musings on 42

my sister Uyên just called me out on my lack of "substantive" posts of late. substantive being relative since we all know how i like to ramble on, usually in mid-thought, about esoteric things that pop into my head (like klingon love letters. i can't believe you lost them, Trung! batlh bIHeghjaj! bortaS bIr jablu'DI' reH QaQqu' nay'.) low brain to mouth filter. blame it on the drugs my mom took during labor.

my bloglite excuse is -- weo, how to delicately say -- i am with child|có bàu. yes, T. & i have borg'ed ourselves the old-fashioned way and we are now nguyễn³ (can chú Bình claim credit for taking us to Bải Bàu in Qui Nhơn in april? or the hokey new age-y womb-blessing on my birthday?) as of tomorrow i will be 13 weeks along and almost officially out of my first trimester. par-tay! because it is damn fatiguing to generate a human being!

Uyên made the request for belly shots. for you undomesticated non-breeding folks, that is not cheap tequila drunk from the pierced navel of some young thing who probably doesn't have good hygiene; belly shots would be a progressive montage of the alien being gestating in my womb until it emerges gnashing and clawing from my abdomen to dominate the world. just kidding. yes, yes, children are blessings and a woman's ability to give Life, to Birth, is Sacred. without this, our survival as a species would end. blahblah. how alienated are we from women's reproductive capacity that the major pop culture reference for pregnancy is parasitic and destructive? the misogyny of society. makes you understand why the cesarean rate in the U.S. is almost 28% and voluntary cesareans (that is major abdominal surgery) is on the rise. fear of vaginas.

theoretical physicist stephen j. hawking comments, "I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image." he is a genius, an expansive intellectual contemplating the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything (the Deep Thought answer to which is 42, leaving us to ponder, what is the Ultimate Question?), and yet that is an incredibly stupid thing to say. as my bà ngoại|maternal grandmother often rebukes my aunties & uncles with her folk wisdom aphorism "mày nghĩ mày khôn quá hả mày chui ra đít tao!|you think you're so smart, you crawled out of my pussy!" put you in your place, punk! (now you understand where i learned how to curse.) women have been creating Life in our own image from the beginning of human time. it doesn't take a PhD or an MD to accomplish that.

so for the belly shots, weo, i'm not cutely pregnant yet (when if ever does that happen pray tell?). i'm slightly bloated, a beer belly of sorts late in the day. my clothes fit wierdly and why are all the clothes in my existing wardrobe so form fitting & cropped? i do glow though, for the record. absolutely luminous. T. has been documenting the process on the monthly (and sometimes weekly) basis. i might be persuaded to post the belly pix, but that requires bribery. food bribery (see the FAQs below).

for the curious, now that we are pregnant, you no longer have to refrain from asking me about my reproductive status or sex life. now commences the pregnancy phase and the ensuing, mostly welcome questions. for your curious pleasure:

MY PREGNANCY FAQS

• are you showing yet?

i am not showing. unless you count my distended intestines that get more compacted as the day wears on. so don't bother touching my belly because you're really just feeling up the detritus and effluvia of my digestion. my Uterus happens to be electric-slide tipped back and to the far left. if you see me rubbing my belly, i am not at this point touchingly bonding with my unborn child, i am really just encouraging some gas to pass. when i lay down and palpate my abdomen (i'm curious too), i can just barely feel her edge (my Uterus is a She btw) tucked deep into my left pelvis. my Uterus and i are in conversation right now trying to reach consensus agreement. i would like her to be upfront and center so that i can avoid having anal internal exams during my prenatals. you read that right. midwife has got to do bi-manual internal exams and palpate to assess baby's growth someway.

• have you seen your doctor yet?

meet my midwife Selena. she's a grandmother, been a doula for many years, owns a birth center, and practices 2nd degree reiki (i'm not really sure what that means either).

we're old-fashioned DIY-ers and we're choosing the safest birth choice possible. we're planning a normal, safe homebirth. babies everywhere else in the world have been born this way since time immemorial. don't see why we should pay an ob-gyn $10K for less than 15 minutes of care and loads of medical interventions. i've seen all the doctor TV shows, i know doctors think of childbirth as a mortally dangerous disease best performed strapped down on her back in a drug-resistant-staph-ridden hospital amongst the ill, the suffering and the dying. not subjecting myself or our child to that. shudder. i'm not that crazy.

• have you seen your baby yet?

ultrasounds have never been monitored for long term risks from exposure. they are a known unknown non-empirical technology. ultrasound machines are not monitored by any safety board, there is no standardized calibration, and technicians receive no training in the technology or its use which is why fools like Tom Cruise can buy one online to use on his cloned spawn. what is known is that there is known cellular mutation with exposure and babies get very agitated in the womb when exposed to ultrasound. there is no safe amount of exposure to ultrasound and one should limit exposure unless medically necessary. that said, we are having one ultrasound later this month. mainly to rule out twins which run in my paternal family. midwives say it skips a generation though.

on a humanistic level, this thinker dude (blanking on the name) commented that the two images that have profoundly changed humanity's paradigm of thinking is the picture of the earth from outer space and the ultrasound image of the unborn. prior to those two images, we could never imagine mother earth as something separate from ourselves, nor could we imagine the baby separate from the mother. when those images were published we furthered our alienation from self, motherhood, nature, etc. which puts us square in this current situation of rampant ecological destruction and fear of vaginas/vulvas-cum-compartmentalized maternity/pediatric healthcare. anyways, ultrasound pictures of babies just look like freaky aliens to me. they don't really generate warm fuzzy "awwww"s from me. its not like i want to bond with an alien. i mean i've watched plenny sci-fi movies. got no love for extra-terrestrials.

