Posted on by slb · 1 Comment

I Give Writers Their Wings.

If you’re following me via any social media outlets, you already know that I’m launching a brand new business this month–a consulting and coaching company for would-be, fledgling, and veteran writers.

I’m offering my expertise as a professor of writing to clients who’d like to learn how to better express themselves, either creatively or professionally, in writing. For those who lack confidence in their ability to communicate effectively through writing, I’ll provide motivation, inspiration, and consistent encouragement, to help them reach their writing goals.

Part-editor, part-instructor, part-mentor, I’m crafting private, individualized writing and goal-setting programs to each client, helping them to channel their passion and enthusiasm for self-expression into clean, professional, and/or marketable copy.

It’s a large undertaking and I’m launching it guerrilla-style, with a basic, informal promotional vlog, a frequently updated blog/website, and gradual dissemination of details about company offerings. You can expect a few updates about my business-building process here at my personal blog, but for the most comprehensive information, follow the company on Twitter, join our Facebook page, and visit the official site.

I’m proud to present to you: Wings to Write Consultation & Coaching, where we give writers their wings.

Posted on by slb · 1 Comment

Seeing You This Way.

This afternoon, I stumbled across one of the many snatches of writing I’ve started, then abandoned. This one’s actually pretty recent. I started it the first week of the new year. I don’t know; I feel like it has potential. But I’m interested in your feedback, so please leave some.

* * *

Mama was never right after Minnie Ripperton died. For months, she walked around the house, grabbin’ at her bosoms like a slaver. “C’mere, girl,” she’d call to me or one-a my sisters, pressin’ our palms to the orb of her breast,”That feel like a lump to you?”

After she got over gropin’ herself, she took to callin’ us in from outside early and holdin’ us to her chest, goin’, “Mm, mm, mmm,” all the time. She wore baby’s breath in her hair for a while, which was nice, but then she took and burned up all her batik dresses. I was ‘specially sad to see those go. Always figured I’d inherit at least one of ’em; then I could go floatin’ around like a goddess from Cape Town.

Sometime, in the kitchen, while the water ran, Mama would purse her lips and, with suds up to her elbows, she’d mumble down in her throat, where she thought no one could hear:”I’m gon’ have to get me a white man….” Even if it meant dyin’ too young to see her babies grown, Mama wanted to be Minnie.

She was still mournin’ after she turned 50 and Maya Rudolph had been on Saturday Night Live for years. She’d watch her impersonate Whitney or Oprah and still say, “That poor, poor child….”

Mama was prettier’n Minnie, with her heart-shaped booty and her French roast skin and them itty-bitty cornrows curvin’ up ’round her head like tiny ropes turnin’ double-dutch. Whenever she went out with a man, which wasn’t as often as the neighbors had each other thinkin’, we used to sneak into her bedroom and rub her tubes of Desert Plum and Tinted Ruby lipstick ‘cross our faces so hard they crumbled, then steal splats of her cold cream and splashes of all her eau de toilettes. We were greasy and glad to be there, in that over-warm shotgun house with the ebony statues of naked men and women huggin’. Just us three girls and our ever-mournin’ Mama.

We didn’t think nothin’ of it, all those years she spent wonderin’ if modern advances coulda saved Minnie Ripperton. Mama was just like that; she held on too long. She didn’t see no harm in it, and I suppose there wasn’t none. But over the years, she lost many a friend and lover to clingin’. It was just too hard for her to accept people change.

“I’m here, Mama.”

Her skin was clammy as ever. Cold in the fingers like she was already half-gone, and she was. She most certainly was.

Posted on by slb

Let Aretha Be Your Soundtrack

cross-posted from PostBourgie:

Aretha Franklin, circa 1960s

Last week, a friend of my grandmother’s passed away, after a brief struggle with pancreatic cancer. She was chic, impeccably styled and coiffed, well-traveled, well-read, highly educated, and within three months of her diagnosis, she was gone.

For my grandmother, the loss is primary. Her memories with Miss Edna span decades. And in her late 60s, losing lifelong acquaintances is becoming an all too frequent an occurrence.

For my mother, the loss is secondary. She grew up admiring Miss Edna’s poise and the kind way she had of treating young people as equals. She spoke wistfully of her travels and achievements and, in some ways, perhaps, wanted to be quite like her.

