New Mom disease

I got it. I sort of knew I would but I also sort of thought I was cooler or something than that, but I guess I'm not. I think my baby is the bee's knees. I think she's the cutest, smartest, healthiest, best baby of all time. Certainly in the United States in the past 50 years or so. I just look at her all the time and think I should probably call Gerber or Gap or something because I have their new top model and it is almost like civic responsibility to let everyone in the world see lots of pictures of her. I know it sounds like I'm exaggerating, and I'm so prone to do that anyway, but I really really believe that she is cuter than anything anyone has ever seen before. She is the epitome of what a little baby should look like. And smart! Oh man, she is precocious in everything. I swear she is doing Piaget's Secondary Circular reactions now, at 2 months, and babies aren't supposed to until 4-8 months. She can very nearly talk. I'm serious, the other day, I said, "let's hang out like gal pals", and she said "Aaahoooh!"(hang out) Sometimes she says, "aaaeeee!"(hi) I can tell just by looking at her face that she is trying to communicate with me. And I'm not the only one who thinks these things. All of the nurses who have seen her say that she is so cute, and people stop me on the street and say she's cute, and I was hanging out with a new person and she said she looked smart. And she's healthy as a horse, strong too. She can support her own body weight with her legs and has been able to for about a month, which is also supposed to be a 4 month developmental milestone. She never gets diaper rash, even when her cloth diapers get super soaked, and if she gets a couple of dots, just letting her have naked butt time for a few minutes clears them right up. She loves to take baths and be naked and won't take a pacifier or ride in the car, all of these perfect things that I just knew my baby would do. Even though she had meconium staining in her amniotic fluid when she was born, she didn't have to be suctioned. Because she's strong and healthy. She is in the 60th percentile for both height and weight, exactly perfect. She is not bald, but she doesn't have way too much hair either. Her eyelashes are incredibly long and her eyes are huge and blue and beautiful.

what I'm doing

What I'm doing is proving to myself that I have lived enough in my childless 24 years that I don't have to feel like a sellout or like I'm going native or whatever for having a baby.
I probably won't give a shit once the thing is out and I'm totally in love with her, but right now I sort of wonder if my unencumbered peers think that I never did anything and now I'm just having a baby and living with my parents. Because I did some shit. Oh boy, have I done some shit. And I'm not finished either, just on break.