• are you having morning sickness?

nope. blessed be! both our moms had easy pregnancies and no vomiting. i have not worshipped the porcelain god this trimester. so i glow. really. it's the increased circulation and extra hormones.

no constipation either. except when our sewer line bust last week and all i had was a bucket for my midnight/early am pregnancy pees.

• are you having any cravings?

i am having a liking for certain things under certain circumstances, but nothing i would call a craving (though ms. Lily says otherwise). but i'm not upset or disappointed if i don't get it, nor am i demanding T. obtain it at odd hours. in general, cravings are your body's way of asking for missing nutrients. so the typical preggers craving for ice cream & pickles is really your body asking for more protein & calcium, and the sour/vinegar to help facilitate the absorption of the calcium. our brains just interpret that in simplistic ways accessible in our modern fast food nation reality. as a rule, T & i eat very healthy and balanced, whole foods, no junk food, not too much processed/fast foods because of my sensitivity to chemicals and allergens. so i'm not having much in the way of cravings. though i will say, i am not desiring sweets, in fact they kinda repulse me. too much sugar, nutritionally empty calories makes me want to hurl. and my lactose intolerance has gotten worse. since i cut wheat and dairy out for a mucus-free diet a few months ago, my allergies have improved immensely. this last weekend, subjected to work retreat and poor lunch menu planning, i had to eat alot of crappy phonebook fast food--pizza & cantonese. bleck. allergies came back in spades both skin rashes and sneezing at nothing. just goes to show food is medicinal. you eat crap, you feel like crap.

we've been getting our nutrients from food so i've been able to stay off the prenatal supplements that generally make one vomit. fyi seaweed is a miracle food in terms of both iron and folic acid and similar minerals content as your own blood. we all came from the ocean at some point.

our biggest challenge is that i've noticed uncooked/unprepared/greasy foods sorta gross me out too as does repetition. by extension, the whole "raw foods" food trend is just blah to me (sorry, Chanda but that was not doing it for me. left me so hungry-tired that i slept 12 hours that night.) which means that i don't want to eat anything in our refrigerator. we're having to do multiple runs to the grocery store in week so it's a good thing we live within blocks of three grocery stores!

so if i crave anything, it's variety. also, i still can't eat anything i didn't like BP (Before Pregnant) like raw onions or dairy but in addition, chicken breast and salmon repel me. and unfortunately i seem to have reached a limit on lao sausage. i'm hoping that just means not for three meals in a row...

simple and mouthwateringly good high end restaurant food really really appeals to me like egg sandwich but a gourmet egg sandwich that is the best i've ever had!!! i'm still waiting for food to taste extra delicious. so the food channel is very dangerous. i just want tasty, nutritious food, my parents' homecooking, meal variety and i don't want to cook. poor T. (many thanx to Lily for rescuing him for 2 nights in a row). so that's why i'm going to SanD at the end of the month, i want bánh giò|banana leaf wrapped glutinous rice flour stuffed with pork & woodear fungus, cua rang muối|crispy salt & pepper crab, canh chua|tamarind fish soup, at least two varieties of xôi|sticky rice--savory & sweet, any kind of gỏi, canh|brothy vegetable soups, chạo tôm|shrimp paste on sugar cane, etc. sigh, heaven. who says you can never go home again?

• is it a boy or a girl?
  

we're not going to find out. there are so few moments of genuine delight & surprise in life. this is going to be one of them. this also means that we don't want a bunch of pink & blue crap. we like colors--primary colors, bright colors, the whole rainbow of colors, black even. pastels are... okay and in moderation. and then there is the ultrasound issue. and yes, Uyên, it's T's decision too. mr. boy scout likes to be impulsive sometimes too. in a planned and defined manner. we have a workplan and a budget.

• do you want a boy or a girl?

we would love either. personally i loved (and hated) having an older brother who looked out for me and would write gruesome death threats to kids who bullied me. he would also torment me, really TORMENT me, endlessly though with personalized insult songs, so it's a tough choice. i also loved having an older sister (mostly). so yeah, really, i loved being the youngest. and you can't really determine that for your first child. so, we leave it up to the goddesses & ancestors to decide. and yeah sposedly T's sperm. like he has any control over that. our midwife who is also a second-degree reiki practitioner says that its a spirit familiar to us and she also told us what gender energy she was getting from the baby's gold-orange aura and my mom with her maternal psychic intuition has a prediction, but we're not telling. flip a coin.

• what are you going to name her/him?

that's for us to know and you to mis-pronounce. just kidding. we haven't decided. it'll be a vinamese name. no surprise there. so if you would like to contribute to our kids' future therapy fund, please send us a check.

• how many kids do you want?

ideally, four. so they can pair up and no one gets left out. however T. says for every pet we have, that's one less child. we already have two cats and i really want two mini donkeys (because any animal deprived of contact with its own species is going to be mal-adjusted, neurotic and co-dependent) so... its still under negotiation. i say, put the donkeys to work. get them to keep our quarter acre yard trim and rent them out to the neighbors for their lawn & kiddie parties. they don't have to be useless pets, they can be revenue generating!