Taking Inventory

So it's been over a month since last I posted. Lots has happened. I've discovered what gender my child will be: a girl. This was neither exciting nor disappointing for me -- I didn't particularly care what I was having, so long as it was healthy. It is good news only inasmuch as it helps me feel a little more connected to the baby-to-be. The pronoun shift from "it" to "she" is helping to get me ready for her arrival, which inches ever closer. Assuming she shows up on time, she will be here in fourteen weeks and five days.

Although my husband and family haven't had strong reactions, lots of strangers and acquaintances get this look of pity or disappointment when I tell them we're going to have a daughter. It's as if that's the second place choice -- one you will make do with rather than one you really wanted. This surprises me. Not that I'm blind to the fact that, even in 2008, women face adversity that men are spared. But it's gotten much easier for us to succeed than it was for our mothers or grandmothers, and I can only suspect (and hope) that the playing field on which my daughter competes with men will be even more equal by the time she comes of age to enter the game.

The little one has also started making her presence known in ways more noticeable than previously. Until recently, the biggest evidence of her was my ever-thickening waistline. A few weeks back, Squishy (the placeholder I've been using until she arrives and we settle on a name for her) started kicking me. It's pretty neat. It's bizarre, to be fair. The fact that she kicks with a rhyme and reason that is independent of my own -- that it's a reaction to stimuli of which I'm wholly unaware -- impresses upon me that this being I'm growing and nurturing is one increasingly independent of me. I mean she's not even been gestating for six months yet, and already she kicks when the mood strikes her.

There are other bodily functions of mine that happen without my willing them to do so. Blood clots when I get a cut. My heart beats without my consciously deciding I want it to. My hair and nails grow absent any volition on my part. But I still chalk those up to choices I am making -- albeit making with a part of my body other than my conscious brain -- on some cellular level. Squishy's movements are something else altogether.

On fronts other than the baby one, we've closed on our new apartment, we're slated to move this Wednesday (Hello, suburbia! Hello, square footage!), and in between the closing and the move, we've managed, with the help of a couple of contractors, to get the place into some semblance of shape. I still have a bunch of things to pack, but progress is being made nicely, and that's reassuring.

I wish I had more to add. I'm not sure I'm cut out for blogging. These days, I'm too busy living life to want to memorialize it. Moreover, I'm not sure I want to have this pulpit for communing with the outside world. It's funny: if I want to recount what's been going on lately, it's easy enough to pound out a five-paragraph piece to e-mail a friend. But it's difficult when it comes to writing for all the world to see. Writing for a readership of one -- the intended recipient of an e-mail message -- is significantly different for writing for an audience with size unknown. It gets back to the issue I raised in a post I wrote last September: I don't want to share the same quantum of information, or deliver the information the same possible way, to every potential reader out there. There's much more I am willing to share with friends than with strangers. Exes and bosses? I want them to know even less than strangers. So I wind up filtering and self-editing to the point that what I started out trying to say gets so diluted that I wind up not saying anything at all. Either I simply don't bother to post or I post words that don't pack half the punch of my original, distilled message for fear that that might offend someone or reach an audience I'd rather remained blissfully oblivious of my inner thoughts.

I actually logged on today with the intention of deleting, rather than updating, this blog. Abandoning it isn't the way to go. I'm either in or out, I'd figured. But then I saw two unmoderated comments. Two people had read my last post and decided to respond. Nothing nasty. Just feedback. And that was enough to get me to stick with it -- for a little bit longer, at least.