18 Years Ago: May 16th--Quieting down

Do you know it's about to happen? Can you feel labor gearing up? Does the baby's movement pattern change?

I'm quite sure I did not think specifically on May 16, 1997 that the next day would be the day. On the other hand, I expect I had a hopeful thought like that every day while we were waiting for Simon to be born.

Candles lit with grandparents
May 16, 2015

I imagine I took walks and naps that day. Ate meals. Read. Maybe I soaked in the tub to relax. I distinctly remember walking from our Family Housing apartment across Plymouth Road to the Blockbuster Video with my friend Anne Adams. I wore my enormous black cotton dress. I'm sure that felt better than strapping elastic-banded pants around my stretched out belly. The video we picked: What's Eating Gilbert Grape. Remember that one? Johnny Depp and very young Leonardo DiCaprio as brothers with an extremely obese mother. Markus and I had never seen it, and we'd been curious. What a peculiar set of circumstances and characters. And it happened to be the movie I watched the night before my son was born. (We have a similar story for Miriam's birth: that film was Central Station, and we watched it with my mother.)

During and after the movie, my belly grew still. Often I felt more nudges, hiccups, and kicks when I was quietest. That is, a fetus can be lulled to sleep by the mother's activity but wake up when the mother lies down to sleep. I had no reason to believe anything was amiss, but I found it unsettling. We said goodnight to Anne, and then Markus and I went up to our bed. I sat propped against the headboard while he put his ear to my bare belly, listening for reassurance. He repositioned his ear and listened with his eyes closed. I was a pile of calm myself, and I brushed aside my worry about this quiet. It must have been hormones, because I think we were both frightened. At last Markus' fingertip began to tap on my skin. Dip-dip dip-dip dip-dip dip-dip. Perhaps a little slower than usual, but solid.

We went to sleep.

The photo in back show Simon
with his grandparents in 1997.

May 16, 2015: I had a quiet day. Markus and Miriam went off on another run (she did 5K, he did 10K). I stayed home this time. I spent part of the day reading. I finished a startling memoir by Sarah Manguso called The Two Kinds of Decay, which describes a lengthy autoimmune illness that caused temporary paralysis, among other symptoms. The recommendation came from Thisbe Nissen, a writer I met back in 2008 at the Wesleyan Writers Conference. I'd had a consultation with Thisbe, and she jotted down titles she thought would enrich my work. I tucked that sheet away and found it only a few weeks ago while sorting out old notebooks.

I find that it pays to follow reading recommendations from writers who have read my work. I took the list and ordered three titles by interlibrary loan. They all came in last week, without the option to renew. So I am busy. Manguso's style is spare, direct, and gripping to read. She describes illness, doctors, medical complexity, and her own thoughts and actions without judgment. She leaves white space. No vignette is more than three pages. I could read it again right away. But I've moved on to the next one on the pile: Halls of Fame, essays by John D'Agata.

Great puddles of wax.

Markus' parents came up from Stuttgart for the evening with us. We had coffee and cake followed by a walk that took us past an enclosure of sheep, many of them adorably young. Our conversation continued over curry for dinner and mousse au chocolat by Miriam for dessert. After dinner we lit candles together to remember Simon on the eve of his eighteenth birthday.