{my topography}

Hi. I miss you. Yesterday was the worst day ever. I officially hate being pregnant.

Here’s to hoping today will be better. And that I’ll put up a real post.

I woke up with a crazy tension headache: the kind that makes everything seem like it the world should be painted in shades of pale blue. Made mint tea and sugar toast, and still I felt like crying.

The sun is out this morning though the ground is soft from too much rain. I am trying, trying so hard to will myself up off the couch and head outdoors with Bean to plant things in the garden, or take a walk with the camera, or even go upstairs and paint something, but so far all I can do is sit here feeling like a collection of glass shards in a paper sack

Bean is playing ‘hospital’ by himself in a nook across the living room. “I have to see if your heart is bumping mama,” he says with a pretend stethoscope in hand.

I turn away so he cannot see my eyes, suddenly hot with tears.

I spent the day in the garden: discovering what weeks of rain and heat and neglect can do to leggy tomatoes and lettuces. Do you know that when a lettuce bolts, it shoots up four feet tall? I’ve learned so much from my garden this year—my first in this state, in this rocky soil and micro growing season. I planted too many lettuces at the same time, and now I’m stuck waiting for new seedlings to take hold and grow into big fat heads, while all the ones I previously planted were ready at exactly the same time and have now all grown bitter and bolted. I also planted far too many radishes and mustard greens, which grow wildly and rapidly bolted within a month. I left them in for a while, an invitation to the honey bees.

What I’ve loved and will repeat are the beautiful artichokes, the watermelons and pumpkins, the bush beans, tomatoes, and sweet peas. I used sticks from the woods to prop the peas up, and today harvested a colander full, which I shucked and had a lovely bowl full of jewel-green peas. Now the only question is how should I cook them?

The sad fact of the matter is that in addition to being a complete amateur gardener, I am even more of an amateur cook. I lack any and all ability to improvise in the kitchen, throwing a few ingredients together in a way that makes the flavors jostle and dance. And it’s something I’m not proud about at all. In fact, it makes me feel somehow very, oh, I don’t know, like a bad mother, to be honest.

DH cooks almost all of our food—he wooed me with oysters in white wine, polenta with chevre and sundried tomatoes, fried ravioli with sage, ridiculously tender steaks and new potatoes. But when push comes to shove his default foods tend to fall into two categories: meat and pasta, and after a while I feel like I should somehow be summoning the rich culinary tradition of my mother. She makes exquisite food using multiple grains and veggies and everything she makes is always exploding with flavor.

Her good food nourished me growing up, and gave me something I treasure: a truly healthy attitude towards food. I don’t eat for comfort; I can leave a half a cookie on my plate if I feel full; and I crave salad and fresh fruit over anything processed. But damn, for all that, I can’t cook anything. And it’s something that I want to change. I want to give Bean, and this new little Sprout the same kind of soul nourishment my mother’s food gave me.

Okay, so I can make practically anything if I follow a recipe, but I get daunted easily and NEVER know what to buy at the grocery store. Our refrigerator and pantry are always full and yet we never seem to have any ingredients to make anything. It’s a dire and sad state of affairs. How do I change this?

I’ve been thinking about food because my attitude towards it has been severely altered by this pregnancy: now everything is mostly unappealing. I have no cravings, and in fact have an aversion to almost every single food product you can think of. Truly, it feels like being cursed. I have perhaps never fully considered just how much I enjoy food. It’s both the ritual of eating together and the nourishment that I love about it, and I miss both with a vengeance. Bread products are the only non offenders.

So I have questions: how shall I cook my sweet peas? And also, how can I possibly go about learning to cook? Not crazy fancy stuff. Just simple wholesome meals using the foods I love: fresh local veggies and fruits, grains, nuts, etc.

If you love to cook, I want to know how you make meals? How do you plan? How do you purchase food for the week? How do you decide what to make for dinner—and make it without it taking two hours and using every pot in the kitchen?

The thing about being married is that it tricks you into the slow, sedate delusion that you actually know the human being you are married to. Because I wake up next to him every morning, heck, I should know my husband like the back of my hand, right? (Although when I think about it, I’m not sure I could describe the back of my hand to anyone without actually LOOKING at it either.) For granted are two words that come into play here, with their accompanying ache and grayness, each syllable painted the color of the rain heavy sky.

And the thing is, for quite some time you can slip into a groove with another person. A routine gets built around you like a Lego fortress, and you’re there inside it, contentedly going about the brightly colored bits of your day. Coffee together in the morning, maybe. An easy push-pull exchange of laundry and dishes and getting things done. Then something happens and within hours, seconds, days, whatever, you’re standing facing each other with hot cheeks and fingers clenched wondering who the hell the other person is.

