Update From The Trenches: 37 Weeks Pregnant

Here it is, the final stretch, the final countdown- (duhhduhduhdunnnnit'sthefinalcountdown) and I'm pretty much in the same boat ( heavily weighed on my end ) as the other mothers-to-be at this stage who I've tracked down online. Huge. My hips are killing me all the time now, not just at night- but when they wake me up at night, it feels like someone put metal pins in my hips, and I turn over to the other side at which point sometimes I can fall back asleep, and sometimes I end up watching True Tales From The E.R. at 3am. Here's a farmer's wife talking about herself at this stage: Minimize, Don't Organize.

Details I'm Sharing Which You Might Want To Skip: the flatulence / the menstral crampish feeling / the painful Braxton-Hicks / the flipping and turning of baby, which makes me feel like I'm about to vomit from the merry go round / the anxiety / the major mood swings / the constant peeing / the strange and sometimes awful dreams / the guilt that I don't feel how I wish I could feel

Here is Lola: Momma are you OK? ( my response: yes ) Momma are you OK NOW?

Daughters are WAY too in tune with their mothers. If I have a flicker of unsettling emotion she's on it like replay. My eyes are soft and still for a half minute and BAM: HOW ABOUT NOW, MOM? YOU OK NOW???

NO!!! I"M NOT OK!!! I'm peeing myself and my hips kill and I feel like crying about everything and nothing and I have no sense of the proper proportion of things so the sadness I feel over Mr. Curry not bringing the laundry in for me like I asked is pretty much the same as the sadness I feel over my sister not being around for this baby AND I can't breathe properly and Ever won't stop kicking me in the vagina and it HURTS!!!!

I am aware of how I would and should and could feel. I would like to be immersed in graceful gratitude that I am as blessed as I know I am to be having this baby girl. I am so incredibly lucky to have my children and my husband and this baby right now and I know, as well as anyone...well, things I won't write because I am superstitious. But I know. I know I'm blessed.
I had a miscarriage last year at 13 weeks, I remember, Mr. Curry remembers, it was a sharp and awful pain to lose our baby, and we are. very. blessed. ( poor. we live in California and are in medical debt up the wazoo, and i'm on disability. but blessed. )

And still, I can't feel it. I can think it. I can know it. But right now, I'm not feeling it. It doesn't even seem real, yet. She moves inside of me, I can feel her entire body rotating, and still, I can't grasp that any day now, she will actually be here, an entire baby, OUR baby, for real. Mr. Curry and I had the night alone last night- well, from 5pm to 8:30pm. So we went out to dinner and shared fries and sat and tried to get our minds around what was coming. At home we watched Dexter until Lola came home. Mr. Curry read her Harry Potter while I cleaned up dog pee and washed dishes, and then I read her one book, and then Mr. Curry rubbed my feet for what felt like a fabulous eternity and then I scratched his head until I fell asleep sitting up, watching Saturday Night Live. It was the most relaxing night I've had in a while, and I slept through the night for the first time in weeks. Awesome.

I keep feeling like we should be having sex every day. We aren't going to be able to have sex for weeks and weeks after. I have a rule about this which is a theory I have had passed on to me about how to keep your lady parts ship shape. This means no sex for a few months. But sex ( Beavis and Butthead laugh here, I said but sex ) is ridiculous and frustrating. I know other women feel all bawchicabawbaw when pregnant, but not me. I feel kind of ... weird, with this ginormous baby flickering her guppy flickers in my belly while I get down with her Father. I can't really immerse myself in the moment like I usually do. Plus my arms start quivering when I have to hold any kind of pressure, and I get leg cramps and foot cramps the second I get close to blasting off, and my back hurts, and I can't breathe half the time because of the pressure on my chest, and I feel geriatric.

I'm so ready.

Hahaha!!!

I'm as ready as I could be.

That's more like it.

things you might not need to survive but would really, really like to know about all the same

CORRECTION: I accidentally had linked the wrong post in this first listing here. So those of you who were wondering what the hell remembering veterans had to do with my childhood, now you can rest assured I haven't totally lost it. Yet. Correct link is now up below, and the post is absolutely a stunner. Ruth's husband's guitar link was not working either, for reasons known only to my computer, but is now working. Check it out, third link on the list! Spread the word for them, trying to make it with a self started business in this economy is rough and brave.

This post actually helped me deal more with the hardness of my life, the things that have been or are hard, my childhood especially, and the things it left me to work out for the rest of my life, like a complicated knit sweater I realized at the very end loop was all wrong, all along. It's a beautiful piece of writing but more than that, I prize it because it is knowledge or wisdom earned not from books or lectures or contemplation or any external source, but from experience internalized.

