To My Prenatal Son

You and I are one. Both one body and not one body. Our two hearts beat together, yours relying on the pulse of the chord that nourishes you, gives you oxygen, gives you amniotic food. You eat what I eat. Feel shadows of what I feel. How your brain develops depends on what I feel, as I hint what you will face in the world outside. I work as hard as I can to send you calm, don’t want my anxiety to mistransmit the message. You hear most of what I hear, just not Jóhannson’s Orphée in my ears as I write. Perhaps right now you hear movements in our home I’ve blocked out with my AirPods. You press your head down on my bladder, cephalic anterior. You invert with me when we do downward dog. You have no choice. I am your vehicle, Garuda to Vishnu, Nandi to Shiva, the mouse to Ganesha. Some people call the fetus a parasite. I feel more like I am a vehicle for your being and growth, my existence subordinated to give you life.

This state is temporary. Soon a new relationship will form as mother and child. You will still eat what I eat, through colostrum, then milk, not the fluid that surrounds you. You will still feel shadows of what I feel, no matter how hard I might try to control the states I transmit to you: your limbic system outsmarts your cortex, my cortex. You’ll hear more of what I hear. Sounds won’t be blocked behind the water womb. I’ll hear you for the first time. We’ll change how we communicate with one another. I will watch your eyes for cues, listen to grunts and swallows as you suck. I will watch how your fingers curl on your hands, your toes curl on your feet. You will watch my eyes, vague at first, but there. For now we communicate through touch alone. Because you are still me, I rub my stomach with the same pressure and circular movement I’ll use when I rub your infant back. I rub me as if I am rubbing you. I rub me to settle you down when you kick in frustration after the hiccups start. The hiccups come on slow, a pulse here and there in my belly that eventually settles into a regular cadence. And then you notice it, want it gone, increase the amplitude of your movements to try to get them to stop. We get up from bed together. We walk over to the room where I will nurse you after you’re born. I rub me to rub you, whisper that it will be ok, that they will go soon, that, like teething, this is a positive sign of growth. That growing up hurts. That this is the first of so many hurts and aches, nothing compared to the heartache of the first unrequited love, the rejection that feeds on unmatched desire. And you, too, communicate with me through touch. You punch the living day lights out of the membrane that surrounds your liquid world when I lie on my left side at night, telling me the only way you can that you hate what your vehicle is doing. I respond. Rotate. Settle onto the other side to grant you peace.

And it is not just growing up that hurts. Since you have been me, since those early days of cells dividing from one to two to four to eight to sixteen to all these powers of two cascading into being, days cloudy in my memory, far away now, sensations I have to stretch my memory to recall, how tired I felt walking up the hill that leads to our home, how tired I felt on walks near the Charles River in Boston or the Pacific Ocean in Victoria, when, pitched momentarily into old age, time somersaulted into the future. I had to sit down after a kilometer of movement to catch my breath. The miracle was that I welcomed the morning sickness (which lasted all day, and came more frequently at night) because it was a sign that you were alive. At that time there were no other signs. You didn’t kick yet. You didn’t squirm your fingers on my lower abdomen. I relied on my nausea to know you were safe. I welcomed the discomfort. When it subsided I worried, fretted that perhaps you weren’t viable. Waited anxiously for the sickness to return. It was all I had of you. And my relationship to the pain involved in bringing you to life changed. I suffered effortlessly because it meant you were ok. Abided in it. Practiced the patience I will need after you are born. And now as we prepare for labor I continue this practice. Your father and I invite situations of physical pain. We hold ice cubes in our hands and breathe through the sensation. We squeeze our toes under the weight of our bodies at yoga class and breathe through the sensations. He massages my perineal muscles, stretching muscles and skin that have never been stretched like this before. It burns. Screams with discomfort. And I breathe through it knowing that the work will help us with your birth. Again time somersaults. We are at once totally here, totally present, and present in the awareness of the work we are doing for that future moment. As I work to give you an unmedicated birth, work to feel you come through me into the world, where others can meet you (for I already know you, your father already knows you too, but not the same way I do), the most challenging exercise I face is that your birth may not be as I wish it to be. I may have to adapt, accept, follow medical protocol to ensure we are both safe, both alive through your phase shift, your coming to live in a new way. But for now, your father and I practice modifying my relationship to pain, and deepen our connection to one another through our work.

