Posted on by slb

In the Land of At Least.

Twice I turned my back on you. I fell flat on my face but didn’t lose. – Yukimi Nagano

1.

This love is a leaden zephyr: it will always sink but at least it was made in the image of that which can fly.

Long ago, I gave you my heart in a kite. You wound the string around your neck: a floating pendant, an ascot that sailed against sky. And we walked together, two children in grown-up bodies: a girl in an eyelet dirndl, a boy in a sport coat and knickers. Playing school, playing doctor, playing house. You always wanted to be the teacher, always wanted to be the patient, always wanted to be head of the home. But at least I was never made to wear the dunce cap. At least I was not stricken with incurable disease. At least the home that we built was made of air.

Before long you began your proposals. The first was framed as algebra: if I asked you to marry me on your birthday, what is the probability you would wed me before gaining ground in your career?

n is the number of times you have asked for a compromise that solely benefits you. x is the absence of rings.

Solve for y.

You said my heart-kite became a noose. At least you didn’t die.

The bloom has long since fled this bouquet. It will shrivel like a cancerous thing. Its petals, if pulled, will portend our eventual fate: he loves me; he loves me; he loves me not. But at least you chose each flower yourself, at least you picked them from a garden you tend, at least you did not leave our outcome in the cold and scarred hands of a florist.

2.

These inner children have grown. The girl has turned in her dirndl for a rough-hewn maternity smock. The boy is donning track shoes. They are every bit as mature as we’ve always looked and as wary as aging requires. When the sedatives wear thin in her blood and she raises her heels to push, his hands are not the ones that act as human stirrups, his eyes not the first to be laid on their child. He is not there at all; he has left for a gig. But at least he is called when the infant wriggles free. At least he whispers her name through a telephone held to her ear. At least he flies back one month later, bearing diapers, sleepy midnights, and money.

At least when he arrived, she did not say: this is the least you can do. The literal least.

3.

This family is a disassembled mosaic: three shards of brightly colored glass, devoid of base and of hold. We float on the surface of waters, carried east and west on winds we cannot control. You have slit my sails and I have shredded yours; at least we are not without oars. At least we have not been submerged. At least we’re not lost to each other, in fog. At least you do not question the resemblance of the little shard to you. At least, should we ever find meet driftwood and fasten, we will make something beautiful, to be ogled, critiqued, and admired. At least on occasion, you roll a tiny scrit into a bottle. It says: my decision to remain on this water alone has little to do with whether we’ll wind up together. It says: this drifting will not always be, at least.

I know better than to read this as a promise. I have learned how to interpret you, at least.

Posted on by slb

He Ain’t Heavy.

We have lowered our expectation, brothers, have decided that it is no longer necessary that you riot for us, that you ride elephants into Rome, that you heft the whole world on your back, attack unjust law, and convince wigged, impossibly white institutions to come up off a few bucks and revitalize our job market.

It was never a weight you bore alone, but we know it felt that way. We are here with you, always, though often we wonder if that’s been enough.

While we peeled open boll upon boll of rough cotton, wrested weevils from your hair in the night, we listened to the stones settling inside you, the flinty resolve with which you plotted our flight. Yes, we sighed within ourselves, we will slither through these fresh trenches with you, make second skin of the mud to deter the hounds. We will run with you and ward off your fright. We will keep your abiku at bay.

What we could not account for were the voices, trapped in the recesses of your minds for no other purpose than to iterate failure and to assure you that any victory can be stripped away far more easily that it was earned.

Your freedom papers, your driver’s licenses, your permanent records, your rap sheets can be falsified, can be manipulated, can vanish.

You are never entirely your own.

We understand now what we didn’t in centuries past: for some, the voices cannot be quieted. Many will die before knowing their courage was not for naught, and others still will squander the gains our ancestors’ courage provided.

So you needn’t worry about the impossibility of meeting our astronomical expectations, brothers. They have evolved. They are scaled back. They have become more reasonable.

We expect you to be present now and not preternatural. And we hope that, even if you cannot keep wrists and waists and ankles free of chains, you can keep them away from your mind. No longer do we expect you to do this alone. We have been made aware of the delicateness of the brain’s constitution and will no longer rely on our myths to explain away or exorcise an imbalance. We expect that you will demand a diagnosis when your sanity suddenly becomes elusive and agree to ingest the medication that will manage your fear, your depression, your rage, if prescribed.

Brothers, you were born to battle minotaurs; there has never been a choice. We gave birth to you inside this labyrinth that neither of us has constructed and because we have witnessed your strength, we’ve expected you to conquer every foe. We’ve wanted you marching and preaching of mountaintops; brandishing rifles while invoking the Second Amendment; and eventually leading our nation.

