Nausea

Eep. It's been a really, really long time since I've posted. And now I'm all tongue-tied, and it's hard to make the words come out. I told myself that today I would just put up the fragment of a post I wrote more than a month ago, and then tomorrow I will be braver and stronger and start again trying to make more words on the screen.

By the way, the nausea is still, at 14 1/2 weeks, not entirely gone. But it is way, way better, and I'm duly grateful.


July 27, 2005

In a perverse way, it seems easier to write when one doesn't have anything in particular to write about. Then it's just playing with words, following one's nose, until maybe something develops. Or maybe it doesn't. But then that just leaves more space to write something, anything, as soon as a fragment of an idea arrives.

When there is not only a thing to write about, but a Big Thing, it suddenly seems to get heavier and more difficult. I suppose it has to do the nagging feeling that one can't possibly do justice to the topic with anything less than a bildungsroman-meets-doctoral-thesis to the tune of 1500 heavily footnoted pages. Well, and then there's how a Big Topic gets all kind of murky and boggy and inchoate in spots, especially if it's emotionally laden. There's just not a nice, clean, crisp, dry way to get from here to there. Every attempt to write passages in one's head seems to end with getting stuck up to the chin in a morass of intellectual complexity and mixed feelings.

It wouldn't be so bad if one could just write about other things in the meanwhile. But there's something about the Big Topic that traps a person's mind in a useless high-rev, wheels spinning, burning lots of gas, getting nowhere. It happened to me before when I was trying to figure out a way to write about my struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome. I didn't write for two weeks as my mind spun and spun. Finally I was able to find the wisdom (or luck, or fatigue) just to give it up--telling myself a soothing story about how someday I would really sit down and write about it, just not now--and then start writing again about something else.

This time my wheel-spinning has had a somewhat different quality, but the ultimate result has been pretty much the same. So here's the Big Thing. I'm pregnant. Newly-ish. It will be 8 weeks tomorrow (in that kooky teleological way they count it, from the first day of your last menstrual period, as if from the moment you started bleeding, you were somehow destined to conceive 14 days later). We'd been trying, so it's neither undesired nor unplanned. It's still managed to feel surprising, though. I had begun in earnest to come around to accepting the idea that Cassie might well never get a sibling. (After all, I'm 39 and counting, and fertility starts going down fairly steeply around age 35, and it had taken 2 years to get pregnant with Cassie, and that was 4 years ago, and, and, and... )

One of the things about pregnancy besides the somehow inescapable mind-blowing-ness of it is the morning sickness. Sometimes the nausea is so big in my consciousness, it feels like anything else I think or feel has to squeeze through around the edges of it. The whole center of my mind is taken up with this big, uncomfortably overinflated balloon of queasiness.