These visions, these hopes, can be empowering, dangerous, and absurd. Empowering because they can fuse mind and body to make birth beautiful by making birth mammalian. Marie Mongan opens her book on HypnoBirthing with an anecdote of watching a cat give birth to kittens. The cat first finds a dark, safe place, the kind of solitude we look for when having a bowel movement. And in this place of safety her body does its work, seemingly effortlessly although undoubtedly with pain. But upon sensing a threat, be that a dog or some other predator coming near, the birthing work halts. The cat closes up. Gets up. Walks away from the now endangered place and only returns when the signs of danger to her kittens has disappeared. This image resonates deeply. For I too am mammal, you too are mammal. We will need a place of safety to give my body the right cues to enable to uterus to push you into the world, to enable the cervix and pelvic floor muscles to stay relaxed rather than clenching and give you space, to focus the oxygen and blood on my abdomen rather than in my arms and legs so you have what you need to move down the birth canal. My mind can help, help by getting out of the way. Help by encountering the pain and sensations without fear, trusting them, trusting you who know much more about this than I. Dangerous because I cannot suffocate you, now or after you are born, with images of what I want you to become. You will be who you are, rife with eccentricities. You may not be like me. You may not be like your father. Sometimes I fear you will be deaf. I will still love you. As Alison Gopnik says, I will work to be your gardener, not your carpenter. I will create conditions for you to grow as you will, a being like me and unlike me. Will watch with surprise as you move in our space. I will not shape you in a pre-formed image, will not mold you and chisel you according to the formal cause (Aristotle) I’ve prefigured in my mind. No Silicon Valley Tiger Mom horror. I am sure it will pain me if for some reason your development is slower than others. I promise I will accept it with grace and do what I can to help you without loving you any less. As James Carse says, our relationship with one another will be an infinite game, not a finite game. I won’t block us from growing together in surprising ways because I feel I need to embody the role as mother. I will engage with you. Inhabit the world of your imagination, embrace it, welcome it as you teach me to recover poetry from prose. I will ask you why after you ask me why. Our conversation will never end, for at its heart will be the mysteries, the big things we never really understand. We’ll journey here together. Absurd because, as I’ve found in my last weeks working before I prepare for maternity leave, the reality of what the future brings is never what we planned. Situations arise. Challenges come upon us. I thought, at this point, I’d be coasting on the ideal of servant leadership, grappling with the recognition that I am not needed, preparing an organization for my impending departure with calm and grace and beauty. But the future wanted otherwise, as it seeps into my past. I am still working hard, solving hard problems, breathing day by day so my stress levels don’t impact you. Sometimes I feel like I’m in an Ionesco play laughing at what I thought this phase in my pregnancy would be like. In my best moments, I feel empowered. I think of you and how I want to be for you, and carry out my work with as much integrity as possible. I want to be strong for you. I want you to be able to watch your mother after you are born and smile, maybe not to your friends, but to yourself when no one is watching, because you have me as a role model. You have already given me strength. Already helped me become a better version of myself.

Your name is Felix. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know your gender, but ultimately am grateful that we learned it because it deepened our connection to you, made you more concrete. At first you were just the baby, just it. When writing about you I’d either use they as a gender neutral pronoun or hop between he and she. And then you became he. And then you became you, Felix, not just the baby inside me, not just a baby, but this particular, unique, singular being. Granted as you grow into yourself outside my womb, your gender identity may evolve. That’s fine. Perhaps this is a temporary you.

Others will meet you in just a few weeks’ time. I won’t meet you then. I already know you. I don’t consider the moment of birth as one of your coming into the world. You are here, currently part of me, not visible to others the way they are used to being with others. Your birth is like a phase shift. Like plasma, you will take on a new form. Breathe in a new way. Eat in a new way. Your stomach will grow. You will poop black tar for the first time. You will take in the world in a new way. You will teach me as you take in the world. I will do my best to teach you, but I think I have more to learn from you than you from me. Someday you might read this and feel embarrassed. I get that. I’d feel that way too.

The featured image is of my hand on my belly one week ago. I tried to write this post last week, but found I was revealing certain details I wasn’t comfortable sharing in this public forum. I stopped. I felt the pain of failure and wondered if I’d ever be able to write this post. Since then, I read Knaussgaard’s Spring, a novel where he addresses his 3-month-old daughter in the second person. It inspired me and give me the courage to write this post. The lyrical mode is protective, gives me the ability to reveal depth without disclosing too much of the particular.