It always was, from the very start, something very abstract. A concept. A mirage. Something that makes you go, “I can’t say for sure, but I know it’s in there…”

Suddenly, I look down and instead of seeing my legs I see only the tips of my feet and my belly button pushing its way out. I try poking my belly button back to its original depth, as an experiment. Something inside pokes back.

And then, it hits me: Something inside’s poking back! And what used to be a concept, a mirage, or something that makes you go “I can’t say for sure, but I know it’s in there” asserts itself. Kicks from the inside.

“I have zero mother instincts,” I complained to Timi as we lunched at Mcdonald’s during our lunch break, a big fat cloud of grease and fat from burgers and fries hovering over our heads.

“Everyone has mother instincts,” Timi argued.

“I don’t. What scares me is coming back home with the baby and not knowing what to do with it.” I slathered a fry in pommes frites sauce and popped it into my mouth. My Little Surrealist kicked as soon as I was done chewing. “I mean, how do you even give a baby a bath?”

“Like this,” Timi said. She cradled an imaginary baby over the crook of her arm and moved an imaginary sponge over the imaginary baby’s imaginary head.

“Seriously?” I asked after she had finished her demonstration.

“Well, I don’t know… I guess,” she admitted. “Anyway, maybe the mother instincts come when the baby arrives…”

***

“Of course you’ll know what to do when the baby arrives!” Marissa exclaimed over lunch Saturday afternoon, as I recounted my conversation with Timi as we started attacking the salmon on our plates. “You’ll be surprised at how naturally it’s going to come to you.”

I must have still looked worried, because Marissa then said, “You shouldn’t worry. If a baby cries, it means three things: it’s wet, it’s hungry, or it’s sick.”

“I don’t even know how to give a baby a bath,” I told her sullenly.

“You need a bathtub,” she told me.

“I already have a bathtub at home!” I said, instantly cheerful.

I detected a hint of pity in her eyes. “Not the normal bathtub, Kala. I meant a plastic tub.”  After a few minutes of silence, she said, “Maybe I should help you buy stuff before the baby comes.”

***

“You mean you don’t have a bathtub yet?!” Dr. Doom exclaimed over the phone when I recounted my conversation with Marissa about the bathtub. “Are you kidding me? You’re what - 5 months? What have you been doing all this time?”

“Uh… working?” I replied sarcastically, ignoring the italics in her speech. “Look - it’s not like I can just take the afternoon off to go and look for plastic bathtubs or baby beds or stuff like that.”

“You don’t have a crib yet?” Dr. Doom shrilled once again. “Do you even keep a baby calendar?”

(For your information: Dr. Doom is pregnant, too. She got pregnant a month after I announced my pregnancy. “Don’t think I did this on purpose. You’re still the star, for god’s sake.” That was the sms message she sent me to break the news.)

“… I have a baby book where I list down all my baby-related appointments. It even has a checklist of things you have to do every month. Milestones, and all that. It even has useful information about your baby’s growth. You can buy it in any bookstore, I think. Or you can order it online. Wait, let me give you the address…”

(When she was in university, Dr. Doom kept a list of the clothes she’d wear during that week tacked on the door of her wardrobe drawer. The purpose was to avoid the embarrassment of being caught wearing the same pair of jeans/shirt twice in the same week.)

I had spaced out a bit during her monologue, but finally floated back to earth just in time to hear Dr. Doom saying “… and please tell me you’re still taking your prenatal vitamins. You don’t know how important that is. What did your doctor say about your sugar levels?”

“I haven’t asked her about it yet. I’ll ask during my next appointment.”

“How many weeks along are you?” she persisted.

“Uh…” I did a mental calculation in my head, and failed. “Between 20 and 22 weeks. I think…”

Even her sigh was judgmental. “Oh well. I’m 16 weeks and 3 days. Three and a half days,” she corrected herself, trying to dazzle me with her accuracy.

