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.

18 Years Ago: May 4th--Baby's room

Crib, October 1997

I started thinking today about the room we readied as the baby's room before Simon was born. By May 4th, with a baby due on the 9th, I expect we had things mostly set up. We had moved my office/studio supplies down to the basement to make the room available. We bought a crib from a neighbor and decked it out with blue bumpers and a battery rotated musical mobile. Another music toy hangs on the outside of the crib in this photo, which shows Simon at about five months old. I had to look for a while in the photos that never made into an album before I found a single photo of the furniture in that room.

Changing table, July 1997

Markus and I kept things as minimal as we could. We purchased a lot of baby clothes at a second hand store called Once Upon a Child. We liked vivid colors more than pastel. And we hung mobiles. The second photo shows Simon on the changing table. I remember a blue terry cloth cover for it, but in this photo he's lying directly on the plastic surface. Perhaps a wet event occurred during this particular change. The photo was taken in July when Simon was two months old. We secured the changing pad on top of my Granny's old dresser, with the drawers holding various supplies. The dresser mirror was mounted to the wall next to the table, doubling the play of the Rainbow Fish mobile. Our babies were always velcro strapped in.

It's a lot of fun to look through the old photos for this blog series!

Memoir (and I consider this series to be an act of memoir) involves a lot of gaps to fill. I have no documented activities for May 4, 1997. Instead, I'll allow myself some good guesses.

May 4, 1997: Perhaps I tied the blue bumpers to the inside of the crib and smoothed the sheet over the mattress. Waiting. I have no note of an activity like swimming, so maybe I did that exercise video again. I'm sure I ate and slept. Walked. Maybe I grocery shopped. This baby could come any day (but don't get too excited--experience says this baby will be late).

May 4, 2015: I've had a day of tying up a few ends that have needed tying for some time. I went to the USA for three weeks at the end of March and enjoyed a busy time of visiting (Ann Arbor, Oberlin, Minneapolis) and helping my parents prepare to move. All that was stimulating and exhausting enough, but I capped things off with four days in Minneapolis at the AWP conference (Associated Writers and Writing Programs). It takes a while to recover from hanging out with 12,000 writers. This evening I took a jog with Markus and Miriam. Well, they ran off ahead of me, and I did a short round on my own. But it was enough to get the endorphins pumping and coat me in sweat.