we are happy 37 weeksEver 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.