We have not always remembered to count the costs, have not considered that, in this unending fight, your minds might be counted among the collateral damage.

We are not at war with you brothers, not fixed at an opposite pole from which we berate you and proclaim to be better at all that you do. We do not want your burdens; we have our own.

But what we have always been willing to be are Ariadnes to your Theseuses. We are always willing to open our hand to you and offer the thread that can guide you toward a harbor, a home.

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How Loss Yields Legacy.

Your old men shall dream dreams; your young men shall see visions.                                            — Joel 2: 28b

There is a dividing line in the lives of the young. On one side is an insular existence, where the elders live and govern, taking us into the folds of their ancient skirts, where they will knit us a history. There, we are fed and told who we are. They distill from their founts of wisdom a pablum we are capable of consuming. We do not understand what we have. We cannot quite fathom how fortunate we are, to hold them, to hear them, to trace their veins with our tiny fingers. But we are no so foolish that we entirely take them for granted. We understand their arms as the haven into which we can run when our parents’ discipline feels more alienating than effectual. We understand their stores as confections to relish, their thunderous or rasping voices a theatre around which we sit riveted.

On this side, they are hearty and hale. Even if their spines curve like parentheses or their fingers are gnarled as twine, we do not note these conditions as anything more than accents embellishing their character. We do not recognize them as lashes left by the cruelest of all overseers: Time.

Cross the line, and your elders are no more. Depending on what you believe, they hover above your life, acting as guardians, or they sit at the sidelines, watching with disappointment or wonderment. Perhaps they are praying. Perhaps their prayers are preventive, and you will never know what calamities you’ve sidestepped as the result of their intercession.

What is more certain is the impact of their absence. Gone are the raised and winding veins, gone the comforting feel of the blood coursing through them. Absent also are the courageous creases, deepened through decades spent awaiting abolition, petitioning for voters’ rights, sharecropping too-small parcels of land; losing homes and children and lovers; then yielding to the technological advances that stole their jobs and divided the attentions of their once-rapt grandchildren.

You miss their certainty, their Gilbraltar-like presence. Without them, your borders feel unprotected. They carried the world so artfully, you were never aware of its weight.

Now, there are days when you can barely square your shoulders. And you are finally beginning to understand.

There are a few years yet, before we return to the other side and become for our children’s children what our parents’ parents were for us. Our work must be thorough and quick. We are left to decipher the glyphs and mosaics stitched into the story quilts they left us. We must apply their epiphanies to the balance of our days, embellishing and righting and multiplying as we see fit.

Many days, we’ll fall short of their marks. We will not all find ourselves at the forefront of revolution. We may not wind up scholars of law or titans of art and of industry.

We may merely be the mint-givers, the switch-wielders, the pipe-smokers rocking under the moonlight on our back porches. It is possible that our most significant impartation will be the secret to baking a perfect pound cake.

We are just as significant. They will need us all.

This is the meaning of legacy.

Posted on by slb

Futile Devices.

It’s been a long, long time
Since I’ve memorized your face
It’s been four hours now
Since I’ve wandered through your place
And when I sleep on your couch
I feel very safe
And when you bring the blankets
I cover up my face

I do
Love you

The futon is broken. A week before you came, I plopped down on it, with our daughter in my arms, and with resignation, a circuit of metal springs slumped under us. If you bend down, you can see the most fed up of the few; it’s jutting near the ground, a smattering of foam entrails circling it.

I apologize for this before you arrive, though I know this is not the most uncomfortable you will have ever been. It is not the most uncomfortable that you will ever be. But I still offer this explanation, with no small amount of chagrin.

I am amazed that I’ve retained, after everything, the habit of treating your every visit like an audition. The role is constantly being rewritten, but my performance is invariable. I am dutiful, accommodating. I anticipate need. If there is any difference at all, it is that I no longer tip my emotional hand. I play every feeling close to the vest.

You assure me that the concave cushioning won’t be a problem; you are too excited to spend time with our ten-month-old. You haven’t seen her since the winter holidays, and though I email photographs near-daily and though you ask to speak to her by phone three times a week, you will be surprised at the unusual length of her legs–on an infant growth chart, her length is in the 90th percentile–and the ease with which she unfolds them when pulling herself up to stand. She was not so autonomous at Christmas, wasn’t looking at us and saying “ma ma” and “da da” with intent. Her hair hadn’t gotten so long that the ends of the plaits in the back grazed her lower neck. You have never experienced the unsettling joy of watching her thoughts progress on her face, each eye its own sprocket, each impish smirk a cog. You have not seen her, with five teeth.

