the end of an ideal and also a beginning

I've been trying to write down the story of Elsa's birth now for several weeks (it was exactly three weeks yesterday), and keep getting interrupted. This makes sense considering that I rarely finish an entire cup of coffee in the morning, much less secure a lengthy block of time to sit at the computer, think, and write.

I'd like to believe that I'm already moving beyond all preoccupations about childbirth now and that the need to talk about it and tell my story is fading. But a few nights ago I had a dream that I was about to get a haircut at a really nice salon and the beautician gave me an epidural before she began cutting. So, I must still be stewing. Moreover, at the very moment I write this paragraph, I can hear Esme in the bathroom giving her My Little Ponies a sink bath and explaining to the baby pony that the mama has "gone to the hospital." Clearly the collective subconscious of our little family is still processing this major event.

I'm not sure what others might interpret in the above photo--maybe something in the range of poignant. For my own part, when I saw this photo just after Elsa's birth, something more like a comic strip popped into my mind involuntarily. It had the caption: "Thus ends my career as granola mom." Because there is something really funny about this picture of mom and baby both sleeping through the big birth event. This allowed me to laugh at what otherwise might have made me cry. And of course, I did cry many tears in the days, and finally the minutes leading up to Elsa's birth. I'm sure the tears were partially due to the pregnancy hormones at work as I approached, then passed, my due date. But they were also brought on by the swelling realization that my hopes, efforts, and will were not very powerful variables in the complex equation that was quickly filling up a chalkboard where doctors stood in professorial authority over my big belly.

And it's no secret that my will was to have a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean). Every mother on the playground of our apartment complex knew this, as did all of my close relatives and friends, and probably a few far-flung acquaintances who couldn't care less. I suppose I am what you'd call transparent, and fecklessly wore my heart for a VBAC on the sleeves of my maternity shirts. But as per indicated by the surgical cap on my head, I ultimately did not get it. Elsa was born by repeat cesarean, despite my nine months of white-knuckled steering away from that destination.

Also plainly evident in this picture: mom wasn't even conscious during daughter's entrance into the world, but, rather, passed out from a paradoxical but potent cocktail of exhaustion, disappointment, excitement, denial, resignation, happiness, sadness, and relief.

I was relieved, in the end, to receive the powerful spinal block that sent warmth down my legs and ended the pain of contractions. I was relieved to know that I didn't have to struggle a minute longer to bring my baby into the world-- she was going to be brought out immediately and safely by a team of capable people. Jeff was standing by, ready to greet her. My doula, standing near my head, was watching the surgery, taking pictures, and, in a sense, keeping vigil, as she had been all night during my labor. Frank Sinatra, oddly, was playing from a small stereo in the surgery room.

Under such circumstances, I had the luxury of letting go, caving into my now painless exhaustion, and drifting into oblivion. And while I wouldn't have consciously chosen to sleep through my baby's debut, it was apparently beyond my power to resist. I didn't even realize I had fallen asleep. When Jeff woke me up and presented me with a swaddled bundle, I was genuinely surprised that so much had transpired without my being aware. This was definitely the end of an ideal. The wrinkly red crying newborn was not brought naked up to my chest in her first moment of life to be warmed and to nurse. I didn't even hear her first cries or the announcement of her weight. And so it was that I became what all the natural childbirth advocates preach against: a passive participant in my own child's birth.

But not really. In the earliest weeks of my pregnancy I actively sought out a group of obstetricians in town who were willing to perform VBACs-- in fact, the only practice in my town. I had a consultation with one of the doctors to ask him questions, like what was the rate of VBAC success among their patients. It was a respectable 70% and I was determined to be among that 70%. I tried to have the healthiest pregnancy I could have. I did prenatal yoga like my life depended on it. When it looked, toward the end, like I might once again have a breech baby (automatic disqualification from a trial of labor), I did more yoga, and everything else I could think of to get the baby to turn, and she finally did. I was poised to go into labor, and clinging to this fact, I waited. I wanted this child to arrive in her own time, in her own way. For reasons I still can't necessarily explain, trying for a VBAC was deeply important to me. Simultaneously, I knew that there was a very good chance that it would not happen, and was ready to flip the switch and emotionally jump ship should the battle go ill.

The more exposure I had to the doctors in this particular practice through weekly appointments in my final months, the more I felt that it would be a miracle if I avoided a repeat cesarean. I apprehended a subtle attitude of defeatism that did not nourish my hopes. I sensed a certain nervousness and lack of trust in the birthing process in general, and my ability to give birth in particular, even though there was nothing about me to indicate that I would not succeed. There were assurances such as, "You know at any point if you're having a difficult labor that you can throw in the towel." There were attempts to assess the weight of my baby just in case she was "overly large," because I might "feel differently about trying to VBAC if I knew I was carrying a ten pound baby." (It turned out she was not even seven pounds at birth.) And there were casual, impersonal questions such as, "Have you scheduled your c-section yet?," even though it clearly stated in my file that I wanted to try for a VBAC. Was anyone paying attention?

Looking back, I see now that although my earliest conversation with the doctor from this practice was not negative or discouraging, neither was it positive or encouraging. His tone was professional, neutral, promising nothing. He spoke in terms of statistics, percentages of risk. He said that I was currently a "good candidate" for a VBAC. Should that change at any point as the pregnancy went along, we would then "have another conversation," about my options. Although I was hopeful in the beginning, I think I realized intuitively, even then, that within this model, within this system, I was going to have to have the perfect pregnancy and the perfect birth. Even though the risk itself (of uterine rupture) is miniscule, and even though I was a healthy person having a healthy pregnancy, I was going to be categorically treated as "high risk." And at any point, I could lose my status as a good candidate. Should anything not go according to the book, I would be disqualified, and no one would lose a wink of sleep over it but myself. I crossed my fingers, and just hoped that the pieces would fall into place. It should not have surprised me when, in my forty-first week of pregnancy, a doctor looked at me with irritation, spoke of hospital policy and said, "This is just the nuts and bolts of how it works."

I was treated according to the rules and regulations of the high risk category, which felt terribly impersonal and unfair. Moreover, metallic hardware metaphors are not what you want to hear from your caregiver in the last few hours leading up to what you know will among the most memorable and vulnerable events of your life. According to Ina May Gaskin, who is considered the authority on midwifery par excellence, and runs a famous birthing center in Tennessee called "The Farm," childbirth works according to what she calls "the sphincter law." She explains it herself in this short video. To put it succinctly and crudely: in the same way that people can't relax and go to the bathroom in a place if they do not feel safe or comfortable, a woman can't relax and give birth if she does not feel safe or comfortable. Likewise, if an animal such as a deer detects a nearby predator, her instincts are wired in such a way as to automatically shut labor down until she finds a safe place to have her baby. According to Ina May, some caregivers are so tense, they can have the same effect on a laboring woman's brain as a predator by merely walking into a room, and cause the birth to stop progressing. Clearly, there is a strong and intense psychological component to childbirth which must be handled with care and understanding.

But looking back to the first conversation I had with a doctor from this practice is telling. I asked him what he thought of VBAC home births. I knew what his answer would be, but wanted to hear it just out of curiosity. He said that anyone who practiced them was irresponsible. Such a midwife was basing her practice on the premise that things turn out alright most of the time. And, he conceded, most of the time they do. But when they don't, they go badly wrong.