***

What am I going to do, I asked out loud to My Little Surrealist, one evening when I’d come home from work earlier than usual and Julien was still at the office. I was sprawled on the couch, feeling like crap. My hand crawled to my belly and I stroked it, marveling at the unfamiliarity of it all, my changing body, my expanding belly. I don’t even keep a baby calendar, I continued. I don’t even know how to give you a bath. I don’t want kids calling you Stinky at the playground, I don’t want that. I want you to be squeaky clean. But occasionally dirty, too. You know? I started to bite at the skin of my lower lip. I don’t know anything about baths, or baby clothes. I can’t even keep track of my sugar levels. What if I turn out to be a shitty mom? My eyes moved to the bookshelf, where my robot Mahmud stood, giving me the hairy eyeball, probably thinking “She’s gone mad, my master; she’s talking to her goddam stomach.”

Even Mahmud is judging me, I whispered conspiratorially to My Little Surrealist. The bastard. He’s sore because I haven’t oiled his joints in the past three months.

The sun shifted the light in the living room and I kept on lying on the couch, worrying. I worried so much it almost suffocated me; it was painful to draw in my breath, and I could feel the tears threatening to fall. I lay there, drowning in self-doubt and self-pity, and a healthy dose of melodrama.

You’ll still love me, right, even if I don’t know what to do? I finally asked in a pleading tone, then I lapsed into silence, still stroking my belly.

My Little Surrealist kicked me.

And just like that, I think I’ll be all right.

Currently listening to:
Phoenix
It’s Never Been Like That

The best thing about being pregnant
Is that I can eat a whole pack of Toblerone in one sitting
And blame it on the baby

Currently listening to:
Get Well Soon
Rest Now, Weary Head! You Will Get Well Soon

Stairs have become my enemy.

Everyday : 7 flights of stairs, 4 flights of escalators, and half the time, the escalators don’t work anyway. I drag myself out of bed, and immediately, stairs plague my mind. Sunday nights, I dream of stairs. Inside the metro, I lean my head against the glass and dread approaching Concorde, visualizing the long corridor that switches to Madeleine, and the last three flights of stairs before finally reaching the office, where I sit all day when all I want to do is lie down; where I wait for 7pm, knowing I’ll have to face stairs all over again.

It happens a lot that I pause at the top of the steps, hold on to the railing, breathing hard, and try to get ahold of myself. This is silly, I tell myself. It’s just stairs. It’s just walking. But it sucks the life out of me, it leaves me dazed. The crowd of people rush by. One time a kind soul - a woman dressed to the nines in killer heels - stopped and looked back at me, poor me, holding my stomach piteously and drenched in sweat, and asked me if I was ok. I responded that I was, and that I was simply tired. She nodded in sympathy and walked on, but I’ll never forget her.

Every night, I dream and dread stairs. All I want to do when I get up is to be home, asleep.

***

Black screen, white squiggly lines. He presses harder into my stomach, and like magic it appears on the screen. I can hardly make it out first, but then he presses a button and the image is captured on the screen, and for a while I can see, then he moves it again and the image disappears in a swirl of white lines. We watch, open-mouthed. I hardly breathe to not disturb the show. I gasp inwardly when I make sense of all the lines. I feel as I do when I’m in a museum, putting my nose as close as possible to the picture to see the brushstrokes.

Do you see it, he asks. Everything is perfect. Bravo, he adds. He presses another button, draws a line across the screen, and a feeling so foreign and intense creeps over my whole body. Foreign. Intense. Foreign. Intense. I want to jump over to where Jul is and sit on his lap and shake like a leaf. Like staring at an artwork in a museum, wondering, how strange is this?

***

At the end of the day, the last set of stairs I have to climb is 40 steps high. At the end of the day I am reduced to nothing but a sad, tired, sorry figure. I have stood in the metro all the way back, in the midst of the unforgiving crush of people, and the only thing that stands in the way between me and my bed is 40 steps, plus a few minutes’ walk to the front door. I can’t do it, I think, but I can’t sleep here either. So I pull on the last reserves of energy I have left and pant my way to the top, drop my bag and keys, remove my shoes and dive into the pillows.

And when I am still and asleep and desperately trying to will the night to be longer, the activity continues in me: growing, simmering, forming, dreaming, and, according to the books, making pirouettes.

Currently listening to:
Company Segundo
Cien Anos de Son