The New Rambler

Things I worried about before I had my baby:

That I would not love the baby.

Yes, really. I worried about this. Hysterical, isn’t it?

That the cats would hate me.

Because, you know, my mother’s cat didn’t speak to her for weeks after I came home. And they loved my pregnant belly. In fact, they loved it so much that they liked to use it as a launching pad, and thus whenever I went in for a prenatal appointment, anyone who didn’t have cats would be totally alarmed by the scratches. And they never knew me not pregnant — I got them when I was six months along.

That I would not be able to breastfeed.

I had a breast reduction when I was 21 and they basically told me I wasn’t ever going to be able to breastfeed. Since I was not ever planning to have children, this did not seem like a problem. I was just excited not to have bra straps digging into my shoulders and to be suffering the various other indignities of the well-endowed.

My breastfeeding anxiety took the form of a peculiar sort of avoidance — I didn’t sign up for a breastfeeding class because I was afraid that people would just look at me oddly, and yet I read all of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, which, so far as I can tell, is a book designed to make just about everyone feel like shit, and particularly people who have to work for a living.

That my house was going to be overtaken by baby crap that I didn’t understand.

People kept telling me I needed things with strange and inscrutable names. “Oh, you need a pack-n-play! Do you have a pack-n-play? I have a pack-n-play you can have?” WHAT THE FUCK IS A PACK-N-PLAY? Or a Boppy? A bassinet is different from a crib? Really? I was supposed to register for all this crap, and I didn’t even know what half of it was. As far as I knew, I just needed a place for the baby to sleep, a carseat for him, and a bunch of clothes for him to sully with various baby effluvia. And diapers. I am not even getting into the nature of clothing. I barely knew what a onesie was before I inherited a bunch of them.

That I would never go anywhere or do anything ever again.

Because, you know, you can’t possible put a child in a car or on a plane or take him for a walk.

That the child would grow up completely fucked up because of his weird family situation.

I’d go into this, but it’s too complicated.

That the baby would grow up to like sports.

Things I worried about after I had my baby:

Measurements.

When we were in the hospital, we were told to measure the amount of supplemental donor breastmilk the baby took in milliliters or ccs. I was also supposed to record how long he nursed and rate five or eight different aspects of breastfeeding on a three point scale every time we tried. Oh yeah, and we were supposed to try either every two hours or every time the baby seemed interested, depending on who the nurse was that shift. Then we left the hospital and the doctor wanted supplement measured in ounces. Then he got his vaccinations and was supposed to get Tylenol in milligrams, but there were two different concentrations of Tylenol. Then it turned out that there was INFANT Tylenol, which is different from CHILDREN’S Tylenol. Really, there’s nothing like getting a call from your daycare director when you’re at work informing you that you have been giving your child the wrong medicine.

I know that I once did nine hundred math problems about all these different kinds of measurements every year in school, but I have completely forgotten all about them, and thus I stand there at midnight staring uncomprehendingly at bottles and syringes and labels. Oh, and every time I take the boy’s temperature, I have to look up normal human temperature ranges on my phone. Every. Single. Time.

Napping.

Good Lord but this baby hates to nap when he’s with me. He only likes to nap at daycare. This all seemed fine until I started reading about how OMG YOUR BABY HAS TO NAP.

That I would not be able to breastfeed.

Well. I can some. But not very much, especially not since I went back to work. I pump 2-3 times a day and get an ounce if I’m really lucky. It’s sort of hilariously pathetic. I sit there in the staff bathroom* and desperately try to shake the little drops that accumulate into the flange into the bottle because I don’t want to waste any of it.

That I really ought to have a landline even though I can’t afford it.

Because, you know, what if my cellphone dies? Or the power goes out and I can’t make calls over my computer? Or someone is here looking after the baby and doesn’t have a phone?

That the baby will grow up to like sports.

I am sure I worry about other things, too. I worry that I am forgetting some really clever thing I meant to put in this post. I worry that there are typos because I am a terrible typist and I have barely slept. That I am not entertaining enough for the baby. That I am fucking him up irrevocably by my very existence. You know, the usual.

But so far at the end of every day, we are both still alive, which I suppose is about the best way you can measure success.

*Yes, I am pumping in a bathroom. I tried using the Friends of the Library room downstairs, which was fine, except that then they periodically need to use it when I need to pump, and then one day a woman got the other key and walked in on me. “I’ll be done in about 8 minutes!” I said, gaily. “Oh, I don’t mind!” she said, and came on in to start book sorting. And then she proceeded to talk to me. So now I pump in the very well appointed staff bathroom, where there is a sink and where nobody ever bothers me. I do have an office, but it has windows to the outside and floor to ceiling window that faces into the staff room, so it’s just not quite the thing.

There’s been a Your eCards thing floating around on Facebook for the past week or so. Maybe you’ve seen it. If you’re reading this, the chances are good that you have. It’s a young woman talking to a young man, both carrying their school books in the traditionally gendered fashion. “I see, so if I don’t have sex with you, I’m a prude bitch, if I use the pill, I’m a slut, if I get pregnant, I’m an idiot and if I choose abortion I’m Satan. Yay.”

I haven’t said much on the whole subject of birth control of late beyond hitting the Like button next to people’s Facebook statuses on my phone because, well, I’ve been a bit busy with my not-quite-eight-week-old baby. But it doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it.