One rough fucking weekend

So it was spring break of '08 I guess, last year, around the very beginning of April and my life was pretty eventful. For one, Ben and I had fallen in love and Amanda had moved out of the trailer in hurt and disgust and many of my friends from Americorps thought I was a sleazeball or something, except my comrades and brothers, Jake and Diarmid. Regardless, since we were all working in schools, we all had to find something else to do for a week because of spring break. I drove Ben to the airport in Seattle because he was going home to Chicago for the week and it was the first time we had been apart since we had been in love. And I had too many dogs because Pierre and Brautigan were both living with me and Judy and Juliette and my landlords said they would shoot them if they went near their heirloom rabbits again so I had to keep the dog door closed and I was really having a lot of trouble keeping the trailer habitable because everyone was shitting and pissing everywhere. For spring break I got a great job cleaning out this old lady's house in Leavenworth. She had died. She lived with some other old ladies I guess and they never threw anything away and they kept it immaculately organized. The basement walls were lined with narrow shelves that had little peanut butter and baby food jars with different kinds of screws and nails and bread bag ties and different colors of thumb tacks. Notebooks of every variety and just tons and tons of really neat shit. I took as much as I wanted. A pretty cup, a yellow polyester pantsuit, a poster of a cat, a scary retro hairdoll, a bamboo bed tray with sidebaskets and a cupholder, etc. Oh and tons and tons of matches, she collected matchbooks and there were boxes and boxes of awesome old matchbooks. I have been disappointed in how well they light, but at least there are always more. It was really great, I loved this job. Leavenworth is unbelievably scenic, that is kind of the point, and we were right on the river. She was donating her house to the audubon society. And I could bring the dogs, so they just ran around and swam and drank the neighbor's coffee all day. It was really nice and I got the trailer really clean and shit. It was so pleasant that I didn't even think about or worry about the ticket I had gotten on my way home from taking Ben to Seattle.
Listen to how bullshit this is. I got pulled over for being right of center. Not speeding, not failing to wear my seatbelt (which they can pull you over for over there), not even being left of center, which could conceivably be dangerous, but right of center. Really the cop pulled me over because I had a whole bunch of bumper stickers about peace and the environment and I was lighting a rolled cigarette, so he figured it was a joint. Regardless, I didn't have my driver's license or insurance on me. I think that I had had to take them out of the car to make a copy for something stupid and never put them back in. So I got tickets, like 500 bucks in tickets, but I could have gotten 400 of it waived because I really did have insurance, but they make you drive back to the city where you got the ticket and Wenatchee is a good 20 minutes from my trailer, and at least 40 from Chelan and I was working full time and thought that I could just put it off for a little.
Ok, so spring break ends and I am going to pick Ben up from the airport in Seattle, maybe 3 and a half hours away. I had all of these little gifts for him you know; a letter, a picture, that creepy hairdoll, and I was wearing the yellow polyester pantsuit and was going to hold a sign and be very funny. I get halfway up Bluitt pass and my car is not accelerating too hot and there's this noise. I had meant to get an oil change, I swear to God I had meant to get an oil change, but I was just too excited and I couldn't wait and I didn't. So some people pull over and we are all looking at it knowing that it is dead, but they drove me to get some oil 15 miles away and back to my car, and it just isn't going to work. I don't know what to do. At this point in my life I had never hitchiked, but none of my friends were answering their phones. I just cried and cried on the side of the road because now I couldn't get Ben and my car was dead. It is hard to believe even now that people can be so sad. A cop or something picked me up and took me to the big Y, a familiar spot to anyone familiar with the drive from Seattle over the mountains, it's at the beginning of the pass. I called a tow truck from there and drank a lot of coffee and didn't know what to do. The buses weren't running and I was still an hour from home. Finally my parents said I needed to call my uncle Bob who lives in Wenatchee and I'd met once. He was nice enough to come get me and was taking me back to my trailer when Diarmid called. Diarmid said that he would take me to Seattle to get Ben, even