It will be nine years for us this September, and with the first warm days of summer and the lushness of foliage and leisure, we were in that kind of place. Soporific and content. I’d sit on the grass and watch him bring water to the chickens, and all I could think about was the way the muscles in his forearm bunched, and damn, life couldn’t get better.

Even with this baby curveball we’ve got going on, it is something we’re both into. Something that’s made us feel like a unit, a family beyond what we are right now, and we plunged into the long month of July eager with plans and complacent with delight.

Then the stock market went haywire (or perhaps more appropriately, continued to do so) and the upstairs toilet leaked so that kitchen ceiling started to drip and suddenly the veins in his neck were bulging and he was yelling in that way that makes everything flutter in the room. Then everything becomes unfamiliar and frustrating, like trying to translate your way through getting to the train station in a language you don’t speak. Even the gestures stop meaning anything, and you stand there flailing, holding on to some quiet small hope that you’ll still maybe make it to the platform.

We did this last night. All bitter and hissing the way cats are when they fight. The kind of empty exchanges that only serve one purpose: to protect oneself and not make a bridge, the kind that send shivers aching up your spine, the kind that if your pregnant and hormonal you cannot help but weep. I wanted to know where the hell all his aggression was coming from. He told me I had the intuitiveness of a three year old. We were beautiful together.

But thing about marriage is that you are in it to stay in it. It’s a funny little predicament actually, how it holds you to a moment, how it makes you bend towards the other when all you really want to do is run like hell in the opposite direction. It makes you keep taking a breath and trying again. And we’ve learned, over the years together, that we do really want to be in it. So we kept leaning towards each other until he was sitting on the floor next to my chair, rubbing my calf as I wiped snot on my sleeve.

I think men do things differently than women. I know this is not a light-bulb thought, but there are days when I feel like everything is so amicable and even between us that those lines of operating differently get blurred. But when it comes to friction the differences rear up ugly and unexpected, again and again, and it always takes us an hour or so of dodging each other and feeling completely hurt and baffled before we find ourselves there, salty skin on skin, together in a circle of lamplight in a dark room working things out.

The difference is that men initially don’t think they have anything to talk about, AND they take every question as criticism. I’m not saying they always do, but they often do, especially when it comes to matters of angst and hurt and importance.

“Why have you been so tightly wound?” I asked. But what he heard was: “You’re tightly wound, and that’s a problem.”

I said, “I want to understand why you freaked out about the leak—I know it’s a pain in the ass and you’re up to your neck in house projects—but what was with all that anger?” But what he heard was: “You dealt with the situation like an asshole.”

It took forever to get past all the defensiveness and interpreting to the disturbed bedrock below the muddy water. It took until he stopped feeling attacked and started feeling protective—one testosterone driven instinct overridden by another—and came and wrapped his arms around my heaving shoulders. And from there we could talk, and did, and then we went to bed like spoons, snug against each other, and the last thing I remember from last night was the sound of his heartbeat, steady and certain in the dark next to me.

Yesterday the moon looked like a copper penny in the sky, red and low against the dark mountains, clouds clinging to its craters. Today it rained. All day; the kind of steady rain that makes you think Biblically, the Ark suddenly making sense.

It was the kind of rain that made me loose all resolve to do anything worthwhile. The sky smudged gray, the ground already full to saturation, streambeds overflowing everywhere, the brown water spilling out into fields where last week new hay was cut. It was a day of naps and feeling sorry for myself.

I’ve been noticing how my moods fluctuate lately. One day, I’m feeling like this kid is going to be the best thing ever, and the next, while I’m staring at the contours of the toilet bowl, I’m wondering how overpopulation is possibly a problem. People do this? Multiple times?

When the nausea slips away from the foreground though, lingering only like a dull haze between here and the mountains, I feel content with the way things have turned out. A year ago might have been different, but now, DH and I are closer than we’ve ever been. In the three years since Bean, since moving to the end of this long dirt road, we’ve grown up a great deal. Having Bean felt like a gamble, and even after, there were long dark months of winter where things were uncertain and fragile between us. Maybe it’s just the summer sun that’s made the difference, but I feel like we’ve worked hard to reach this new place of camaraderie and passion. For us, growing up and growing a family have happened like dominoes: the one and then the other a tipping point.

But then there are days where all I know is that winter will be back, and with it the new baby and sleep deprivation. These are the days when every single food tastes offensive, and if DH tousles my hair I get hot flashes and feel annoyed.

