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So we’re setting up the nursery for the baby, as much as we can. We live in a 3-bedroom apt. in Brooklyn. One bedroom is ours; one is Matt’s studio (and super small too); one belongs to deanpence. So the baby will be in with us, as long as we’re here.

That part’s not so bad to me, apart from the crowding. I wanted to have the baby in our room at first, especially while I’m breastfeeding. We’re getting a co-sleeper bed, which will allow him to be in arm’s reach for feedings and anything not diaper-related. And if he wakes every few hours, that just seems more logical than a crib in another room. Not that we have the space for a full crib anyway. Or another room to put it in.

But where to put his clothes and diapers? We had decided at first to buy a dresser, then when we realized we’d be moving after about 3 mos., that we’d get some sort of portable, pressboard contraption that we could leave behind.

Until Friday. Friday I went out to the laundromat and on my way saw a white wooden dresser which looked the right size, sitting out for the trashman. It was missing 2 drawers, but otherwise seemed in good shape.

I’m not normally a big fan of curb furniture; especially in our old neighborhood, you just assumed that it had been peed on by a homeless guy or a dog by the time you saw it. But we’re on our Super Funtastic Frugality Campaign to save up money for all we have to do in the next year, and the wheels in my head began to turn. I dispatched Matt to look it over and measure it to see if it would fit our space. It would. So I had him and deanpence go pick it up.

“What about the missing drawers?” they asked.

“Aha!” I said, flush with my frugality. “I will get some cheap plastic bins that will slide into the spaces. Then we can use it till we leave, and put it back out on the curb. Cost: nearly nada.”

“That is so ghetto.” exclaimed deanpence in disgust. However, since he’s not trying to juggle new baby/move/car purchase in the next year, I didn’t expect him to understand. Besides I think it’ s more ingenious than simply trashy.

The problem now is, as we were setting all this up in our bedroom, and I got the dresser cleaned up and got a good look at it…well actually, it’s a rather nice piece of furniture. It’s a good wood, just needs a new finish, and doesn’t smell of pee. I find myself calculating the cost of taking it with us when we move and getting new drawers made and then refinishing the whole thing vs. buying a similar piece new (at least $400 I would think). I like rescuing things that still have a useful life. I get a little sad thinking about them just rotting in a landfill somewhere. But I’ve promised Matt to make no plans until we know whether we’ll have room in the moving truck for our reclaimed ghetto dresser.

In the meantime, it’s holding our collection of donated (thanks Mom! Thanks, Sis!) onesies, bibs, and blankets, with room for diapers and baby bricabrac left over. We’ll put a changing pad on the top, and the Critter will have his basic necessities set up and rarin’ to go. There are no special wall hangings on the walls, no silver rattles, no ceramic lamps that match the theme of the wallpaper and crib sheets. No wallpaper or crib, come to that. Just the decor we already have, what we’ve been given, what we’ve bought on sale, and what we’ve found. There’ll be more to come; we’ve registered for what we can, and know that we’ll probably need to buy a few more big ticket things. But that’s pretty much it.

And then I watch A Baby Story, which seems to be taking place in an alternate universe than mine, where all women have epidurals and usually c-sections too, and live in McMansions furnished with $800.00 cribs and carefully coordinated nurseries. And I just shrug my shoulders, knowing that to a baby, none of that stuff matters anyway. The Critter will mostly be concerned that we’re here, to feed him and love him, to keep him warm and change his diapers, and the lack of Winnie the Pooh(tm) wall hangings be damned.

It may be ghetto, but to him, it’ll be home.

Religion is a subject that comes up pretty often for me, and as we anticipate our child’s birth, I expect to hear a lot more about it in the coming years. I am going to have to explain why we do not plan to take our child to church, or Sunday School, or Vacation Bible School; we do not plan on having him baptized. Many of our loved ones have been reserved about our lack of churched-ness up to now, figuring it’s a phase all young adults go through, and that we’ll see the importance of church again once we have a child to raise.

It’s all part of the mindset that taking your child to church is like a vaccination; it inoculates them against doing or thinking evil things. I can almost understand this point of view, but the trade off is usually that instead they are exposed to an organization that discourages them from thinking for themselves, that promotes sexism, racism, and homophobia, and that is so afraid of science and knowledge that it will willingly promote untruths. This is far too high a cost for the otherwise benign pleasures of praising God, reading Scripture, helping the poor and needy, and feeling part of a community of faith. So we will most likely stay “unchurched” and our child will have to decide for himself what he does and doesn’t believe. He may believe as we do; he may not. That will be his right to decide. If he truly wants to go, I’ll gladly get up and drive him, or let him go with a friend, though I will also want to talk about what he’s being told there. And as far as God goes, I expect we’ll have lots of conversations on this topic; it certainly won’t be off limits.