For me, the loss is tertiary. What I remember most about Miss Edna is having to hide when she came to visit, because whenever she did, her beloved poodle, Pierre, was in tow, and I was terrified of him. When I was older, though, I wanted her courage. She’d gone after a PhD in middle-age, traveled to Africa alone and lived there for quite some time. She’d raised a son. She’d worked at Morgan State, Baltimore’s favored HBCU. I wanted an inkling of whatever motivated her.

In some ways, our relationships to Miss Edna mirror our relationships to Aretha Franklin.

Nana remembers her first as a dewy ingenue, singing solos with her Daddy’s choir, then as a source of wonder, when at just 19, she could sing heartache that resonated with the long-grown.

Mom remembers her “Soul Train” years: afros and and maxi-dresses and Rock Steady. She remembers breaking up and feeling like the world would stop if an Aretha record did. She played “Till You Come Back to Me” until the vinyl wore thin.

My earliest memories of Aretha are the iconography. I remember her performing, “Think” in a waitress uniform in The Blues Brothers. I remember the fun of spelling (and misspelling) “Respect” on the playground and hearing her cover of “Natural Woman” for the first time on a bra commercial.

But as in the case of Miss Edna, we all, in our own way, claim Aretha as ours. And news of her illness isn’t filtered through our gradations of acquaintance with her. The worry isn’t watered down through the generations.

Whether you heard her first in the 50s or just this week, you likely feel a kinship.

Aretha is your all-knowing aunt. The one who’s been everywhere and always has money and stays telling your mama what to do. The one who’s unlucky in love, but still sings tales of hopeless romance at your parents’ anniversary parties. She’s all brass, strutting into every room with her back straight and shoulders square, no matter how much weight they’re carrying, always wearing something that makes the crowd whoop, “Ooooh, girl! No, you didn’t… She’s known great loss and that glint of loneliness you think you see in her eyes isn’t imagined. And you wish you could tell her how much she’s adored. And you wish you could tell her to take better care of herself. And you wish you knew an accurate count of the women who emulate her.

But she wouldn’t entirely believe you.

You so desperately want her to, especially now, when her time here with you might be more limited, especially now, when you know so well what cancer is capable of.

At its most malevolent, cancer robs. It takes and it takes and it takes; it is insatiable. And you hate to hear that anyone’s body is being pillaged by it.

Hope, if you hope. Pray, if you pray. Wait.

And now, as ever, let Aretha be your soundtrack.

Posted on by slb

Post-Natal Premonition.

1.

I’d waited, as all most women in my position do, for you to want me again. It wasn’t as long a wait as I imagined.

I’d thought Story would be elementary-aged, perhaps embarking on her first role in a school production. She’d be playing a hummingbird or a cornflower, wearing a costume I paid someone else to design. You’d be in the audience, in a seat right next to mine, waiting for some other child to deliver his single line so you could start whispering a semi-rehearsed spiel about how “good” we once were together and how we owed it to our daughter to make another go of it. We’d applaud at the appropriate moments: when a honeybee curtsied,when a pilgrim cracked a joke. And we’d spend the downtime hissing protests.

“We don’t work,” I’d murmur with an eye to the stage. “This is not something we need to ‘try again’ to confirm.”

“We’ve never tried it with a kid,” you’d counter.

And I’d guffaw, inappropriately, then field the death glares from camcording parents in the surrounding rows.

After the play, we’d go to dinner, someplace where kids eat for free on Tuesdays and anthropomorphized ice cream sundaes are served. You’d try to hold my hand across the table, and I’d let you, because recoiling the way I’d want to would send the wrong message to Story.

But I’d be thinking. Even then, I’ll be thinking. Of now, of a year ago, of the strange callousness that possessed you for the first two trimesters I carried our child, of the pervasive, intergenerational expectation that I pretend that callousness was a figment of my imagination.

This sentiment rolls around my mind, on occasion, like a ululation from the ancestors: Become an amnesiac, for the sake of your child. We have.

It’s hard to take heed to such an admonition. Bruises inflicted on the ego don’t heal as easily as those that stain the skin. And a heart stitched hastily will keyloid.

I am not finished stitching my heart. The thread is thin, the tissue it’s sealing mercurial.

I cannot promise you an amnesiac’s forgiveness. I cannot assure you of more than yeoman’s love. What I’m capable of, with you, is a care that’s efficient and serviceable, is a tenderness contingent on pleasant memory.

2.