I know very little about computer programming, not even enough to be dangerous. But I do know that much of it is based on what in Latin and Greek we call conditions — if then statements. Some of the conditions have wonderful names. Future more vivid was always my favorite; sadly, there’s a future less vivid, too. The conditions in the statement above are just ordinary present tense conditions, and they are presented, implicitly, as a series of ors. The young woman can be a prude OR a slut OR an idiot OR Satan.

I am a human being, not a computer program, and I live often in a subjunctive mood, in a series of ands, not ors. What does it say if, for instance, I used birth control AND I got pregnant? If I got pregnant AND considered abortion? Am I an idiot slut bordering on Satanhood? I should get that on a tshirt. Or perhaps I should put it on my resume: Education, BA, MFA, MLIS; Employment: Adult Services Coordinator, Branch Manager, Youth Services Assistant, Graduate Instructor; Other: Idiot, Slut, Honorary Satan.

The other thing I know about computer programming is that it is inherently full of bugs. Things work but not quite right. If you have a smartphone and it seems as though the apps are asking you to update them every other week, well — many of those are bug fixes. But fixing a bug often begets another bug, and so on. Sometimes the bugs are errors in the code — forgotten symbols, typos, and the like — and sometimes they are errors in the programmer’s thinking, breakdowns of logic or sequence, strange workarounds that stop working.

What I know about human beings is that we are complicated. We are not easily sortable. We cannot be legislated. We are created, gestated, born, and nourished through a tremendously messy process, one all mixed up not only with bodies and precious bodily fluids but also emotions, frequently complicated, messy ones.

There have been innumerable brilliant responses to the latest attack on women’s health and women’s reproductive rights. But even they are mostly predicated on the kind of logic that dominates the ORs of the comic. We must be able to control our fertility. Using birth control means being responsible, not being a slut. I believe all that. But I also know that control is something we in fact have very little of. I was responsible; I still got pregnant. The result is the baby now sleeping in a sling on my chest, and I would not trade him for the world.

When I became pregnant, the public debates I had participated in about women’s reproductive rights since I was a teenager no longer seemed relevant to me. Not because I believed that I lacked choices, or that I was not entitled to them, not that I will not still campaign with all I’ve got to preserve those choices for people. What seemed irrelevant was the idea that any body of men — and they are mostly men — sitting in any government chamber in any statehouse or capitol could have the foggiest notion of what I was going through, or that they had any right to know, or any right to decide or dictate.

A woman’s control of her own body is limited, even to her. It should never be limited by anyone else.

I sometimes wonder if the experience of playing Sky Masterson in a production of Guys and Dolls is enough to give you a lifelong boost, or if instead everything after that is kind of a letdown.

My high school put on a production the spring of my freshman year, and of course I had a huge crush on the guy who did play Sky Masterson, who was tall, dark, and handsome (and sang a hell of a lot better than Marlon Brando, although that’s not really saying much). I tried out but did not get a part, there being few roles suited to fat girls with marginal acting skills in that show (singing “House of the Rising Sun” at my audition was, in retrospect, perhaps also a poor choice — I thought I had a rendition down pretty well, but the expression on the face of the director would suggest otherwise). I then had high hopes of getting to be in the pit orchestra — I’d been offered a spot, even — but then it turned out that the score had no viola part. So I had to settle for sitting in the audience. I went the last night, because that was always the best show. (Our theatre was so small that the swing choir had to hold two shows a night for two nights in a row in order to accommodate everyone. It was always best to go to the last show on the last night, because it had the best special acts and it also invariably had the most insanity, like the time all the guys came on stage without their socks on and the director stopped the show to make them go back and put them on.)

It was fabulous.

Well, no, I’m sure it wasn’t. There were a few less than great performances; I knew that even then. But Nathan Detroit was good, and Sarah Brown was good, and Adelaide was amazing, and — well, I’m probably still not in a position to give a fair assessment of Sky Masterson. When you are fifteen years old and grew up on MGM musicals and the senior guy you have a crush on is singing “Luck Be a Lady” and throwing his whole body into it — well, let us just say that your critical faculties are not exactly fully engaged.

Years later I ran into him at a party. He was still tall, dark, and handsome, but I didn’t recognize him until he introduced himself. I was riding rather high by then — recently accepted into a supposedly prestigious graduate program, writing a newspaper column, making new activist friends. It wasn’t the sort of party where you sat and caught up with people. I got invited because I knew some of the hosts, a group of guys who swallowed fire and lay on beds of nails and so on. They all lived in an old house on Dubuque Street, and the place had been decked out as an ongoing art installation for the party — the part I remember was a room filled with old televisions, all tuned in some fashion so their screens displayed a different, vibrant color. Somehow, though, the word “party” had drifted down to the dorms nearby, and so by the time I got there, the place was packed half with art students and activists and half with guys with identical haircuts and Abercrombie tshirts looking around confusedly and saying, “Dude. . . where’s the keg?”

So I don’t know how Sky Masterson was doing by then. According to Facebook, he seems to be doing well now — married, kids, good job, etc. But that moment when he recognized me and I did not recognize him threw me off and continues to do so. I always thought that certain kinds of success could insulate you from whatever other turns your life took, that somehow, if you’d had that kind of moment even once, that kind of “Glory Days” moment where you hit the ball or made the run or sang the solo or simply looked dazzling for one evening of your life — I thought if you had that, it would last. It would define your life from then on.

