Dear US,
It’s funny how the compulsion to write diminishes: it’s not that I am not reflecting; more than ever in my life, I feel involved in being. I feel mindful when I walk, when I breathe, when I sit on the couch. When I went to acupuncture last week, for the first time in 3 months, Marina was shocked when she read my pulses.
“They are like the pulses of a different person–they are so strong!”
Before, there was always weakness, the struggles against stress, the “liver” which always reacts to the tumult of the environment; and now? They have righted themselves. She says that most pregnant women’s pulses change, but she had to witness mine to believe how much they could change. How strangely good to be so healthy, physically and in the psyche.
I did convince her to give me one needle–the one for sexual joy!
The weather has also been bringing me back to life: I walk and walk, though last week, I overdid it, with the frenzied fear of becoming fat (the dismal prospects of maternity fashion do not help the self-image, either) which is still well intact. I gain all my weight in my legs, it seems. But when I overdid it last week, I had a whole episode of the old nausea and vomiting. Could it be that this baby needs me to have legs like the Statue of Liberty to hold him up? Apparently so!
Well, if I could breathe my way into accepting all the vomit, I guess this is the next new challenge: breathing my way into accepting monster legs. There has to be a better term. Mother’s legs. Well, vonR does not seem to mind. I had no idea he would be so attracted to a pregnant body. He calls me Fertility Goddess; now, why can’t I feel that way about myself, especially in those vile dressing room mirrors? Clad in crap-brown khakis, or jeans with an unimaginable, stretchy elastic thingamajig? With the fitting room attendant saying “buy bigger–because you are only beginning to grow.”
Yikes!
How did you deal with it, US? This takeover by the flesh…
The unsolicited advice also seeps in, but so far, I have been able to nod and deflect.
Today an artist friend is coming over to sketch Russian folktale characters on the nursery walls: we have started moving around the apartment.
Space is being made here.
I’m reading Iris Murdoch, seeing good friends and taking walks, cooking, puttering around; vonR is taking boxing lessons, and also learning to control his anxiety a little better; Pearl continues to teach us how to postpone to the next day. Things just don’t bother me the way they used to. I do not exactly know where this skill of filtering out the turmoil, or the drives for literary publication, or pleasing impossible bosses and infelicitous career paths, or over-caretaking those who can take care of themselves, all of which were tripping me up, comes from. I do not have the time for those things. There is some important work before me. I hope this groundedness is here to stay. I am smiling at people I don’t know. I am easing my way off medication. I am approaching 42 and marriage and this afternoon’s lunch with equal apprehension. I don’t know what’s next, besides a baby on sling sometime in August, and some things to teach him, some things to show him. Whatever it will be, no matter how crazy and exhausting, I feel capable. On my big thick legs, connecting me to the earth. This life suits me. I must have been ready for it. Just ask my pulses.
YY