though it was now approaching 8 pm. I had left home at 2. I was happy, I couldn't believe what a good friend I had to drive me all the way there so I could see him just a little sooner, because he was going to have to take a bus or something the next day. So we drove to Seattle and we found him and got him and were on our way back and we were so in love, we sat in the back seat together and held hands and kissed and didn't wear our seatbelts and Ben told us about his trip and we were listening to the Love album Forever Changes and Diarmid was driving. And we went around a curve too fast and the road was kind of frosty because we were on the mountain pass and we crashed and flipped and rolled and I thought I was going to die and then we landed right side up in the ditch. Everyone hopped out of the car. There was broken glass everywhere and I wasn't wearing any shoes and all of the gifts were strewn all over the road. We thought, with relief, that we were alive and it was o.k. and maybe we could even start the car back up. Ben was saying that he was hurt and we didn't know how much or if we needed to go to the hospital or what. A car stopped and asked if we needed a ride, we almost said no, but the car was obviously not starting back up and Ben was actually very hurt and we got into this kid's nice car. T.J. was his name and he drove us to the Wenatchee hospital. I swear to God that was the longest fucking car ride of my life. Every bump was unbearable. Ben was moaning and crying in the back seat and I was so afraid to touch him even though I wanted to. No one said a word for almost the entire drive, which was at least an hour. We got to the emergency room sometime around 1 or 2 in the morning. I was wearing the yellow polyester pantsuit that was now stained with a little blood. None of us were bleeding much that we could see, but I didn't know what sort of injuries Ben had inside, I thought he might die. I thought he was going into shock. I was terrified. At the emergency room we had to fill out so many forms. I quickly learned his birthday. There were cops there and they wanted statements and I asked if we were going to get in trouble for not wearing our seatbelts and said that I thought I had the right to not get myself in trouble, but they said they just needed statements and I didn't know what to do but cooperate. Ben had to have his shirt cut off and he had x-rays taken of his right arm. The nurse wouldn't give him any drugs until the x-rays came back and even said "It sounds like you're asking me for narcotics, blah blah blah" until she saw the x-rays and then she wasn't such a bitch. We had to ask them to x-ray his left hand too, because they apparently forgot that that was also hurting him. Regardless, he got all bandaged up, with a sling for his right arm and his left hand wrapped up because both were broken and we were out waiting in the parking lot for a cab, joking about how he might have to quit smoking because he wouldn't be able to do it himself. Diarmid admitted that he was going to have to switch to a bicycle for a while (as was I) and Ben said that he had known it might take some sacrifices, but he was glad Diarmid was finally coming around to his point of view. Ben, as we all know, doesn't drive and hasn't had a car as long as I've known him. (except for the new Saturn wagon that I consider ours, even though I'm the only one who drives it) Once the taxi driver got there we took Diarmid home and went to the drug store to get his prescription pain pills. That Walgreens was apparently run by idiots because they couldn't give him the prescription because their printer wasn't working and they couldn't print labels. So it is now 5:30 in the morning and we are paying this cab driver to sit and wait with us at the Walgreens and he is getting more and more pissed about the lost work and about how he is off work at 6. Eventually he did leave and got another cab driver to come. The pharmacy never did get us the drugs and we just left because I was going to die I was so tired. Back at the trailer, there were 3 crazy dogs who had shat everywhere and were insanely excited to see Ben. We had to tie Pierre up so that he couldn't reach the bed and he was trying to jump on Ben and it was awful. I am pretty sure that Ben was hungry and I made spaghetti. Spaghetti, of all things, was what he wanted. The drugs must have been working pretty good at that point because he was smiling like a kid as I tried to feed him. We were still so in love, we thought this would be the best test of our relationship ever.
The next morning I had to help him go to the bathroom and we had no pain medicine and no car to go get it and it was Sunday so the buses weren't running. The trailer was 7 miles from Entiat, which has a single grocery store, and 12 from Wenatchee, and we were stranded.
Things got less romantic from there.