I was wrong, of course — even the Bruce Springsteen song makes it clear just how wrong I was, but I hadn’t really listened to it then. I was twenty-four and still waiting for that moment to come, unaware that I was living in it already.

I’m putting this in a post of its own because, well, there may be some people who do not want to read graphic details about labor and delivery. If you do not want to read such details, this post is not for you. I don’t mean to imply by that that childbirth is scary, gross, or totally unpleasant, by the way — I just realize it may not be of interest to all readers. Also, I apologize in advance for the extreme length of this post. To paraphrase Mark Twain, if I’d had more energy, I would have written a shorter blog post.

I am amused at times by the phrase “natural childbirth.” When you have a noun and then a noun that gets modified by an adjective, the implication is that the noun alone is the “normal” or predominant meaning. And so in the United States, when we say childbirth, we usually mean a woman with an epidural lying on her back. That’s normal here, but it’s not really normal elsewhere. What’s normal in, say, Europe, or for that matter most of the developing world, is called natural childbirth here in order to differentiate it from what we perceive as normal. Culture! Language! Such fun. But I digress.

I knew from fairly early on that I wanted to have a natural childbirth. Well, actually, what I knew was that I wanted a doula. I didn’t know a whole lot about doulas, but I loved the idea that a doula was someone whose whole job was to support and take care of the mother during the process, and I figured I needed all the support I could get. I am a doctor’s daughter, and I grew up at the hospital, but I still hate being left alone with medical personnel, especially when they are talking fast and in jargon, or disbelieving what I say, or accusing me of one thing or another.

I also chose early on to see the nurse-midwives at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. I was 35 when I got pregnant, which is just on the cusp of where they start to consider you to be of “advanced maternal age,” but astonishingly, given my rather poor general health, I was not actually considered in any way a high risk pregnancy. Seeing the midwives meant I would have all my prenatal appointments with just the four of them, in rotation, rather than with the constantly shifting parade of residents and medical students and attending physicians and nurses and nurses in training that you get at a major teaching hospital. I was an emotional wreck, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that large a group of people talking to me. Being seen by the midwives meant I’d be isolated from all that but that I’d still be in the hospital and have the excellent OB staff available at a moment’s notice should anything go wrong.

Having a midwife and a doula doesn’t mean you must have a natural childbirth — after all, emergency C sections sometimes have to happen, and some people who go the midwife route still choose to have epidurals and so on. But they are experts at natural childbirth, and they encourage women to have agency in the whole process. That sounded good to me. And the more I read, the more convinced I was. I’m a sucker for anything that tells me that the body is smarter than science, and that’s the general theme of natural childbirth. In theory, if you don’t muck around with your body by pumping it full of Pitocin (an imitation of the hormone that causes you to go into labor) and anesthesia, you end up with this miraculous natural balance of hormones that cause your body to do everything it needs to do, and you get a fantastic high right after you give birth.

Having done it all now, I will say that that was sort of true for me, although the high may have been overwhelmed by exhaustion and relief that the whole thing was finally over.

So here’s my childbirth story, as best as I can remember.

The night of my due date, my mother, the baby’s father, and I went out for an elaborate dinner at Devotay, because, well, what the hell, why not tempt fate? It was very good, and I came home and slept in my usual fitful late pregnancy fashion. At 7 a.m., I woke up with a pain in my gut and said to myself, that was a contraction. Like, a real contraction, not one of those wussy Braxton-Hicks contractions.

I had more of those throughout the morning, ten or fifteen or twenty or even thirty minutes apart, pretty sporadically. They got a bit closer together as the day wore on. I checked in with my doula a few times and she said I should keep her posted. At some point the baby’s father came over and made spinach lasagna and we had dinner, and he started timing the contractions, which were more like six or eight minutes apart. My mom came, too, and they each read to me for a bit (I specifically requested that everyone involved in my labor bring something to read to me). The baby’s father read the beginning of The Solace of Open Spaces and my mother read “Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep,” which is a very, very odd fairy tale by Eleanor Farjeon, who also wrote the song “Morning Is Broken,” which you probably know from hearing Cat Stevens sing it. Somewhere, lost to time, there’s a tape of my mother reading this same story to me when I was five or six years old, with me playing the xylophone in the background.

Around midnight, the contractions were quite close together, enough that we all decided to go to the hospital. Melissa, the doula, and my friend Caitrin met us there. The midwife checked me and said I was only a centimeter dilated and recommended I go home again for a bit and try to get some sleep. They even gave me Percocet to help me sleep. It had no effect. But Caitrin and my mom came back home with me, and my mom dozed a bit (she claims not a lot) while Caitrin massaged my back and belly and talked me through the contractions, and ran a bath for me, and made me a snack. At 5:30, she announced it was time for us to go back to the hospital. Off we went again, and this time I’d gotten to four centimeters and they decided to admit me.

I then got moved to one of the very swank delivery rooms. Assorted furniture, okay bed, lots of room to pace around, huge fancy tub, and lots of fun equipment they bring in to help you with labor. My favorite was the birthing ball. In fact, I liked it so much that at some point during that very long day, they said, “Laura, don’t you think you should get off the birthing ball? You’ve been there for two hours.” I had no memory of being on the birthing ball for two hours (two hours?!?), but then I have no real memory of time that day at all. I went into labor on a Saturday and labored all through Sunday until evening. The next day I was convinced that it was Sunday, that we were missing church. My mother had to tell me again and again that no, it was Monday — church was yesterday, and that someone had managed to restrain our rector from having everyone sing “Come, Labor On” for me.

