The Dreaming Body, The Sick Body, The Mother Becoming

Wednesday was Baby’s first Disneyworld trip, as part of mommy’s work trip. It was great. I walked a lot, ate good food, and rode all the classic, tame rides (no Spacemountain for me :( but yes to Pirates of the Carribean!).

Thursday was Baby’s first ER trip, since mommy doesn’t yet fully grasp the limits of her new body, apparently walked way too far, gave herself a migraine, and then had pregnancy nausea on top of the migraine and couldn’t stop barfing for four hours and had to get an IV drip. Then she stayed an extra night in Orlando, and her sister sent her three grocery bags of Jello, which she would get up every few hours to eat until she could get on a plane again.

I find myself seesawing along parallel tracks right now.

Track 1. I’m charmed by calling myself Mommy. I loved covertly watching the preteen girl with her parents at the airport after their Disneyworld trip and imagining myself with a kid like that someday. Sometimes, especially when I see Asian babies, I like imagining what my baby will look like.

Track 2. Also, when I did the IV drip, they gave me an anti-nausea medicine called Reglan. The doctor warned me it might make me anxious. But then I got what he actually meant when the medicine hit my veins and I started uncontrollably shaking and tossing and turning and feeling like I couldn’t settle no matter what I tried, like the bed was made of barbed concrete. I was out of my mind in a way I rarely experience, except when I’ve fainted. Terrifying.

Quite honestly, track 2 is way more omnipresent for me right now. People joke about a baby being a parasite, but really, that’s largely my experience so far: a thing in me that mostly makes me really sick. It is incredibly counterintuitive to cultivate affection towards a thing that makes me this sick with very little benefit.

Track 1 only exists in my imagination, in my fantasy. It’s a whole lot of what if and it could be. And not much now. I think there’s a reason track 2 feels more real daily, and not just because it’s somatically overwhelming. Paying attention to track 2 is a practice I’ve very adamantly cultivated: no what ifs, no magic somedays, just a relentless, precise attention to now and the truth of now.

There’s really something to this practice: it can let you savor the process and not just the finish line; it keeps you attuned to other people; it helps you make excellent plans.

But I think I may have come up against its weaknesses. When the current present is brutal and dreary, wishful thinking, dreamy thinking is incredibly powerful.

I’m reading Ask Polly this week on dreaming.

“Listen up, you stubborn, impossible animals:

A dream isn’t an outcome or a finish line. A real dream is something you do with your body, mind, and spirit. A true dream relies on existing in a romantic state where your dream is yours, it belongs to you, it lives and breathes through you, it flows through your cells, it wakes you up at night, it enhances colors and smells and sounds, it reshapes each day, it calls you to action. A genuine dream conjures the spirits of the dead. When you’re in the grips of your dream, when you’re honoring its enormity, the sky is on your side.”

I am so incredibly out of practice with this. I’m not even fully sure I know what the original dream was that has made me want, my whole life, to be a mother. I know my reasons for doing it now had to do with personal growth and stability, and other responsible reasons. And my logic was largely grounded in cynicism—and an utter lack of dreaming—around a life partner ever existing.

Goodness.

This makes me sad on behalf of me.

“Your dream reminds you of how you were born into the world, the shape you took before you learned to be practical and safe, the sounds you made before you learned to set your expectations lower and lower until you expected nothing at all, until you learned to act grateful for nothing, until you learned to act, pretend, manipulate, decide.”

Where do I even begin here, to pick up the dreaming again and lay aside the pragmatism?

I tell you that I write the way I do, gritty and tangible and dark, because it’s the truth, and that I know it’s the truth because it’s a little bit scary to say out loud. Like how you’re not supposed to say that maybe you resent this fetus a little bit for making you feel so sick: I’m telling you the truth.

But there are some other things that are true, and I’ve been way more scared to say them out loud than any of the other stuff. Because I can scarcely hope that they might actually come true. If I really let myself, I can dream of a moment in the hospital when the doctor turns to me and hands me a healthy baby and oh my god the baby’s crying and I’m crying and my sister’s crying and now I understand why I kept going through all those months of nausea and exhaustion and now I understand why my heart longed for this for years and years and years.

If I really let myself, I can dream of loving the same books as my kid; being amazed as their inevitably nerdy interests emerge; so many bathtimes and songs that are special only to us; the shared family inside jokes.

Every dreaming word I write comes with wafts and whispers of cynicism: yeah, but you’ll also just be tired a lot. Yeah, but they will also fight you a lot. Yeah, but eventually they will leave you. Yeah, but what if they hate you a little bit? What if they’re not healthy? And most of all: what if you love them too much? What if that love makes you a little, or a lot, blind to the truth of your relationship?

I know parents like this. Parents who are so obsessed, so doting, that their only reason for living becomes their child. The idea of becoming like those parents feels really gross. And maybe this is at the core of my bracing against dreaming: fear of loving too much.

It’s like that with dating too, incidentally: it’s always my biggest fear. That I will love someone so much that I lose myself. Or I will love someone so much that I will embarrass myself. Or I will love someone so much that…I don’t even know what the specific fear is, but this kind of enormous, world-encompassing love is so much that it frightens me.

It’s easier to think of pragmatics: is this person a good match? Am I safe from risk? I dated someone once for almost a whole year that was like this: we were a pragmatic match. We cared about each other, we were willing to put in the work, I would be financially secure if we stayed together. But dreaming with him and about him was hard, and what I did dream of, I didn’t execute. I just let myself get smaller and quieter and more aligned to his dreams until the relationship fell apart.

“You know that to engage with a dream is to completely attune yourself to your body, your purity, your strength, the force of your will, and also your greed, your impatience, your lust, your grief. You know that enduring those forces is hard work.”

I’m greedy for a child who will be a joy. I’m greedy for a kid who will like me, most of the time, and who I will like, most of the time. I’m greedy for it not to be too hard, I’m greedy for a motherhood that will feel like purpose and meaningful sacrifice and something that I can say was my favorite thing I’ve ever done.

I’m greedy for a pregnancy that feels like glowing and joy and I would do anything for this miraculous child, instead of what I’ve actually got, which is, goddamn motherfucker this is hard. But I can still align to the truth of what I want.

“You kill your dreams because you hate feeling sad or uncertain, and dreams bring all of the feelings with them.”

People tell me a lot that I’m going to be an incredible mother. I’m touched by this, and I also think they are correct. I’m not exactly sure what other people notice that makes them say this, it could be a lot of things, but I, for one, think one of my best gifts is that I work hard at feeling everything and accepting everything. These are great traits for raising a child.

The trick, now, I think, is to go even deeper into everything. There are things to feel here that I’m dampening, things like lust and desire and fantasy that are just as much the truth as the bitter.

“A portable dream is ‘I will walk through this day hearing the songs that float through my head, treating myself like the rock star I am, treating myself like someone who is capable of anything she sets her mind to, someone who can take a feeling and make a song from it, someone whose spine is aligned with the stars in the sky, whose imagination is bright and hopeful, someone who resists the aggression of this anxious world at every turn and replaces it with beauty and light and hope.’

When you ignore your dreams, you ignore reality.”

Welcome to my pseudo-journal about the experience of trying to have a baby as a single person. Now that I’ve published my memoir about God and sex, maybe eventually, these notes and jots will become a second book.