one of my favourite poems

This Body Is Growing a Person

By Sheree Fitch

 

Why say: I'm going to have a baby?

You give birth.

But you never own.

You never have.
 

To say baby is to say cherub cheeks and dimpled wrists 

warm snuggle bunny baby bundle.

Sure there's a faint echo of crying and smell of baby shit

but both are sweet to ear and nose in conception.

 

Say instead:

This body is growing a person.

Picture that chalky fish on the ultrasound screen as

infant, toddler, child, adolescent

a grown person with a mortgage

no job, child support to pay.

Picture inside you a temper tantrum

a three-year-old scribbling on the walls

a face full of acne

a lip being stitched

a weeping teenager broken-hearted for the first time

a door-smashing wall-pounding adolescent

a runaway

an addict

a crackpot conservative, a lunatic lefty

a vegan

a vegetable

a prostitute

a convict

a schizophrenic

a tightrope walker, a high-rise window washer

a human trying to be.

 

Picture yourself inside yourself.

(Now there's a terrifying thought.)

 

For nine months see baby

an old person with false teeth, pleated face

halitosis, osteoporosis, a bruised heart.

 

Say:

This body is growing a person.

Be prepared

when baby stands before you

framed in the arch of a doorway

waving goodbye with a promise to call

a baby you can no longer hold

                            no longer rock

                            no longer kiss and make it better for.

 

Just watch:

as he goes out

into a world

that most days

is just not              good           enough

for any baby you might dare to call your own.

 

1993, Sheree Fitch. In the collection "In this house are many women, and other poems", Goose Lane Editions. 

Sheree's website is here. 

So I'm pregnant!

I found out on June 21 and ever since have been keeping it mostly a secret. I say "mostly" because I told my close friends, and our immediate family (parents, siblings) right away, but have been waiting to hit that magical 12-week mark before I let it be public (and then, Adam had to call his friends in Chicago, and then I went on a trip to Toronto, so it's taken a little longer than I expected to announce to the world). I'm at 14 weeks now. Due February 8th, 2018. A wee Noble-Elliott concoction! Woo hoo! 

I gotta say, it has been hard not to say anything on social media relating to pregnancy, and instead pretend life is just ticking along as it was before. So I've mainly just not said anything at all.

As well, I've been really tired and nauseous, so that other than going to work and then coming home every day, and sleeping, and then waking up and sometimes making supper before going back to bed, there hasn't been a lot to post to Instagram or blog about, really. (Except for my trip to Toronto last week, which, thank goodness I wasn't super tired for.) And I didn't want to just post the same naps, dishes and office pics over and over, and come across as super boring. ("Doesn't she ever get her ass up off the couch anymore?" -- I imagined people thinking.) But I also didn't have the energy to "look for inspiration and beauty in the everyday!" or anything along those lines - I was actually quite happy to just take time to chill. 

This has resulted in me taking a kind of social media hermitage for the last month, which has been nice in some ways, and irritating in others. 

What's Been Nice:

  • For Adam and I to just enjoy the knowledge that we're cooking a little baby up, and things are relatively chill for now... I'm not showing, not everyone knows, it's just us and our little Strawberry/Plum/whatever fruit size it is that week. Before long my bump will grow, and everyone will know, and life will probably never be this quiet again.
  • To take a little break from social media, because really, that's always good for creativity and ideas, even if I resist it at the time.
  • To prioritize rest. For several weeks there I would get home from work and be so exhausted I could not do anything else but crawl into bed and sleep for two hours. It didn't matter that the dishes weren't done, that the clothes were in piles on the floor, that the book I ached to read was right there, that there were projects I wanted to work on. None of it mattered because my body was growing a human and it was effing tired and needed to rest. 

What's Been Irritating:

  • Dangit but I just want to talk publicly about what I'm going through! And share All the Feelings - the excitement, the fear, the fact that a human being is growing inside my body, which continually blows my mind. 
  • I hate not explaining things. I know, I know, everyone has the right to take breaks and not say why, and I would never begrudge anyone else that right, ever. But I also just like to say "Here's what's going on with me!" rather than some vague "Oh I'm a little worn out right now". I like honesty, I like to share. I guess that's why I like blogging? LOL.

ANYway. So yeah! I took a little break, somewhat. Because I'm pregnant! Main takeaway: I've been sleeping a lot. My nausea has now subsided. And the baby, which started out Blueberry-sized the week I found out I was pregnant, is now the size of a Peach. 