I myself would not have been comfortable with a VBAC homebirth either, but in retrospect I wish I could have secured an experience for myself that would not have been so radically opposite from the personalized attention of a midwife who is able to invest a bit more heart and soul into the birth experience. I learned the hard way that the psychological (dare I say spiritual?) component to childbirth is simply ignored by the medical model of care, which thinks itself so advanced and air tight, a bastion of expertise.

In any case, I had a perfectly healthy, uneventful pregnancy, just as I did with Esme. But it seems to be my particular experience with pregnancy that it begins like a wide, safe, leisurely, tree-lined boulevard, with no traffic. And of course, I am grateful for this. It goes along like this for blocks and blocks and blocks. But then, in the final weeks, without warning, that boulevard quickly bottlenecks into a narrow, rude, traffic-filled street in a congested, overpopulated part of town. The intersection of the birth is just ahead. It turns out, unluckily, that road work is happening and the way I'd like to turn is blocked by a detour sign. To make matters worse, the traffic light is broken and blinking, and cars are backed up in all directions. In such a situation, no one gets special treatment. A grumpy, impatient policeman is directing traffic, in no mood to be reasoned with. I'm trapped behind the wheel, inching forward in a locked line of cars, and suddenly feel very naive for having trusted the generic and conventional advice of mapquest. I wish I had mapped out an alternative route on my own.

I can never entirely explain to myself how or why, at the approach of a due date, things go from emotionally ordinary to feeling nearly apocalyptic. Again, I realize that much of this is probably hormonal, and perhaps a common experience of all women as they approach childbirth, whether they can expect things to be routine or not. Maybe childbirth, though certainly common, is never just a routine, everyday affair. It quivers with too much potential for comedy, tragedy.

In seminary we discussed the meaning of the Old Testament laws about what made a person ceremonially "unclean." A person was considered unclean if they had come into contact with either birth or death, and was required to pass through a period of cleansing in order to re-enter ordinary life. We were told as students that this uncleanliness was not something bad or sinful, but rather holy and divine-- extraordinary. Birth and death are human affairs which touch the divine, and therefore they are fearful, sacred, holy, and stand apart from the ordinary. They must be treated as such.

As a baby's due date approaches, it becomes, at least in my experience, impossible to continue pretending that something merely ordinary is about to happen. My due date with Elsa was on Monday, April 13. Until it was actually upon me, I failed to really consider the implications of the fact that this was not just any Monday in 2009, but Holy Monday on the calendar of the Orthodox Church.

Holy Monday is the first day of Holy Week, which is arguably the most beautiful but also the most spiritually intense and demanding time of year. It is well-known that emotions and passions are like taut guitar strings during Holy Week. People at church can be grumpy and short. Communities and families may bicker over nothing. With forty days of fasting behind you and the anticipation of the Feast of Feasts ahead of you, and the most beautiful and serious poetry, Scripture, hymns and prayers surrounding you in church daily, it's no wonder. For me, even though I was too pregnant to fully participate in all the services, I did make it to many. And seemingly independent of my own participation, the aura of Holy Week seeped into our home on its own accord, as it does every year. There is a certain glow.

Time feels as if it is being compressed and events are set in motion. Christ is betrayed and will stand before Pontius Pilate. A pamphlet arrived in the mail from our seminary, a short reflection on Holy Thursday, by Alexander Schmemann. In it he talks about the mystery of this unique day in which "light and darkness, joy and sorrow are so strangely mixed." It seemed only natural to me to find a certain synchronicity in the full-term baby pressing me at all sides from within and the liturgical drama which was leading up to the Cross and finally Easter.

On Holy Thursday, I had a doctor's appointment that I knew would be pivotal, and which I was somewhat dreading. It was the first time I went to the doctor since passing my due date. Both Jeff, my doula, and Esme came along--quite a crowd. This was the appointment of the "nuts and bolts" comment. This particular doctor breezed into the office with my file and brusquely asked when my last ultrasound had been because "as far as she was seeing, the last ultrasound was showing that the baby was still breech." This was not correct. The baby was not breech and there had been a more recent ultrasound showing this. But the word "breech," with all its emotional baggage for me felt like a brick being hurled at my head. I sat there at the edge of the examination table dumbfounded and knew right away that I was not in the proper frame of mind to deal with the forceful personality of this woman. I also could tell that she was not really interested in listening to me either.

I can't explain what happened next, except that something snapped in Jeff and whatever rhetorical skills have carried him through far too many tedious years of graduate school were suddenly marshaled and employed on my behalf in the face of this doctor. In short, he was heroic.

Up to this point, he and I had been preparing for the birth as if in two different spheres. He had been working hard at the library, trying to get as much of his course work out of the way so that he could take some time off when the baby arrived. I had been working at home, trying organize our small space and figure out how things were going to fit and flow with two children instead of just one.

As for my feelings, hopes, and fears about the birth, I felt that they were in a chamber that I alone visited throughout my pregnancy. Jeff always sympathized and supported my desires to have a particular kind of birth, but was not personally invested in them himself. I have always been mystified by couples who promote the Bradley Method, or "husband coached" childbirth, because I could only snicker at the thought of my husband being a self-taught expert on cervical dilation, or telling me how to breathe during a contraction. And while he spends his days at school pouring over the most dry academic books, I suspect he'd be bored to tears before making it through one paragraph of Ina May's Guide to Childbirth. And honestly, this has never bothered me at all.

But this is why I was surprised when, at this appointment, he suddenly rose up and became my voice when I faltered before the pushy doctor. She seemed furious that I had somehow slipped beneath the radar and gone past my due date (merely four days) without anyone from their practice having intervened. (I suspect now that she was irritated with her colleagues and I was just caught in the crossfire.) She wanted me to go home immediately, pack my things, and head to the hospital for a c-section that afternoon. I won't go into all the tedious details of the conversation we had with her, except to say that she interrupted me at least three times. She accused Jeff of being sarcastic when he was actually asking a sincere question at one point. We told her that I'd been having pre-labor contractions for two days and suspected that I'd go into labor naturally very soon, and that it seemed reasonable at this point just to wait at least through the weekend to see if perhaps the c-section could still be avoided. There was nothing to show that my baby was in imminent peril if she stayed in the womb for a little while longer. She barked at me and said something about ignoring the advice of three doctors (she supposedly had quickly consulted two of her colleagues without our being present), implying by her tone and body language that I was being a stubborn moron. Finally Jeff, realizing that things had reached an impass, had the presence of mind to ask if we could speak to another doctor. She said yes and left the small room, letting the door bang shut behind her.

I felt manhandled and shaken by this encounter, in which I'd barely gotten a word in edgewise. In the end we did speak to another doctor who was much more flexible, amiable, and reasonable. He had no problem with letting us wait the weekend to see what might happen. By the time we left the office after this lengthy, stressful appointment, I felt like I was suffocating and could not wait to exit into the parking lot where there would be air and sunshine. My doula told us to go eat our favorite foods, do something outdoors, and spend the rest of the day emotionally recovering. I knew, with every fiber of my being, that I had done the right thing. It would not have been right to succumb to the established protocol and go in for a c-section that very day. I knew that my baby was fine and that I was not putting her in danger by giving her a little more time. But despite this, a poisonous seed of doubt and insecurity had been planted and my strength was sapped. It would be difficult to regain a totally untainted, positive attitude about this birth.