Personally, I disliked nearly every second that I spent in church growing up. It was a prison and it felt like one. I have yet to spend time in any church that didn’t feel the same. Not that there weren’t good people there; there were. But there was also an astonishing amount of hypocrisy and callousness towards anyone who wasn’t like us. There was no one who challenged the edicts that kept women from leadership; no one who asked why we had a “sister church” that was all-black, which sometimes came to worship with us, but was not considered part of the same convention as us, as though black people and white people could not possibly worship the same God every week in the same room.

I have no problem with Jesus; I have lots of problems with what his followers have turned his teachings into lately, namely an excuse to meddle in the personal lives of others and to shred the Constitution. It astonishes me that a religion that professes to understand that we are all sinners nonetheless, like the pigs in Animal Farm, thinks “some of us sinners are better than others” and therefore get to decide how the less-important sinners should worship and conduct their daily lives and educate their children.

Would Jesus be happy at the millions of dollars professed Christians spend to intimidate judges and slap discrimination laws up, instead of doing what he commanded–caring for the poor and needy, being an example to the world? Whatever right-wing churches in America today are promoting, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with Jesus’ teachings at all. It seems to have a lot more to do with making sure we keep Those Bad People out of well, everywhere, so as to keep Us Good People pure. An idea much more akin to those of the Pharisees than to those of the man who spent most of his time with thieves, prostitutes, the indigent, tax collectors, and the sick. James Dobson’s chest-beating about “purity” doesn’t seem to have much to do with Jesus’ exhortation to pray in private, alone, in humility.

Right wing churches nowadays resemble no one so much as those who left the battered traveler on the side of the road before the good Samaritan came along. Or worse, they seem inclined not only to ignore him, but to kick him viciously every chance they get.

I don’t want my child to learn those lessons, or to learn to associate God with boredom and ignorance and hatred. To tell the truth, I have lost interest in looking for a church that doesn’t do those things; I have found that I can carry on, spiritually speaking, without a church at all. If I stumbled across a place that seemed welcoming, I might stay; it might be that there is no place that wouldn’ t make me feel resentful and restrained.

Maybe churches just don’t work for me; maybe the whole idea of churches just doesn’t work. I can’t say. I certainly can’t say what my child will think or want when it comes to religion. All I can decide ahead of time is that I won’t stand in his way, provided he approaches whatever he believes with an open and questioning mind. If I have to inoculate him with anything, the ability to ask the questions that need asking is the strongest medicine I know.

On one of the forums I frequent, a (17-year-old, first-time) expecting woman was puzzled as to why her father did not want to be in the delivery room with her. She also mentioned that she wanted him there because her two best friends, her boyfriend, her mom and her 11-year old sister were going to be there, too (and somewhere in there, a doctor or midwife and maybe assorted nurses).

I mentioned this to Matt and he said “What, does she think it’s like receiving a Grammy?”

My response to her (which she did not reply to yet) was something on the lines of, um, how much room do you have in your hospital room? And do you think all these people are going to be able to deal with seeing you naked, seeing your bodily fluids, and seeing a baby come out your lady business? Because, in picturing my family, there are very few individuals whom I think would be able to deal with the above. Not because they don’t love me, but because, hey, nudity, and goo and stuff. And undoubtedly, hours of me walking around and cursing and making other noises.

Birth shouldn’t be shameful or hidden or anything, but it’s not like having a violin recital or a tea party either. You can’t be ladylike or pretty or please an audience with your performance, or chit chat about Aunt Frieda’s gout while you’re doing it (at least not in the thick of it). It’s hard, sweaty, painful, and to me anyway a bit…sacred. There’s nothing casual about it, even if it’s fairly quick and uneventful. It brings up powerful emotions, and requires you to be extremely brave and strong when you are in a lot of pain, to not be ashamed to yell or cry or put yourself in undignified positions to get the work done.

I don’t know this girl, of course, but my hypothesis would be, she’s scared about her birth. She’s thinking that if she surrounds herself with lots of people, it will take her mind off of what’s happening and make things stay normal. If she treats it like a picnic, it will feel like one. I can understand the impulse, but what’s more likely to happen is that this doesn’t work, she freaks out, the nurses rush everyone out of the room, and then she has to deal with the situation with just her boyfriend there, who is as scared as she is. My heart goes out to her…I can’t imagine doing what I’m doing now at 17. I would be terrified too. What she really needs is one strong, experienced woman (midwife or doula or relative) in the room with her, letting her know she’s going to be ok and that she can do this.

