20 Weeks

Yesterday I saw my unborn son’s long bones on an ultrasound. Happily, they all seem to be there: your tibias, fibias, femurs, and so on, stark white against the television-static grey of the sonographic background. I’ve seen these parts of his body in the same way before, but not since the bones actually calcified. At the previous ultrasound they were visible, but rendered in a light misty colour, as though the contrast setting in his body was still being turned up. Yesterday, as the sonographer chased him around my womb trying to get a clear image of his arms (UPPER.LIMBS in the allcaps sonographic annotation terminology), she alighted on his radius and ulna, pointy little bones that he is already using to fling his arms around inside me. She froze the live video and zoomed in on these two complementary forearm bones. This image generated an immediate and intense memory of seeing a seagull swallow a whole, chewed-up chicken wing on the playground of my primary school about twenty years ago. I was upset by this, and it was the only time during the session that I felt like I might cry.

Two nights before the ultrasound I’d had a very unsettling dream in which a childhood friend I haven’t spoken to in decades had fallen off a cliff and died, and the task of embalming his corpse had somehow fallen to me. I couldn’t remember having agreed to this, and was painfully and embarrassingly aware of my inability to complete the task, but I felt I must have said I’d do it. His body, curled up in a foetal position and discoloured with lividity, sat in my large, stainless steel laundry sink, awaiting preservation. People kept dropping in to ask me when the body would be ready for the funeral, and I prevaricated, stalled, dissembled. I felt shame at having recklessly volunteered for something I wasn’t qualified to do, but didn’t have the courage to admit to these people that I’d made a mistake, and couldn’t be relied upon to facilitate my friend’s passage from existence to nonexistence. I stared at his body for a long time, racked with these feelings of failure, wondering why I felt responsible for this person I was emotionally attached to but didn’t really know.

I’ve been having a lot of strange dreams recently, especially since I started to be able to really feel my son moving inside my body. I’m an incredibly deep sleeper — once I’ve set my mind to unconsciousness, almost nothing wakes me up until I’m ready to come back to life. This means that my partner, who sleeps lightly and seems to briefly wake up during almost every REM cycle transition, very often witnesses my sleep behaviour at length. The other day I asked him whether I’ve been snoring — one of the obstetricians at the hospital clinic asked me to ask him, as apparently snoring is very common in pregnancy and can indicate other problems. He said no, I haven’t been snoring, but I have been thrashing around in my sleep more than usual. I suspect this is because the baby is most active when I am the most still, and his movements are enough to interrupt my leaden slumber, if not enough to actually wake me up. I’m lying in bed as I write this, and I can feel him wriggling around like a restless puppy.

My pregnancy wasn’t quite planned, but it wasn’t really an accident either. We’d agreed that we would start “actually trying” to conceive sometime in 2023 — I can’t really remember what I meant by that? I think I had in mind ovulation tracking and intercourse schedules, which seems very silly now. In the meantime, we would simply stop actively contracepting. For some reason, I believed it would take us a long time to conceive. (Trying to put myself back in my mind during this period is almost impossible. I simply can’t imagine why I thought these things, or what I expected to happen.) The time between stopping our contraception use and conceiving a baby was less than a month. My first pregnancy symptoms were crushing exhaustion, anxiety and mental feebleness, which have yet to abate, perhaps accounting for why I have so much trouble remembering the assumptions and volitional states that led to my own impregnation.

These symptoms have essentially ground my social life to a halt, increasing the strange, unreal, lonely qualities of this period. I’ve been to a couple of parties and weddings, but I’m always thinking I’m so tired, have I yawned too much already, when is it acceptable for me to leave, and so on. I’ve spent a lot of time alone with my son, agonising over what to name him, imagining what he will be like and what I will be like as his mother, hoping he inherits the features I find so attractive and endearing about his father. But ultimately, all of this solitary contemplation feels a bit insubstantial; he feels the most real when other people acknowledge that he is there, especially if I perceive their acknowledgement as somehow incorrect, giving me something to assert, even if I don’t actually say anything. At the ultrasound where I saw his bones, the sonographer insisted on using the due date derived from my last menstrual period, even though by my calculations, and by every other ultrasound I’ve had, this is five days too late; at the end of the ultrasound she then told me he was measuring five days ahead. Of course he is measuring five days ahead you dumb bitch, I thought to myself. I told you already, he’s five days older than you think he is.

I know this relative isolation is making me a bit unsocialised and weird, but it feels right to feel weird during such a weird time. It feels right to have time to myself, to let this transitional period happen, like hanging around in the airport waiting for a delayed flight. The first half of pregnancy really feels like it’s not real; you can’t see anything from the outside except a woman experiencing physical weakness, telling you there’s someone else inside her body. It also feels like a secret the baby is keeping from me, forcing me to rely on ultrasounds, and dreams, and strange new symptoms, various indirect or unnatural ways of observing him. As the baby’s bones are calcifying inside me, and his movements get stronger, and his tissues slowly grow out of the truckloads of fruit he is causing me to crave, I am learning to be someone to him, even though he isn’t quite here yet.