Jeff and I stopped and got Thai food, then went home, put Esme down for a nap, and debriefed. I am not categorically anti-medical. But I realize now that the real issue for me in Elsa's birth transcended any rivalry of VBAC versus c-section, medical versus natural. It became an issue of personal versus impersonal. I didn't want my birth--a sacred thing-- to bear the impersonal latex glove prints of science. I know science gives us many good things but I am wary of its one-size-fits-all, systematic approach, and I do not trust it implicitly. I thought that having a doula at my birth would be enough to counteract the hospital system in which, as Jeff put it in a moment of realization, "birth and death are treated like taxes." But truly, although having a doula was a wonderful comfort amidst the whole experience, it wasn't enough to change the ultimate outcome. In the days leading up to the birth, we realized, too late, just how powerful the system is, and how small we were within it.

As I had suspected, I did go into true labor on Friday night. I labored for a little while at home but after my contractions became close together, intense, and regular, we went to the hospital. And that's where the story simply gets onto the fast track of inevitability. I was hooked up to an IV and a fetal heart rate monitor which I could not unhook. What's more, it took the nurse three tries to find a vein in my arm, which I had to hold out obediently and keep still for a long time while having contraction after contraction.

All of this ensured my discomfort and kept me bound to the small area beside the hospital bed. The baby's head was descended fairly far and, we found out later, she was also posterior, or sunny side up, which makes for a longer, more painful labor. The position of her head made it too painful for me to sit down while contracting so I had no choice but to stand and hold onto the side of the bed. I would get chilly, then hot. I recall that was shivering quite a bit and my legs eventually started shaking from fatigue.

Somehow, though hours passed, I never settled into the hospital room and had the delirious impression that we had perpetually just arrived. And of course, nothing I had read about natural childbirth really prepared me for how hard it would be. I struggled to relax and breathe during each contraction, and "get on top of it," as my doula put it. The key is to try to relax and work with the force of each contraction, but everything about the hospital environment was working against my being able to truly relax. Standing there in a thin hospital gown with a needle poking me near my wrist and two itchy elastic bands around my abdomen, it was inevitable that, as the night wore on, I too wore down physically and emotionally, and felt incredibly discouraged. Knowing that my cervix was not progressing very fast, it became clear to me that I needed relief in some form if I was going to continue at that rate until the end. It would have been helpful to get into a warm bath or something like that, but with the monitor and IV connected, that was not an option. It would have also been helpful if the team of people caring for me were determined to do everything in their power to make me comfortable and make a natural birth possible. But obviously that was not going to happen either.

In the early hours of the morning I opted for a half dose of intravenous pain control, which seemed like the most benign choice. It didn't totally blot out the pain, but it allowed me to lie down on my right side and rest for a bit. But in retrospect, I don't think this was a very good choice. In such a position, feeling slightly dopey, my blood circulation was not optimal, and the baby, who was also tired from all the contractions, started showing heart rate dips on the monitor. After that it was just chaos, and I can barely say what happened. The doctor and several nurses came in, I was turned on my left side and given an oxygen mask. I was terribly uncomfortable on my left side. I had not dilated very far by this time-- only four inches. It was clear that if I was going to finish the labor naturally, it was going to take a long time. Every woman's labor is different, and I know plenty of women who have gone through long labors. One friend I know labored for three days with her first baby under the care of a midwife. It would have been possible, I believe, but only in a radically different environment, where I was allowed to move freely, find a comfortable position, and, most of all, get into water. In the context of the hospital room, where everything was working against my comfort and encouragement, it was simply not possible. And while I can't be sure why the baby's heart rate dropped, I do still believe that it was situational and a direct consequence of me lying down on my side, which was a direct consequence of taking the only form of relief I felt was an option, which was a consequence of having no other options for relief, which was a consequence of being bound to a small area by machines.

As soon as I stood back up, her heart rate bounced right back to normal. But how many more hours could I just stand there on the cold tile floor and continue in back labor? Why didn't I just get an epidural? I would have, as a last resort, but my doula said that because it causes the mother's blood pressure to drop, it would likely also cause the baby's heart rate to drop as well and would result in an automatic c-section. If I was going to have a c-section, I didn't want it to be an emergency due to another heart-rate drop.

As we tried to process what was happening, Jeff and I looked at each other and realized that it was scary and pointless to go on. As Jeff said, it all felt so complex and tangled at that point, there was no right choice. I could have tried to labor longer and see how it went, but truthfully, it seemed futile. Jeff said it was as if someone had told me to run a race and then put weights on my ankles. In the circumstances set up by the hospital, choosing to go ahead with the c-section sooner rather than delay the inevitable made the most sense. In radically different circumstances, perhaps at a birthing center, under the care of of midwife who trusted in the birthing process and was devoted to making me comfortable, in a place where I could truly relax and feel cared for, there is a good chance that things would have gone differently for me. Of course, there is no way to know such a thing for sure.

So this is my birth story. Elsa was born at 11:30 a.m. on Holy Saturday, the day before Orthodox Easter. We named her Elsa after Jeff's grandmother, but I wanted her middle name to reflect something of Holy Week, which was so closely bound up in my anticipation of her arrival, so I chose the name Joanna. Saint Joanna was among the women who went to the tomb of Christ to anoint his body with spices. They are called the myrrh-bearing women in the Orthodox Church.

I do not know why things turned out as they did. I am thankful for the c-section that brought Elsa out safely and surely, even while I can never be sure if, under different circumstances, it would not have been necessary. Now it doesn't really matter. In some ways, I wish I had never cared so much, because it would have simplified the whole matter. I am healing well and have had amazing support from dear friends and neighbors. I have two healthy daughters, and I am deeply thankful. I am also glad that I at least had the opportunity to go into labor this time and try for a VBAC, and that Elsa got to arrive in her own timing, on Holy Saturday.

In childbirth, as in all things that matter, there are ideals, and those ideals are certainly good. But I learned through Elsa's birth that human ideals, no matter how wholesome and legitimately desirable, are not the content of my belief. There are ways that one hopes life will unfold but in a fallen world they only happen sometimes, for some-- not all the time, for all-- and usually without explanation. We are only asked, like the myrrh-bearing women, to be faithful should we ever be asked to live through a very dark day, to forgive seven times seventy, to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.

lo, the winter is past

Last year our March, according to the average temperature, was actually the coldest month of winter. This year it has come back in an unrecognizable form, as if it decided to switch its allegiance to spring and be forward-thinking. We have had some beautiful days lately-- sparkling, unbelievable for March in South Bend. Yesterday, St. Patrick's Day, was the best so far. We went walking in short sleeves; we stayed outside for hours. We didn't have to put our sweaters and jackets back on until the sun began its final descent.

For me the day simply oozed with traditional connotations of St. Patrick's Day, which is to say, it felt charmed, lucky, merry, blessed, lighthearted, persisting in green upon green, then ending in hues of gold.

I've never experienced a St. Patrick's Days which so predictably conformed to leprechaun-friendly, four-leaf clover stereotypes. Instead, my experience of St. Patrick's Day is that of a late-winter pseudo-holiday which, like its lame February cousin Valentine's Day, takes a stab at an unpopular calendar month, trying to puncture the dreariness and thus provide some distraction during the long interval between the first-rate festivities of Christmas and Easter. School rooms, beauty shops, and dry cleaners pin up some dreary pre-cut paper decals of hearts and clovers in an effort splash a bit color at an unflinching facade of gray. Couples try really hard to enact romance; bar patrons try really hard to re-construct some iconic ideal of Irish pub merriment. The terrestrial remains terrestrial and accentuates human powerlessness against winter's longevity. All the candy hearts, thematic cupcakes, green beer, and green rivers of our towns and cities are not muscular enough to float the weight of a single human soul upward.

