Gravidity

So, yes; I’ve been quiet at these pages for several weeks because I’ve been pregnant, and working under a twofold limitation: the physical self-obsession that this generates and the shadow of our July loss.  The first shrank my usual range of narrative topics and the second meant that what remained could not be written about anyway.  This may not have been such a bad thing, interest-wise, since I’ve been exhausted, emotional and, as Grinderman has it, “so thin and sick“.  You may imagine me as a shadow of my bridal self, waking up with groaning and panic attacks, eating desultory handfuls of dry crackers and lacking, in every way, a sense of perspective or humour.  I am grateful for the online honesty of others, particularly Brenda, in this regard; their forerunning of my own experience has offered, if not hope, then something like solidarity.

To the comfort and delight of the señor and me, the little one revealed itself at the eleven-week scan as four-limbed, whole-brained, two-kidneyed, bestomached, enbladdered and with nuchal transparency (the latter an indication that the fetus likely does not have Down syndrome).  Most extraordinary of all was the 3D-technology that enabled us to see its face from all sides, little boxer hands covering its nose and lips until it lowered them to reveal its face.  (A pregnancy website I came across prior to this appeared to have been translated from an East Asian language, urging mothers-to-be not to be alarmed if the fetus’s nose seemed very flat; it would likely become more pointy in time.)  An exciting moment in all of this was when the little one flung out its arms and legs with the most rapid movement, as one might do upon entering a waterslide.  Just five centimetres long, with translucent skin that means its interior and exterior can be seen at the same time, we could only regard the form in the images with wonder.  (That sense of wonder helped greatly to mitigate the fact that the scan was done internally (for which the phrase “small wand-like transducer” is correct in all except the first adjective).

My pending exit from the first trimester has seen a reduction in the immobilising nausea that has kept me glum and testy since my wedding, an experience no doubt enhanced by the knowledge that the likelihood of something further going wrong now shrinks, though there are still further tests for gestational diabetes and of course the risks of later pregnancy more generally.  I have shrunk physically under the deprivations of all-day morning sickness and the cessation of my former life as a bon vivant with its over-eating and over-drinking, and both the señor and I are sporting leaner and, some might say, keener frames as a result (all the better, in my case, for the necessary weight gain that’s coming).  Neither of us regrets these changes; it seems apt that we start the putting away of our former ways of life earlier rather than later.

Now I am on holiday for a fortnight before returning to the fray of my working life on secondment; another theme about which I can’t write here but fragments of which you may occasionally find in the Stuff education pages.  I cannot speak with certainty about what will happen to my own employment at the university until the change proposals applying to my area have been released, but this won’t be for eight or nine weeks or more yet.  In the meantime, there is much to do for others whose fates are already proposed.  I am missing teaching — a subject for another post — and looking forward to returning to the classroom for some of my time in the February semester.

During my absence here, not only has Christmas passed but also the sixth anniversary of the starting of this journal, an experimental hobby I took up while recovering from sinus surgery and playing with my new puppy.  A lot has happened since then, some of it this year.  In the past, I have expressed detailed emotional landscapes with regard to what I would like in the new year.  This time around, it’s fairly straightforward: a live birth and continuing employment.  Ça suffirait.