self portraits

One thing that has changed a lot with my pregnancy is my body image. Not my body, I mean, no shit my body, it's insane, it's doing things I never thought of it doing and it feels weird, looks weird and doesn't act the way it used to, but today I'm more interested in the way I see my body and the relationship I have with it.
In the months before I got pregnant I was experiencing the best body I'd ever had. Our relationship was great. It was the kind of give and take where no one feels like they are giving or taking and every moment is a shared joy in breathing, moving, working. It was actually a lot like how I feel about Judy. The kinds of things that might be considered maintenance chores, like exercise or eating healthy were as happily undertaken as the kinds of things that might be considered rewards for such tasks, like sleeping like a rock the instant I went to bed, eating as much as I wanted all the time and having really excellent sex. It is hard for me to say what the basic feeling I had about my physical form was. It was like a supreme lack of concern or anxiety. But I wasn't taking it for granted, I felt great and I knew it and loved it. I just wasn't worried about it. Like Judy, I just don't worry about her; I know she's great and I know why because I did it and I trust her implicitly. I never had thoughts about whether or not I should do something out of concern for my body. Not things that would supposedly be good or potentially bad. I just did what was right at all times and it was easy and never let me down. We had fun together and when I accidentally ripped my knee open falling off my bike, it healed up just like skin does.
Now, however, is a different story. I try hard not to resent this body, since we're carrying precious cargo and all. For the most part I don't really feel like it is mine. Especially the middle part, which essentially isn't. I am so aware that the baby lives there and that she is there all of the time, curled up with her feet under my right ribs and her back along my left side. But it is just so heavy, this body. It is the opposite of my old body, which could do anything and go anywhere and jump and climb and ride bikes forever. This body hurts and doesn't manuever too hot through somewhat narrow walkways. My feet are always swollen and sore, from the time I wake up in the morning until I'm laying awake and uncomfortable in bed. Nearly everything I do is tinged with concern for my body, which is basically a concern for the baby. Should I be lifting this, or trying to climb over this. Before there were a lot of things that I probably shouldn't do that I did without a second thought, drinking, smoking, (like a chimney! unfiltered cheap tobacco!) ice cream every day, riding in cars without seatbelts. Now I can barely climb the stairs without collapsing and my nipples have gotten really huge and really dark and i haven't seen the space from my belly button to the middle of my thighs in months. There are things going on that I don't understand that make sex really pretty uncomfortable, aside from the obvious positioning difficulties. I want to not make it sound as though this is all terrible though. It is magic. A separate person, a new person, growing and living inside of me. Inside like right next to my organs and my back; not an undefined sort of spiritual inside, but like there are her feet. This feeling is the feeling of her head on my bladder and when she stretches, I need to pee. I can see her writhing around in there under a relatively thin layer of my skin. She is so big and real. Except, of course, when I try to picture her on the outside. Then it isn't very real at all and I don't know what to expect or what she'll look like or really how this transformation is supposed to take place.

About this time, but last year

I was working on the farm, Sunshine Organics. My Americorps term of service was almost up (on July 15th, which, incidentally, is the day I will be induced if I don't have this baby before then) and so I was volunteering on the farm for service hours and also working at the school with the elementary school kids, helping with the set for their play, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It was really cute. Every day I would wake up at my trailer and get ready and put on Judy's safety vest and we would ride the bus to Entiat where we would hang out in the school until 12, when we would ride the bus up to Chelan and work on the farm until 4. Then I would either see Ben, if we were seeing each other, or ride the bus back to my trailer, where it was HOT. Often I slept at the farm, on the couch or in the yard. Once I didn't have to work at the school anymore it just made more sense for me to move out to the farm because my trailer was melting apart. My candles melted and ran in rivulets down the walls, and my chocolate chips melted in the cupboards. I slept on wet towels because otherwise I felt like I was on fire. In the morning I cooked pancakes and hardboiled tiny little potatoes and kept them in the fridge to eat throughout the day. I guess I spent a huge amount of time at the river, because it was shady and cool and Judy and I could swim and there were all the free cherries we could eat. Which was a lot. Enough to give me the shits most days. I smoked a lot of menthol cigarettes. Juliette, by the way, was living with Ben, which was for the best because she probably would have roasted in that trailer and I never figured out how to get her onto the bus. The saftey vest I put on Judy in the mornings was so that we could lie and say she was my service dog and they bought it.
So I moved out of that oven and onto the field at the farm. I strung a rope and hung tapestries and put 4 pallets out with my king sized mattress on top. Getting the mattress to Chelan was an adventure; Grace and I got it at 5 in the morning from my trailer one day (it is very fucking cold sometimes in the morning) and I just clung onto it in the back of the truck for 30 miles on the highway up the mountain and it was heaving and flapping and I was so scared and cold and I cramped up all over. I felt like the smallest monkey holding onto an airplane or something. But having it out there was totally worth it because late July and August is shooting star season and every night Ben and I would see shooting stars when we lay in bed. I woke up to the sunrise every morning and I knew how the moon waxed and waned. The view....I will try to find a picture of the view. The glacial lake, the mountains, the llamas and the sun and the orchards. It was a beautiful place to sleep, even if for the most part I wished that I had a real home and that all of my things weren't getting so dirty and wrecked. All the workers from the orchards drove past and kicked up dust and saw me naked all the time. Granted, I looked fabulously tan and thin and in shape and also I cared less about being seen naked than I ever had before in my life.
In the mornings I would walk down to the greenhouse to make my coffee, and then I would make some oatmeal in my coffee maker and pick some strawberries to go in it. I put hot chocolate mix in both the coffee and the oatmeal, until I ran out and had to start chipping away at this brick of brown sugar I'd been hoarding.