Well, I exaggerate. But my point is that my personal experience has conditioned me to temper expectations and distrust the approach of these holidays. I do not make plans for them, nor do I expect them to be remotely inspiring. Instead it has become habitual in me to ignore them and treat them as supra-ordinary. Jeff and I totally forgot about Valentine's Day this year until the day was almost over, at which point we barely so much as tipped our hat to it. That was my idea of a very successful Valentine's Day.

So, my doctor's appointment yesterday was naturally dominating my thoughts more than any official notation in my date book that it was St. Patrick's Day. As far as I was concerned, this appointment could not get here quickly enough. This is because, in the few days preceding, I really felt as if this baby had turned head down, and I was on edge hoping that an ultrasound would confirm that this was so. My morning was spent at home watching Esme and her best friend Lukas--both of them about twenty times more rambunctious than usual. Or it may have been that I felt twenty times less comfortable than usual, a large, unwieldy, short-tempered pregnant woman, uncomfortably full-bladdered, red-faced on the windy playground, unable to read even a paragraph of my novel due to snack and sippy cup requests. It took all my resources to herd the two of them out to the playground, then back in, up and down the stairs, later cleaning up Esme's potty training playground mishap (the worst kind), and finally wiping copious amounts of lunch off their hands and faces, nevermind the sploshes of yogurt on the floor. The moment when I would break away to go to this appointment lay just beyond the moment when Lukas would go home and Esme would go down for her nap. The promise of this moment did not make the morning seem shorter. Jeff would come home to take over and I would mercifully make my exit and drive away in a bubble of Personal Space.

When the appointment finally came, it happened almost too quickly after all the waiting. Without any ostensible delays, (although I almost was delayed by Esme deciding to resist her nap and throw a hysterical fit at my departure) I found out about the baby. It was head down. It suddenly was, so simply, true. The very fact of it sent me home in a cloud-car. All the anxiety, emotion, and fatalistic musings of last week came to weigh less than a cloud. This baby had turned, and would not likely turn back, and that was the simple truth. There were no other solutions required or decisions to be made about an external cephalic version. The pending notion of a scheduled c-section was promptly removed from the table by my busy doctor before he moved on to his next thing. I left the office with only the sparkling afternoon of an unexpectedly beautiful St. Patrick's Day before me. I was surprised to find myself subscribing to the feeling that, in fact, it was a holiday.

In the end, my friend and I decided to walk to Notre Dame, corral our husbands respectively, then eat outdoors at one of our favorite spots on campus. These were not very illustrious plans involving live Celtic music, imported beer, or corned beef, but I didn't care. The day was so beautiful. Esme's hair was a wild, tangled yellow mane, blowing in all directions like a royal flag as she ran around in squirrel patterns in the sunshine. I didn't care if all we were doing at one point was sitting outside the library on a stone wall amidst air that was remarkable for its freshness and civility toward the range of human temperature tolerance. I was in sandals, short sleeves, and carrying an almost full-term baby who was (and still is) properly situated for her birth-- all utterly remarkable and unanticipated realities whose very realities were sufficiently marvelous to hold me in a state of composed passion for this day and my existence within it. Undergrad students, exiting their classes and streaming by in clusters here and there, were invariably in bright kelly green, some with died green hair, green mardi gras beads, green top hats, tights, or clover-patterned bobby socks. St. Patrick's Day outlandishness probably may only happen in such a degree at a university whose mascot is the fighting Irishman, and part of me always rolls my eyes at this, but yesterday it only served to increase my sense that I was swimming in a particular kind of day, in which earthly hopes and pleasures were allowable, indulged, even freely granted.

I suppose I believe in the possibility of such a day (this feeling tends to come each year in some form at Pascha, for example), but I never actually expect it, and certainly not on St. Patrick's Day because it is St. Patrick's Day. I suppose I also believe that things can come to us that are shaped in the precise shape of our fears, and thus designed to displace them absolutely. But I never genuinely expect that either. I certainly would not expect all of the above on March 17, any given year.

Last week, in my situation, I knew I needed to pray. I thought about praying that the baby would turn downward, but that didn't seem right. Instead, one night in my sleepless worry, I did pray that God would simply be with us in the birth of this child, whatever "kind" of birth it turned out to be. I burrowed into my heart and found the capacity to be stubborn with God. I would stubbornly insist on believing that, even if the birth were the kind most seemingly managed, scheduled, and acted upon by human will and planning (a scheduled c-section), I would stubbornly believe that the date and time were chosen by God, and that his action would be at work in, with, and through this event of our little human family. I have always felt a certain disappointment and horror at the idea that my child's birthday could be pre-selected according to the convenience of a doctor's schedule. But I decided, in praying, that I would refuse to see things that way. It would be a stubborn, hard-headed, impossible interpretation of events, that others would find kooky, I think, but it appealed to me as correct, and, feeling my way in the dark, I think that it was the only possible prayer to pray. It was the only possible faith.

I remember my grandmother, who struggled for years with a chronic headache which would never fully lift, told me that one day, at my sister's birthday party at a pizza restaurant, her headache suddenly lifted without explanation, and she felt for the first time in years what it was like to not have a headache and simply enjoy a moment of life free of that burden. It came back eventually, but she interpreted the moment as a sign to herself of what it would be like to one day have all of our burdens lifted, so easily and completely after they have harassed us for years with their unbreakable yoke. She said is was a silly and humble moment for it to happen-- at a child's pizza party-- but from the way she talked about it I could tell that she regarded the moment as an instance of God's action in her life, and she held onto it as such.

I know at this point in my pregnancy that anything still could happen, and having the baby turn downward is no guarantee of anything. Pregnancy and childbirth are, in themselves, inherently fragile and crazy endeavors. But I do believe that God is acting among us, in us, behind us, and with us (something like what it says in the Shield of St. Patrick) and that this particular winter is pretty much over.

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away." Song of Solomon 2:11-13

alive to the mysterious nature of tummies

I haven't really blogged much through this pregnancy, and now, as I enter into the narrow tunnel of its finality, in which All Things Childbirth comes into sharp focus, high relief, and dramatic potency, it is difficult to tidy my thoughts.

Because I'm not just thinking of myself and the birth of this mysterious new baby who likes to push so strongly against the walls of her in utero apartment. I am waxing philosophical about humanity at large. And humanity in particular. Some friends of ours who are our age and have two daughters-- a girl close to Esme's age, and an infant under the age of one-- have been in the hospital for several weeks now with their youngest girl. I learned that something was going on when I caught a cursory glance of one of their newly uploaded photos on flickr and saw the unmistakable pink and blue stripes of a standard hospital baby blanket-- the kind you always see on photos of newborns before they go home. I thought irrationally: why are they just now uploading birth photos? Then I looked closer and saw tubes and wires hooked up to their baby girl, clearly lying on a hospital bed, and my heart leaped. Next I investigated facebook and learned the news that something mysterious was going on with her intestines that required emergency surgery. That was a few weeks ago. Since then they haven't been able to leave the hospital as doctors are still trying to figure out what exactly is wrong. As of yesterday J, the father, updated his status to say he was "still worried-- [my daughter's] tummy is still a mystery."