I’ve never been in such a different space in my life. It’s a tiny bit like having a fever in the way that it removes you from the regular world and makes time seem irrelevant, but it’s also nothing at all like a fever. It’s a little bit like walking home a long, long, long way because your car has broken down, or because you don’t have bus fare, or because you just need to walk, but it’s also nothing like that, because you don’t know how far away home is.

I spent the day working through my contractions — walking, straddling the birthing ball, leaning onto a counter or the bed or the sink or someone who was unwittingly standing near me or getting into that fabulous tub. Caitrin and the doula took turns massaging me and talking me through the contractions. I’ve been doing yoga for about a year and a half now, so I’m used to Paying Attention to the Breath. I ditched my childbirth education class before they got to the breathing parts (since the first half hour consisted of a nurse reading from canned PowerPoint slides that told us we should eat lots of vegetables and drink lots of water, I felt not so bad walking out after things didn’t improve in another hour), but my doula said that yoga would see me through. Oddly, though, the breathing pattern I ended up using the most was the one I used to have to do for asthma tests at the pediatric pulmonary clinic when I was a kid. In-out-in-out-deep breath in-blow it out as hard and as long as you can. I did this instinctively, it seems, and I could see in my head the little lines on the machine going up and down all those many years ago.

Sometime in the afternoon it got to be time to start pushing. I no longer remember how I knew that, or if they told me, or what. I had been looking forward to pushing because I had heard how much some people love it.

I was not one of those people.

I pushed for four hours. I pushed standing, sitting on the toilet, squatting with my arms around the baby’s father’s neck or holding myself up with the birthing bar or lying on my side with one leg elevated. I tried every position that the nurse and the midwife and my doula suggested. I believe I also yelled at people a lot, and I am told I sweated like a racehorse. I seem to recall that at some point somebody offered me lip balm. Lip balm! Like I cared about lip balm! I just wanted to take a nap!

I’m not sure if it was before or after I started pushing that I threw up everything I’d managed to eat in the past twenty-four hours.

Finally I was too tired for anything but the sidelying pushing position, and so despite my fantasies of delivering my baby squatting and having someone catch it, I ended up on the bed. In theory through all of this I was undergoing intermittent fetal monitoring, which is to say that rather than having the monitor affixed to you at all times, the nurse just approaches with it from time to time. It seemed as though “from time to time” meant “every other minute” to me, but I could be wrong.

At some point around the fourth hour of pushing, people began to look slightly worried. I learned later that they were having a great deal of trouble getting the baby’s heart rate because he was so far down the birth canal, and when they did get it, it seemed to be fluctuating rather wildly. The midwife told me later that she wasn’t too worried but that to someone looking at the monitors outside the room, it would have looked very worrisome. She did give me some oxygen, in case the baby’s umbilical cord was getting pinched and he wasn’t getting as much as he should. It was like asthma treatment all over again!

I was at this point convinced I was going to be pregnant forever, with a not-quite-born baby stuck in me. I was waiting for someone to tell me what a failure I was, but nobody did. I thought perhaps I’d just fall asleep and they’d figure they had to slice the baby out. They said, no, no, you’re in transition — it’s the hardest part! I thought I’d been in transition for HOURS at that point. Apparently not.

What did happen, finally, after assorted consultations and some more worry about the heart rate, is that the midwife told me, “Laura, I think you can push this baby out yourself, but it’s going to take you two or three more hours.”

If I had a response other than ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?, it is lost to history.

She then said, “Or we can get the OB team in here to help you out with the vacuum extractor. You’ll still have to push, but it will help speed things up.”

At this point, if someone had told me they could pull my baby out by putting a screw in its head and using a pair of pliers, I would have said yes. So of course I said yes to the OB team. And then very suddenly there were like twelve more people in the room, all in scrubs, all kind of racing around like they’d just been hovering outside and waiting to be called upon. And yet they were amazingly respectful of me, of my midwife, my doula, and my whole entourage. (Truly, I did feel as though I had an entourage, for perhaps the first and last time in my life.) I never felt as though they were taking over, or telling everyone to clear out of the way. They came in, set up, waited (not long) for my next push. . . and then suddenly everyone was telling me I had a baby.

I saw him wildly waving his arms as someone lifted him up. I didn’t get to have the immediate skin-to-skin contact I’d initially wanted, because they had to take him off to another part of the room check on some things. My mother and his father went with, and my doula stayed with me. A nurse, who had clearly been waiting for this ALL DAY swooped in to give me some Pitocin “to speed up your contractions so you can get the placenta out.” It seemed sort of silly to me, since delivering a placenta is a lot easier than delivering a baby, but I wasn’t in the mood to argue at that point, so I did end up with an IV briefly. I tore a tiny bit, so the OB team stitched me up. And then — then they brought me my baby, and I got to hold him up against me and look at him. All around me people were taking pictures and making phone calls and sending texts. I was oblivious to it all. Whatever pain I had been in was gone, completely, and there, somehow, was this beautiful, wide-awake creature, looking around at the world and at me for the first time.