I listen to you speak of her, listen to the softening of your timbre, the smile that creeps into your every utterance of her name. You sound, finally, like a father. In exchange for this yielding, this acquiescence to what has been reality for me since two Novembers past, I am expected to pretend that you have always sounded this way, that there has never been a lapse, a hardness, a turning. But this part of the role I cannot play convincingly. Try as I might, I cannot forget the Twilight Zone in which we dwell, where you are no longer a man possessed—wild-eyed, wounded, pulling away from a situation you’ve convinced yourself is a trap—and are instead kindly, ingratiating, and generous.

For you, this visit is a five-day furlough from your life out West, a time-pocket wherein our child is tangible, rather than an apparition whose absence haunts you. For you, this is an act of proof that you are “trying,” that you are willing.

For me, it is five days.

It is the welcome sharing of weight, both literal–she is now twenty pounds–and figurative. It is a nice respite, this ability to wake you when she rouses herself at 4am and again, for the day, at 6:30 and hand her off to you just long enough to make a bottle, think, brush my teeth, pee. It is nice not having to negotiate these things, to assess whether it’s worth it to leave her in her crib in my room, if the whole time I’m gone, she’ll be racked with dramatic and furious sobs.

I appreciate the sudden parity and the absolute lack of complaint. You are so kind to me now, so readily deferring certain parenting decisions to me, your tongue ever poised to prepare an apology–even if the infraction is minute or imagined. This is an interesting turn. This is a return.

But this is not our lives.

There is something false between us now, something stilted in our interaction, a barely discernible counterfeiting. It is so imperceptible that it often seems imagined.

But I know the things I haven’t said.

I am not okay.

I love you, which no longer computes. I shouldn’t, it would seem, considering. But I do—for there was always this underpinning, beneath either romance or rejection, apart from togetherness or separation, that bound me to you. Something that existed before intimacy and long after it, too foreign a sentiment and to odd an admission to make, aloud. But here it is, after all of it, just lingering.

You are my Laurie. You are more my Laurie than the lover that I made you. We were made for the baring of our deepest secrets, for adventuring in attics and abroad. We used to share journals, writing reams of minutia and epiphanies then mailing them or passing them hand-to-hand in a ceremony of secret exchange. And I wouldn’t seem surprised if, in some fugue state long past, we spit in our palms and pressed them together or sliced crimson slits into index fingers, mingling blood.

You will always be here. We are brothers. And this is why it all backfires.

And I would say I love you
But saying it out loud is hard
So I won’t say it at all
And I won’t stay very long

But you are life I needed all along
I think of you as my brother
Although that sounds dumb

And words are futile devices

Posted on by slb · 3 Comments

‘I, in my father, have been.’

Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)

My social media feeds have become a worldwide wake, elegy, and repast for poet-author-musician-activist Gil Scott-Heron. I didn’t know much about him. So it feels like I’m viewing the body of an elder lying in state. You go to pay your respects, to hear the twenty-one gun salute, to observe the significance of the loss–but it doesn’t touch you as deeply as it does many of those around you, who have where-were-you-when stories about the first time they listened to an album or read a page or prayed for his recovery.

So rather than making this something more intimate than I have any right to make it, I’ll leave you with the (edited and revised) comments I left on Twitter yesterday, after learning of his passing:

I’ve lost a lot of beloved black men in the past few years–great uncles, a grandfather…. Gil Scott-Heron could’ve been any one of them.

There’s a kind of universality to the perils that plague black men and the ills that hasten their mortality.

Jessie Fauset once wrote, “I am no better than you. You are no worse than I. Whatever I am, you in your children may be. Whatever you are, I in my father have been.”

And it speaks to the connectedness of us all, of how there is no real moral superiority. We are all susceptible to self-destructive behavior.

When someone dies as a result of said self-destruction, our response should be to turn inward, to remove the beam from our own eye, and then extend our hand to others.

… Or maybe I’m reachin’.

God rest Uncle Billy. God rest Uncle Warren. God rest Uncle Hosie. God rest Uncle George. God rest Grandpa Mitch.

