Aubade (morning song, seven months)

ABC radio is on playing choral music; it is just after 6 am and I am already bath-clean and smelling slightly of lavender.

I play finger-splash music in the bath, which has stirred up the baby. He’s feeling lazy like me though- just turning slow morning tidal rolls that are oddly pleasant.

It’s a good time to be up: obligatory birdsong, cats weaving through the tomato plants in the yard pretending to be great white hunters, and no human noise yet from my street.

My world is well. So well it seems almost naïve to feel this lovely lull when there is storm and chaos all around. But I think pregnancy does have its own purpose, one of drawing in to integral internal rhythms of physical needs, but also of drawing in to an optimistic quietude and peacefulness. Judith Wright said it well with ‘oh node and focus of the world’

 

Perhaps I need to feel that my world will be a warm and safe place for my baby or I wouldn’t give birth, just stay pregnant all my life, baby wrapped and gently rocking in the safe hammock of my self.

 

I used to think pregnant women seemed dreamy at best, and dumb at worst.

I think now I am the same. A bit dreamy, definitely dumb at times, but clearly battening down the hatches and preparing my rusty old ship for the onslaught ahead.

The ship is calm, or more perhaps becalmed- that time of floating still in the eye of a storm where the world is silvered and semi-real and we are held motionless by big weather unseen

.

Little waves lap at the hull; the crew carve wooden dolls and wait.

 

 

 

 

Things about pregnancy I did not know…

-It makes all food my food.

I can have just eaten my regular weekly mountain of ‘pub-grub’ at one of the many local hotels but if a plate of someone else’s food gets carried past I could happily eat that too. Pub-staff have been so convinced by my longing glance that they instinctively veer toward me with said plate.  Chris has to tell them to ‘move it along now, nothing to see here…”

-At work I am more effective in meetings (cause I don’t really care if or when I’ll get my say which makes me a better 'active listener') but a real dunder-head about language.  I said to Adrian the other day “I’m glad you’re here cause I have to ask Adrian to do a meal relief”. He said, “Well here I am then”.

-That nasal congestion just keeps getting worse.  I feel that if I press on my face snot might shoot out of my eye-sockets. Lovely image huh?

-That there is a muscle that Pilates-freaks probably know about just above the pubis that acts as a pretty major ‘big belly bra’ for the expanding womb.  I know about it now cause I’ve wrenched the fucking thing every which way when running full speed down a ramp for a train this morning. I can tell little ‘Marmaduke’ is OK cause he’s been kicking away all happy in the bliss-bubble of amniotic fluid and his own wee-wees (yes- they are very self sufficient and able to make all kinds of fun in there!).  But when I go to sit or stand I feel like some previously taut and supporting secret muscle is now flubbering around loosely down there.  No pre-natal yoga tonight.

-Telling people (particularly parents and in-laws) that you’ve decided to call the unborn son ‘Marmaduke Action Sager’ is a really good way of shutting them up about their favourite names. We figure anything else we decide on will inspire nothing but unutterable relief in all curious parties.

-Marmaduke doing somersaults makes me laugh my head off. Now. I may not forgive him for it after a few more weeks’ growth.

-Sleep is but a distant dream, and infomercials are surprisingly tempting when you are wakeful and hugging cats on the couch at 3am.  If I had a credit card I’d now be the proud owner of a Winsor Pilates machine, some Wen (not shampoo!) hair cleanser, some Principal Secret skincare and some Bare Essentials mineral powder foundation.  I have even wished for acne again so I could legitimately purchase ‘Proactiv’.

-Chanel 31 is the only alternative at this time, showing old black and white melodramas. I think my cat Damage cried with me the other night when Liza died without ever telling her Viennese lover that he’d fathered her boy-child. As he read the love-letter she’d written to him from the madhouse I looked at my fluffy feline friend and saw that he too had a tear in his eye…

 

22 weeks and counting down.

Big Lil’

 

 

 

Chris's advice to his unborn son

Be a kid.

Money is not success.

Don’t put anything inside someone unless they say its ok.

Don’t buy another round of drinks until everyone has finished.

Poo is not paint.

Country music is not cool.  Ever.

Foreskins are not meant to stretch that far.

It doesn’t matter how hot she looks, someone else is sick of her shit. 

People are cool, unless they prove otherwise.

Girls are smarter than you, and they have more words at their disposal to prove the point with.

When mum and dad lock you in the ‘naughty cupboard’ it’s cause they love you.

want to offer our unborn boy some words of wisdom?    leave your comment