So hurray! I can't wait to share more of my pregnancy as it progresses. In the meantime - here are two fun board books I bought already... you know this kiddo is going to have a massive library before it's even born!

I do not want to forget

From my trip to Toronto last week:

  1. The buildings. So many buildings, some so tall you have to tip your head wayyyyy back to see the tops. So many houses, all side by side, sharing a wall or an alley. Street after street after street of them.
  2. People, people, people. Not just white people. Brown, black, Asian, Indigenous, so many different kinds of people. (It's easy to forget in mostly-white Cape Breton how many different kinds of people there are.) Subway cars full of people, sidewalks walked over hundreds of times an hour. People crossing the street in droves. People, so many, each with their own life, their own plans for the day, none of which I'll ever know. I delight in this and also am a fish out of water in this. I can pass, I can play along and pretend I am a city girl, enough to navigate the Subway. But it is also unnerving, it is not my normal. Still, I like it.
  3. A city so big and sprawling. One neighbourhood of it is the size of my town. Subways, street cars, taxis, Ubers, cars, bikes, people walking. Homes and stores and highways spooling out and out and out into the farmland beyond. Clouds overhead, grey-blue and ominous, threatening thunder later. A humid summer.
  4. Gardens, to match all the houses. Lush, spilling onto the sidewalk. Some manicured and tidy, little postage stamp lawns. Some unruly and moist. A little space is enough. People live with it, this is their life. A house ten feet wide and 50 feet long. I come home to my house in Cape Breton and feel the space of it, luxurious all of a sudden. Wide. 
  5. The way Aleena looked like a Queen in her dresses, the way all the women at the functions sparkled. Literally sparkled, from all the jewels and shiny threads on their clothes. The way each lenhga or garment had a different colour scheme and it all worked beautifully. 
  6. Niagara Falls and the mist like rain, pouring down on my and Laura's heads. I had the red poncho hood pulled down to my eyebrows and my sunglasses pulled down just enough that I could see out, but barely. My sunglasses were covered with water and there was water everywhere. The sunscreen on my face was running into my eyes. The boat was in the middle of the horseshoe of the falls and I have no idea how the Captain could see in the white froth and churning water and the mist that was not mist but pouring rain. The roar of the water, and the excited cries of all the tourists on the boat, all in red ponchos, exclaiming over being drenched, exclaiming over being right in the heart of a huge cataract of water pouring four million cubic feet of water every second. The rush of it, the energy. 
  7. How I feel when I take myself out of my normal and plop myself down in someone else's normal for a week: like anything is possible. Like all the little excuses I tell myself in the run of a day about why I do a certain thing a certain way, or why life is the way it is in Cape Breton, or about what I want to do with my life - are just that, excuses. That I can change it at any time, if I put in the effort. Sometimes the effort isn't physical, it's mental - just working to see something differently. Seeing excuses for what they are and choosing what to keep, what to let go of, what to try to change into something else. 
  8. A special dinner out with two women I have known for thirteen years, at a fancy-ass restaurant where we laughed and laughed and joked with the waiter and caught up on each other's lives and ate fancy-ass onion rings and they split a truffle.
  9. Sour candies, two couches side by side, "Insecure" and "Mistresses", laughter spilling out of us.
  10. A furry, soft, excitable, delightful dog named Harriet. 

July 21 - 10 things

  1. Taking breaks = so good, so necessary, so right. Going back to the work, or the app, refreshed = feels 100% amazing. SO much better than "powering through" and doing creative work from a place of exhaustion. 
  2. I love seeing Elise Blaha Cripe get inspired on a new thing. It inspires me, gets me charged up to cut out the things that no longer serve, to welcome in the new things or the things that are old but are now new again. Thank you, Elise. 
  3. The abundance of July in plants in ditches - blue, white, purple, all the plants. Hazy hot days.
  4. Those blue plastic bags of recyclables went to the curb last night and are being picked up today. 
  5. Swimming yesterday at Groves Point. The water calm, no waves. Liquid cool all over my body, my hands making a path through it. 
  6. "Excuse me, where did you get that suit?" Twice yesterday. "A website," I reply. "Swimsuits For All." Are they saying that instead of saying, "Go you! A chubby woman wearing a bikini!" or is it just simply what they are thinking? Either way, I will take it. 
  7. "Helloooo babe!" from a client, stopping by my office. "Coffee today," he says, and he pulls a loonie out of his pocket to show me. "Don't lose it," I say, because he is notorious for losing his money. I will probably give him a cup of coffee anyway, even if he does lose it before breaktime. 
  8. Next week I am flying away from the ocean, inland to Toronto. I will spend a week there. I will stand in a wedding from a culture different than my own. I will see friends I haven't seen in a while. I'm looking forward to it, but also a little nervous too. The older I get the more I am a creature of habit, of home. 
  9. A Friday at work where there isn't anything pressing, where the boss is off for the day, where I can start to feel caught up on my list = precious. 
  10. A chocolate chip cookie and a cottage cheese so smooth it's basically yogurt.