You always want a hug at the baggage claim. That restarted when you arrived for Story’s delivery. It continued when you met her for the first time at a month old. And here you were again, with an easy grin and open arms. I didn’t understand it; between us, an embrace seems a gesture of foregone intimacy. It’s too easy, hugging, like little has changed.

Even so, I embraced you without refusal or protest. But I did it limply, pulling away as quickly as I leaned in and taking off toward the car a half-foot ahead of you.

I would do the leaving here.

Within a half-hour of your arrival, we were chuckling at my precarious night-driving ability, eating Frostys in a Wendy’s parking lot.

“I miss you,” you exhaled, with a kind of relief and wistfulness that tends to inspire a kiss.

Immediate gratification: you missing me is an admission of my importance to you, is a concession of significant regret. The way things are is not the way things should be. This is enough, I suppose. But it isn’t.

I avoided returning the sentiment. Just absorb it, I told myself. Don’t cave and confess that you miss him, too. Resist the urge to be smug. Refrain from being difficult and saying, ‘You should.’

3.

It’s tempting. We are parents; we have power. We could erase all our acrimony. We could pretend that the only parts of last year worth remembering are our apologies and our laughter and the healthy birth of our daughter.

I could delete all my pregnancy essays and replace them with lovely fables that reconstruct your absence as something noble, inconsequential, but necessary.

We could rebuild reality, tell her this was our plan all along: bicoastal life, no marriage, co-parenting in five-day stints.

She would believe us, at first. She’d believe us if we kissed, held hands, embraced. If we all played Wii together on weekends, if she saw us whisper intimately at recitals, she’d believe.

And then one day, she wouldn’t.

Our carriage is only so convincing. The seams will begin to show. The basic incompatibilities we’ve both bemoaned would rise like buoys, despite our best efforts to sink them.

At four months old, our daughter stares. Her stare is long and unnerving; she doesn’t blink. She looks, until she’s decided something. Only then will she glance away.

She will not outgrow this, not with us. She’ll be this way, lifelong. She will look back and forth between us, until she’s confirmed a suspicion: you two could’ve been happier. You could’ve searched for a more settling love, instead of settling for a love that underwhelmed. You should’ve been more specific about what you needed; perhaps then you would’ve learned to fulfill each other’s needs—or else, it would’ve been easier to let each other go, rather than running each other through a wringer of reevaluation. There was nothing to reassess. I will always love you both, regardless of your relationship to one another. You needn’t have emitted smoke or erected mirrors for me.

Posted on by slb · 2 Comments

Remain Calm.

Story cries out in her sleep. This is not uncommon. The cry is usually singular, urgent, distressed. Her face contorts, then settles back into sereneness. I rub her back and wait for the eventual ebb, the customary return to cherubic tranquility. Instead, her wail persists. I scoop her up, still expecting the calm that had marked her sleep, just moments before, to return.

This is one of the acts at which I am beginning to feel efficient: scooping my daughter up before she’s fully awake and rocking or bouncing her back into slumber. My success ratio is one to three; I’m proud of it. She still isn’t as comfortable in my arms as she is in my mother’s. She’s with her for twice as many hours a day as she is with me and has been since she was four weeks old.

But at nearly four months, we’re working ourselves toward a rhythm. I hold her securely now; she no longer squirms and flails until I hand her to her Ganny. Now, as a gesture of burgeoning trust, she wraps her tiny arms around my neck and rears back to take in our surroundings, like my shoulders are the railing on an open-top tour bus.

This is different. Walking makes things worse; she is beside herself, her lungs pushing gusts up through her throat, out of her quavering mouth. Her arms are striking out at air; her body racks with sobs. As is usually the case when she becomes this inconsolable, I sit with her and look at her face for something readable.

This, too, yields me moderate success. A certain sigh or shriek or grimace can be quickly diagnosed: Milk. Comfort. Restlessness. She never cries because of soiled diapers.

I’m still learning her. Tonight, there’s little to discern. She’s reached the point where she doesn’t bother to look at me; she knows I don’t know what to do. This is a moment that immediately follows the stage of the plaintive stare: as I’m trying to read her, she’s trying to convey her level of distress to me. This is a fleeting opportunity, already lost to us tonight. She takes the bottle I offer, but only for three sips. The milk on her tongue lends a gurgling effect to her protests.

