Abby

I don't feel like writing today. I feel hot and sore and uncomfortable and far from rested. I should go find that web site with lullaby lyrics and sing to Abby -- that always makes me feel better.

I can't believe (still/yet) in some ways that I am going to be somebody's mommy. She knows my voice already, and she'll depend on me more thoroughly than anyone else in the world. Our relationship, as she grows, will be the most complex, and probably the most impactful, of any relationship in her life, at least until she has her own babies (girls and their mothers, you know). Because she's inside me right now, always with me, it really feels sort of like we're embarking on an adventure together, and I'm not sure I have that much greater an understanding of what we're getting ourselves into than she does. As annoyed as I get when people (who shall remain nameless) insist on pointing out to me that my current 2 kids are periodic visitors in our lives, while Abby Jane will be a permanent resident (do they think I don't realize this? that the fact has escaped me?), there is an element of denial -- no, not really denial, but a recognition that living with my husband and my baby under one roof all of the time, having to be the one to schlep her off to day care or wherever, etc., are experiences that I am not fully prepared for. To this, I say, "Duh!" Who is prepared for such a thing? I have never claimed to be anything other than a new mommy, with a little more experience than I would otherwise have had -- experience with toddlers through kindergarten, which is to say experience of a mutual mad love affair with our two kids and also with their driving me absolutely nuts until I want to hide from them (preferably in bed, under the covers, in the dark).

But now there's this little girl, Abby, a whole new kettle of fish. A whole new genetic soup, unique on the planet. A mix of me (God bless her) and D, with no interaction with D's ex, or the kids' loony nanny. She'll even have relatively little interaction with her half-siblings, compared to the amount of time S and R spend with each other. Abby will be a brand new experiment, both in nature and in nurture. Like my doc said, the hormones are working nicely; I am dead in love with her already. Forget teaching her how to read or tie a shoelace or eat solid food -- I want to sing her across Scotland; I want to take her up in the Space Shuttle; I want to show hold her up to the most beautiful mountaintop view I've ever seen, like baby Simba in The Lion King, Elton John crowing in the background; I want to introduce her to God (but she probably knows Him a lot better than I do). I want to give her a life so loving, warm, soft and safe that she comes to believe the universe thrums with love and goodwill. She already has the best Daddy she could hope for -- I have to believe that good intentions, desperate desire, a tiny bit of experience, and boundless, joyful love can conspire to give her the best mommy I'm capable of being, too.

I feel the anticipation so strongly now -- 11 weeks to go -- it's almost time to meet her! I love her so much that I wonder how, as a new parent, one makes that transition from thinking of her as the most miraculous creature ever devised to recognizing her as just another human being, albeit one beloved to the point of heartache. Maybe you don't really transition -- maybe you just begin to allow for the reality of her, so that you can adore her and also let her drive you nuts sometimes. After all, a surreal, perfect little miracle-creature can't really learn how to talk back to her parents, suffer heartbreak, or play in the mud, can she? As much as I want her life to be perfect, smooth and holy, I want even more for her to be a real, live human being, and I'm pretty sure that's exactly what she will be, no matter whether I will it.

The Good Mother Side

And now I'd like to take a moment and say, "What the f---?!" I know that after the baby comes, D and I are supposed to suffer sleep deprivation severe enough to make us forget each other's names, not to mention why we live together, but before?? I would like to know what kind of a vindictive God would give us the propensity, say, to be stomach or back sleepers, such that nothing else feels right, only to grow our babies on the front of our stomachs and put very important, apparently nonsquishable, major blood vessels down our backs? And if it's not God's fault, then it's definitely the fault of those sadistic, officious authors of pregnancy books, all of whom insist that you sleep on your left side, the "good mother side," the only position that allows all your internal organs to fit comfortably, all your vital fluids to flow smoothly, and your growing baby, apparently, to grow. Do I sound touchy? I'm sorry. After a week or so of having reached the breaking point with my 4-foot-long "boyfriend pillow," when no sleep behavior works for both me and the baby, when even my husband's restless leg syndrome, snoring and cover-hoggery seem like small potatoes compared to the relentless, achy, throbbing pain of trying to lie on my sides (I'm a right-side mother, too, so *&%$! sue me), I am touchy. I suppose the whole situation is worsened by the fact that I've just had NECK SURGERY and my NECK doesn't want to be contorted by all these pillows -- expensive, down-filled pillows which I now loathe and imagine roasting in a giant ducky bonfire -- but I've seen enough women bitching about this problem in enough pregnancy memoirs to know that surgery is not necessary to make sleep in the almost-third trimester a total, miserable, weep-inducing disaster.

