in one Chinese takeout box, we speculated that this must be the way that the Chinese have invented so many varied and flavorful sauces over the millennia. If only my expert-on-all-things-Chinese brother Drew had been around to confirm.

Then I shopped while Matt unsuccessfully searched for a mechanic with time to take a look at our very unfortunately timed gas leak in our car. I got really tired and had a weepy hormonal breakdown. No worries though, I cry about once a day lately. It’s fine. I’ve accepted it. It’s how I’m processing.

Which brings me to the ‘how am I feeling?’ portion of your question. I think the baby dropped the other day as we were working like mad to close up the house and pack up the car. Since then I’ve been feeling movement lower, and unfortunately my feet have finally been a little swollen. Maybe I can breathe deeper? I was still breathing and eating pretty dang well for the most part, so I don’t think I appreciate this phase as much as most mamas do. I’m just annoyed with the swollen feet. But other than that I’m still pretty great. Other typical discomforts are minimal or nonexistent.

Emotionally? 99% of the time I’m all peace and bliss and excitement. Then there are random moments, usually when I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, when I have an oh shit, I’m going to have to give birth. Really soon. moment of terror. I’ve never done it before. Birth seems like such a monumental task to be handed to such untrained, naïve newbies, yet that’s been Mother Nature’s plan since the beginning for some reason. So I go back to embracing that truth, and trusting that I will be surrounded and supported by some of the very best humans on the planet: my husband, my mom, my midwives (and possibly one of my dearest friends, too). And this baby isn’t staying in there forever. That’s just a fact.

We came home and Matt threw together a quick veg chili and biscuits for dinner while I wrote most of this.

And now I am sitting here finishing up, listening to a Sara Bareilles album that baby heartily approves of, judging by his dance party that only quiets when the music does. J Tomorrow’s schedule is looking very full. There’s a hammock on an enormous screen porch that’s begging to be used before the weather gets too cold. I have a ton of scrapbook supplies ready to be assembled into baby boy’s baby book. I’m thinking my favorite made-from-scratch lentil soup is in order for tomorrow’s dinner. We’ve set up a super sweet home theater with a silver bed sheet and our projector. And of course, I’ll have another blog to write. It will probably be more introspective and less of a play-by-play, and maybe also have some Farm pictures. If I can gather the wherewithal to take a walk on these swollen feet.

Until then! (Too tired to proofread this, so forgive my errors.)

Why do I write for teenagers?

As most people know, I have an MFA in writing for children and young adults. Most of us in this weird club with this highly specialized degree would agree that the question we get the most often is “Why do you write for teenagers?”

MFAs in writing are supposed to be serious business; often too serious, judging by the frequently mocking references to “MFA writing” in the serious literary community. So it seems counterintuitive to most folks to bother paying all that money and doing all that work to get fancy letters behind your name that are all about making up stories for obnoxious, self-centered kids. After all, that’s not very serious is it? So truly, why bother? The reasons are always multi-faceted for all of us, yet our primary reasons differ from person to person. My primary answer is that I write for myself, as many writers would say. But I realize that at the heart of my Self, that is, the adult adaptation of my soul, is teenage me. And dealing with that is the most serious (and often painful) business I could possibly invest myself in.

I’m lucky enough to have gotten to watch the development of significantly younger cousins and, most closely, my own brother, from infancy to adulthood. In my observation of these people, we are mostly born who we are. Yes, we significantly mature and develop our unique personal qualities. Or they can be adulterated by pain or abuse, walls can go up as a result of loss or trauma, deflections and disguises often become a part of our everyday survival. But inherent in those words—wall, deflect, disguise—is the indication that the something that lies beyond is what it has always been and always will be.

So what’s so special about adolescence, if I am who I’ve always been? I think it has to do with a kind of Self consciousness you lack as a young child. Young children look out a window, so to speak—they are watching and absorbing, molding themselves to fit their familial and cultural expectations with very little regard for themselves as an individual. Ask a typical five-year-old seriously who they think they are and they’ll likely simply tell you their name. That’s the only identifying factor that matters much at this age. They are who they are, but that is of little importance to them. But ask a teenager who they think they really are and you’ll get a deer in headlights look, a terror of being revealed.

Teens stop looking out the window and become, developmentally appropriately, what adults often condescendingly refer to as “navel gazers”. They start spending tons of time literally and figuratively looking at themselves, as they were born and shaped, in the mirror. What do people see when they see me? What do I see when I see me? Does it measure up? Is it good enough?

And I say, try though we may to bury it deeply, to hide it, ignore it, and laugh at it, the unique brand of pain that comes with facing those questions on a daily basis shapes everything about who we are and who we become in the six or seven decades of our lives after adolescence.

Yes, we grow up. We get more comfortable in our skin. If we’re lucky, we learn to accept compliments with grace, we put less stock in our physical appearance, we embrace our talents despite continued struggle to fully actualize them. But underneath that, underneath all of that, something remains.