i am inspired

  1.  I am inspired by Sommersalt's July experiment. (Here.) She is writing a list of 10 observations of the world around her, each day. They are spare and beautiful, striking to the heart of it.
  2. I don't think I will do it every day. At least not right now. I am not in the headspace for a daily project. But I am in the headspace for simplicity. And for noticing. So we shall see. 
  3. The birch tree I see when I look out the window rustles and tosses like a green pom-pom, gently shaken.
  4. There are things I am waiting to tell, waiting to make public. I am both anxious and excited to share. In time. 
  5. My partner showers and I can hear the water spilling and running. 
  6. There is a card my mother gave me, sitting on my desk beside me. A photo of two women sewing, wearing cloth around their heads, their faces looking up at the photographer, is on the front. Mom used it to wrap a pair of socks she knitted. 
  7. My office is packed with things, most glaringly four blue bags filled with recyclables, waiting for next Friday. 
  8. I crave tomorrow's freedom to fill my time as I please, and ache to turn my attention to the space I live in. 
  9. We are about to drive over to Sydney and get some ribs at RibFest. 
  10. Love. 

finding my electricity

It's May, the end of May. The grass is green and bushy, coming along now. All the plants in the garden are making themselves known. Greening, growing.

Life rolls along. I and Adam go to our respective works, do our jobs. Come home. Make food. And all of the little things that fill up a day. (Texting, paletting, peeing, singing, walking, dish-doing... et cetera.)

Last post, I wrote about my new job and some of the resistance roadblocks I've felt. Well, those voices of resistance are slowly creeping back into the corners, but they are still present. But as I do a little more each day, I get more confident. 

There are still times, though, when I take a big step out of my comfort zone, and then I feel nervous. Like last week - the choir I direct held a Spring Concert/Singalong for the other clients in the Centre and boy, was I nervous! For weeks leading up to it. There is nothing like pushing the boundaries of what you know, and going into the territory of "who the heck knows how this will go!", to make me feel... all the feelings. I was nervous that I'd f*ck it all up, that all my coworkers would laugh at me or talk about me behind my back, that the choir themselves would forget all the songs we've been learning, or that some other Potential Complete Failure would come to pass. Or all of those things at once! Whenever I thought about May 26 (the chosen date) those fears would flash across my brain. 

BUT deep breaths and mantras help. Seriously! Mantras like "Just do your best, Noble. That's all you can do." Or "Just take things one minute at a time." I say them to myself in my head. Whenever needed. 

And the concert/singalong went great. We sang, people listened, they sang along, they clapped. We all felt good about what we had done, what we had accomplished on this mission into the territory of "who the heck knows how this will go!". And we celebrated. 

***

My creative joys right now:

  • comics! I rediscovered Lucy Knisley and have fallen in love with her style and stories. Her career and reflection of how she's gotten to where she is are interesting/inspiring too. 
  • writing! I had the chance to talk one-on-one with Esme Waijun Wang (I won a contest she did on Instagram, so that was rad) about how I want to write a novel. (YUP - yikes - what?! NBD.) She recommended a course she made called Where's the Electricity? to get started. I bought it and we'll see what happens. I'm curious to see what passions/obsessions emerge as mine.
  • Photo books - I want to make one for each year of my life since 2007, which is when I stopped printing photos and putting them in albums or scrapbooks, and started collecting digital data (without really knowing that that's what I was doing). I'm sick of all those memories being stuck behind a screen. I want them on paper, something I can touch and look through with no electrical cord needed. 
  • (still) my 100 Day Project - I'm making colour palettes and posting them to my Instagram. See them all here. Example palette at top of post.

Where's life taking you lately? I'd love to hear.