To my husband on the anniversary of our wedding and five days after.
Today is slurpy outside.
Jon drove us up to campus this morning so we could put in our grades. In minutes the rain pelting our windshield slushed into snow, then balled into hail. The mountains are capped with dusky grey clouds - misted like some Neverland island. It seems like the chilly first day of spring; it's the first time I've seen how green those mountains have grown.
This semester was a volley of mismatched ambitions. For the first time my three loves: family, literature, and writing have grown so large that they are bumping elbows and squealing for more room. I'm finishing my thesis daily as well as trying to use up some of my awkwardly new free time to write. In the mean time I have a baby boy literally elbowing my insides. I never knew a mother could take for granted those pesky flicks of knees, fists, feet and elbows. Some hours I find myself rubbing my belly to calm the movements and realize I have no idea how long they've been going on.
The first time my baby kicked I was standing in the doorway to the bathroom of our old apartment. I must have been dropping hairpins into the crystal bowl I kept on the bathroom table; perhaps I was blowing my nose or taking an all-too-frequent urination break. I felt a small peck, a flutter from the inside pushing out. I froze, thinking I knew what it was, but not sure. I waited for probably a full minute or two, anticipating a repeat. I got nothing and went back to forgetting that I was even pregnant at all. I'm amazed at how easy it was in that first trimester to forget that some small life was bouncing around in its uterine fishbowl inside of me. Now his miniature reflexes thump almost constantly and I wonder if he ever sleeps.
I realize that I never wrote about that first trimester. It might have been amusing to chronicle the bizarre lists of cravings I had, the hours of uninterrupted drowsiness, the strange bursts of giddy energy. I drew back to foods I ate only as a child: macaroni and hot dogs, barbecue potato chips, tuna and gray squares, Fruity Dino Bites, and twice-baked potatoes steaming with roasted butter and heaped with sour cream and fake bacon bits. I sickened myself, but I ate all of these things and would have to confess that no meal - not even a seasonal squash and lobster bisque - has ever tasted better than prepackaged, processed, artificially-flavored pregnant lady cravings.
The most bizarre craving I never had the guts to fulfill. For the first time in perhaps a decade, I wanted something so very unholy.
I wanted a Happy Meal.
I didn't want a cajun-spiced black bean veggie burger, a grass-fed beef steak, or an organic turkey patty with bleu cheese and caramelized onions. I wanted a thin, slippery card of beef slid between mashed sesame-seed buns, sprinkled with tiny chips of processed onion, and slobbered with ketchup.
With a side of fries.
And a 3-inch-tall Barbie in a plastic bag.
But I fought off that craving and am now simply hungry at all hours. I have eaten up boxes of strawberries with reckless abandon, downed six eggs in a single day, and can no longer live on a single burrito for lunch. I'm not gaining any more weight than I'm supposed to; I just never realized what fatsos pregnant ladies really are. I'm only in my second trimester. I don't long for the third. A professor of mine last week affectionately referred to his 3rd-trimester wife as being in "that angry waddling penguin phase" - squawking and honking at any discomfort while the little chicks bustle and flap all around her. No, I don't long for that.
But I am glad to be done with that stage of pregnancy when getting up before 10:00am was impossible. For nearly two months in the winter I'd loll on our couchbed for hours after Jon left for school. I'd awaken to a little puddle of tepid oatmeal sitting in a bowl at my elbow. He made me breakfast every morning, whether I was conscious or not. I'd sit halfway up, my temples drunk with drowsiness and my belly rising with morning sickness, and spoon it (pathetically) teaspoon by teaspoon into my dry morning mouth. Several days I barely made it to class - as my mid-semester evaluation shows ("sometimes she was a bit late" or "we didn't always start on time"). But every morning I had breakfast ready, no matter how sick with growing baby I was.
Today I woke up in the dark again. It's been sunny for months now, but the overcast sky is limping the hours deceptively along. It is half past noon and I feel like morning is just beginning to settle. It's a Seattle spring day here in Provo and I find I don't want to turn to my books. It almost tastes like fall. I remember sitting in a rain-drenched car in the cemetery parking lot while yellow leaves drop carelessly, covering the names on molding gravestones. Two falls ago I was there, piping hot air over my feet and thinking hard about why life wasn't turning itself toward the sun. It's strange now that I have been married for a year and five days to that very person who I sat thinking about in the car in the cemetery parking lot. It's strange that I never thought I would, or that daily life would be so very hilarious and gay when I did, or that new life would burst in on us with rain, words, and kicks.
Happy Anniversary.
