MY PRAGNET BELLEY

First things first: Thank you so much for your concern.  I'm embarrassed and sorry to have made you uneasy.  Everything's absolutely fine.  I am well; this past Wednesday I hit the 26 week mark and there have been, thus far, no bold and daring escape attempts.  I've been mostly offline, visiting my mother, attending my brother's wedding, and trying to figure out what to say here next.  And then inspiration struck.  I know! I thought, sitting bolt upright in bed this morning.  I'll write a long impenetrable blog post about why I haven't been blogging!

It's hard to know what to write these days.  I don't write much about Charlie.  In fact, I'm finding it hard even to write about why I don't write about Charlie.  The responsible claim to make is that I respect his privacy and am trying to be careful about sharing his life with the world at large.  But that's not it, not really.  It's almost entirely out of stupefaction: I don't know how.  I don't have words.  I can tell you he's funny, for example.  I can even tell you exactly what he said, in tones of great good humor, as he bit the back legs off his cow-shaped cookie: "Now it can hop."  But I can't tell you how that bubble of laughter felt as it rose in my chest, or how hard it was to suppress, or the relief of letting it out, letting our son — our son! amazing even three years later — see that I find him utterly captivating.  See the problem?  Watching a three-year-old dance at a wedding is a relatively common experience, not worthy of hyperbole to anyone but his family.  But for his awestruck mother, whom words otherwise seldom fail, "captivating" doesn't cover it.

I don't write much about infertility these days.  One commenter suggested that since I am currently pregnant, with a reasonable expectation — holy disabled cow, 26 weeks — of a live birth, it would behoove me to, oh, how did she put it?  Step off.  In general, I resent being told to do so, even going so far as to bristle when I hear that polite disembodied voice at the end of a moving sidewalk.  ("No, lady, you watch your step.  Uppity robot bitch.")  But in this instance the commenter has a point.  What do I have to say about infertility these days that has any relevance whatsoever?  One and two-thirds children later, I can no longer speak of the loneliness and isolation infertile people feel on a daily chronic basis with any kind of immediacy.  (That is not, by the way, a complaint.)  Approaching the third trimester, I spend no time at all worrying about what we'll do if the pregnancy fails.  (Plenty could happen, we all know that, but contemplating any of it is a far cry from the frantic plan-B-ing we do when we see that seven-week spotting.)  And although pregnancy after infertility is an experience well worth chronicling, a pregnancy-after-a-child-after-infertility is different in every way.  I now have bloodthirsty cow-biting proof that not everything turns to shit, and that knowledge informs everything about the way I feel this time around.  Specifically, it makes this all much easier.  And easy and infertility don't mix.

So for a blog that confines itself to infertility, pregnancy, and parenting, what's left?  Only MY PRAGNET BELLEY.  (Someone found this site by Googling that term, can you believe it?  I must have words with the proofreading staff here.)  And while I have plenty to say on the subject, I am feeling kind of shy about saying it.  I got e-mail from a reader who was offended by an ad that ran on my site for a while, one featuring a picture of a bald wide-eyed infant, suggesting that maybe I had forgotten what it used to feel like to be confronted with such things.  My first reaction was, Well, huh.  Yes, I guess I have, in the way that we forget exactly what it feels like to drop a bowling ball on our foot.  We remember that it did hurt, but we can't re-experience the pain simply by trying to recall it.  And, Jesus, I don't want to.  I am thankful every day for that merciful amnesia. 

But then my second thought was sincere puzzlement: What am I doing here, then?  When pregnancy, a pregnancy in which I am fairly confident, is all I have to talk about, am I alienating people I care about every time I post?  I mean, more so than usual...?  Are infertile people coming here, reading my petty carping about veiny legs and pregnancy magazines, and feeling slugged in the gut by someone who used to get it?

This uncertainty has made me feel somewhat muted.  I want to talk about things like baby names, delivery plans, and, I don't know, onesies and Boppies and Soothies and other interesting products I refuse to name aloud, because, hey, sound like an ass much?  Normal mother-to-be things, things I couldn't consider last time because I was too preoccupied with fear.  I want to talk about where I am now, and about how happy I am to be here.  And I stop short, because, again, sound like an ass much?

But then I consider the proposition that that's all any of us can do, talk about where we are now.  And then I start hating myself for being so ridiculously self-indulgent as to imagine anyone expects otherwise.  And then I sit here and ask myself incredulously, Did I really spent almost all day writing a post about why I haven't been writing, instead of something funny or interesting or informative?

Why, yes!  Yes, I did.  But I won't do it again, nor will I drop out again so inconsiderately.  I will write, instead, about baby names (undetermined), delivery plans (hazy), and maybe even Charlie (delectable).  And also MY PRAGNET BELLEY (bruised but unbreached, hallelujah).