When I tell people that I was in labor for thirty-six hours including four hours of pushing and did it all without drugs, they look at me like I’m completely crazy. Quite possibly that’s true. . . but you know, it actually wasn’t so bad. Like, I’d do it again. Perhaps I say that just because of amnesia, and because the result was my baby boy. That’s surely true. And surely part of it is an unnecessary level of pride on my part. I took great pleasure in saying to all the nurses over the next few days, “No, I didn’t have an epidural.” But maybe in this life we accomplish what we can. My godmother told me right before I gave birth that giving birth to her children was the first time she really felt physically powerful. It wasn’t the first time for me, but it was one of the most intense. And for me, that was worth it. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

A drear-nighted December may not be the best time to listen to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. Then again, is there ever really a bad time to listen to Bob Dylan? (Dylan haters to the side; this post’s not for you.)

I first heard the album in its entirety sometime between my sophomore and junior years of college. Sophomore year is when the Indigo Girls’ live album 1200 Curfews came out. I got a copy for my birthday, and we all listened to it incessantly on my hall and argued late into the night about just what Italian poet was being referenced in “Tangled Up in Blue,” which they cover on that album. At some point, it must have dawned on me that I needed to hear the real thing, and so on some trip home to Iowa City, I picked up cassettes (yes, I still bought cassettes in those days — my car then had a tape deck — as, for that matter, does my car now) of Blood on the Tracks as well as Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited.

(It should be noted here for those who are unaware that I was raised almost entirely without popular music. I did not hear the Beatles until I was a teenager. I knew “Blowin’ in the Wind” from singing it at camp, but Dylan was as unfamiliar to me growing up as I suspect Bach’s collected organ works are to most people.)

I don’t believe that my repeated listenings to all three albums that fall actually precipitated my first major depressive episode, although I suppose there are those who would argue that repeated exposure to “Desolation Row” and “Visions of Johanna” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” not to mention “Simple Twist of Fate” and “You’re a Big Girl Now” and “If You See Her, Say Hello,” are not really good for anyone suffering from unrequited love, perceived poverty, and ensuing clinical depression. But so it goes. Along with Elizabeth Wurtzel, I’ve always believed that the sound of Dylan’s “ragged, edgy vocal cords” is actually the sound of redemption.

I also spent a lot of time that fall sitting at a table at Chan’s, a Chinese place a few blocks from campus, eating chicken fried rice (I never ordered anything else) and reading exclusively books not actually assigned for any of my classes. I had gone that fall from seeing the cafeteria as a wondrous place wherein food appeared magically and dishes were swept away on a conveyor belt to seeing it as a place of overcooked pasta, stale cigarette smoke, putrid cooking smells, and social isolation. My best friends were living abroad or off campus or had become biochemistry majors and chained themselves to their desks, and so I mostly ate alone. Doing so at Chan’s, with the neon lights and the rain and the company of some Beatnik tome seemed infinitely preferable to doing so at the cafeteria. I worked more hours at patrol to make up for the expense.

I’ve always credited another Romantic poet — Coleridge — with saving my life that semester, later that December, when I was alone in my dorm room with nothing but some clothes and a handful of books I needed for my last finals (everything else was packed and stored for a month for my impending move off campus). Among those books was an anthology of the Romantic poets, and one night I opened it to “Frost at Midnight,” and somehow it had on me the same effect that the music William Styron describes listening to in Darkness Visible had on him: I decided to live.

But that was just one moment, one little, though crucial time. Dylan was a constant, and if he didn’t make me happy, exactly, he sustained me in some way, much the way those plates of chicken fried rice did. And now, tonight, with the rain coming down outside, that’s what I remember.

This post is adapted slightly from the beginning of this month’s The Stage column for Little Village. The online version is not available yet, but those of you who are local can pick up a free copy of the print publication at numerous venues around town.

My father never made it to the war. Like many in his generation — he was born in 1923 — he wanted badly to fight in World War II. Having learned there were only two standard eye charts used in induction exams, he memorized both, figuring he could read enough of the first row to figure out which one it was. The ruse worked. He joined the army, but he was honorably discharged partway through basic training and told “not to come back even if we are invaded.”

The exact events leading up to his discharge are lost to his memory and to a fire that destroyed a great many military records in Kansas in the 1970s. But he was not forgotten: at his funeral in 1981, some forty years after his short tenure in the Army, two military officials showed up with an American flag, a headstone and a hundred dollars. The oldest local living veteran came to the burial to read “In Flanders Field.” He was even offered burial in a national cemetery and the American Legion in Enosburg Falls, Vermont, where he is buried, still keeps a fresh flag at his grave, along with those of all the other veterans buried in that tiny town.

The military does a much better job than most of us at remembering and honoring the people who served, even those, like my father, who gave nothing more than a few weeks of their lives. As a society, we do not do so well. This month we have Veterans Day. Some of us will get the day off work. Most of us will notice that no mail is delivered that day. My grandmother will tell me about observing a minute of silence in her grade school classroom at 11:11 on November 11 for Armistice Day, as it was originally called. But even though we are fighting two wars, Americans won’t take more than that moment or two to remember, perhaps only noticing when they go to the bank or the post office or the library and find it closed.

This year, however, Iowa City area residents have a chance to do much more: They have a chance to hear from veterans themselves at Working Group Theatre’s latest production, called Telling: Iowa City. Nine actors, all of them veterans, will put on a performance based on the stories of many more Iowa veterans from World War II through the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This past August, Working Group Theatre and the UI Veterans Association interviewed dozens of veterans from Iowa. Working from those stories, playwrights Jennifer Fawcett and Jonathan Wei crafted the script of this production. Wei is a founder of The Telling Project, which has produced shows in Eugene and Portland, OR, Sacramento, CA, Starkville, MS, Washington, D.C., Seattle, WA and Baltimore, MD.

