Something goes wrong and suddenly all that calm and surrender stuff is a million miles from your brain. Now you’re lying on the upside down kitchen bench propped up on the couch, so that your legs are above your head, and you’ve got an ice pack on your stomach because supposedly the baby doesn’t like its head cold. (How can it possibly feel that?) You’re making acupuncture appointments for tomorrow and seriously considering getting someone to burn herbs next to your toes because people swear by this, it worked for them, and it couldn’t hurt.
Fear makes me unrecognizable to myself. Fear isn’t the right word. Anxiety, disappointment, frustration. Wanting badly for something to be different from how it is. I think of myself as a realist and calm under pressure. Other people seem to think so too. But watching myself panic like this makes my whole sense of self seem flimsy. Is my rationalism so dependent upon favorable circumstance? A lot of this conjecture takes place lying upside down.
I go to a chiropractor who tells me I’m misaligned. She doesn’t explicitly say, “And that’s why the baby is in the wrong position,” but comes close enough. I’ve never been to a chiropractor before and she clucks over my unevenness. A couple light taps and cracks and she charges me $200, insisting that I come back tomorrow and then again within a few days, because the procedure only works after multiple adjustments. When I tell her I have work she fixes me with a stare and asks if it’s as important as my health. That night, I don’t feel the predicted soreness or wellness. I don’t feel anything. Is it a scam or am I just not very sensitive?
When I was around 7, I was one of the ringleaders of a group of “fairies,” as we described ourselves to the other girls. We insisted that we could feel the pain of trees by pressing our hands against their bark and that our shoulder blades were actually the growing stubs of wings (mine stuck out sharply from my back and I could wiggle each one separately, lending credence to this idea). A couple of the girls told stories about coming to the school playground at midnight to be part of fairy rituals, but I always thought that was taking it a bit far. We were all bullshitting, right? I couldn’t really feel anything from the trees. But then sometimes I would wonder. Were they here at night in rituals without me? Was I the only one who was just pretending? Eventually one of our acolytes freaked out and told the teachers on us, forcing the fairy movement to go underground and then disband.
Now I’m in a zero gravity chair at the acupuncture place and trying to will myself to feel something. Mostly I feel tense, because I’ve got a bunch of needles sticking out of me. I’m trying not to judge the experience. Lots of people say this helps them, but it’s impossible for me to know if they experience something I don’t. My hard science brain means I have no framework to think about all this, except a general belief that a closed denying mind is less helpful than an open accepting one. But where does the impulse to try all this stuff come from? Does widespread practice of a technique mean that it’s effective, and it’s only my Western-Enlightenment colonial mindset that discounts so many other people’s experiences? Or do we do things just to do them, so that we can say we did all we could?
It’s hard to figure out the right level of agency in these situations. I want to be accepting of what I can’t control, but I also don’t want to put unquestioning faith in systems that maybe don’t care about me as much as they should or that profit off my distress. It’s that last line of the AA Serenity Prayer that always struck me as the crux of the thing. “The wisdom to know the difference” between what you can change and what you can’t.
I’m swimming every night after work. I feel good in the pool; strong and weightless. And like I’m doing something.
At a friend’s seder, we make up our own rituals and I get everybody head down with their butts in the air concentrating on the feeling of somersaults. It’s silly and absurd and makes me feel beautifully connected to this group of people.
Now is the day before my External Cephalic Version, when a doctor will attempt to manually rotate the baby from the outside. They do it in the OR just in case they need to do an emergency C-section. I’m nervous, because it’s supposed to be painful and because of the very small risk to the baby. I’m also relieved to be taken care of by doctors. At this point, all I want is professionals with years of expensive education to tell me what to do. I know that I contradict myself. I make the choice to relieve myself of the responsibility of judgement, for now at least, and we’ll see about later on.
What I’m cooking
Easter Party Spread
We had a baby party last weekend and I made a kind of brunch or high tea spread, with little sandwiches of artichoke salad and málà cream cheese cucumber, hot cross buns, almond jam dot cookies, and beet-pickled horseradish deviled eggs. It was all very pretty. Anthony made a visualization of babies and dumplings floating through space that was also very pretty.
You could adapt this set of dishes for Passover as well. The deviled eggs are fine, artichoke salad would be great on matzo, and the almond thumbprints would work with just almond flour and no baking powder.
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