When did this national obsession with left-side sleeping hit? I can't imagine that some time between polishing off each Friday night's $.25 pitchers of beer at the officers' club and finishing her pack of Marlboro Lights, my mom settled me and herself carefully down for a comfortable sleep on her left side. Of course, maybe it was the obstructed blood flow in Mom's inferior vena cava that turned me into such a nutcase, who needed neck surgery at age 38 and now can't walk, but DAMN, I want to lie on my back! Forget that, actually -- that's pie in the sky. I just want to sleep for an hour at a time, for 60 whole minutes before I wake up, spasming in pain, and have to wrestle my pillows around so that I can sleep on the other side of my body for another five seconds before I need to move again.

It's not only my neck, and it's not only the solid-rock, total-rib-cage, 24/7 muscle spasm I've endured for the past four months, either (which feels a bit like a corset made out of cast iron and charged with electrical current). The new, fun thing is pregnancy heartburn. If I so much as take a sip of water to moisten my throat, which is undoubtedly dry from all the mouth-breathing I do thanks to pregnancy nasal congestion, and then lie down -- on any side at all -- I will instantly suffer searing, eye-opening heartburn pain that hurts all the way into my ears and gives me a headache. I take my Tums, and also my one remaining prescription medication for the various gastric ailments that have hospitalized me twice with ulcers -- most of those meds are no-nos in pregnancy-- but it still hurts enough to wake me up. So I try not to ingest anything within 3 hours of lying down. Of course, the Pregnancy Books say I should lie down once every few hours to relieve the obscene and disturbing pregnancy edema I have in my ankles, which were never svelte to begin with, and it also says that I should eat six small meals a day (which just about works, since I can only eat about half a chicken breast before I get full) and drink water all day long, so . . . . f**** it. Shoot me now. If I hadn't had a little Jewish leprechaun of a very skilled doctor once tell me that I'd probably die young of esophageal cancer if I couldn't get my gastric distress under control, maybe I'd be able to sleep through the heartburn.

Meanwhile, D's suggestion is that we try having him sleep in another room. We have a queen-sized bed, and it is tight quarters, what with me, him, Abby and the boyfriend, but I will miss him if he's not there. So then I might just be lying there miserable and frustrated and awake, but not even comforted by D's snorty, kicking, quilt-stealing maleness. Still, the only time I can sleep for an uninterrupted hour seems to be after he's got up and gone to work, when I find myself still on my side, but in sort of a more free-flowy kind of side-sleeping, limbs akimbo. I think it still has more to do with the fact that by the time 6:30 arrives I am so completely exhausted that I could sleep through one o' them single-fiber EMGs, but he may have a point. We may have to try separate beds. Another option might be for me to move to the couch, where as I've reported before I have been able on multiple occasions to nap for two hours straight. Lately, the heartburn is a problem there, too, but maybe that can be overcome in some way.

If you mommies out there have any ideas that might keep me from blowing my brains out, please let me know. The first one of you to think, much less say, anything along the lines of, "Just wait until the baby comes, if you don't think you can get any sleep now!' is in BIG TROUBLE.

Byline: C___burg, MD

Most mornings, I write in a journal. I put a heading on each entry which has, since college, included the date, sometimes the time of day, and always the "byline" - which city I'm writing from. What a weird thing, to think as I did this morning that the "C___burg, MD" in the upper-right corner may not change, now, for decades. I mean, sometimes it'll probably say "Bethany Beach." It will most likely say "Washington, DC" sometimes if I write at the office, or maybe "Ligonier," when I visit my brother. Once or twice it might say things like "Charleston," "Asheville," "Santa Fe," "Napa Valley," "New York," "Edinburgh," "Kyoto," or, God willing, "Maui," if we go on good vacations. But it's never again likely to say "Arlington," or "Rockville," or "Bowie," all places I've lived here in the Metro area, because we've found our House. Our Father of the Bride Part II House, about which we intend to become the Schmaltz Family (sorry if you don't get the reference). And that byline is definitely not going to say something like "Denver" or "Pittsburgh" or "Anchorage" because we've moved there. We've all made this agreement -- D and his ex-wife directly, I and the stepdad indirectly -- that we'll stay right here, within 50 miles of the White House (as if that were a healthy place to raise a kid), our little S and R blithely forming the growing center of our universe.

My own wanderlust had shifted significantly before I even met D, or I wouldn't have been able to agree to such a deal. Oh, I say that with such certainty. What do I know? I fell madly in love, with D and also with his kids S and R, and I have no idea that anything would have stopped me from signing on. Let's just say that I feel perfectly good and right about putting down roots for once, even if sometimes I think about 14 years from now, when R heads off to Bucknell or Wake Forest or Yale, as a big, gilded doorway opening wide on the chance to move somewhere else. Sometimes I think about it that way, I said. Not always. Don't panic.