Whether or not you know someone in the service personally, you owe it to yourself to go and hear some of these stories. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 8-10 in Theatre B at The University of Iowa’s Theatre Building and Dec. 2-4 at Riverside Theatre.

Working Group Theatre is also soliciting more stories from veterans. To submit yours, or to read more, visit workinggrouptheatre.org and look for the links for Telling: Iowa City.

Two weeks ago I killed my cat. Well, technically, the vet did it, and it’s not called killing, it’s called euthanasia or putting down or, most euphemistically, putting to sleep. I did this because he was old and sick. He weighed only 4.6 pounds, down from his eight pound prime. He had an infection in both eyes and one paw. He was almost completely dehydrated. Shrunken is how the vet described him. He gave him only another twenty-four hours to live, but then said he was such a tough cat he might hang on for another week, getting weaker and weaker. Everyone at the office was amazed he could still stand. I told them that the day before he had jumped on my bed. Twice. But I killed him, or I let him be killed, and then I buried him in the backyard, with the help of a friend. It was dark by the time I got started, and I was digging by the light of a railroad lantern, digging finally sitting down, with a trowel, because my six-months pregnant body could no longer manage the balancing act of digging down into the hole and pulling the shovel up carrying dirt. I was a poor lever operator.

Five months ago I nearly killed the thing that will become my baby. Technically again I would not have killed it. And they don’t call it killing, not unless they are the sort of people who hold signs outside of clinics with bloody fetuses. They call it abortion, or D&C, or, most euphemistically, termination. I decided not to kill the six-week old collection of cells, though. I decided to keep them and let them grow. This week I read that they now weigh two and a half pounds and have five senses and a full complement of body parts. This seems rather impossible, but apparently it is true.

Nobody ever criticizes you for putting your cat down. Even the most rabid anti-abortion people I know are okay with, as they say, putting an animal out of its suffering. Of course, no one says it’s easy, either. Go out and tell people that you had to put your cat or dog to sleep, and you will gain instant sympathy. Post it on a social network and people you barely even know will offer hugs and condolences.

Nobody posts on the internet that she put her embryo down. Many of us, of course, would support her, would offer her strength, would recognize that this, too, may have been a hard decision, or it may have been an easy one, but that the telling of it would not be easy. Because of course many people would not offer such support. They would tell her that she was wrong, that such decisions were not hers to make, that they should be beyond her control.

If you believe that God gave man dominion over all the animals, I suppose it stands to reason that you also feel no particular qualms about having control over their life and death. I never thought I had any particular qualms about it myself. It’s true that I don’t hunt, but it’s also true that I’m not a vegetarian. I kill flies and mosquitoes with impunity, and I feel little regret when I step on ants. Two of my cats died at home, before I had to make any decisions about whether to excercise my control over their lives, or at least over their death. I exercise control over my cats’ lives every day: I decide when to feed them; I tell them where they can and cannot go; I clip their claws and give them drugs when the vet prescribes them. But I’d never exercised this particular kind of control before: not the saying yes to the large does of anesthesia, not the petting and holding the cat for the last time while the vet left me alone in the room with him, not the praying that the baby inside me wouldn’t choose that moment, the moment when the syringe hit the cat’s leg, as a moment to kick or turn a somersault. That life and death intersect is something I know. But I didn’t want them to right then.

A great many people believe that you should not have control over human life, and in some instances, I am one of them — your typical pro-choice, anti-death penalty tax and spend bleeding heart liberal pacifist. No one — least of all the state — should be able to control the ending of another person’s life. But the beginning of life — that’s where everyone gets hung up.

The issue is often framed as that of who controls a woman’s body — the woman, her doctor, the church, the state? The belief, among those I consort with, is that the woman should be in charge. I believe that still, and I will continue to fight for it, but the past six months have led me to understand how little control one actually has.

I used birth control, but it did not work. As a friend of mine says, birth control is a misnomer. You’re not really in control of the situaiton. Contraception is better — you are trying to prevent something from happening, but it may or may not actually work. To be in the tiny, tiny percentage for whom it does not work is an odd experience, especially at age thirty-five, when you have a professional job and a savings account and are about to become a homeowner. But there you have it: you’re not in control. And if you decide, as I did, not to take a certain kind of control at that point, you lose control completely, not only of your body but also of yourself.

I am twenty-eight weeks pregnant. I weigh thirty-six pounds more than I did six months ago. In those six months, I have been nauseated, fatigued, and dehydrated. My blood sugar has dropped to the point that I’ve fainted. My whole body has at one or another time hurt, often several parts of it at once. I cannot remember the last time I woke up and felt good, or the last time I leaned over to pick something up or got up from sitting on the floor with anything resembling grace or ease. One goes in that time from pregnancy being a secret that nobody knows — at first, not even you — to a fact on display for everyone, a thing everyone sees and comments on. The baby — and it is a baby now — swims around and kicks and punches, and it is supposed to. At the hospital they lecture you: if the baby doesn’t move ten times every two hours, something is wrong. That is but one of a long list of things you are instructed to watch out for. If you get a headache or a fever, if you bleed or have stomach pain, if you vomit: all these things are out of your control, and all of them mean you must call the hospital, go in and be put under the control of the machines, the blood pressure cuff, the fetal heart monitor, the ultrasound, the people in scrubs and the people in white coats.