Ever flipped again. I went to a non stress test for her, and everything looks great. I got to see her 'practice breathing' which brought tears to my eyes. And I got to see that her head was once again upward, pressing against my left rib cage. So. There you have it. What can I do? Just wait.

Ruth wrote me about her husband's new-ish business, and it's pretty awesome. If you are a musician or know a musician, you want to look at this gorgeousness

A great, interesting interview with Po Bronson, author of Nutureshock and father of two, on his book about scientific information and parenting choices. This is a book I have on my Amazon list and have found fascinating to flip through in Borders.

I'm on page 1 of the Babble list thanks to you guys! Thank you so much if you've voted, it's a small thing I know but it makes me happy!

Love, love this discussion and brief interview with Lori Munson regarding the memoir she wrote about her marriage, This Is Not The Story You Think It Is: An Unlikely Season Of Happiness, on Lindsey's nourishment-for-the-soul blog A Design So Vast. I'm putting this book in my cart; I aspire to write so honestly and movingly about my own marriage here on Flux.

Something beautiful? Something unique? Here.

Saving the best for last, bring out your tissues and close your cubicle, tell your children you need 15 minutes without disturbance, let them turn the TV on. Because once you start reading this, and then get to the point where you realize what kind of story you are reading- that it's not the birth story you thought you were reading- you will not be able to stop. One of the most moving, heartwrenching and breathtaking posts I've ever read online. Thank me later. And thank Girl Who for linking it, so I could find it, and link it to you.

XOXO Maggie May

Put On Your Fancy Headpiece and Vote For Me, Please

I'm nominated on Babble's Mommy Blog List for 2010

Can you go there and vote for me? Because that would be awesome!

Click on the above round ad for Babble, then click on 'Alphabetical' and search for Flux Capacitor. I think it's the 2cd page, unless it moves. Then click on the thumbs up, give yourself a hug from me and go outside in your headdress and do a fancy dance!!!

Thank You Quite Sincerely Maggie May

Would you believe me baby when I tell you, that you're the Queen of my Heart

Happy Birthday!
I never write on my wife's blog because... well come on. Who wants to see me fumble around with words on this blog. I'm not a writer, but I could damn near write you a novel on how amazing my wife is and all of the reasons I love her. But I'm Irish Catholic and enough of a hard case to not put you through that. Anybody who has read this blog for any amount of time knows that I "married up". I know, I can't figure out my luck either. But I wanted to share when I fell in love with Maggie. (It was the first time I saw her)
When I was seventeen I went with a group of friends on Halloween to a mutual friends house. (The mutual friend was Maggie's boyfriend and my eventual best friend). I walked into the house with the tile foyer, high ceiling and huge family room on the right side. As we walked in I heard a piano playing from the family room. Drawing my attention that way I saw a slim blonde girl in a black witches dress with the triangle cut at the hem sitting up right and playing the piano. I vividly remember everything slowing down and... and words can't describe it. She was everything incredible and unattainable and beyond me. The most any of us got from her that night was a polite nod and a brilliant smile. And then she kept playing the piano until we left.

What I thought love was is so much less than what it is. Happy Birthday. You are occasionally ridiculous, but you are my world.

Mr. Curry

expecting everything

we are happy 37 weeks

Ever turned. At today's appointment, the good doctor could not find her heartbeat where it was last time, so she turned on the wand found Ever's sweet faced head planted downward. I was mesmerized by her nose. Her nose! Whose nose IS that, I thought to myself. It's not my nose, it's not Mr. Curry's nose, it's not Ian or Lola or Dakota's nose. I don't recognize that nose. Lola and Mr. Curry gazed at her; I was suspended in the moment where her profile hung cheekily on the monitor- if it's possible for an unborn baby to look cheeky? Then my Ever did. If she had known I was gazing at her, I suspect she would have winked.