I hope she finds that person before the big day.

Spam is one of my pet peeves–not the straightforward herbal Viagra-giant penis kind (it’s hateful but it happens to everyone) but the well-meaning kind. This can be Jebus-spam, like the one I get at Christmas about how candy canes were created to symbolize the blood and purity of Christ (refuted here) and how little Jimmy is going to die soon but wants you to send him a happy email before he goes.

The worst is the kind Twistyfaster brilliantly rants against as rape spam. This is the kind about evil men lurking everywhere and how it’s up to you to take the following steps (provided in the email) to avoid them. Which usually amount to being paranoid and hypervigilant at all times, and preferably, never leaving home without an armed guard. As she points out, women get this spam all the time; men never get the spam that tells them that hey, raping women is bad and hey, don’t do it.

Really she covers it better than me, read her post. It’s awesome.

Interesting discussion on echidne about the whole Harry Potter thing that pretty much sums up my feelings. I feel no ill-will towards Rowling–I’m glad to see any writer, especially a woman, achieve that kind of success. But my feeling towards the books has always been “meh.” Echidne feels the same way:

Maybe I’m deficient in some deep and substantive way for not getting the Potter appeal. Or maybe my reaction is the normal one for someone who has read cartloads of books in this particular genre. From that angle the Potter book I read was well-written and plotted but not earth-shatteringly different or new.

That’s about right. It’s pleasant enough, but since I’ve already read so much of this genre growing up, I’m a little too jaded to get into it now. If I were 10, I’d be a fanatic about it too.

Echidne’s post reminded me of an essay by one of my favorite authors, A.S. Byatt, that got her in trouble with Potter fans. I liked this part the best:

But in the case of the great children’s writers of the recent past, there was a compensating seriousness. There was — and is — a real sense of mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures in dark forests. Susan Cooper’s teenage wizard discovers his magic powers and discovers simultaneously that he is in a cosmic battle between good and evil forces. Every bush and cloud glitters with secret significance. Alan Garner peoples real landscapes with malign, inhuman elvish beings that hunt humans.

Reading writers like these, we feel we are being put back in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when supernatural and inhuman creatures — from whom we thought we learned our sense of good and evil — inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled. If we regress, we regress to a lost sense of significance we mourn for. Ursula K. Le Guin’s wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world where magic really does act as a force. Ms. Rowling’s magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is.

As Byatt says, the “numinous” is lost, and it’s that shiver of dread and excitement that is missing from the Potter books–or to be fair, from the first book, the one that I read.

It might be that the later books have more darkness in them, as reviewers say, but they don’t seem to have any more magic in them–the darkness seems to come from simple conflict–adults turn out to be unreliable, good people die, Harry discovers darkness within himself. All good things for a book to include, but more magic-flavored than magical.

I am always a little bit crabby, to be honest. I don’t like dithering, or people who can’t make up their minds, and thus put me behind schedule. I don’t like people who are in charge of something but can’t be bothered to fix obvious problems in their organization. Those sorts of things get to me more than out and out rudeness, sometimes, because I figure people who are downright rude/violent/mean are in fact, mentally-ill cretins. People who aren’t cretins but who can’t just get on with whatever it is they need to get on with bug me much more.

But that’s because we’re always most outraged by the sins closest to us. I am a champion procrastinator, myself. I am very good at not, in fact, getting on with whatever I need to get on with until a deadline looms over my head. And only dread of future collapses and embarrassments keeps me from letting problems get too out of hand.

I have no idea where I was going with that. But anyway.

I’m at 25 weeks, officially, as of yesterday. Plans, procrastination tendencies or not, must be made as this deadline looms large and life-changing. Big plans, involving jobs and money and moving and more money. And little plans, for things like laying in enough diapers, bottles, and perhaps some nipple shields (I threw that one in to make the fellas cringe, heh).

It’s time for us to be doing all this family/life/etc. stuff, I’m not really upset about it, but it is more than a little intimidating. They’re actually going to let us leave the hospital with this little person, and then Matt and I are responsible for it, and that’s pretty much it. Nobody is going to check our work with the kid; we’re free to mess him up or not as we choose, for the most part.

I think I’m a bit like a soldier on the eve of battle at this point; the whole thing seems more than a little unreal and ridiculous. I think I’m supposed to be in hormonal mommy-heaven, dreaming baby dreams or something and cooing over any babies in my vicinity. Perhaps writing bad poetry and making abstract sculptures about our deep spiritual connection.