I look to my mother with questioning eyes. She tells me that Story is sleepy. She’s frustrated that she’s woken herself up and, by sitting her upright on my knee, she thinks I have no intention of helping her back to sleep. The idea infuriates her. As I watch my mother analyze intensity of the cry, it stops short. My head swivels back to the girl in my arms, and her face is frozen, her mouth agape, her eyes wide and brimming with terror. I turn back to my mom, my own eyes alight in terror.

She closes the space between us in a flash and claps her hand on the baby’s back until she begins to cry again. I’m shaken.

“She’s done that with me before,” Mom says, reassuringly.

I remember her telling me about it. It was weeks ago. I hadn’t thought much of it; by the time I was home from work, any evidence of a breath-halting episode has erased itself from my cooing daughter’s face.

Now, I’m acutely aware of how critical a two-second cessation of shrieking can be.

In my relief at the sound of her hollers, a nervous chuckle slips from my throat. “I don’t like that,” I whispered.

Mom begins to walk her. My panic abates. My chest loosens. As usual, my mother has everything under control. With newly empty arms, I sit in a living room chair, pondering (as I often do) this curious conflation of roles: in many ways, my mother seems mother to us both. In many ways, Story seems more her second-generation daughter than her granddaughter. Mom would disagree with this—and has, whenever I’ve brought it up. Of course Story has an inimitable relationship with me; we’ve been together nine months longer than she’s been with anyone else. But, occasionally, it’s difficult for me to believe this.

Our relationships to one another continually defy my expectations. I knew I’d be inexperienced. I figured she’d be able to sense my situational uncertainty. But I thought we’d be bonded by biological imperative. I thought the nine months might count for more, that my touch and my scent and my voice would compel her to prefer me over anyone, always. Instead, she honors time and presence more than biology. While I’ve been pacing back and forth in college classrooms, pining for her, she’s been nestling and cooing and smiling and sleeping in the soft and warm blanket of my mother’s body.

Of course, I’m grateful for this. Without Mom, Story would spend much of her day with strangers, in a room that smells of disinfectant and damp diapers, listening to the plaintive wails of other infants, bonding to someone I barely knew. But part of me longs for preference, that parlor trick most new mothers have mastered by the fourth month: an immediate, contented silence when she’s passed into my arms.

Story’s still screaming, but this is normal for 7 pm. Her witching hours begin at 5 pm and last until whenever she drifts off for the night, typically between 9 and 10:30 pm. Mom has taken her into the kitchen. She is bouncing her, and I’m waiting. When she’s soothed, we’ll begin the slow work of putting her back to sleep. Dim lighting, a muted and flickering television, perhaps soft hums and whispers, swaying while walking from room to room.

The shrieks intensify. They are shrill and nearing a fever pitch. Then: silence.

“In the name of Jesus!” my mother screams, piercingly.

I rush to the kitchen. Story’s body, rigid and eerily quiet, is tilted toward the floor. Mom is clapping her hand against Story’s back; hollowness echoes.

Two interminable seconds pass before Story’s cries consume the stillness of the apartment. Her face is flushed and terrified. So are ours.

I’m groping for a useful response to this scene.

“Call the pediatrician,” Mom says.

I do, knowing that I’ll have to go through a maddening process of reporting details to an operator, who’ll then hang up and relay them to an on-call nurse. The nurse will call back, repeating the details I’ve already explained, then waiting for me to confirm their accuracy. I worry over the length of this process.

In the darkness of our bedroom, I pace at the foot of the bed and, with sweaty palms, pounding heart, and halting speech, I explain to the woman on the other end of the line that my three-and-a-half-month-old daughter has been crying so hysterically, she’s repeatedly lost her breath.

Tears slide down my cheeks. I’m alarmed at their paucity.

“A nurse should be reporting in nineteen minutes,” she says. “Would you like to speak to someone earlier?”

I stammer. “I’d… like to. Yes.”

“Okay,” she says and I can practically hear the shrug in her voice. “We’ll have someone call you soon.”

Story has stopped breathing twice in less than ten minutes; nineteen seem impossible.

I begin to contemplate 911. If it happens again, I think, even if invoking the name of Jesus and a vigorous slap tot he back still revives her, this is a legitimate emergency. We have no way of knowing if the next time will be the last. We have no idea what’s happening or what’s causing it.

“In the name of Jesus!” Mom cries from the kitchen.

I dart out. The sight’s still the same: Story’s stiffened body tilted downward. Vigorous slaps to the back, her face a frightened mask.

