Category: Pregnancy
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Then he picked up his rain coat, turned around, and went to hell
Wasp-waisted island off the coast of Maine. The point in the afternoon where the heat has gathered itself up in folds. Independence Day, which feels, this year, like a sour joke. I’ve stolen away to the third floor of the old, expansive house where we are staying. To write, I have a blunt pencil and…
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Just a chapter and not the story itself
A second birthday, a third maternity leave. A second August and most of September in our new old house. Great rains sometimes fall / evening cicadas sing /dew glistens white on grass / swallows leave. This is the week that thunder ceases (more is expected this weekend). Like that, the baby is two months old. Like…
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Matters of the Heart
One of the great, enjoyable mysteries of any pregnancy is what the baby will look like. How strange, then, to know my daughter’s interior so intimately months before I saw her face. Read more
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A million words for bath-pruned skin
Pregnancy, to me, is like holding my breath: the longer it progresses, the harder it is to concentrate on anything besides its eventual end. My son has cropped up at the edge of the bed, one hand curled around the ancient Motorola cell-phone, long dead, that he carries with him everywhere. He is slurping on…
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I wait for the click
By the time I publish this post, New York will probably be out of this heat wave, but right now we are in it. The air above the sidewalks shimmers, and the sidewalks have quasi-emptied out. The oldtimers who peddle the wares they find from newercomers’ discard piles have retreated into their favorite bodega; the…
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To Leave the Phenomenal and Enter the Sublime (or, notes on pregnancy cravings and The Secret History)
It is a measure of how swiftly I now fall asleep that I am only eighty percent through The Secret History, which I bought over a week ago and have reading in fevered subway and elevator snatches and those drowsy bedtime minutes ever since. I bought it after reading Esquire’s marvelous, scintillating oral history of…
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Just Don’t Call It a Waddle
Today I came across a list of ways of walking. It’s a vocabulary list, on an Argentinian ESL language site, and its breadth and the generousness of some of its inclusions made me smile. “Mooch,” for example, breaks free the shackles of glommingdom: to mooch is to wander, walk slowly without any purpose. Why, the…
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Are You Supposed to Be to Eating That? An Analysis of Pregnancy Food Guidelines around the World
It started with raw fish. I was ten weeks pregnant and riddled with low-lying nausea that reared up at the very thought of vegetables — any vegetable, though the leafy green ones were especially noxious. After a lifetime of balanced eating, it was hard, mentally, to recast mac&cheese and buttered pasta as daily staples. No,…
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