There are successful television dramas built around the tantalizing potential of a difficult diagnosis-- when the human body doesn't do what it's supposed to do and an entire staff of brilliant, over-achieving doctors must solve the puzzle. These cases get tidied up in one hour on TV. But how agonizing to be a parent, sitting by your child's side for weeks in the hospital, while her continued well-being may or may not skitter just beyond the fingertips of the best human effort, intelligence, care, and control. How frustrating and confounding when a seemingly automatic component of nature, whose functionality should not require even the slightest effort of conscious human will-- the bowels-- suddenly decides to malfunction in one small, new person, for no apparent reason. A tummy that doesn't work is indeed a mystery, when tummies almost always, in all cases, work just fine without our ever telling them to do so.

A few weeks ago I was trying to leave the house for a routine pre-natal appointment in the afternoon. I had been busy at home all day with Esme, doing housework, keeping her entertained and her two-year-old energy reigned in. In my bustle and distraction I had forgotten to eat properly, and then, on a whim, made myself a really strong cup of hot chocolate. A neighbor had agreed to watch Esme while I was at my appointment, so after the hot chocolate I started rushing to get her in her coat, shoes, gather her sippy cup and other items into a bag. Then I started feeling strange and my eyesight seemed spotted. But I didn't think anything was really wrong until I started to write a note for Jeff and the words came out scrambled and dyslexic. I couldn't believe the nonsensical words and random letters that were coming from the tip of my pen. I knew what message I wanted to communicate, but it would not transfer from my brain to the paper. I crumpled up four different notes before giving up and thinking: whatever is wrong, it is probably a good thing that I'm headed to see the doctor at this very moment.

My mind seemed to clear by the time they called me from the waiting room, but of course I wasted no time in describing to my doctor what was clearly an alarming incident. I was disappointed in his lackadaisical reaction. I wanted to shake him and say: Can't you understand??? My verbal ability just abandoned me!!! Ironically, it was this appointment at which I was to learn the result of my gestational diabetes test, which came back clear. I thought for sure I would be told that I had tested positive for gestational diabetes, with my blood sugar levels performing such crazy tricks. Instead I was told that everything looked fine. The doctor said I had probably had a hypoglycemic episode, and I just needed to be sure to eat protein snacks regularly and not let my blood sugar drop. It appears that an hour or two of total mental murkiness is, according to all standardized modern medical care, within the range of normal. Interesting.

Bizarre as this incident seemed to me, I decided to let it go. Then, a few weeks later, it happened again, this time a little more dramatically, on Forgiveness Sunday, which is the day before Lent in the Orthodox Church and thus the last chance to eat dairy. Ice cream being (need I even state this?) the pinnacle of all possible dairy foods, we went out with a group of friends for ice cream at Bonnie Doon, our local retro ice cream parlor. Pregnant women do not fast for Lent, but I was still happy to indulge in the spirit of the excursion. I won't go into the tedious details of what I'd had to eat that day, but it had been a strange eating day for various reasons that were somewhat out of my control, and I could tell that, once again, something was amiss, when I started seeing blackish spots in front of people's faces. I knew better than to order anything sweet so instead I opted for the cheesy, deep-fried genre of 1950s diner indulgence. After about a half-hour of sitting there, chatting with friends, I noticed that my words were not coming out correctly. In fact, I was speaking gibberish. Again, like before, I knew what I wanted to say, but the words were morphing and distorting themselves upon exiting. Alarmed, I managed to say to Jeff pointedly: I need to go home.

We did, and I was fine within a few hours, but still really alarmed and confused about what had happened. I later spoke with a diabetic friend who said that it was clearly a case of low blood sugar-- hypoglycemia. Another woman I told said that something similar happened to her after the birth of one of her children. She was speaking nonsense and the hospital staff thought she had had a stroke. It turned out to be a migraine headache that was putting pressure on the speech center or her brain. Well, I had had a headache too while this was happening, so perhaps somewhere between blood sugar and headache something somewhere was "putting pressure" on the speech center of my brain. I like that term: speech center. It is good to know that my brain has a speech center, and that most of the time it works just fine, but that it is not always guaranteed to do so, as I would have naively presumed. Twice now, in fact, it has roundly betrayed me, in a way that I was helpless to control. This experience-- though harmless in the long run-- has now become a part of my own history. It has left me with a distinct impression-- an impression of human beings, starting with myself, as strangely plastic, changeable, mysterious things.

If there is anything that pregnancy twice over has also taught me, it's this mystery. Obviously, it is very mysterious to have an autonomous being, separate and distinct from myself, grow from seemingly nothing and then poke its elbows at you from the inside. Of course. But there is also the mystery of an unwritten drama as I approach the birth of this baby. I guess I should mention that at my 35 week appointment I found out, as I had suspected, that this baby is breech. The vast majority of babies turn head down just before birth, but some do not, for various reasons. Esme never did, and my doctor didn't catch it until 39 weeks, which made it far too late to do anything about it, so they scheduled a c-section, and I was knocked off my feet by the disappointment of having a "normal" birth taken away from me.

I thought that perhaps if I wanted a VBAC badly enough in my second pregnancy (which I do), and also sought out better, more attentive pre-natal care (which I did), that I just might achieve it. Now it is not looking very sure. Now it is looking like I may very well be headed for another surgical birth and the long recovery that follows. If the baby cannot flip on its own, and/or will not be flipped by the doctor's hand, this is what will happen. I will not know what it is like to wait for the exciting surprise of spontaneous labor. I won't know what it's like to have a single contraction. I will not experience the gratification of pushing a baby out. I won't have a story about the full moon breaking my bag of waters, and so on and so forth.

Please don't tell me. I know too well: in the spectrum of human griefs, losses, and disappointments, this is really quite banal and insignificant, and reifying this into something next-door to tragedy is not entirely valid. In fact, it is arguable that my disappointment in not being able to have a natural birth is quite irrational, given how difficult and painful natural birth can be. I cannot think of very many solid arguments for why it should necessarily be important (although, in the circles I move in, it certainly seems to be, without question).

I think of friends who have trouble conceiving, and who pine and pine for pregnancy. I think of friends who have been pregnant, and miscarried. All is mystery, mystery, mystery. Nothing bears comparison or questioning. Some tummies digest food while others do not. Some tummies grow babies while others refuse. Some tummies specialize in breech babies. One tummy, if it is not irreverent to call it that, was the expansive dwelling place of God. Tummies are mysterious indeed.

At my last doctor's visit, after a quick ultrasound confirmed that the head was up, the doctor actually said, "Crap, there's the head." (This wasn't my regular doctor, by the way.) Then he proceeded to explain that sometimes the shape of a woman's pelvis can prevent the baby from getting comfortable with its head down, and showed me with his hands what a "normal white woman's" pelvis is shaped like, and other--narrower--possible shapes. My own pelvis is now a mystery to me. Perhaps it is not "normal." But I can't see it to confirm this, so perhaps it is. Perhaps I'll have another c-section. Perhaps things will still right themselves, and I'll have the birth of my heart's desire. Right now, I have to live within that ambiguity and accept it.

But is it not totally absurd that I could go away from that appointment envying the pelvises of other women (of all things), even while some women, unknown to me, might be envying my pregnant abdomen, even while these friends of mine in the hospital might be envying their own lives before they were suddenly turned upside down by the problem of a mysterious little tummy?