When I fainted, they took me away in an ambulance and put a needle in my arm. Around the other arm they put a blood pressure cuff, and it inflated and deflated every ten minutes. Around my wrist they put a band with my name and hospital number, the same one that was given to me when I was born. Somewhere the very first band with that number is in a baby book my mother made. Eventually, only when they knew that someone was coming to pick me up, they unhooked me and let me go, let me put my own clothes on and walk out the door.

I live now in a house that I bought myself, with money I earned. My old cat is buried here between two trees, where I imagine he watches the birds and feels the squirrels and chipmunks and gazes West toward the sunset, toward the place he came from, where I used to live, and where my other cat is buried. This past week I got two new cats to share my house with me. They have taken control. They jump on tables and counters, investigate behind and underneath the furniture. They run and jump and pounce, sometimes on each other and sometimes on things only they can see. They are, at times, even more active than my baby, who rarely stops moving in my womb. I do not bother to count his kicks — I can tell he is there and doing well.

In twelve more weeks, give or take, I’ll be back at the hospital, and my son will be born and get a number of his own. I will not control when that happens, although I hope to control a little bit how it happens: I hope to be there at the hospital with my mother and my doula and some friends. I hope not to be hooked up to machines the whole time, or to be made to lie flat on a bed. I hope to be able to see my son as soon as he is born, perhaps in a fog of pain, but not a fog of painkillers. I hope that my body will perform the way it was made to do, making milk for my baby to drink, but many years ago now I decided to exercise another sort of control: I had a breast reduction to ease the strain on my back, and to have the body that was more like the one I imagined and less like the one I was given. So I don’t know yet if the ducts that need to be there for the milk to come have managed to regrow from their severing, or if that particular control I tried to exercise so long ago will mean giving up another thing now.

Let go and let God, say the twelve-step people, whose Serenity Prayer is perhaps the clearest distillation of control that we have. They pray for the strength to change the things one cannot accept and to accept the things they cannot change, and they pray for the wisdom to know the difference.

I walk through life now wondering if there is a difference, or if the surest form of control is simply to accept change. I pray for my son and for myself, for my family and for my friends, but I rarely know any more what to ask for. Peace, I say. Change. Something. Whatever it is we need, if only we could know.

I do not care if you do not like poetry.

People often ask me if I like children. The question always cracks me up. “Sure,” I say. “I like some children.” I mean, really. Would you say to someone, “Do you like people in their 40s?” I like some children just the way I like some people. I don’t really see them as a separate category.

I also like some poetry although, as a matter of shorthand, I am often apt to say simply that I like poetry. But that’s untrue as a whole.

I do not like Wordsworth.

I do not like Robert Frost or Robert Lowell or A.E. Housman or W.H. Auden very much.

I do not like Jorie Graham, though God knows I tried to for a long time.

There are a ton of poets I have never read and whose work I thus can’t comment on at all. And my like or dislike has nothing to do with whether or not the poet in question is any good. I have very little notion of what that means, and one of the beauties of giving up writing for librarianship is that I no longer have to know what it means, or get into arguments with people about it. My job is (among other things) to find books that people like, books they are in the mood for, books that work in some way for them. I’ve always loved Sam Johnson’s line that a man ought to read just as his inclination leads him, for what he reads as a duty will do him little good. I just didn’t realize until I got to library school how closely Johnson’s views mirrored the second and third laws of library science:

Every reader his or her book.

Every book its reader.

And there’s the wonderful essay by C.S. Lewis in which he talks about how if someone goes back again and again to the same book, no matter how terrible you may think it, you may be sure that for him “it contains a kind of poetry.”

I’ve been unpacking my books in my new house, but I’m not done. Yesterday I was hit by a sudden and intense desire to reread some of Diving into the Wreck, which I own but can’t currently find. A normal person, I suppose, would see this as a good reason to unpack some more boxes, but of course I am not a normal person, and I work in the library, so my first inclination was to see what all we had by Adrienne Rich (and thank you, library selectors of years past — there was The Fact of a Doorframe just sitting there waiting for me to check it out).

I regard a sudden and intense desire to read a particular bit of poetry — or to read poetry at all — as highly peculiar, but perhaps it is no more peculiar than pregnancy cravings. (I don’t have cravings, just aversions. Please, whatever you do, don’t offer me chocolate.) And as things go, there are certainly worse vices, and things that are much harder to obtain.

I read poems, but I never write them. I thus blame the following entirely on my friend Aliki, who convinced me this weekend to play something called The Poetry Game*. I should know better than to fall for such traps. Make of it what you will.

Range

Crow, titmouse, lilac, blossom:
the hillside in spring as you ride
up the cablecar
and see the things that are there
and the things you only imagine
ephemera
the canon of spring
the shoots that rise from underground
as the creek rises
the engines starting,
John, Jennifer
the speed of approaching summer
when everything will bloom
when love will run out of control
everything quicker and quicker
the green overwhelming.

It is early spring.
The worlds now hover in your throat.
You cannot speak, only wail
cry,
climb as the cablecar climbs
to reach an altitude where you may
look at the hillside below
as down at an auditorium
empty
afraid only of what might come.

*The game, should you want to play it, involves taking turns naming a list of words. Then everyone has to write a poem (see, I didn’t realize this part before we started) using some, all, or none of the words. We had 30 words total, and I think I used 23 of them.

