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.
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