Posted on by slb · 1 Comment

Links & Updates.

hey, all.

sometimes it’s nice to take a break from the hustle and bustle of the day job (which is ending within the next week and can i just say: summer is terrifying for an adjunct professor who doesn’t have classes but does have a child? *shudder*) and the hard work of trying write extra-stylized creative memoir blog entries. during such breaks, i write all in lower-case (except proper nouns) and, like your average tech-dependent American, obsessively track my social media sites and blog stats (mostly on my smartphone) and feel totally disheartened when i don’t have replies.

but that’s neither here nor there.

in my absence from posting, i want to direct you to a few of my friends:

– Kristen Witucki is a really, really cool lady i met in grad school. we had fiction workshop together. i’d strike up pre-class conversations with her in part because she’s awesome, but also to cover up the fact that i was kind of afraid of her guide dog, Tad, who was this huge black Lab chillin’ under our conference table.

anyway, Kristen and i became mothers within four months of each other. we spent most of our pregnancies trading notes and now, to a lesser degree since neither of us have as much “free” time, we trade notes on motherhood. here’s a link to her blog: http://kristenwitucki.wordpress.com/. Kristen recently entered Medela’s Keep the Connection Photo Contest for new and expectant mothers. She describes in 25 words or less how she “keeps the connection” to her son, Langston, through the act of nursing. On the surface, her photo is one of many contest entries. But as a blind mother, her photo and caption are activism. With discriminatory incidents like this happening on a regular basis, it’s important for her (and us) to inform others that blind parents are just as capable as sighted ones in understanding their children and their unique and particular needs. Vote for her photo here. Your vote is a show of solidarity and advocacy.

– next up: my mother has become a blogger. not sure if you all were aware that i’m the daughter of a minister (i’ve probably blogged about this?), but i am. my mom’s ministry blog is located here. she updates every friday and she’d love to expand her readership, so check her out. she’s a great writer, in her own right, and i’m super-proud of her. right now, she’s in the middle of a series; her posts are necessarily stand-alone. if you want to give the series a shot, you’ll get the most out of it by starting at the beginning. First series post: here. Link to the whole series: here.

– the amazing artist, tatyana fazlalizadeh, has started a new site called Love Letters From Dope People, which is pretty much exactly as it sounds. it’s musings on love. from dope people. and when she says dope, she really means it. check out the interviews and essays. they’re pretty profound.

– finally, as of about six weeks ago, i blog for theloop21.com, a black daily news site in the vein of the huffington post. check them (and me) out and if you dig what you read, be a repeat visitor. links to a couple of my “popular” posts are here and here.

in other news, i’ll be back with a new motherhood post pretty soon. maybe today, maybe tomorrow, but soon. and i hope you’ll remember it, if not for the rest of your life, for a really really really long time. 😉

Posted on by slb

Bertha Mason Syndrome.

In the deep shade, at the far end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.

[…]

She was a big woman, in stature almost equalling her husband, and corpulent besides: she showed virile force in the contest – more than once she almost throttled him, athletic as he was. He could have settled her with a well-planted blow: but he would not strike: he would only wrestle.

‘That is my wife,’ said he. ‘Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am ever to know – such are the endearments which are to solace my leisure hours! And this is what I wished to have’ (laying his hand on my shoulder): ‘this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon. I wanted her just as a change after that fierce ragout. Wood and Briggs, look at the difference! Compare these clear eyes with the red balls yonder – this face with that mask – this form with that bulk; then judge me, priest of the gospel and man of the law, and remember with what judgment ye judge shall be judged! Off with you now. I must shut up my prize.’

— Chapter 26, Jane Eyre

It begins with a rejection, a hiding. At first, the wildness inside you is a faculty of which you are in full possession. You do not bare it lightly, do not wield it as one does a sword or an AmEx Black. It is merely an accent, a trinket with which to adorn yourself in the presence of a lover, of a spouse who should adore you.

You intend to offer him incremental revelations of your wildness. You may dance, for instance, nakedly in the parlor, may sing for him a private song in an unsteady and, thus, very vulnerable warble. Perhaps you will unspool the hair that polite society would prefer you kept pinned and straightened. It will swirl like a wind about your welcoming face; you will reach for his hand and guide his fingers through it, venturing an invitation you have never before extended. You will entrust to him a description of a time when you were lain bare, rubbed raw, exploited.

And it will be there, perchance, that he will first reject you. You will notice a slight disdain curled on his lips at the end of your confession, a recoiling at the texture of your hair. He’ll say nothing at first, for these are new, these fetters enmeshing you. You don’t yet know what it means to be bound, lifelong, to a person incapable of loving you.

It is assumed that the esteem is the first to go, that the initial rejection immediately triggers an erosion of self-worth. This isn’t so.

What is next is the dimming of vision. Once, and not so long ago, your fate was a painting within purview: a masterpiece on stark white canvas with you, in kaleidoscopic color, as writer, sojourner, and wife to a husband, near-worshipful in his gratitude for having you, rendered as clearly as if it’d been crafted by the delicate brush of Pre-Raphaelites. Now, it seems the work of a pointillist’s hand. In months, it will become as incomprehensible as cubism.