I said to someone online yesterday that third grade was awesome. And indeed it was.

It was the year my best friend showed up at Lincoln, because the alternative school she’d been going to closed. I had an excellent homeroom teacher, and Dan and Tim and Aaron all sat behind me, and one day I figured out one of Aaron’s puzzle tricks faster than he did. All of us were terrible at remembering to bring things for Show and Tell, and so we resorted each week to our pockets. In those years, I always kept things in the pockets of my windbreaker — stones and pieces of string and bits of balsa wood and my first jackknife and the acorn caps that we colored in with pencils until we’d worn the pencil lead down to a nub and the inside of the acorn cap looked like dark pewter. And of course marbles. That was the year we played marbles. Every day at recess we were up in the corner of the field, where no grass grew, drawing circles in the dirt and explaining the rules to newcomers: two in the game to shoot, and you got to keep any you shot out. I lost a great many marbles. But it was worth it, even when Dan showed up with his cheater marbles — miniscule white things that were impossible to move. He never lost any of them.

It was one of the years another friend and I went creeking after school. I still always wore dresses in those days, and we were convinced creeking was probably illegal in some fashion, and so whenever a car passed by us on River Street, we’d duck down to avoid being seen, me with my legs spread in a wide squat to keep my skirts out of the water. It was also the year we decided to go as Little Women for Halloween. We both checked the book out of the library in September, and every night we’d call each other up. “I’m on chapter five — what chapter are you on?” I got to be Jo, of course, because I had the brown hair. My mother sewed a dress for me — red calico with green ribbon and off-white plain eyelet trim, which came out less Christmasy than it sounds. (“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents!” I practiced my lines a lot.)

I kept D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths in my desk that year and read bits of it every day during silent reading. My mother still read to me every night. I’d settled in well at our new house, and I no longer got lost walking home. Walking to school in the morning still involved the shortcut past the pipe that was, according to my friend, actually a Civil War cannon, and through several backyards, whose owners had thoughtfully provided us with stepping stones, and through the valley that, in the spring, was nothing but violets. It was a good year.

That’s what I say about it now, anyway. Those are the parts I like to remember.

It’s also the year I started getting dragged to therapists once a week. I was a bad liar and never knew what to say every week when the same kid asked me why I got to leave school early that day. It was the year someone first called me fat. It was the year I began to have doubts about that Civil War cannon and the year I started to perceive, more than ever, that class divisions were something that some people actually cared about, and that those people were going to make my friends’ lives miserable as a result.

I always think of myself as having had a happy childhood. My grandmother always says I was miserable as a child. It’s hard to know whose sets of memories to believe, or even which ones of one’s own to choose. But this autumn, back in the city of my childhood, I’m going to cling to pieces of string and bits of balsa wood and go looking for some acorn caps.

I was born back east.

Anyone with an ordinary understanding of the geography of the United States will, upon hearing I was born Iowa, immediately wonder about my grasp on reality, and they might be right: a lot of people here question the grip on reality of the greater population of Wyoming, where I used to live. You see, out there, “back east” means anything east of Cheyenne. I lived there for five years, and the sky over the Big Horn Basin shook me loose from my previous understandings of time and space and a whole lot more. I don’t live there any more, but I will never be the same.

I moved back to Iowa to be closer to my family, and, as it turns out, to have a kid, although that wasn’t part of the initial plan. I’m unwrapping the dishes in my house now and getting the news of seven months ago in Wyoming, when I packed them up in the pages of the Casper Star Tribune, the Billings Gazette Wyoming Edition, the Powell Tribune, the Cody Enterprise, and the Northern Wyoming Daily News (sadly no longer called the Worland Grit). I have a canister of bear spray and boots with Wyoming dirt engrained in them. I have a calendar of pictures from the Shoshone National Forest and enough topo maps to paper a room in my new house. I still subscribe to High Country News. But I can hardly bear to look at these things.

Outside my window now I see giant maples, and crickets sing all night, loudly enough that it keeps me awake, loudly enough to drown out the memory of the trucks on WY120, the calves crying for their mamas, the coyotes laughing. I say that word with two syllables now: cuy-yote, not cuy-yote-ee. I don’t look up at the sky at night because I can no longer see the Milky Way. People at work tell me they’re going hiking this weekend, and I’m baffled. Where? How? There is no wilderness here. I keep leaving my car windows rolled down and then riding home with my skirt getting wet, because I forgot that back east, it rains.

Everything is smaller here except for the parking lots. The sun isn’t as bright, and the people all move close together. Only the Amish use horses for work.

It sounds like I hate Iowa, and that’s not true. I was born here; my son will be born here. We will eat tomatoes with our hands in the summer and grow them in our backyard without a greenhouse. We’ll canoe in lazy rivers and dance to music downtown all summer long. We’ll have excellent medical care and all the books we could ever want. But we won’t have stars, or lodgepole pines, or cabins miles from anywhere, or encounter moose or elk.

Some people are born in the place they are meant to be from: it’s as if they got to skip the step where they are merely half a person, floating around waiting to meet their other half. They were made from whole cloth, and they root where they are planted. Others of us, though, are more like the sea creature fossils you can still find here in Iowa (and in Wyoming). I imagine they are dug up from underground and face the light of day and wonder where the water is. They are dried out and at home now on the ground, but surely they remember the ocean.