My daughter could be dying. Right now. Right now, as I stare at my mother, who’s managing to keep clutching a thread of composure as she waits for Story’s cry to return.

I don’t believe she’s dying. It is not a belief I can process. I’ve had practice. Long before she was born, there were discussions about whether or not she would live. I decided then that, inasmuch as I had any control over it, she would. I decided that, inasmuch as I didn’t, she would. And she did. And she is. And she will.

Still.

“Should I call 911?!” I yell stupidly, over the sound of Story’s freshly restored hollers. Why can’t I just follow instinct? Why do I need a second opinion?

“Yes,” my mother confirms.

I dial. This is the first time in life that I’ve had to.

Dispatch answers; I repeat details: hysteria; silence; no breath. She initiates a three-way call with an emergency responder. He can hear my daughter in the background.

“If she’s crying that loud, it’s a good sign,” he says. “She’s getting enough oxygen. But we’ll send someone out to check her.”

Things settle significantly in the ten or so minutes between the call and the arrival of the EMTs. I talk to the on-call nurse, who tells me that, sometimes babies get hysterical and they can’t catch their breath, but it isn’t serious. “Is there something that you want me to do…?” she asks. I answer no, because I can’t think of a caustic retort.

While I’ve been making calls, Mom has calmed my daughter. Suddenly, I no longer care who she prefers; I’m just glad to have emerged from the depths of dark possibilities.

I think of the future. I think of her as old enough to tell knock-knock jokes and climb into my lap on her own. I think of tea parties featuring confections she’s prepared in her EasyBake oven and whispering secrets by flashlight.

*  *  *

In subsequent days, we’ll know more. We will know that this may’ve been a breath-holding spell: an involuntary cessation of breath, triggered by anger, frustration, or unpleasant surprise, occurring in less than five percent on all children, possibly recurrent, through age 2, when over 80% of those affected age out of it. We know that, whatever the trigger, the multiple events mostly likely had something to do with her fear at losing her breath and her alarm at being so vigorously revived.

We know now that Story can read our worry. We must mold ourselves masks of tranquility.

Story will be reticent and worried, particularly in the evenings. She will look around, wide-eyed and uncertain; she will calm herself when she feels an escalation in her cry. She’s intuitive; she knows that something critical happened to her and senses it had something to do with her frustration.

But she’s returning to herself. And so are we.

Posted on by slb · 5 Comments

Sloughing

for Story

1.

–And after you, the seep:
a bloody comet’s tail, eight weeks,
arachnid crawl
of clots, the slow
retraction of a slackened core.
A self unrecognized, a shell
awash on foreign shores.

2.

Daughter,
you have made me something
akin to Lot’s wife: forewarned
to shuffle off
regret, to slough
the longing
for abandoned lands.

3.

Love is a dermis, earned
by the measured erosion
of ego, a molting of
parsimony, a flaking of
our sin. For you,
I will slough all
my skins; I love
beneath the bone.

Posted on by slb · 4 Comments

Rappelling.

We are no strangers to stumbling. We Brown women, we world-weary grande dames, we know the impact of a fall. Falls slow us, but rarely cripple. They hurt us, but seldom maim.

I can see, in the way you cry, in the way you strike out at faces and necks and scratch at the hands that hold you: in this life, you will trip, but you will not be pushed. You may fall, but not without first fighting to regain your balance.

You are already protesting injustices: the scarcity of milk or the slowness of its delivery; being repositioned in a lap or on a chest without your expressed consent. You know an infant’s rights; you will not stand for their violation.

It’s inspiring, your tenacity. You contend for the things you desire, and you already have such keen understanding of what those things are.

If you were older and someone other than my child, I might envy this in you—especially now, when it’s so difficult to discern not only what I want, but what will be best for both of us. You are direct and unafraid to be disruptive, unencumbered by the ballast of decorum.

These are values critical to writers—and were I the writer I set out to be as a child—the career kind, whose work yielded all the income necessary to live—I could afford to embrace such values.

But years ago, I fell. Into routine, into the maze of middle-class trappings, into the minutiae of an artless kind of world. I decided to hedge my bets. I’d write, sure, because I’d always wanted to, but in case it didn’t pay or I never got published, I’d seek out a sound profession. I’d teach, I told myself, for stability—and writing would fill all the excess spaces.

