sleeping children in their beds. Setting out the cereal bowls for morning. I even like folding my sons’ pajamas, still warm from the dryer. I know by heart the Joy of Cooking recipe for blueberry muffins and the names of all seven dwarfs and eight reindeer. I guess they add up to a kind of household rosary, and I can’t imagine ever forgetting any of it, though women older than I assure me I will.
So much of life remains uncertain. But I always know the punch line to Charlie’s one joke. (What kind of car does Humpty Dumpty drive? A yolkswagen.) I know Audrey will always make a face out of her meatballs, arranged on top of her spaghetti. Willy will always claim his pants are dry. Charlie will always, before settling down to read a book with me, run to get his bear, whose string he likes to twirl in his ear.
For years now, the routine around here has included looking after a baby. And while living with an adolescent may be more emotionally demanding, for pure physical rigor there’s nothing to match those first few years with a young child.
Now, even as the end of baby tending comes into view, I find myself feeling not only liberated, but ensnared, looking back as much as I look forward. Partly, perhaps, my wistfulness comes simply from not wanting to see a stage I have loved come to an end. Maybe I’m also scared. (When my children were all very young, my life was clearly laid out. There was not so much room to question what I should be doing. There was little opportunity for experiment and adventure, but also that meant less opportunity for failure.) And partly I am wistful simply because there is not much I like better than holding a baby in my arms.
I have been spending my evenings this past week watching Olympic skaters spin around the ice. In my dreams, and anytime I find myself on a smooth frozen pond with no one watching, I am Tiffany Chin. I hum myself a soundtrack. I rely heavily on hand gestures rather than triple jumps and camels. Because the truth is, I’m not much of a skater—even when I’m not, as I am now, nine months pregnant, with thirty extra pounds and a sore back.
For the first eight and a half months of this third pregnancy of mine I have been carrying on my life pretty much as usual. It’s the two children with us already who demand the attention I once gave to childbirth manuals and nursery decoration. Also, I tell myself I know all about babies and having them. When people inquire how I am, I tend to register surprise at the question and then say “How about you?” I have almost forgotten that around March 1 a baby is going to be born here.
But there comes a point—and it’s here—when the body and the mind get pretty much overtaken by a pregnancy and every inch is occupied territory. (With even my hair no longer normal, I am advised to hold off getting a permanent.) Three times in the past six years, I’ve reached that point in a New Hampshire winter. (My son’s and daughter’s birthdays coincide with the full moons of one February and one March.) And now here I sit once more, staring out a window at nothing but mud and snow, putting off taking the ten steps between my chair and the door, where our dog is scratching to be let out, because the task just seems too tiring. I’ve spent the last twenty minutes drawing moustaches on the models in the annual Sports Illustrated bathing-suit issue. I might as well belong to a separate species from those flat-bellied, golden-skinned women in their silver bikinis.
It’s an odd state to be in, this period just before the birth of a baby. The mind empties. I see my true self slipping away, being replaced by a person who behaves, not like me, but like full-term pregnant women everywhere. Unexplainable tears. A ravenous appetite for salt one night and sweet the next. A need—as real as an artist’s for paint or a keyboard—to wax the floors and repaint the kitchen. I want to hold not only babies, kittens, puppies, but a nearly
So much of life remains uncertain. But I always know the punch line to Charlie’s one joke. (What kind of car does Humpty Dumpty drive? A yolkswagen.) I know Audrey will always make a face out of her meatballs, arranged on top of her spaghetti. Willy will always claim his pants are dry. Charlie will always, before settling down to read a book with me, run to get his bear, whose string he likes to twirl in his ear.
For years now, the routine around here has included looking after a baby. And while living with an adolescent may be more emotionally demanding, for pure physical rigor there’s nothing to match those first few years with a young child.
Now, even as the end of baby tending comes into view, I find myself feeling not only liberated, but ensnared, looking back as much as I look forward. Partly, perhaps, my wistfulness comes simply from not wanting to see a stage I have loved come to an end. Maybe I’m also scared. (When my children were all very young, my life was clearly laid out. There was not so much room to question what I should be doing. There was little opportunity for experiment and adventure, but also that meant less opportunity for failure.) And partly I am wistful simply because there is not much I like better than holding a baby in my arms.
I have been spending my evenings this past week watching Olympic skaters spin around the ice. In my dreams, and anytime I find myself on a smooth frozen pond with no one watching, I am Tiffany Chin. I hum myself a soundtrack. I rely heavily on hand gestures rather than triple jumps and camels. Because the truth is, I’m not much of a skater—even when I’m not, as I am now, nine months pregnant, with thirty extra pounds and a sore back.
For the first eight and a half months of this third pregnancy of mine I have been carrying on my life pretty much as usual. It’s the two children with us already who demand the attention I once gave to childbirth manuals and nursery decoration. Also, I tell myself I know all about babies and having them. When people inquire how I am, I tend to register surprise at the question and then say “How about you?” I have almost forgotten that around March 1 a baby is going to be born here.
But there comes a point—and it’s here—when the body and the mind get pretty much overtaken by a pregnancy and every inch is occupied territory. (With even my hair no longer normal, I am advised to hold off getting a permanent.) Three times in the past six years, I’ve reached that point in a New Hampshire winter. (My son’s and daughter’s birthdays coincide with the full moons of one February and one March.) And now here I sit once more, staring out a window at nothing but mud and snow, putting off taking the ten steps between my chair and the door, where our dog is scratching to be let out, because the task just seems too tiring. I’ve spent the last twenty minutes drawing moustaches on the models in the annual Sports Illustrated bathing-suit issue. I might as well belong to a separate species from those flat-bellied, golden-skinned women in their silver bikinis.
It’s an odd state to be in, this period just before the birth of a baby. The mind empties. I see my true self slipping away, being replaced by a person who behaves, not like me, but like full-term pregnant women everywhere. Unexplainable tears. A ravenous appetite for salt one night and sweet the next. A need—as real as an artist’s for paint or a keyboard—to wax the floors and repaint the kitchen. I want to hold not only babies, kittens, puppies, but a nearly
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