once

I bought a big blue chevy van off craigslist in Omaha with my last 500$ (actually, I only had 400, I had to beg the rest) and spent a week reupholstering the inside and making it my own: new fitted sheet on the bed, curtains, side panels, it was beautiful. It was October and I was due back on Sunshine Farm in Chelan, WA by the 11th for the wedding/social event of the season. During the course of driving those 1600 miles I blew a tire in South Dakota, I think it was South Dakota, it's always fucking South Dakota, that state goes on forever...and it was cold and night so I just slept in the van and the next morning in the frost I was trying to put the spare on and I didn't have any parts and I was really really tired and ready to go home. A man driving a delivery truck stopped and helped me, he had the parts. I wouldn't have been able to do anything without him, actually, because the spare was practically welded to the rack and I didn't have a jack or anything. He drove me to a nearby town so we could get a big enough wrench and we changed the tire and he recommended that I follow him to the next town because he delivers tires and could get me a deal on a new one. So I did and then they had to call around and try and find a cheap tire and I waited and waited and it snowed and snowed and then they put it on and by the time I was ready to go, the man had gone, but he had already paid for it all, it was nearly 100 dollars. His name was Rex, which coincidentally is my totem animal. A T. Rex.
So back on the road and smoking cigarettes and getting 12 mpg if I'm lucky, just charging it all to my credit card, and listening to my mp3 player with headphones tied to the earflaps of my winter hat as I wind around these mountain passes and there was so much goddamn construction and it was night again and I was terrified driving a van that big while other cars screamed around me. The first time I'd driven mountain passes since the accident, I'm sure. Yeah, because to get to the Seattle airport to get TO Omaha I had had to hitch hike, but it was day and there was no snow.
About 2 hours into Washington, it was very late at night and there was no way I was stopping, this was the 10th and I was so excited to get there and sleep and see Ben and Judy and Juliette. I was on the phone with Amanda and she was sad because her dad died and I was telling her that there was no reason for her to apologize to me, I was happy to talk to her and then my phone cut out, so I was calling her back and not paying attention to the speed limit in the small town I was going through. Was it Wymore? No...some farm kind of name in Douglas county? It was very small and I accelerated back to highway speed before I should have and was pulled over and then it turned out that my license was suspended for some tickets I never paid back in the spring. I got a ticket mailed to me after the accident because I admitted in the emergency room that I hadn't been wearing a seatbelt. Which was bullshit because I asked a dozen times if I was going to be ticketed and said that I wasn't going to tell them anything, but it was very stressful and they had said I wasn't going to get in trouble, they just needed an account of what happened. Regardless, I never paid it because I no longer had a car (not because of the accident) and I didn't care when I got the letter saying my license was suspended. Plus I was broke and taking care of my boyfriend with 2 broken arms and neither of us had any transportation and the ticket was in Wenatchee, we were staying in Chelan and I still was working full time at the school and they wouldn't help me at all on the phone. So the cop who pulled me over in October said that he had to take me to the station, 30 minutes away, so that I couldn't drive anymore on a suspended license. I was 3 hours from home at this point and he drove me in the opposite direction and I didn't bring my coat or anything but cigarettes and a copy of the Plague Dogs by Richard Adams. The whole way there I alternated between crying and moaning and then trying to engage this fucker in a conversation about whether or not the laws always align perfectly with his personal ethics, and what a person is to do when they don't. At the station I was pissed. I was supposed to sleep there because it was, like, 20 degrees out and windy. I was so pissed that I couldn't do it, so I went out and tried to hitch a ride back to my van, where at least I had a bed and my food and my phone charger. It was 1:30 in the morning and so cold that I had to walk back to the station a couple times to warm back up, because no one was stopping to pick me