I did not contend for my deepest desire. And for many years, I watched compatriots succeed where I’d settled and publish via channels I’d passed up.

Even after I realized I’d always be better at writing than explaining how to write, I didn’t contend. I didn’t rail against practicality. I didn’t bristle at stability. I didn’t innovate or abandon convention.

I got older. I acquired the accouterments of independent living: an apartment, a car, and disposable income—and regardless of how little I loved my day job, I couldn’t bring myself to give it up in favor of unemployment, rejection letters and a room in a home that belonged to someone else.

And then you were born, bringing with you myriad ironies, this one being chief among them: the dream I deferred before I had a child to support is the dream I’ll need to pursue in order to support my child.

Unbeknown to you, we are at a crossroad. I can no longer afford to teach. The “stable” career I selected is among the most precarious of all.

Suddenly, I must reclaim what I’ve long suppressed, the part of myself I’m so proud of in you.

Posted on by slb · 3 Comments

The New Normal.

By now, you’d intended to have explanations—for the life you lead and the home you’ve made and the diminishing balance in your bank accounts, for your student loan debt and your temporary inability to afford clothing that fits or a haircut. She does not need these now, but you do. Lord, how you need to be able to explain things to yourself.

You have no time to remember.

Your life has become a carousel–there’s a bobbing electric breast pump; four escalating stacks of ungraded essays; an apparition of DJ Lance Rock flailing his orange-clad arms; and the sound of your daughter’s breathtaking wail as a  soundtrack.

You don’t get much time to settle into her. Four days a week, you work, which means you’re gone no fewer than five hours and, often, closer to eight. When you’re home, you are still at work, stealing the attention she rightfully deserves, reassigning it to students and sleep. You feel guilty that your mother is with her all day and also helps with her at night. You worry that there’s prolonged stasis, that the arrival of your maternal instinct has been  waylaid by your work and the convenience of round-the-clock child care.

You are never enough, alone with her. You are never alone with her enough.

She is growing. You swear that her oft-uttered coo, “ah-pool,” is “apple.” She also says “up” rather clearly, when you do*. You resist the urge to proclaim her a genius, though you secretly believe it in your heart.

You will tell her she talked at two months.

But what more will you be able to tell her, if she asks, of her first quarter of life?

Mommy was tired. She was barely holding onto lucidity at her classroom lecterns. She yawned as she held you at home. She grumbled whenever she rose to pump milk at 3 in the morning. Her chest cramped every time she checked the fridge and saw that you were just one bottle away from hunger, that the ten bags once crowded into the freezer are down to two, that your appetite is growing quicker than her breasts’ supply.

You miss her. She’s holding your gaze so much longer now. Her crying is no longer constant. And though she’s only been with you 75 days, you feel like she’s been here forever. You feel like, years from now, she could be your dearest friend.

You rush home to smell her hair, to touch her skin, to try to elicit her smile. This last thing has recently become easier, for your serious daughter now anticipates your ritual of making your fingers her mobile, of widening your eyes when she coos.

She knows your face, your expressions, the varying lilts of your voice. You’re learning her sense of humor. You’re learning what keeps her from crying.

It’s the best education you’ve ever had.

*Once, every tenth time I say it or so. 😉

Posted on by slb · 2 Comments

Non-Stress Test.

In a room marked “Triage,” on the Labor & Delivery floor at St. Mary’s, the nurse led us to an alcove, behind a blue curtain.

I was told to sit in a wide leather chair, the color of caramel, and asked a number of questions in quick succession: why did your doctor send you here? What is your height? What was your pre-baby weight? What is your current weight? Allergies? Medications? Due date? Have you felt the baby move today? I answered them all as quickly as they were asked.

I was there as a precaution. My obstetrician sent me, immediately following my prenatal appointment, where she diagnosed me with gestational hypertension and ticked off a litany of possible outcomes and procedures I might need to undergo in the two weeks left until my due date. She’d tossed around terms like induction (“which could take days, if your body’s resistant to the process…”) and “brewing” and preeclampsia. She also mentioned that, because I was measuring one centimeter smaller than I should, she was ordering an ultrasound in nine days—that is, of course, if I don’t go into labor before then.

There were other instructions: go to the lab and have blood drawn each week. Head over to Labor & Delivery twice a week, starting that day, for exactly the exercise this nurse was prepping me for.

I kept most of this to myself, limiting my discussion with the nurse to one-word responses. Neither of us seemed game for small talk.