The C-Section canceled, I went from wondering and worrying about the unknowns of a great slicing birthing from my abdomen and back to wondering and worrying about the twice known great birthing from my vagina. I told Mr. Curry that on second thought, I'd take the C-Section. Maybe, I said, I should wear a shirt to my next appointment that says Save The Vagina! with an image of a C-Section on the front.
So November moves like this, back and forth, up and down, Ever topsy-turvy and the nightfall coming earlier and earlier. Tonight it darkened at five and now as I write I hear a pack of coyotes in their high pitched frantic yapping and yelping and the neighboring dogs responding with loud, aggressive barking.
I feel a bit shaky, a bit uncertain, a bit 'unnerved' as Dishwasher put it recently. November always does that with me, and now with a baby to come, my mind and body are slowly turning and adjusting, as Ever's head will have to do in my pelvic cavity, making small but significant and uncomfortable changes to get us where we want to be, with each other.
The coyotes are closer. So loud, and at least five or six, one breaking pack to howl for a few seconds before lapsing back into the yelping. They sound primal happenings: hunting, eating, burrowing, sex, birth, death. They announce their plans into the nighttime with each other as comfort. They have no where else to go. Their canyons have been bulldozed and concrete poured where their dens were laid. They are the Rats of Nihm, they are driven into suburbia by hunger and fear and confusion, and then they learn the streets, and try to make their way in an unfamiliar and unfriendly world. They make bed underneath the empty sauna's and half filled sheds of our backyards, to birth their babies, to feed them scattered dog food and neighborhood cats. Signs will be tacked tomorrow to lampposts: Missing: Flapp, our Cat. The cross middle aged man down the way will put out poison. The coyotes will slink where they can, dragging their babies with them, past the raccoons hiding in trash cans, past the birds nesting in porch overhangs, past the home where I live, nine months pregnant, waiting for my child to begin her descent into our arms and this strange, hard and wonderful world.

Ferraby Lionheart 'Harry and Bess'

a song for easy rolling afternoon sun and love, and a gorgeous video

November's Child

the light around the house dims
sewn in, or sewn out. a sealed rabbit hole.
we meet the evening-tide with bright eyes.

November brings it's dusky murmurs,
some stories of gypsies and stolen children
of pots full of bone and skin.

i watch carefully the flight path of birds
across the lucid flash of sunset,
to see what they are afraid of, how they clutch black claw.

baby stills in the oblong stretch of my stomach.
rabbit in the hole, unborn in Winter's hibernation;
borne into wild compassion and thoughtless instincts-

she will always be hungry
she will always find beauty a flame on the end of the branch;
be tempted to flee with wild things, burrow her babies far away.

i am too, November infant- first wail to a darkening sky
first cries to the silent forest and flash floods of Mississippi:
responsible to nothing but the heartbeat of my mother

her breast and her hold and my wandering heart.
the eagle stretches his dark wing over the windows of home.
even at this distance, i can see how he eyes my unborn.

everyone is hungry.
everything needs, though its wilding may not speak the word.
i close the sliding glass door on the darkening world

and touch my husband's warm neck with frozen fingertips.
the light blazes from the seams of our home,
gaping at the dirt and roots

we feed our children and break bodies against one another.
this November is collecting stormfronts: a birthing is coming:
with the light spilling yellow at the corners of our mouths.

