Name him? No problem.

It ranks among the top ten weirdest physical sensations in my life, this thing that's happening right now. I'm watching what I hope is a knee roll back and forth across the globe of belly jutting forth beneath my rib cage. Tomorrow, this still unnamed human man child will be in the 35th week of his tenancy in my uterus. What must have looked like a spacious studio loft when he signed the lease is now more like one of those demo cubicles in IKEA that attempt to prove a point about how tolerant people can be about living in 200 square feet given the proper drawer configurations in bright, optimistic orange.

At a little over eight and a half months pregnant (I just did the math recently and realized I signed up for 10 lunar months, and that the ninth month is actually a full-on additional month. I am such a chump), I'm still in a pretty good mood. Height and a long torso are finally paying off after excluding me from junior high couples dancing and properly fitting one-piece bathing suits. Constantly I am told how small I am for my timeline, which flies in the face of everything I've ever been told about my appearance. "Tiny" is not a word I hear a lot, especially when my go-to power move for uncomfortable social situations is to wear heels that increase my 5'10" height to a whopping 6'2".

Still, I miss long stretches of sleep. I miss moving freely about the planet without a constant scan for the next available bathroom. I've seen so many bathrooms recently that I truly wish they came equipped with something more stimulating to look at on the stall walls. One of the best things about living near a train yard in Kingsville was the quality of the graffiti, and I wish our local Target-- a place I've visited with depressing frequency as I try to throw together a nursery-- would break down a provide markers and stencil material in the stalls for our apparently ill-equipped youth.

Pants is gone again. Again, again. He's in phone contact now, which makes things easier, but also means that the things I couldn't lift or that need his signature to get done or that otherwise require his physical presence are fresh in my mind when he calls. We're trying by phone and email to name the baby. I'll get sporadic texts with just a name and a question mark, or replies to my own with either a simple "nah" or an elaborate disqualification scenario. A recent example:

Me: Miles!

Pants (creepily echoing my brother, who said this to my face only a month prior): he'd be the kid with all the allergies, a perpetual stuffed up nose

Me: But... Milo for short?

Pants: Meh. Three different inhalers.

He liked the name Ethan until I reminded him that on Lost, Ethan's the creep who shows up in the dark with a hypodermic needle, dead-eyed and rain-slicked, and jabs the one pregnant woman in the lot before he later chokes Charlie nearly to death and hangs him in a tree. Totally out.

We compiled and then burned through a list of traditional names, mostly wielding the axe of "I knew a guy named [X] and he:

was such a douche

dumped me in junior high/high school/college/after two utterly mediocre dates

cheated in college economics

shoved me down a hill in kindergarten

played football

once shoved an entire Cheeto up his nose on a dare and then got a horrific nosebleed

hit my car

had the most terrible farts and never rolled down the window

was dumber than a bag of hammers

invented the atom bomb/ social conservatism/ eugenics

We're working our way now through a list of decidedly weirder names, and the formula is more complicated. It involves hypothetically taunting our unborn son with potential nicknames, imagining his resume sitting among others on some suited man's desk while the man mutters his name thoughtfully over and over, weighing our son's future in the roll and taste of a few syllables, and, for me at least, the exact vocal pitch of my relatives as they read the birth announcement aloud in their homes, no doubt liberally employing italics.

In quiet moments I look down at the rumbling bulge of this unseen boy, his passing joints and growing muscles, and I ask him, "Who are you? What's your name?" His movements feel like messages sometimes, heavy with meaning I can't untangle, but which is probably variations on the theme of "Let me out." Despite a growing feeling of stabbiness at the tidal wave of unsolicited parenting advice directed at me in the past few months, I continue to read "studies" that "suggest." Mental list of to-do's augmented by today's social science reading: discuss race early and explicitly, praise effort over intelligence and try never to praise insincerely lest the kid think I'm full of shit, insist as much as possible on a full night's sleep for my teenager to guard against clinical depression, hostility, and loss of motivation (i.e., to guard against my teenager becoming exactly the kind of teenager I was). This along with: hang curtains, hang pictures, trim chokeable tags off toys, and keep writing even through this growing thicket of mind-numbing mothering anxiety.

Speaking of things that needed to get the F out of me and on to their next destination in life, my book, as full-term as I could get it, is out in the world right now on two different hard drives. In theory, it's getting read and critiques, advice, and direction for finding an agent are on the way. Somehow I'm avoiding the compulsive email check and hand-wringing, and I can only conclude that hauling around a squirming medicine ball in my gut and fretting over what to name it, and thereby how to save it from Cheeto-snorting douchiness, is effectively occupying all current neural circuits.

Emergency Egress

Considering what I'm doing right now, I probably deserve to be trapped where I am.

I'm writing in public, at a Starbucks, no less, on my little MacBook, the very picture of pretentious writerly-ness, and I am tactically surrounded by some kind of extended family. There are at least four toddlers in the mix and two infants, and the family has commandeered the three tables immediately around me and all available chairs. Various diaper bags and standing men block my egress, and the apparent paterfamilias, Grampy, is now wielding a camera and whistling and shouting at his grandchildren to get them to look at him. It is clear that he is over the moon to have such a large family, and he keeps saying, "They haven't seen ALL MY KIDS!" as he snaps away. Grandma repeats the suggestion to heard all the adult couples-- I can't even tell how many there are-- into standing together, so the mysterious They can discern who is married to whom. A fight breaks out between two of the toddlers over a plastic horse and the chorus of adult voices rises to meet it with various well-researched but conflicting strategies. The conversation proper, fragmented, cyclical and shouted, attempts to elevate itself another acoustic level to compensate.

This is my future.

My little man, 30 weeks along, sits stubbornly in breech position, his head pressing into my ribs, still for now. He still has no name, though I've seen a creepy sepia rendering of one side of his face in the curiously named 4D ultrasound and decided that, in utero, he is already a heartbreaker.

I was going to elaborate further on some line of thought, but now one of the dads is carrying on at high volume about the schedule of juices his children will drink and at what times. I wonder if this is what's in store for my attempts at writing-- I'll start a sentence that may or may not be brilliant, may or may not point promisingly, like a shaded path to somewhere deeper and unexplored, and then instead I will have to observe and weigh in on my child's capricious beverage preferences and lecture at length on his nap schedule.

The family is eyeing me, as I'm clearly taking up a table that could be better used for diaper bag storage and to allow the one remaining adult to have a seated shouting venue. Imminent domain. Now they're shouting about the church service they've just attended and the fit one child threw which had no solution, and no end game, evidently, and a sense of panic is climbing my chest like a small, frantic monkey.

I'm pulling the eject handle.