Assorted updates from the gestational front

In no particular order.

I cut coffee completely out of my diet, and I have more energy now than when I drank it. I’m sure I’ll go crawling back to it when this phase is done, because coffee is not ultimately about energy at all. I think you know this too.

I didn’t believe I was pregnant at first because I didn’t feel any different.

Rationally, it makes sense—you don’t feel yourself incrementally aging, and your body can be sick, silently, before the onset of symptoms. A strangely erroneous belief of mine: that I could sense what was happening inside, or that my body wouldn’t undertake such a task without signal. As signs appeared, I rationalized them, thinking the parts did not equal a whole of such significance. I believed it thirteen weeks in, when I saw our baby move on the ultrasound screen.

I should say “she”; this baby is a girl.

A related fact which obsesses me these days: by now, she has developed ovaries complete with every last little egg she’ll ever have. My daughter’s genetic contributions to her children are fixed, then, which means that anything I’ve passed along to her I’ve had with me since before I was born. It makes me feel connected with my grandparents and grandchildren, but also distant from my daughter in some ways.  At birth, she’s not a product of the things I love about her father and about myself because the most loved things are made rather than given.  If she’s to grow up sharp and heartful and resilient, it has still to begin.

Quilting is incomprehensibly difficult. Nobody warned me and now I’m resentful.

We’re due in April, eleven years to the day after Bill and I started dating. Birth scared me at first, but not anymore.

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