I was too busy imagining labor and how most of it would occur on this very floor—sooner than later, if results were unfavorable here.

She took my blood pressure with an electric machine and as the cuff loosened around my biceps, we read the red numbers together: 121/81. “Well, it’s normal now,” she said, wryly. “I’ve cured you.”

I smiled, as she placed two tranducers on my abdomen: one to monitor your heart, the other to seek out contractions. A wide white band of elastic held each in place, as the nurse reclined the chair, elevating my feet.

She told me she’d return in twenty minutes, before ducking out and into the larger ward.

I stared at the machine to our left, with its running scroll of paper filled with crimson grids and crinkling black lines, searching for drastic dips or spikes, as though I could decipher their meaning. The orange numbers on the LCD screen fluctuated as a heart icon flickered, then disappeared beside them. I placed a hand just under my diaphragm and nestled further into the comfortable chair, basking in the room’s sterile chill. The coldness provided quite the contrast from the impermeable heat of my apartment, with its constantly, yet futilely whirring box fans. I think we were both giddy at the cooling-off of my skin.

Behind another curtain, a different nurse began to prep another mother. This was her third child. Her blood pressure was quite a bit higher than mine, but she seemed in rather good spirits.

After her test began, I realized that the sound of your heartbeat was indistinguishable from the sound of her child’s. The only distinctions were the scratchy asides of your movements, which were frequent and amusingly frisky.

I’ll miss that when you’re born, all the time I spend guessing at what your jutting appendages are saying about your personality and all the calm I feel when I touch any bit of skin and you push up from underneath it.

Non-stress tests, as my obstetrician explained them, are to ensure that the baby’s still happy in her environment. “If you don’t pass the test, we may have to get her out of there.”

The idea that my uterus could become a menacing place is alarming. But what’s worse is the knowledge that there are no non-stress tests that can so concretely gauge your happiness on the outside of my womb.

I will have to tend to that myself.

At the end of twenty minutes, the nurse returned to tell me things looked fine. She unhooked the elastic band, removed the sensors, and handed me a napkin to wipe away gel.

For now, my warm, round body’s still a happy place for you. For now, I’ll savor the sensors and squiggles, reassuring me you’re well.

Posted on by slb · 2 Comments

A Fiction Attempt.

Isla

That was the only night I ever spent in Nathan’s arms. I gave the full heft of myself to that embrace, just went limp and made my spine an outward arc so I could gaze up at the ceiling. Never once felt in danger of falling.

Spanish moss dangled from the rafters; the whole club felt like a jungle aflutter with beastly gyration. The band, who’d come down all the way from  Chicago, played with a fervor their cool, smirking faces didn’t betray. Their congas fed pulsations to the floorboards. We felt the quaking rise up through our feet. That band and the sweat and the waggle of hips only inches apart, on every side, sent my husband and the two noisy babies I’d borne him deep into the back of my mind—not long and not for good, just for seconds at a time. Glorious, airy seconds at a time.

Now and then, Nathan leaned forward and let his lips graze my collarbone. Each time, my face flushed, cheeks aflame, and heat prickled every pore on my body. I’d recall his grin and how hungry it was, when he first spotted me in my black dress, looking for all the world like a sexy, sequined fish, the way the skirt hugged my hips and bloomed out at the knee. It was a risk, waiting for him out front, my hand poised to open the latch on our gate, before the sun even had a chance to go all the way down. But I was alone, for once—completely alone. I couldn’t help but make the best of it.

He hadn’t waited for the gate to open. He hopped it, eyes tearing straight down from my marceled hair to my scarlet toenails, and pulled us down, practically to our knees, to steal a kiss beyond the prying eyes of my neighbors. It was the only time we ever kissed square on the mouth. He told me, lifting me back to my feet, that I smelled like lilacs and home. He smelled like talcum and conquest. But I kept that to myself.

On the dance floor, what little there was of it, folks were watching. But folks were always watching, then holding forth on all the things they’d watched, days later, huddled over washbasins or whiling away a few minutes in line at the butcher’s.

I knew my name would burn up the telephone wires come the next day, but I let Nate kiss on me that night, every time he tried. I couldn’t help it. His lips had this way of humming a song against my skin, and all I wanted to do was hear it.

I should’ve known something wicked was coming. My Grandma Jo always used to say: you lose your shame, your death ain’t far behind.