This has not happened. I don’t dream about cute little babies, or blissfully cuddling newborns. At least not that I can remember. I mostly make lists in my head of things to do, things done, and things that I can write off as unnecessary. Sometimes I think I’m the least sentimental mom-to-be you ever met.

I still don’t really feel any connection with the baby as a person. I know he’s there, I can feel him move around, but the idea that this experience will result in a new permanent member to Matt’s and my family doesn’t seem to be sinking in. I’ve decided not to worry about this, since I don’t think it’s up to my conscious mind, and I’ll have the rest of my life for it to feel real anyway. I worry occasionally that we won’t like each other, but have it on good authority that this usually isn’t a problem until they hit 13 or so. Apparently the process of squeezing someone out of your uterus makes you inclined to like them, and they, not really having anyone to compare you with and needing you to survive, generally like you too.

Or so I’m told. Right now, I think my brain is not convinced this will happen. But this is the same brain that was all “Yay! Babies!” last year, so I think it is just having stage fright and can safely be ignored. It’ll come around.

I have about 20 more minutes of my workday, but my brain has already checked out, so here I am. I am working on a better post, but it’s kind of a shaggy dog…it includes so many different strands that I want to talk about that I’m having trouble wrestling it into post-form.

So I’m going to ignore it and just tell you that, in my opinion, there simply aren’t enough interesting people in the world. Most of the people I know are just dead boring. They go to social events, they see movies, they eat out, they talk about boyfriends/friends/spouses/kids. None of which is bad in itself, but Jesus, people, there is so much else to talk about. Politics. Books. Death. Religion. Music. I know these are mostly verboten in “polite” conversation, but what’s the point of polite conversation anyway? Instead of flapping my jaw in useless blather, I could be reading, or baking a cake, or something just remotely more entertaining than hearing about the restaurant you went to last night.

I realize the irony of saying this on a blog, a medium known for its devotion to blather. But really, I do try to talk about the more interesting stuff in my head and not as much about how much I need a haircut. Because that bores even me.

It has been really instructive to start noticing my own moods, and trying to understand where they come from. This weekend, a depression swooped out of nowhere in particular, robbed me of some sleep and peace of mind, then lifted as suddenly as it came.

Depression is such a strange beast (and maybe happiness is too). The exact same set of facts and circumstances exist around you however you feel, but when you are depressed, you are only able to focus on one group of them, the most negative. When you’re elated, it’s just the opposite; you only think about the positive things in your life. You know, whichever mode you’re in, that you are ignoring some things and paying attention to others, but it’s very difficult to consciously choose which group to pay attention to. You don’t want to always be choosing euphoria, because there are things that you need to think about that are dark, that require your anger or your sadness. But if you think only about them, the world closes in on you, and you lose your ability to act.

I was in a discussion on metafilter not too long ago, about obesity. And the commenters seemed fairly evenly divided between those who saw it as a disease with physical and psychological (and even social) causes, and those who said things like “these sad sacks of flab just need to get off their asses and eat less.” And the commenters would perhaps then relate how they used to be heavy but got off their sad sorry asses, etc.

And I remembered how, when I used to think of myself as a sad sack of flab, I was even less motivated to eat healthily and exercise than when I didn’t. Because you don’t think those things about yourself unless you’re depressed, and depression and hopelessness don’t get your ass out of bed and onto the Stairmaster; they make you sleep in and maybe eat a tube of cookie batter to make yourself feel better. Because hey, if you’re are doomed to be a sad sack of flab whom no one will ever love, at least you can have a moment’s pleasure.

Anyway, what I was trying to get at is that when I start medicating myself with food, I know I am depressed, and for the moment, I’m not always sure how to fight it. Reason is not a tool that works; shame makes things worse. Understanding yourself helps a bit, I’ve found. Depression is at least partially anger, at least for me, so sometimes finding a focus for my anger that isn’t me can help. Meditation of a sort, so long as you go into it with no expectations, can help. Mindless tasks can sometimes distract you. But mostly, I just crouch down and wait for it to leave, which it eventually does. So far.

I can’t have anything but compassion for someone whose depression doesn’t leave, but moves in and makes itself comfortable.

My khaki maternity pants are a bit loose, but they stay on my hips when I go down the stairs. A few weeks ago they fell off of me if I didn’t double up some of the soft elastic waistband and safety pin it together. About 2 weeks ago things began to move forward, unmistakably. The birthmark right beneath my ribs that looks like a long narrow scar doesn’t run vertically anymore, but curves out at a 45 degree angle, following my belly’s new line. I’ve never been flat-stomached, but this is different, a smooth hard curve that I’m not really used to yet. I’m still surprised to see it in the mirror.

