Day 4. A Pregnancy Journal.

Day 4. This Could Be the Fourth Day of the Rest of My Active Life.

....and reappear again. Turns out a little blood is natural, part of an exchange program between the uterus and the egg. Or something like that. I guess we'll find out soon. She left a little while ago for the doctor. More than anything, I hope she's all right.

Last night she insisted that her tits were bigger. Personally I didn't see it, or didn't want to and that's understandable. Same for her. She sees a lot of things that aren't there, like when she alluded to my disappointment if it turned out that she wasn't. I've been nothing but clear in our six months. Last night she admitted that maybe she was in denial, carrying on with me despite knowing where I stand. She takes it personally. Like maybe she's not good enough, or pretty enough (she said this), or that her shit's not together, and maybe on this last point I'd have to agree somewhat, but the point is and always has been with me. My shit's not together and deep down I know better. I feel it to my core. I don't know why. Maybe it's irrational. Maybe it's fear. Maybe it's just plain old irresponsibility and or selfishness. Whatever it is - it's not the proper footing for an uphill climb that will last the rest of my active life. To put it another way, I'll be sixty years old when I'm off the legal hook.

She delights in the fact that I've been staying in and cooking lately. I had her over last night for Ahi steaks with a creamy shallot sage sauce that I made up. I served it with forbidden rice and broiled eggplant slices, and a salad of walnuts, pear, beets, leaf and bleu cheese. It's true, I've been getting into the kitchen lately. Part of it is the fall season and part of it, my new resolve to live better, exercise, spend less by staying out of the cafes and restaurants, and generally be more efficient in my life. That doesn't mean I want to give up my apartment anytime soon. Not when I feel like it's working for me, that I've got some kind of routine going. But she calls it nesting. Which, outside of the circumstances would be fine, but given the context and delight she takes in pointing it out, I'm alarmed and I'm convinced she's delusional. There's no way you could spend the past six months with me and come to that conclusion, unless you were living in a slightly shifted reality.

Ditto for this morning, because I went out, and above and beyond, for our breakfast. It's not unusual for me to make two stops on such a morning - one for croissants at the Armenian bakery and another for fruit or juice or milk at the neighborhood bodega just a block further. But because I came back with little extra something - some dried persimmons in powdered sugar, and a whole story about the confusion I caused in asking about them, especially when the women helping me realized that I wasn't Armenian, well suddenly I'm nesting again. With a straight face. My answer is no, quite the opposite. In fact, I was flirting with the women at the bodega and I was delighting in my freedom and the looseness of my life and my little neighborhood of young singles. And as I walked back I hung my head, not in shame, but in sadness, a sadness that my cozy little life might well come to an end and I would never again feel so enchanted by these simplest of pleasures because of the enormity of rearing a child.

This is always the place where people will line up to tell you the opposite. That it's the best thing that ever happened to them. Almost without fail, of the people I know personally. But then I look around. It doesn't look so rewarding most of the time. I know my parents didn't feel that way when they were deep in it, trying to make ends meet. I look at another friend who hasn't slept in three years and has maybe written five lines of verse in that time, and another with a drug addicted sixteen year old who sleeps with men our age. Then I look around at the world at large. Where are all these angels? And all these fulfilled people who are caring for them? How many millions of them are in foster care and juvenile prisons, all set to take up residence in one of our beneficial adult facilities, where, incidentally, a lot of parents are housed. Why doesn't anyone tell the truth about childrearing? It sucks and it's hard, and of course, it's beautiful and rewarding, but the truth is uglier than most care to admit. It's a roll of the dice. You throw the child up in the air and hope he comes down all right. And a lot of the time it doesn't work out very well - not for the child or for society, and there's not a damn thing you could've done to stop it.

No, I don't need people lining up with more denial and I'll tell them straight up if I get pulled into their cult. You can beam at me all you want but I still won't join your bliss.

I've noticed that the longer I wait to hear from her, the harsher my words become. I hate being in a reactive position on this and I tried to tell her last night how it might be different if it wasn't a new relationship and unplanned but all she could think of was her dried up uterus at that point. Like that right there - I could have said menopause instead. But she was piling the disappointment of her whole life up on me - like I was the reason she was thirty seven and without a child, just floating through her life as she put it. I pointed out that two of her lesbian friends we visited last week seemed very content and well adjusted without children. We don't have to procreate. I think that's what makes us unique, apart from the rest of the animals. We can actually lend a hand to nature. We can pull back if we see the strain is getting too much for her. We can fill our ranks when the balance is tilting the other way. But please, don't tell me it's an imperative. We have to realize that a big part of this maternal instinct is Judeo-Christian socialization, aside from being a modern industry. And it's also time that we admit that our species is out of control.

While I'm ranting on the subject, let's point out another pitfall of our constant moralizing, as when, for example, one says, that things happen for a reason. Why not just come out and say, if god wills it then? Admittedly, the genesis of that saying might be more junior-college rational, alluding perhaps to the old notion that the universe worked according to hard and fast laws and principles, according to the strictest science, which, like god, is nothing, if not prescriptive, but modern physics tells us otherwise, doesn't it? Probability and randomness dominate the major theories of the existence of our planet and of life on this planet, right down to the sub-particle level. Things happen to us in life and most of the time they are dumb, meaningless accidents. If you think otherwise then you're either a poet making an aesthetic observation on the nature of life or you're a fundamentalist, a person who says, if god wills it, just like those guys who blew up those airplanes a few years ago.

Of course, if she is pregnant, it did happen for a reason, a very straightforward reason and she's right to say so. We had sex and we didn't adequately prevent it from happening. But there's nothing mystical there, there's no kismet, no astrological alignment. No harmonic joy. No miracle. Nothing, in other words, that will sway me, as romantic-minded as I can sometimes be.

But it's an old trick, like I said, and things will appear and disappear and reappear. She just called. It's true, the home tests were right, but there's some concern about an ectopic or fallopial pregnancy so she has to go for an ultra-sound. Naturally, her health insurance ran out since she went part time at her job. What timing. What upheaval. What chaos. A new relationship. An ongoing career change. A mortgage that she struggles to meet every month. Overhanging credit cards. Trips to the shrink. And a body approaching menopause. Of course I realize that no one gets away with living but I can't help thinking I've been shanghaied.