I've always had this wanderlust, since my folks broke up when I was 13. It probably originated in just wanting to get the heck away from them, and the homey but limited place where I grew up, but it evolved I think from some sort of greediness, an enthusiastic snatching at experiences. One of my favorite endeavors has always been spending time in a new place. Even if all it amounted to was hanging out at an almost-deserted Golden Gate Park, or wandering around wharfs and churches in Edinburgh or lighthouses and pottery shops in Maine, I loved travelling, almost always on my own, and I loved talking to friendly strangers, eating different food and noting the different books on the front tables of the bookstores there. I loved the way the trees differed. Have you ever smelled a butterscotch pine in the Rockies? Or seen a prehistoric forest untouched by the scratching of mammals? Sometimes I tried extreme experiences, like paragliding or heli-hiking on a glacier (I don't like standing on glaciers, I discovered), but usually I just browsed in shops, or sat out in a public place with my journal and people-watched.

Travel is different when you go with someone else. Like my husband does now, my girlfriend Sara likes to fall asleep to the TV, and when we were in Sedona together, that was a new experience for me, just like having our "cards" read on some supernatural hot spot and being informed that we are both Queens of Hearts. My friend Carrie in New Zealand was like me in that she'd rather hang out with the locals -- the bus driver, the tourist boat captain -- than with other American tourists; I thought I was like her in that I could actually emigrate Down Under, but I was wrong on that count.

There's always some part of me that wants to stay a fish out of water; I would never be a good expatriate. Whereas Carrie started talking like a Kiwi and took up rugby along with a small cottage on the rugged coastline, even had I moved there I would have remained an outside observer, probably always writing about it in my journal and probably ordering Old Bay and the NHL package over the internet. Even when I've lived someplace for years, like Philly or Ann Arbor, or Charlotte, and even when I've got my favorite haunts and people and seasons -- in the south, my accent even changed -- I never became what you might call an honorary native. DC most certainly would have remained that way for me, since the vast majority of people who live there are also outside observers. As for C___burg, MD, my current byline? Our home with loyalties divided between Baltimore and DC? Well, travelling became something altogether different when I met D. For one thing, there's less of it: I'm a mom now, and also D has a grasp of this thing called 'cash flow' that I never really troubled with before. More of it has been to our beautiful family beach house and amusement parks, and there have been fewer March trips to my usual cold-and-grey spots like London, Scotland, and Massachusetts (sorry, Bit).

But most striking is the different experience of travelling with a man you really, truly love and trust. I have to make that distinction, because I have travelled with another man. Vince, a guy I dated in law school, and I went to Italy together to celebrate passing the bar exam. We fought and argued our way through Rome, Florence and Venice, though we look happy in the photos, mostly struggling over who was the leader of the expedition. As the man, he naturally (I suppose) thought he was; however, I didn't trust him to find our way out of a chocolate cannoli, especially given his complete lack of Italian language (I knew a very little) and his general lack of facility interpreting the nonverbal cues that are so important when the bus driver doesn't speak English. Besides, it was Italy. The locals --the men, anyway -- were much more helpful to me when he wasn't around.

D and I, meanwhile, have made countless short trips and two long ones, to Ireland (where I thought I was going to get engaged) and to Hawai'i (on our honeymoon). Those trips have been hugely different than what they would have been had I been alone (and not for the obvious, bedroom-y reasons). I felt safer, more complete, and happier (I often used to get melancholy on trips, but then I used to get melancholy in the grocery store and at the hair salon, too). There was a richness to the experience that came from layering the blooming intimacy with D over the exploration of a new place. Dare I say it, there was even something peaceful and right about relaxing and allowing him to take charge most of the time. The trips were wonderful, both times. And D really is a great travelling companion. He makes me laugh, he searches high and low for anything I need or want, he is responsible and resourceful and adventurous and an excellent driver on the wrong side of the road. For all these reasons and more, I can't wait to try out a few more bylines with him, like Paris and Barcelona and even Deep Creek Lake.

In the meantime, I am looking forward to finding a permanent church home here in C___burg, becoming active in the schools and learning all the best hiking trails, cheeseburger places, and needlework shops within a 2-hour drive. I am excited to form bonds with our neighbors and understand local politics and find farmer's markets -- or maybe even a co-op! I've considered trying to start a book club (maybe next year) and I will definitely be looking for a mommies' group. The idea of setting down roots feels really good. It's my first try at growing them, though -- so send your prayers and any good cultivation tips you might have.