This is the 23rd week, just past the halfway mark of this pregnancy. I walk and sit with back straight and my stomach stuck forward now, because to slump is to cramp all my internal organs, which have crowded together to make room for the new boarder. He’s growing, and I know he’s probably swimming and turning and dreaming to himself, in his little world. He hears my heartbeat all the time, and the rumbling of my guts, and maybe some of the outside world—traffic, subways thundering past, his daddy saying “hello” to him. Last week the kicks started in earnest. I was anxious to feel them, because none of the descriptions I read seemed to help me imagine it; “fluttering” “bubbling” etc. And when they came, they weren’t like that at all. More like when you get your heartrate up and put your finger against the pulse in your neck; you can feel it jumping, just under the skin. His kicks are like that, except erratic and wandering. He seems to prefer being head up, tilted to my right, and kicking me on the lower left belly at random intervals. It’s funny how soon you get used to it, and keep going about your business.

I can think of him as “him” but there’s still not a lot of emotion attached to that, because technically, we haven’t met yet. It’s strange, we’re as close physically as it is possible for two beings to be, but we’re strangers. To him I’m a safe place, a studio apartment with free food service; to me, he’s an unknown quantity, like a blind date. I won’t know how we’ll feel about each other till I see his face, and maybe not even right then.

I had been worrying about this a bit, my lack of pre-natal bonding, until I realized it was ridiculous. I probably don’t have some horrible genetic defect that will keep me from loving my baby. We just need to be properly introduced. Right now, I think about him as I would about a neighbor who I never see but who doesn’t cause me any trouble, though I sometimes hear his stereo playing.

In my life right now I’m surrounded by mostly younger and/or childless people, so I’m not getting the traditional bombardment of advice pregnant women are warned about. Or rather, I am, but it’s amusingly off-base. The other day my (male, gay) boss seemed to think I was stressed about the baby and was trying to reassure me that surely, he would be mellow and laid-back, since Matt and I are both so mellow. But as I shot back, that’s no guarantee. He might be a hyper little hellfire. He might be irritated by our mellowness and enjoy riling us up. “Maybe he’ll be one of those babies who never cries,” interjected my coworker. (This is the same girl who occasionally bursts out that gosh, it must be so weird to have this—thing–growing inside you! Like an alien! In fact it kind of freaks her out to think about it! She tells me all this wide-eyed, not cognizant that this may not be the most sensitive thing to say to a pregnant lady). Well, as far as never crying goes, while she’s done some babysitting, I don’t think she’s ever dealt with a colicky newborn with explosive diarrhea at 3 am, so whatever honey. Don’t blow sunshine up my ass. He’s gonna cry sometimes, more than I want him too, definitely. That’s part of the package.

And the thing is, it’s not like I’m worrying about those 3ams right now, because there’s no point. I accept that they’re likely, and I’ll deal with them when they show up. Why ruin this time worrying about that one?

If I sound serene and zenlike, don’t be fooled. I still avoid gory or violent things because they give me nightmares. I still cry easily at sad songs, meaning Aimee Mann hasn’t been on my playlist for a while. My emotions have the same heightened edge as with PMS, and I move quickly from sadness to laughter to rage. I feel radicalized, ready to storm the barricades when I see things that make me angry, writing snippy posts on forums and leaving caustic comments on blogs, not cushioning my words in as much niceness as usual. The foofaraw over Barbara Walters and her idiotic comments about breastfeeding (basically “it’s icky and I don’t want to see it, ew!”) had me going for days, wishing I was already lactating so I could join the nurse-in outside her studio.

My hatred of George Bush and his administration could not really get any deeper, but having to deal with the issues of health care and soon, maternity leave, hasn’t improved my mood at all. In a perfect world he and his buddies would be reincarnated as illegal immigrants with 3 children and no language skills, cleaning toilets for less than minimum wage. I have a crush on Democrat Harry Reid right now, for backing up his earlier statement that Bush is a liar and refusing to retract it. Now we need about 100 more of him, and maybe a media that could find its spine, too.

That’s what I would wish for this baby, a world with more truth tellers in it, but not much is likely to have changed by the time he shows up. But I knew that going in; I knew that I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for a better world to have him. He will have to live in it, neocons, Guantanamos, and all. I hope it won’t all be too much for him, that things will be improving by the time he’s old enough to notice.