I have a mounted reproduction of the above icon on the wall in our bedroom. It is the Theotokos of the Sign. The night after finding out about the baby's breech position, I took it off the wall and put it near me, so I could face it and think about it. The baby had an unusually active night of churning, kicking, stretching, pushing. I was on high alert for whether or not turning might be included in all of this activity. I did not really think my baby would turn downward, but the very hope kept me wakeful. It would be natural. It would be supernatural. I wonder how often hopes of various kinds like this keep people awake at night, fully alert and alive within the reality of the ambiguity we all appear to inhabit.

sing-steering and chinese holidays

I am trying to break away from my tired blog themes and remember how to describe things more immediate. Today would be a good place to begin because it was a Saturday of heightened feeling and sensible detail due to a surprise influx of warm air-- air warm enough to thaw the very thick layer of snow that has been over our town for weeks. There is nothing like a day of fluke weather to make my senses pay better attention.

That things were going to thaw, that it was really true that a day of relief was upon us, could be sensed as soon as I got out of bed, and I opened all windows wide for the first time this winter. I even went into the stairwell of our apartment building and took the liberty of opening some windows there-- the stuffy stairwell where cooking smells from multiple families--vapors of onions, fish oil and pancakes--have no choice but to turn back on one another, clash and linger, until, I imagine, they are displaced by new odors, and fall to the floor in the form of dust, mingling with the mud and rock salt from snow boots on the black rubberized stairs.

Esme does not particularly like to bound up said stairs, and getting her up them, back into our third floor apartment takes some measure of effort on my part each and every time. In the past if she resisted, planting her feet, dawdling, or blatantly bolting the opposite way, I would not bother with verbal persuasion but would whisk her bodily (and slightly angrily) up, up, up. When my front door is close, I want to go through it and unload, not linger in a dirty, stuffy, cinder block stairwell, bantering words with a two year-old. But as I grow larger in this pregnancy I have found myself staggering under our combined weight by the time I reached the last few steps, so I've had to be more creative about getting her to use her own little feet. Holding her hand I coax her, stair by stair, by singing, "This is the way we climb the stairs, climb the stairs, climb the stairs," to the tune of "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush," and so forth, until we arrive at the top. I didn't know if it would work the first time I tried it, but it did. She shifted into a cooperative mode, looked down at her toddler snow boots and began moving them in sync with mine. So far, it has continued working, and is gradually becoming our stair-climbing ritual.

I suppose it's o.k. to digress and point out that Esme now seems to love singing songs, learning songs, repeating songs. I've sung to her since she was a baby but it's only been recently, since she turned two really, that she has wanted to participate. Whereas breast milk was my secret fix-all in her infancy and early toddlerhood, now songs have become my handiest tool. I sing-steer her to the car and into her car seat. I sing-steer her to the community center so we can get our mail. I sing-steer her away from her friend Lukas'house, where she's been playing and doesn't want to leave. On the way home I sing-steer away from puddles and patches of ice. I sing-steer her into her crib for naps and bedtime.

Thanks to a Mother Goose CD which has seventy-one tracks and which we never drive anywhere anymore without listening to (sigh), I now know all seven verses to "Mary Had a Little Lamb," a song I previously believed had only one verse, if I gave any thought to it at all. My repertoire is now brimming with all of these songs, plus all the songs my mom and dad sang to me as a child, and all the Julie Andrews movie standards. There are songs from camp fires sat at, folk music listened to, and hippy-kid guitar sing-alongs participated in. There is John Denver, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Simon and Garfunkel, to name a few kid-friendly, yet not annoying, possibilities I've pulled out the wazoo. Then we have this book called Rise Up Singing, which is an amazing collection of well-known folk songs. Sometimes instead of a storybook I sit and rock Esme with this book in hand, just paging through and singing every song I happen to recognize. Esme likes this book and likes to flip around in it, pointing to the illustrations, asking questions, and giving me orders. The pen and ink illustrations clustered haphazardly in the margins are wrought in an unmistakably 1970s aesthetic and remind me of the doodles that might decorate the notebook of a bored but artistically inclined high school student. They are of bearded men and flowing-haired women, flowers and babies. Esme points and says:"Sing that! What's that? Who's that?" Unlike me, Esme is good with names, and has a mind for who's who. But this book, filled with generic illustrations, makes it impossible to satisfy her identity queries. I usually just say: "That's a man," or "That's a woman; she doesn't have a name, these are just pictures of people, in general." This never stops her from asking on the next page. But there is one exception: an illustration of a woman next to the "Ballad of Barbara Allen" who is obviously meant to be Barbara Allen, and so, when we go to that song, I'm able to tell her who the woman is supposed to be. This is why, the other day, when I asked her who she was "talking to" on the phone, she told me it was Barbara Allen.

Now I've really digressed. But honestly, the only reason I wanted to write tonight was to write something-- anything-- slightly different from the tired themes I keep going back to. I wanted to be concrete and possibly write about the things my child does and says, like other mother-bloggers. I was going to describe today and I wound up talking about my daughter's propensity to remember names and sing songs. It's all related really, whether I am tying it together thematically or not.

I suppose I mentioned the sing-steering thing because I was going to point out that today was a day in which no sing-steering was really necessary, because the day didn't feel that difficult nor toddler boots so heavy. It was a Saturday, which happened to be a spring-like day, which happened to be a significant Chinese holiday. Being outside was not something to brace the body against. By late afternoon, the playground out back had shed its thick white uni-crust armor and was allowing visitors. Jeff and I took Esme out and watched her explore the familiar but long-estranged equipment from where we sat side-by-side on the bench swing--an activity which, in itself reminds me of our daily life here in the summer. The playground bench spoke of summer but the weather spoke, of course, of spring, and the feelings felt therein. Esme's hair got really curly and wispy all over her head from the breezy air and the overall dampness of the melting world. Her wild soft hair looked to me like an emblem of everything the day was turning out to be.

As it was getting dark we went to the community center where all the Chinese graduate student families had prepared a lantern celebration for Chinese New Year today. I filled my plate with home made Chinese dumplings and other dishes apparently too authentic to readily identify by name to fellow Americans. I found a spot near friends among the chaos of all the families and kids running around, Chinese character painting lessons going on in the next room, shouted warnings about not letting your kids choke on pennies hidden in dumplings. Older kids, kids of riddle-solving age, gathered around a wall where slips of papers containing riddles were taped up. Esme ran off to play and then returned to my side for bites of noodles from my fork--another sketchily procured dinner among the many of her short life so far. Finally all the kids went outside under the moon where sparklers were being duly distributed. Although little feet kept slipping here and there on still-intact patches of sidewalk ice, the air was still amazingly mild there under the moon. No one could stop remarking about the weather. We walked back toward our building with our friends the Thames and the Heymans. My friend Manuela and I held Esme's hand on either side, counted to three, and swung her over dark puddles.

i did what i could

This is the first winter I have spent in northern Indiana in which I have not yet experienced a seasonal shift in mood. I am pleasantly surprised with myself for making it into February without downshifting. Despite the inevitably cumbersome nature of being in my third trimester, I am moving through the days with some measure of buoyancy and an adequate ebb and flow of energy to accomplish routine tasks. Even at my best I am no Stable Mable or Fannie Farmer. I am no domestic goddess and tend to be disorganized and dreamy. But I have not been dreaming my way through this winter, or languishing on the couch.

