Baby Love Read Online Free Page B

haven’t yet talked about. He’s in his sixties, and has a little shake that makes hitting nails a challenge sometimes, but I consider it a blessing that he has agreed to help reclaim this little house of my mother’s from dry rot, wasps, and a general state of dilapidation.
    After finding a fairly nice gate that I will be able to open and shut without too much effort even at nine months, we went to see the house he has been building for his family for fifteen years. His wife, Martine, made me chamomile tea with honey for the nausea I told her was flattening me, and Carl brought over a book of photographs of the home birth of his second child.
    The pictures were incredible. Carl was young and cute, with long, braided hippie hair and an embroidered denim shirt. In the pictures, he’s rubbing his wife’s back and holding her hand and kissing her. She’s lying down, fully naked and fully pregnant, surrendering to the process first on her back, then on her side, then on all fours when the baby is ready to come out. The room is dim so the baby won’t be shocked, and Carl’s first child, Tomas, who was four or five, holds a flashlight so they can take pictures.
    Martine and Carl sent me home with something called The Birth Book, a collection of birth stories published by a midwifery collective Carl worked with in the seventies. After reading the stories of ten or fifteen women and their partners and midwives, I feel more than ever that I want to have a home birth. I can’t imagine having the baby in a hospital. I just don’t see how lying flat on your back can possibly be the best way to have a baby. I mean, for starters, it works against gravity.

May 4
    I had my first official prenatal appointment today. It was like being on a conveyor belt at the baby-making factory. I was weighed, my urine tested, and seven vials of blood were extracted from my arm. I was asked about my mother’s health, my father’s, sister’s, and brother’s. Then back to the beginning for Glen’s family info. The doctor briefly skipped a rock across the ocean of my diet, instructing me to avoid shellfish, raw eggs, and one other thing that I now cannot remember. Then she prescribed a prenatal vitamin and handed me several sample packets of the enormous bright purple pill. She did a quick vaginal exam, apparently the only one I am going to have until I go into labor, and then the whole thing was over.
    The appointment took about twenty-five minutes and she never looked at or touched my stomach. There wasn’t time or opportunity to discuss the creeping depression I’ve been feeling, or how concerned I am about my life changing, or my fear that I won’t be able to handle it all. I mean, technically there was. She did ask how I was feeling, but we were going along at such a clip, I couldn’t imagine what would happen if I bogged things down with my actual thoughts. She did say she had several patients who stayed on antidepressants through their pregnancies with no side effects whatsoever. That was helpful, considering I’ve been gnashing my teeth to stubs every night worrying about the implications of taking them: Am I going to burn in hell or give my kid epilepsy?
    She also said, somewhere in between the questions about my family’s health history and the exam, that she’s looking forward to delivering my baby. And that she hopes I won’t do something silly, like have a home birth.
    Uh-huh.
    After the prenatal, I indulged in my bimonthly luxury of getting my eyebrows and toes done. Just as I was lying down, Yelena, who has been in charge of my eyebrows for the last three years, asked how old I am and if I am planning to have children. I hesitated just a second too long, trying to figure out how to answer, and she said, You’re pregnant! And I said, Yes, and she said, I knew it! And then we both laughed and I told her how nauseated and tired and freaked out I am, and she told me about her clients who come in to the salon the day before