The thing is, I’m trying to learn how to ride the waves. It’s something I think I’ve always struggled against. I’ve always been a planner, a long-term-goal-keeper, a girl with a map and an escape route tucked into the back pocket of her paint stained jeans. But lately I’ve started to feel like these things might not serve me any more. Fleeing no longer seems like an option, sensible or not, simply because the desire is no longer there. Is this what becoming rooted to a place means?

I’ve planted roses this year. For the longest time I’ve always thought that planting roses was a signal of something, because roses with their exquisite blooms and sharp thorns are things you can’t take with you. They don’t like to be transplanted, and here, at the front of the house, along the narrow walk by the door they’re thriving: bursts of canary and crimson that make me smile every single time I walk by.

So I’ve planted roses, and maybe I’m starting to put down roots. Together, we’ve worked to mediate the ache and wanderlust; finding find a balance we can both live with of a life that fills us up with adventure while still holding us snug in the palm of this moment here, on this land, where the wild grasses and black-eyed-Susan’s flatten in the wind. It’s taken years to reach this point, longer than the time we’ve spent living here for sure.

When we moved here I was still grieving the death of my father. I felt him everywhere: in the boards and the hammer; in my son’s middle name. Now, time has softened the sharpness of that loss, and home has started to mean something different than what it was growing up among grape-stake fences and dry summer grass on my parent’s land.

So I’m feeling like I’m ready for this. Like we are. Except for the damn nausea and stomach pain that lingers perpetual and invasive. Sometimes that makes me just want to curl up in a ball and cry.

Your three year old gently pats your chest and asks, “Are dees bigger mama?”

True story.

I’ve been truly miserable the past few days. Drowsy and doubled over with stomach pain. It’s not just the nausea, it’s the discomfort, the indigestion that is always and forever there. Everything disagrees.

And, I’m hormonal.

Proof?

I watched Dirty Dancing last night. It is quite possibly one of my favorite movies, although I couldn’t tell you when I ever watched the entire movie in one sitting. This became evident last night when I broke down into vast hormonal sobs at the scene where Johnny leaves Baby and that song “She’s Like the Wind” is playing. Yes, I sobbed.

DH thought I had lost my mind.

BUT. I discovered something then, that was rather momentous. The movie continues! That’s NOT THE END. For my entire adult life I somehow have managed to never see the end of Dirty Dancy. Ever.

And so I thought it was a sad movie, and Johnny leaves and Baby is heartbroken…

I’ve grown accustomed to being hunched over. Hunched, as in, knees up, back rounded, almost fetal. This is the way I spend my day, curled on the couch, attached at the hip to my laptop, mostly, between tentative forays into the kitchen, and occasional attempts to be useful in any way. It isn’t pretty. Remember when I used to be a runner?

When I wake up, for a split second as I’m lying there in bed, I think I’ve maybe just been having an unpleasant dream (one that involves lots of dry heaving and vomit.) I lie perfectly still on the apricot colored sheets and feel the wind blow through the open window above the bed, cool on my cheeks, and my body feels simply there. Toes, knees, arms heavy from sleep. Usually, DH has already gone to shower, but Bean, who crawls into our bed at sun up, is snuggled next to me, and I still like the smell of his hair, so I curl towards him and nuzzle in.

Eventually though, I must stand, shower, and begin the ridiculous process of trying to put food in my stomach while my stomach furiously tries to expel it. Banana didn’t go over so well this morning. Peanut butter, which I can barely stand in ‘real life’ is one of the few things that sticks without complete offense. If I eat every two hours, I seem to be able to avoid vomiting. Sort of. According to the doctor, this is all good news. She told me this with a grin, while she measured the blur of black and white with a fluttering heart rate on the ultrasound monitor. Due date, February 24.

Yesterday was miserably hot, which only increased my discomfort. Over night though, the humidity was squandered in big fat raindrops. Now, the grass is dew-dimpled and silvery. Everything is a tangle of green, the meadows are waist high with grass. The goslings have tripled in size. In the garden, the cabbages like fat purple jewels are tucked between pewter leaves. The tomatoes are ramshackle, taking over an entire bed. The radishes have gone wildly to seed, but I leave them in place, their tiny white flowers calling for honey bees.

Last night, in a rare moment of inspiration devoid of nausea, I made peach grunt with a pile of almost spoiled peaches. Easy peasy. Cut up peaches and place them in the bottom of a pie pan with a few dabs of butter and a sprinkle of sugar. Mix 1 cup flour, 1/3 cup sugar, and 1-1 ½ cups whipped cream together until it becomes a sticky dough. Place dough in mounded spoonfuls on top of peaches and bake at 375 degrees for about 40 minutes until the top is golden brown and the peaches are bubbly.