A Family With Teenagers

Parenting teenagers has completely altered my perception of us as a family. Before Dakota hit 14, we were the parents of three children who were joyful, easy to discipline, whose idea of a great time was Friday Night Family Night jumping on the master bed and playing cards while eating pizza, children who came to us with their problems easily and trusted our answers, children who were polite, respectful, well behaved in public!, openly loving, children whose natural creativity and innocence seemed remarkably intact in a stressful world of high competition, children who adored their family unit and our togetherness in a way that felt uncommon in our suburban neighborhoods. Mr. Curry and I were extremely proud. Perhaps a bit smug- but who could blame us? We damn earned it- both coming from dysfunctional households and abusive situations, both of us damaged and dinged, both of us working our asses of to parent these children beyond our scope and to push ourselves to meet their needs even when we did not know if we had the internal resources- somehow, we always found them, and solutions, and joy- and that was- is- something to be proud of. Pictures from those years show the kids hugging, running, laughing, playing with our dogs, wrestling with Ed, arms wrapped around each other with grins the size of Texas.
Then there was last Christmas. When we attempted our family photo. This time, Dakota was 15, Ian 13, and Lola 7. The very title of the post signals a serious fork in the road: There Are Some Things You Only Laugh About Later. ( it's still not later enough if you know what I mean...)
Our family had it's bubble popped. All the outside forces that we had kept from our internal, intimate world had invaded the boys, and they were changing. Middle school had absolutely wrecked Dakota. I don't think he would disagree. He was in private school until fifth grade. His sixth grade year was god awful. I wept often for my sweet boy, who was rapidly becoming jaded, angry at adults, full of false bravado ( to keep his chin up against the bullies who we spent that entire year dealing with in the Principal's office, after Dakota was jumped by three boys and then SUSPENDED for punching the leader back- don't get me started, I'm turning red as I type..) and insecure. School and grades became a completely insignificant part of his life as he was completely focused on getting through each day without getting in a fight, being humiliated or feeling like a social failure. And it's important to note that Dakota had never, ever had social problems before this- he was a very gregarious, popular kid who always had plenty of friends, who knew how to approach kids he didn't even know and strike up a conversation and end up hanging out.
Ian was struggling too, still pulling in straight A's, but finding the later years of elementary school almost as hard as Dakota found middle school. Ian is brilliant, wears glasses, and isn't a kid who cares about having a style or making sure his hair is cool. There was bullying, and then Ian turned to being a bully, and his jokes began to have a hard, mean edge to them. The defense and protective posturing was so high and so poignant in both Ian and Dakota that I felt almost feverish- how to protect these boys? What was happening? What could Mr. Curry and I do? Why was the school system such a colossal failure in preventing or helping us deal with these issues?
I will never forget when Dakota accused me of ruining his life. Why, I asked, terrified to hear the answer. What did I do? You set me up to think of the world as a good place, Mom, he answered. You put me in private school for all those years where kids act completely different, and the teachers all listen to you and care about you, and you guys ( Mr. Curry and I ) were always so calm and never spanked and freaked out on us. The real world isn't like that Mom. The teachers don't give a shit about the kids. The kids don't talk things out, they fight. You told me how to handle problems in a way that no one else uses. You made me a wuss, Mom.
My heart broke then in a way that still aches on the fault-line.
I look at blogs where all the children are 13 or younger, and I remember so vividly, so gratefully, when our worst problems were the occasional sibling beat down between the boys, teasing that went too far with Lola or refusal to recite those spelling words one more time. When middle school and high school with the intense scholastic pressure, drug and alcohol availability and pressures, physical fighting and interaction with burnt out adults did not begin to make life hard in a way that I'm glad I had not forseen. It was all the fault lines of our family and our past that were pressurized, that opened, that cracked underneath our boy's feet, and ours.
We had circumstances that set the boys up for worsening problems at this age: the boys, although they've known each other as best friends since Ian's birth, are not biological brothers, and both come from 'broken homes'. Both were born to extremely young parents ( I was 20 and alone when I had Dakota ) who had childhoods that in no way, shape or form set them up to be successful parents. Both were born to parents with emotional problems, although Mr. Curry and I had tackled them head on, with all resources we could scrounge. Both were born into poor families. These things were circumvented throughout their childhood's by the sheer force of our love and our willingness to get and use therapy for healing, and our dedication to providing a stable and loving home life focused on a close family unit, but in the teenage years the weight of their angry stomping at the shock of teen culture and stress broke the lines. It was no longer enough that Mr. Curry and I were loving, supportive, solution based, and spent all our free time with the kids.
Teenage years are incredibly hard, with the enormous brain changes, the intense and before unrivaled pressures to succeed higher faster better at school, the 'training' to be scholastically focused and successful from a young age, the culture of pill popping and pot smoking ( especially here in California ) the sexual activity that keeps setting back the starting line younger and younger, and the constant reminders to be 'well rounded' and ' goal oriented ' and have plenty of outside hobbies and interests, as well as the final blow of overcrowded and under-functioning public schools where emotional intelligence and guidelines are practically non-existent. It's Lord of the Flies on the middle school lunch grounds.
So what to do? We began with emotional, panicky fumbling and are the more stabalized thick of it now, with some resources and tools we have begun to master, and many more, I'm sure, that we will utilize in the coming years. Books, therapists, programs, banging down doors at the school- these are all common experiences for parents of teens now a days, for a wide variety of problems and conflicts. The glut of books out there on how to help your struggling teenager is a hard reminder of how intensely our society is struggling to figure this out.
Humbling yourself is the first step. It was very hard to admit, at first, that what we were doing was not working. At. all. After all, we had it all figured out before, survey says. We were batting high and the kids were thriving. To go from a noisy household with happy children to sulking teens punching holes in the wall was completely shocking.
And now? We are adding a newborn. But I think we are up to the challenge.
Batter up!

potluck

darling, i have some bad news.
the pink eye of my right has
swollen overnight, and i am
not of face to drink red wine
and slum cigarettes at your

office Christmas party .
this year i will miss
your hand on Delta's high
and mighty behind, as she
glances at me shyly pleased,
to be so clearly well endowed.

give her flank a pretty spank
as she whinnies in her rum.
i'll be home swollen and alone-
hardly any fun.
willing to sacrifice the platter
spread for my husband's

reputation, i'll keep tuned
to Reality Television and it's
humping and bumping and
imbibing. i've been brought to
tears before with the emptiness.

but tonight my right eye can't cry.
with my left good eye, keeping
one on the prize, keeping Clintonesque
persistence in the value of
this marriage- i change channels
in flickers of dark and light as

you squeeze her sweating carriage.

m.m.e *undated. old. **the poem, not me.