Without an image of the future on which to focus, you will become disoriented, leaving yourself susceptible to a stronger strain of insult. It will evolve from mere gesture to verbiage. He will never say: I hate you. But his tone will ever imply it. The accusatory “I thought you said”s and “Weren’t you supposed to”s, the “This is nothing close to what I wanted”s will wear down your ever immunity.

Before long, the figure you see in the mirror regards you with your husband’s relentless skepticism. When she reach for the apple of her cheek, to confirm the sunkenness you suspect, she jerks away, appraising you with a smug, superior eye. And in that instant, you know you’ve lost your only ally.

There’s nothing left, then, but the final stage, in which you are so distant, so feral, so unrecognizable as a woman of elegance and means that your warden-spouse believes you will not notice his parading of the governess he has positioned to replace you, into the attic where you are imprisoned.

Impossibly–and most cruelly–is the hairline crack this syndrome causes in your brain, which hears your husband paint himself the victim and, rather than allowing you the capacity to curse him, instead processes his lament as an echo with which you can only empathize.

Posted on by slb · 1 Comment

Black Love-Blockin’.

Topic #2 in my Ask-n-Blog series: “Can you write about the issues of black men relating to black women (and vice versa) and how media comes into play?”

I should preface this by saying that I didn’t ask for clarity on this question to find out what, specifically, the inquirer might be looking for in an answer. I think my response might be more organic that way. But if the topic-provider is dissatisfied, please get back to me with a follow-up question and I’ll tailor the response to your intent.

The Black dating scene is a junior high dance. “Good brothers” stand on one side of the floor. “Good sisters” are on the other. And despite each group’s claims that they desire to meet the other—and are, in fact, often skeptical that the other even exists—no one is willing to be the first to ask the other to dance. All anyone wants to do is complain about the DJ.

Everybody’s dressed up. We’ve all begun the work of making ourselves “quality partners” to an equally self-possessed party who might be looking for one. We’ve managed our emotions, taking the time between relationships to figure out our role in the failure of our last one. We’ve earned enough of our own money to afford the expenditures of a courtship. If we have children, we’ve arranged an amicable enough relationship with our co-parents to be able to assure a new significant other that there’ll be minimal drama. We have a home in which to privately receive guests and suitors. We have friends, hobbies, and professional pursuits that will ensure that we won’t be all up under whoever we’re dating.

We are disinterested in double lives. If someone were to date us, he/she wouldn’t find errant numbers, clothes, DNA from other current trysts hidden among our things. And if someone were to date us, he/she wouldn’t be on the hunt for this type of evidence.

We are able to trust again.

Now, this is my personal definition of what it means to be a “quality” potential partner. It’s cool if this isn’t your bag. But I’m gonna speak from this space.

“The media” would have us believe that there is no dance. CNN keeps (heedlessly) reporting things like this:

… More African-American women are deciding to adopt instead of waiting for a husband, says Mardie Caldwell, founder of Lifetime Adoption, an adoption referral and support group in Penn Valley, California.”We’re seeing more and more single African-American women who are not finding men,” Caldwell says. “There’s a lack of qualified black men to get into relationships with.”

The numbers are grim. According to the 2006 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, 45 percent of African-American women have never been married, compared with 23 percent of white women.

Three years ago, NBC Nightly News’ Rehema Ellis interviewed, like, three black women about their marriage-less lives and how slim their pickings were and called those women representative of the black female median. Gorgeous, accomplished sisters are out here writing articles that encourage single Black women to plan for single parenthood, if they want children at all, since it’s totally unlikely they’ll find an African-American man they’ll want to spend the rest of their lives with.

I can’t speak for men, but these are the types of things that keep sisters on our side of the dancefloor. We’re giving perfectly acceptable suitors the side-eye, waiting for their other shoe to drop and fully expecting them to self-fulfill our stereotypical prophecies about how they’ll eventually fail us. We’re paranoid. Between our own failed relationships, our girlfriends’ horror stories, and the propagandist puff pieces network news keeps force-feeding us, it’s hard for us to believe that, among the all-dressed-up dudes across the aisle, there’s someone compatible to us.

But all this is immaterial, really. Every couple’s “issues relating to one another” have to do with their preconceived notions about how a person should behave and their difficulty letting go of those notions, in order to accept that an expectation of a thing is only a hope. How we manage realities different than the ones we’d like is the measure of whether or not we’re ready to invite someone else into the complicated, shimmering mess that is our lives.

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. 😉

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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.