We ate it with whipped cream. The dough bakes into this lovely scone-like confection. Really quite delicious, even while nauseous.

Now I am hunched on the floor beside Bean who is drawing with scented markers. Of course, he thinks they are the coolest things in the entire world. I think they were invented to torture women afflicted with the all day version of morning sickness.

While I’m genuinely excited about the idea—the idea, mind you and not necessarily the actuality—of two kids, the fact that I now must be pregnant for the next eight months is painful to me. And depressing. I hated being pregnant the first time around, and I hate it no less this time. I also hate all those women who virtually sparkle the entire time they are pregnant. Who act as if it is the best thing in the universe. Halley Berry types who say they wish they could be pregnant forever.

Am I the only person in the world who hates being pregnant?

In the restaurant the other night, this is what transpired:

Me: I’ll have a Tom Ka soup and an order of spring rolls.
DH: I’ll have—(some weird unpronounced-able pork thing)
Me: He’ll have (pointing to Bean) one spring roll, please.
Waitress: So you want two springrolls?
Me: No, an order of springrolls for me and one for him.
DH: Wait, HOW MANY spring rolls do you want?
Me: (Getting anxious) Um.
Waitress: So you want three springrolls?
Me: Yes

Waitress leaves.
DH: You know you’re going to be getting THREE ORDERS of springrolls right?
Me: What? I said I wanted three springrolls.
DH: No. You said you wanted three orders. She asked you how many orders you wanted. You said three.
Me: I said… (suddenly feel hot tears at the back of my eyes. Cover my face with my hands.)
DH: You are going to be getting SIX springrolls (laughing.)
Me: (pathetic and teary eyed) Let’s not talk about the spring rolls any more.

Waitress arrives with three plates of springrolls, six in total and gives me a weird look.

Hormones. What the ef? Seriously, they are rocking my world. Also, it should be noted that I suddenly didn’t even LIKE the damn spring rolls.

What were/are your favorite foods while pregnant? And by “while pregnant” I mean early pregnant when your entire central nervous system is being drenched in HCG, thereby making almost all foods intolorable.

I spend much of the day curled like a cat, now, dozing. My dreams are surreal and technicolored and sexy. My stomach is in a constant state of upheaval, the word nausea hardly encompasses the scope of queasy that I feel. It is a perpetual all day thing, indigestion, bloating, every single food suspect.

I turn my nose up at foods I have always loved; I become obsessed with certain food and then suddenly, irrationally, cannot stand them. The refrigerator is a dangerous place. I can hardly stand to open the door. My sense of smell has gone from acute, which it has always been, to hyper sensitive. I can smell peanut butter across the room. Garlic makes me dry heave.

It’s a weird state to have suddenly slipped into. Early pregnancy has forced rest upon me. It’s been a long time since I sat in a lawn chair on the grass and did nothing. I sit and watch clouds get tangled at the horizon; swallowtails land on the yellow roses by the door; my small boy rides his bike pell-mell up and down the driveway, skidding to a stop on purpose. He has attached a pinwheel to his handle bars, and it spins brilliantly. His face is a smudge of wild strawberries and dirt: a recipe for little boy glee. Next week he’s going to summer camp at his preschool for four half days and I’m holding my breath, wondering what it will be like.

Of course, I start to think about him there, away from me, and my heart feels like a bungee jumper, mid air before the cord catches at the bottom of the fall.

He is at this lovely stage right now where, on a good day, he’s the sweetest most sensitive little guy in the world. He picks me flowers. Sometimes when we’re walking he’ll stop dead in his tracks and gasp, “Oh look at that flower, its just so beautiful!” He notices sunsets, and birds darting though the sky like bright flecks of paint.

In the book Lyle Lyle Crocodile, he gets genuine big tears in his eyes when we get to the page where Lyle gets locked in the zoo. And at the playground when a smaller boy was crying, he stood near by, a worried look on his face, until the boy was comforted.

I so hope that this tenderness doesn’t get wiped away by the big-boyness he’s sure to acquire in the first few days of spending so much time with other, older kids. Around big boys he walks taller, his little shoulders thrown back, and laughs at jokes he doesn’t understand. He’s growing up, and it makes me feel dizzy.

The other day he asked, “Who will snuggle me at preschool?”

“Your teacher will,” I said hopefully, and he smiled, convinced.

But will they?

And what about me, when this second little one enters the world? Will my heart really expand to love the both of them? Somehow I can hardly believe it, even as I feel fiercely protective of my tender belly, where this unexpected miraculous handful of cells is multiplying and growing: tiny arm buds, eyelids, it’s heartbeat like the fluttering wings of birds.