The term "winter blues," sounds harmless and almost spunky, like a Joni Mitchell song or a Crayola crayon, but the reality of it, in my experience, is that it is serious, like the hand of a giant pinning me down for a stretch of several months, or a spreading bruised color that bleeds and blocks out the light from my mind's space. January, February, March: months in which my self has, in the past, gone to a place of particle stillness, inertia. My self-in-other-seasons almost can not recognize this winter self, and the sad thoughts it floats to the surface. That's how I feel when I read some of my blog posts from last winter.

A few months ago a speaker came to the community center here at the Notre Dame married student housing complex, a psychologist from the Notre Dame counseling center. Her talk was entitled, "Beating the Winter Blues." Again, it all sounds so harmless and upbeat; her power point presentation sported a stock image of a big yellow, smiling sun. I was glad I went though; I finally had some concrete, clinical, official-or-what-have-you information to explain my winter self to my self. I learned that Seasonal Affective Disorder has a high incidence in this area-- even higher than in Alaska. I was also comforted by the other women who showed up, all wives of students and mothers like me, and shared bits of what happens to them in the winter. It did me good to hear a few practical, industrious moms, with large families, extroverted personalities, can-do attitudes, and healthy bodies, saying that they lose all sense of motivation and succumb to the gloom of February in South Bend.

This winter a few dark clouds have passed over my head, lingering maybe, but not hovering. They move on and winter sunshine reappears, bouncing off the snow blanket two stories below our apartment, then coming in through our windows. It forms occasional afternoon glow-patches on the living room rug, where I endeavor to do my prenatal yoga.

That said, it has not been a mild winter so far. The temperatures and snowfall have constituted what is called, objectively, a "hard" winter. But this refers to logistics: the thorough bundling of self and toddler required before every front door exit; the vigilant re-application of balms and lotions to chapped hands and lips that immediately negate the moisture; long days spent entirely in three small, artificially heated rooms, otherwise known as cabin fever; the sense that one is torturing a machine by turning on a car; the physical separation from the people who live right next door, simply because no one is out and about, sitting on benches or utilizing swing sets. All of this is wearing, but of course, it's all doable too. People live here; people settled and founded towns and built livelihoods in these unfriendly climates long ago, and even climates more unfriendly, though I shudder to think of it. It's doable as long as one has an internal mechanism in place to produce the necessary energy for the endless succession of little, ordinary, immediate, everyday winter chores. And winter is, in all its moments, in my opinion, chore-like if you live in South Bend, Indiana, with its uniquely gloomy geographical vulnerability to "lake effect" everything. I have a major bone to pick with Lake Michigan, for being close enough to ruin the weather here but too far away to enjoy in any immediate, lake-side sense.

It appears that this winter I seem to have what it takes to function in a pioneering, livelihood mode, even though every day I wonder if this will be the day my internal combustion tank breaks down and abandons me. This unprecedented buoyancy might be due to pregnancy, in which, as it is well-known, all normal rules of body chemistry can and must be thrown overboard. My asthmatic sensitivity to cats, for example, has unexpectedly gone haywire during this pregnancy, and who could say why? In Andrew Solomon's book on depression, The Noonday Demon, a book I really enjoyed reading a few years ago, he tells an anecdote about a friend of his whose life-long battle with severe depression lifted during her pregnancy, only to return afterward. I am not talking about severe depression, thankfully, but I do hope that the lightness I feel this winter is not some temporary glitch due to the chemical irregularity of carrying around an internal baby factory.

Or it might be owing to the fact that I've been faithfully taking my daily spoon of cod liver oil and chewing my lemon-flavored vitamin D gummy each morning. Omega 3 supposedly does wonders, and I'm pretty sure that I wasn't getting enough of it in my diet previously. I've made other dietary changes. I've been eating grass-raised meat and more homemade chicken broth, pure farm butter, raw milk. My body seems to respond well to these things. I also now have something I didn't have last winter: an outlet to the outside world in the form of a part-time job three days a week. This makes an inestimable difference in my mood.

But bodies, and their chemistry, remain a mystery, and pregnant bodies even more so. I can only approach it by trial and error and hope that whatever I am doing right this winter, if I persist, will keep yielding the same results in the future. I can only hope that the proverbial rug does not shift beneath my feet, then order me to lie down underneath its heavy woolen weight.

I recall from last February a most unmotivated, diminished version of myself sitting in a shadowy living room during Esme's nap times, listening to some newly discovered music, an album by Sibylle Baier, whose melancholic words resonated strongly with me at the time: "Remember the day / When I left home just to buy some food / Myself in that painful February mood / I did what I could." Yes, I do remember that even just mustering the energy to bundle up and get myself and Esme to the grocery store being painfully burdensome, rather than just "a pain" in the ordinary sense of the expression, like it is this winter. I remember feeling, in a despairing way, that I could only do what I could do. That's still the case. We can always only do what we can, but this winter, I am grateful to find myself able to do a lot more.

expectant mother parking

All I can say about my mind lately is that it resembles my sock drawer, which is jammed full but yields precious few wearable pairs when I am in a pinch to get out the door. This is why I haven't written much for a while. The ideas I collect and toss into the drawer have certain potential, quality and color, but remain strays and refuse to self-organize into a thematic event. I suppose that writing, at its best, is a thematic event for me-- a special event. It's the culmination and choreography of thoughts that I toss into the drawers, boxes, and bins of my mind, according to category. If a category starts to overflow and beg for attention, I must throw myself upon it, which is to say, write about it until it is tidy and purged of disorder.

But lately this is not happening for me. There have been no event-worthy thought groupings, no overflowing bin. My relationship with thoughts and words has lately mirrored my ill-fated relationship with home economics and domesticity, which makes me feel as if I'm spinning my wheels or chasing my tail. My thoughts lately have been bound into the arena of our tiny apartment, where food goes bad and gets thrown out for lack of planning, and toys, books, and puzzle pieces find their way under furniture and remain there for lack of organization, or the simple willpower to pick them up and put them away for the thousandth time. I get so frustrated with myself, and this perpetual feeling of incompetence. Perhaps this is why I write: my words will stay put, and in an order which pleases me. And, for that matter, the process of ordering words gives me pleasure. Not so with housework. It takes me no small effort to torture my home into an order which pleases. Once achieved, I do enjoy the feeling of an ordered living space. But I lack the talent to forge a sustainable system, and so the satisfaction is always fleeting-- hardly worth the investment. This is where I find myself.

I snapped this picture recently as I was going for groceries on a snowy day. It is the line in a parking lot designating a place for "expectant mothers." The sign is equipped with an image of a stork carrying a baby, and is next door neighbor to the handicap spots. I used to feel ridiculous about actually utilizing such a luxury, especially when I tend to feel so well during the second half of pregnancy, and quite capable of walking the length of a parking lot. But this time around, my second pregnancy, I have no problem sailing into it with a sense of impunity. I am a mother and an expectant mother rolled into one, which sounds like a paradox, and probably is. I know what to expect-- oh how much more do I now know. But in some ways I still do not know what to expect. If I had to stick to one story I'd say that I still do not know what to expect while I'm expecting, except that, shortly after I brought home my complimentary copy of the book by that same title from the doctor's office, there appeared copious bright red crayon scribbles inside. I now know to expect that sort of thing.

