another small flame
pregnancy brain, interruptions, coherence / incoherence
I’m deep in book-writing mode, the manuscript growing by the day, though it’s very much a draft: still rangy and unpolished, too wordy here, too vague there. The months are ticking away and most days I don’t know how I’ll finish the book I want to write. Of course I know that I will finish it, but often I wonder how. Where will those hours come from? And what will be the quality of the final product? Will it meet the expectations I’ve set for it?
There’s so much I hope for this book, so much I want to say, and I have to accept that the final product will be finite, the result of a nine-month writing sprint, plus another month of edits, all while working and parenting and carrying on with the rest of life’s mundanities and difficulties and celebrations. As I was typing this I remembered a phrase from the book Art & Fear: “vision is always ahead of execution” and that’s exactly how the process feels to me. My vision far outstrips my execution, at least in these early drafts.
Outside of the manuscript I’m not writing much personally, beyond little notes in my Notes app. Predictably, these notes have taken the form of a pregnancy diary because yes, I’m pregnant with our third child. A twist in the plot! I was not planning on growing a baby while also gestating this book—but here we are.
I type the weekly transformations of pregnancy into a running list in my Notes app, often while parked in the car, toddlers in the backseat. Or I write down a sentence in the kitchen as they cling to my legs asking for snacks, or while they tumble over each other like puppies on the floor. (Week six: Constantly nauseous, constantly thirsty. Dry and throbbing headache. Muscles achey and sore, like the flu. Gagging while brushing teeth. Week eight: I, the dessert queen, have no appetite for anything sweet. I’m flattened by fatigue, especially in late afternoon and evening. Took a 30-minute afternoon walk in the heat the other day and it nearly did me in.) This Notes app has once again become my journal, as it usually does in life’s more intense seasons. I’ve always been someone who records my days, but with less time to write by hand, this is the way I can snatch the details from the air and preserve them. Partial solutions, I tell myself. Better than writing at all.
Around week eleven, I showed the girls a digital rendering on my phone of what an eleven-week-old fetus looks like. Our baby looks like this, I told them. The size of a kiwi! and cupped my hand into a kiwi-sized shape. The four-year-old clapped a hand to her mouth and giggled. The two-year-old laughed too, but she wasn’t sure why. Sometimes we ask them what we should name the baby. The four-year-old makes up nonsense sounds or suggests the names of her friends from preschool. The two-year-old, after careful consideration, suggested “baby doll.”
As I spend time with Mary, and Marian art, and Marian poetry, I often come across paintings of the Annunciation in which Mary is reading. This is an artistic trope, to imagine the angel interrupting the young girl as she reads. In some paintings, Mary’s finger is placed on the page, still marking her spot. It’s like she’s not sure if she’s ready to close the book. This is the moment before she gives her yes, and this moment contains the possibility that she’ll turn away from the angel and back to the pages of her old life.
It’s hard to imagine anyone’s life upended quite as dramatically as hers, but still—I recognize the hesitation, the longing to return to the moment before, when she was just a girl reading.
This pregnancy is an already-beloved interruption, but an interruption all the same, unexpected enough to rearrange plans, logistics, work, and trips already booked. By the time the book is complete, I’ll have written the majority of it while pregnant—which is, of course, both fitting and highly inconvenient, especially during the slog of the first trimester. My friend told me, “I can’t wait for this to make you a more honest writer.” Meaning, there’s no romanticizing pregnancy now! At least not in those early months of flat-out fatigue and morning/afternoon/evening sickness.
As with other hinge points, I’ve had to ask myself: what will be the quality of my acceptance to this interruption? Will it be grudging or open-handed? So far it is both, depending on the day. But as weeks pass, my gratitude swells. I’ve been holding a line from poet Beth Ann Fennelly close at hand. She writes about discovering she’s pregnant, and feeling the awe of being given one more “small flame to cup in my hands.” I am cupping this flame as gently as I can.
“Pregnancy brain” is a patronizing joke, but it’s also true that, at five weeks pregnant, I took off my wedding rings and left them outside on a public bench. (I KNOW.) They’ve since been returned to me, thanks to a lovely gentleman and some frantic phone calls, but I still have absolutely no memory of taking them off. I regularly lose my train of thought mid-sentence. I’ll be talking to someone and the second half of my sentence just…evaporates.
I can hardly run, which is different from my first two pregnancies, where I could at least jog through the first few months. Now, my muscles feel wrung dry. My heart and lungs can’t keep up with the cardio demands. A Google search (“why is running first trimester impossible”) reminds me that I have four to five times the normal amount of blood swimming through my veins, blood that my heart is working overtime to push around, but GOODNESS. I miss the mental lift of running, its anti-anxiety magic. Instead I slam protein, go for walks, lift the lightest dumbbells possible, and fall into bed, leveled by this effort.
None of this is overly bothersome, this time around. The benefit of it being my third pregnancy is that I now trust the pattern of incoherence and coherence. I will come apart in some ways, and I will come back together, rearranged. Pregnancy asks for little deaths in exchange for the outsized gift of more life.
The feelings of incoherence remind me of this bit from Sara Fredman’s essay:
“But by now I have seen myself split and cohere and split again enough times that it has come to feel like an established identity. I have gone to pieces before and I have seen the pieces come back together, sometimes in surprisingly fertile ways.”
That’s it, exactly. I was incoherent throughout the first trimester. Now early in the second trimester, I’m beginning to cohere again. Then comes total incoherence after the birth! The upheaval and disorientation and total absorption of postpartum! Followed by a much longer return to a more fixed and recognizable version of myself. Still, I will return to this self and find her changed, often in richer and more complicated ways.
So here I am, writing this book and growing this new little life, and what I feel now, most of all, is profound gratitude. My body remembers, my hands resting on the bump (already very visible!) that conceals a small flame within.
I’ll leave you with this poem, one of the few things that I managed to write (by hand, no less) in the early weeks:
Six Weeks
Or: When Someone Mentions That Mythical Pregnancy Glow
Already, you are
burning inside me:
first star in the night,
silent flame, fleck of sand,
eyelash flicked from fingertip.
This sprawl mostly snuffs out
starlight, but there—
see it?—a rip, a seam,
a hole in the blanket
of black.
Burrow deeper, burn brighter, become
more real. Grow, abound, eat
my bones, gnaw my stomach
to an ache.
Take me over, be more
substantial than light
until one night
I imagine
I can feel the glow of you.
From My Commonplace Book
“These phenomena all point to a profound isolation at the heart of modern life, a pulling back from a shared, embodied, and committed life with other people. Birth, like democratic politics, challenges us with otherness, with the putting aside of oneself to make room for another person, and with the challenges of difference and plurality.”
Jennifer Banks, Natality
Read With Me
I’ve had a stretch of reading much-anticipated but ultimately disappointing novels, alas (most recently Vigil by George Saunders). The book I’ve loved most this year is Mothersalt, a collection of poetry by Mia Ayumi Malhotra. I’ve read it straight through several times, and now return to it weekly just to flip through and sit with one of the poems. The language is vivid, carnal, and luminescent, exactly how the pregnancy/birth/postpartum continuum can feel. Also, The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion (IYKYK) are bringing me deep delight, as well as the side chatter with friends who are also Emma fans.
ICYMI
A recent essay on birth as a thin place:
Thanks for reading with me—I’m so glad you’re here.
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Emma :,)
Beautiful as always ✨