Recently, my dear friend posted this picture from my senior prom on Facebook. Yep, that's me in back, the brunette with the 'I'm forcing this smile right now' look on her face :

I’m so glad she posted it, I’ve been looking for it for ages! I wanted it for my author website someday, and you better believe I'll put it there! But looking at it was even more painful than I’d anticipated. At first I resorted to the defense mechanisms I refer to above—I ‘jokingly’ referred to myself as a huge loser. It was classic deflecting, the ‘call yourself something first so nobody has a chance to think it before you acknowledge it yourself’ move. I showed the photo to my husband, Matt.

“Come here!” I called. “Here’s that picture I’ve been wanting to show you!”

“What picture?” he asked, coming into the room.

“The group picture from my senior prom when I couldn’t get a date,” I tried to joke, but I started crying before I could even finish the sentence. I let a second pass.

“Wow,” I said. “I guess that stuff never, ever goes away, does it?”

Did it matter that I am now a reasonably confident grown woman happily married to a man who adores me beyond all reasonable expectation I may have a right to, and pregnant with his baby? That I'm happier and more fulfilled than I've ever been? Nope. Not to teenage me. Not to the me that still lives right there in the middle, constantly whispering to my subconscious all of the reasons that I don’t measure up. Will anything ever change her mind? She made the first decisions about my self worth, and friends, those decisions stick around.

As I continued to look at that picture, I remembered viscerally how that and other similar situations felt all through my junior high and high school years. “The worst part,” I told Matt, “was knowing that if I didn’t get in the picture, I was calling attention to myself. I was making everyone feel awkward and sorry for me. But if I did, I completely stuck out and looked like a loser. I was screwed either way. I felt like that all. the. time.”

Though my sweet friend’s sweet boyfriend who didn’t go to our school graciously stepped out of the picture so that she could be my “other,” it didn’t really change anything. I was still the defective one. I knew that there were rumors that I was a lesbian, that I was a little too close to my girl friends. I also knew there was nothing I could do to change it, even though it was so not true.

I had crushes on boys all the time, but the second they showed what maybe even could have been a glimmer of interest in return I would nearly have a panic attack. One time I actually did have a panic attack, shaking uncontrollably on the bathroom floor after a boy I liked dared to put his arm around me. In hindsight, I can see the damage that was done to me in my childhood and the strange and opposite way I chose to deal with it—where most girls hurt in the way I was may have become promiscuous, I became completely closed off when it came to even beginner-level intimacy with boys. A therapist I saw a few times called it “fascinating and unique” as a coping mechanism. But to teenage me at the time, I just felt like a freak. I didn’t know what my problem was, all I knew was that boys didn’t like me. In typical cruel and simplistic teenage fashion, this led to a self-judgment that I wasn’t worth much. And I was probably ugly.

So as an adult, am I kinder to myself? Of course I am. I don’t really believe those things (intellectually) anymore. For me, getting out of my small town and exploring the world, daring myself and taking those dares, was the psychological equivalent of getting out of the small, mean box I’d put my Self in and looking at what was really real about who I was. As I progressed through my twenties I became increasingly confident and self-aware, more and more willing to take on scary things as exciting challenges and open myself up to others, and much more able to deal with rejection and meanness and efficiently leave it outside of the box where I keep my self-worth. Overall, I’m pretty proud of who I am and who I’ve become. My external expression of that person could use some work, my efficiency leaves something to be desired (to put it kindly), but that’s an essay for another day.

But still. Teenage me exists. She controls more than I’d like her to. When a photo from thirteen years ago demonstrates its power to bring me to tears, I can’t forget that. So I remember anew that the most important reason I write for teenagers is that I write for her.

I write for her because like most adults, I try to bury her and lock her away. But: I’m always aware that just a tiny slight of her hand can act like a railroad switch—cause an alteration in judgment that is oh-so-easy to just not notice in the moment, though it may change the whole trajectory of my life.

I may not be able to get rid of her, but I cling to a stubborn belief that I can love her and teach her, maybe even help her heal. I have to believe that I can get her to understand that she wasn’t a loser at her senior prom, and she wasn’t the only senior that didn’t get a date. She was actually the only one with the guts to do what she wanted to do and go anyway, in her shimmery blue and purple snakeskin print dress she’d optimistically purchased months before. She was the beginning of the person who said yes I’ll go to Spain for a year even though no I don’t speak Spanish or know anyone there. Yes, I’ll go to California and work at that camp for the summer, sight unseen. Yep, I’ll transfer schools my senior year of college rather than go back to the school that made me miserable. Sure, I'll volunteer to translate Spanish to the best of my ability for total strangers at the free medical clinic. Absolutely, I’ll get an MFA in writing for kids, because I know that’s what I was born to do, even if it does mean bucking every single piece of conventional writing wisdom and taking out monster loans to do it.

Teen me was seriously awesome. She made the very first of my biggest, bravest choices without precedent to reassure her that it would turn out okay, even amazing. I’m going to keep writing the stories I need to tell to help her understand how awesome she is, until she gets it through her head. Is it futile? Maybe, but I have to try. Because when she gets that, that’s the last piece of the puzzle. That’s when I really get that, not just on the surface, but all the way through to the middle. It would be the truest kind of freedom there is. And then who knows what I'll be able to do?