I think I'm coming to terms with the struggle that ensues when I, combined with a small child and a small apartment, try to achieve a sense of domestic order. I eek out small victories, which yield modest satisfactions. Then all comes unraveled, and must be done again, world without end. I think there are women who achieve order in the world-their-home with ease and great satisfaction, because they possess talent. Where there is talent, there is energy--the work itself is energizing. I have to accept that I'm not such a woman, and that I will continue to struggle with this. I will struggle because I sincerely believe that domestic order is important for family life, and because I want my family to have some measure of that order. I cannot dismiss it as unimportant, just because I don't excel at it; I cannot utterly succumb to disoder. But I am also gaining insight into the fact that, as evidenced by the sweet symbol of the stork, the essence of motherhood is not domesticity. The essence is in many other, sweeter things. I wonder, for example, at the prospect of a new and different personality in our family, and how the delicate balance will be tipped and re-situated by this new life. I also like to imagine how, years from now, Esme and this girl, her sister, might have the kind of friendship and memories that I share with my sisters. There is this and so much more that transcends petty frustrations with the self as it is subjected to inadequacy.

I think that this is all I can write for now, even though it strikes me as a mismatching pair of socks. My mind is partially stuck at the moment in some kind of slushy, oily, rainbow-y parking space.

all creation rejoices

wings
Originally uploaded by ambery

I stayed up late on election night in the television's glow, like everyone else in America. Jeff controlled the remote and alternated between the major networks, avoiding commercials and trying to find the best commentary and least obnoxious presentation. We always favor PBS, with its spare branding and sane spokespeople over, say, Fox or even CNN, with their splashy and over-produced backdrops and cinematic soundtracks. For a time we even watched Comedy Central, where Steven Colbert and John Stewart were going at it together. But approaching midnight all of the major networks began to glow with essentially the same thing: an array of human faces, both in Chicago and in Times Square, tilted up and open, soaking in the vision of their new president like a field of wildflowers in a long-awaited rain shower. The camera, as it does at a major sporting event, would alight on one face, then another. But these faces were definitely expressing far more profundity of human feeling than any sports fan.

I'm really not good at writing about politics. I might even have no business writing about them, any more than I could be a sports commentator, because, by nature, I tend to be so a-political and clueless about what's going on. It's like baseball for me: I only watch the World Series. I didn't even really and truly pay much attention to the career happenings of either candidate until their campaigns culminated into the live and very hard-to-miss presidential debates. Only then, tuning in from the place of pajamas and ice cream, did I start feeling some election vibe and developing something like a stance.

My opinion was born too late and didn't have time to reach maturity. Like everyone else who adores him, for reasons that-- at least to me-- are exceedingly obvious, I too started to get excited about Obama. But then the night before the election day, however, I started getting last-minute voter panic over my own dearth of real knowledge. I had not really read much or followed much; I had been overly content to receive the generalities; I had not done my own research. I started finding things online, naturally, and stumbled on a transcript of Obama's speech to Planned Parenthood, where he talked about his daughters' freedom to pursue "their own version" of happiness. I am not ready to be a spokesperson within the deadlock of the abortion controversy, and am always so impressed by Orthodox writers like Frederica Matthewes-Green or Jim Forest, who do it so confidently, and well. But I will say that while I desire happiness for my own daughter, it isn't the happiness that Obama was preaching that day-- a happiness qualified by the unhinging of persons, one from another, so that one is free to fly away, like a kite with no string. I believe in a happiness bound, tangled, and burdened in the very strings and sinews of human parts. The brilliant, rousing oration on behalf of our nation's daughters, who are each to pursue their own version of happiness in Futureland, made my heart burrow down and hide itself from American dreams, whose intoxication, I remembered sadly, I can never truly, deeply share.

The next day the polls were open. I fiddled around the house in the morning in a state of procrastination and denial, doing chores, and feeling burdened and sad, wondering if I could bring myself to go to the voting booth only two blocks north of my apartment, as I'd been planning to do for weeks. In the end, I did go, after concluding that I would feel worse-- really lame-- for not voting at all.

But despite my sadness and self-distancing from my own ballot, I am still not impervious to what those people in Chicago were feeling last night, and are probably still feeling in the afterglow. I especially feel a strong poignancy and wonder for the deep-seated emotions that minorities and immigrants in this country must be feeling right now at the mere symbolic power of what has happened. Maybe it's because I only live two hours from Chicago, but when I walked out of our building the next morning, it seemed as if perhaps all of that big emotion emanating from the Windy City had rolled over our land overnight, transforming nature in its wake. The air crackled. The autumn season, which has been with us for weeks, growing tired, felt newly minted. Little brown papery leaves were twirling down and somersaulting across the pavement in swirly, anti-gravitational bunches around my car as I drove Esme to the friend who babysits her while I'm at work. When I arrived on the campus of Notre Dame, a campus known for its park-like landscape, these same trees throwing their confetti were also filled with singing birds. It was a cross between autumn loveliness and spring riot--the embodiment of "all creation rejoices."

Jeff and I are very lucky that I have a part-time job in the same place where he is a student, because sometimes we can meet for lunch, and it's like being on a miniature date without Esme, which otherwise is a rare thing. We sat on a bench outside where a bumble bee and airborne leaves wouldn't leave my food alone, and talked about the various reactions to the election which we were seeing and hearing in the people around us, and online, of course, on facebook. Just walking from one side of campus to the next allowed us to overhear cell phone conversations such as, "I can only hope that the next four years are just so horrible that a Republican will get elected back in," to, well, you know, the exact opposite. I saw one young black student bounding up the stairs to the student center holler to a friend biking by: "I know, man, right?"

One professor, an Obama supporter, had to dismiss a herd of undergraduates and cancel a Wednesday morning class shortly after it began because she was still crying from joy and couldn't go on with her lecture. Meanwhile, we had also heard news of some of the reactions from the Bible Belt, where Jeff's home town is squarely located, and where a certain church pastor there was praying a certain Psalm verse "over" Obama. Jeff was curious, and looked up the verse. He found the disturbing words: "May his days be numbered."

I am a little worried about America right now, and all of these extreme emotions. I am cautious, and yet if I am being truly honest with myself, I have to admit that I too find the election of Obama exciting, and am waiting with everyone else for some of this election dust to settle (if it ever does) so that we can see how exactly the next four years are going to look. And while I do hope to see a lot of the changes he has promised, like paid maternity leave and more sick days for parents, and equal pay for women doing jobs identical to men (e.g., the Lilly Ledbetter Act), I know that, as everyone is so quick to point out, not all of this is going to happen promise per promise. I understand from number crunchers that the proposed healthcare reforms of Obama, and McCain, for that matter, are not even remotely possible or realistic.

More than anything, I think it comes down to this beautiful weather where I live, in Indiana, a swing state, and what one chooses to read in it. I do not really think that creation is rejoicing in the election of Barack Obama. Instead, I think this:

All creation rejoices in you, O Theotokos, for through your miraculous childbearing, all creation has been set free. Surely the angels marveled at the love and compassion of God when He lowered himself to be born as a man in a virgin's womb. The angelic host rejoices, seeing the fullness and the depths of God's love, and all humanity rejoices with them, for the human nature is set free of bondage. All of creation rejoices, as Apostle Paul says, "for creation is set free of its bondage into the glorious freedom of God's children."

By the way, special-special thanks go to Amber for leaving open and overly generous permission to blog her amazing flickr photos.