up. Finally, around 3 or 4 a newspaper delivery guy stopped and said he would give me a ride after his route, which sounded fine to me. This guy was hilarious, I've never met a zanier dude. He was ranting about government conspiracies- training the troops in Iraq for combat against civilians, to loose them on us eventually, and how he had seen bigfoot on his delivery, etc. He was swerving all over the road, but it was these dirt backroads, we just seemed to be winding farther and farther away, I had no idea which direction we were facing and we came up on the plateau and the moon was setting and it was so huge and red, I'd never seen it like that before. Then he almost hit a coyote because we were smoking a bowl and he never had his hands on the wheel, he was waving them around or grabbing my arm or shining this flashlight on his map or something. Eventually we got to the town that my car was supposed to be right outside of and the dude was CONVINCED that he was running out of gas and he was pissed. He thought there was a gas station in this town and he couldn't find it and kept driving in circles and finally said that he had just barely enough to make it back to the bigger town he had picked me up in, the one with the station, and he had to do that or be stranded. Since he said we were in the town where my car was I told him to just leave me and I could walk to it. It was so dark and cold and I couldn't find it anywhere. I was terrified. This was probably the moment in my life that I most thought I was really in trouble. It was just so cold and there weren't any cars and nothing was open. I saw headlights finally and flagged them down and tried to tell them the deal and this couple was not hearing it. They definitely thought I was not legit. I swear to God the woman in the passenger seat was a man. But they didn't care where my van was or how cold I was, they kept trying to pull away and I was practically trying to climb in the window. They finally just took me the opposite direction I wanted to go, into the center of the town, where some little diner was opening early. Real early, like 4:45 or something they let me in. I guess hunting season was starting. I was so tired and sick at this point I didn't know what to do. I got a coffee and just sat there like a sad sack of shit for maybe 3 hours until some guy asked if I was waiting on a ride. There wasn't anyone coming for me and my phone wasn't working and none of my friends had cars anyways. He gave me a ride to my van. Now the cops from the night before had sworn up and down that they would arrest me and impound the van if I tried to drive it away, but I didn't know what to do. First I slept. For a few hours, but then I woke up and I still didn't have a working phone or anyone coming to get me so I didn't have anything to do BUT drive on home. I was scared, but no one pulled me over and it was fine. I got home just in time to have a glass of wine at the reception. I was tired. Later Ben and I drove up some mountain to a scenic spot and I was just so exhausted, plus the wine and pot and no food that I just started puking everywhere and thought I was going to die or pass out or something. He had to drive us home and he was scared and we had Judy and Juliette in the car and I puked in a bucket.

This is my living room, the drape to the left is covering my window that faces east across the river. We have mattresses instead of couches. Here are the pets, all sleeping together.

My yard after the big snow this weekend, there was so much! This view is standing on my porch, looking south towards wenatchee.

These are some pumpkins we carved for halloween.

Looking straight across the river from my front porch. Sometimes when I wake up and go outside, it is beautiful!

This is Juliette, asleep with her tongue out.

The other side of my living room, that window faces the sheer rock wall. The blanket looks the same because we did rearranging between those two pictures.

View from almost the road, looking northish, there's my trailer and the landlord's house, the busted cars (edit, I guess all you can see is the tractor, the cars are a little more to the left), the mountain, the dumpster.

My trailer again from the driveway, you can kind of see the door and the thing I call the porch. The window to the right is the kitchen.

The living room window that faces the rock wall. Excellent, eh?

My landlord's goats and that rock they love to stand on.


A sideways picture of my car with some bighorn sheep above it. Can you spot them?

When I walk judy north past the landlord's to the rock quarry and then look across the river


The rock quarry.