It's impossible to imagine a body made from my body no longer also my body.
—11 dec 2015—
It is the new moon today, the last new moon of the year, and the last new moon before the baby’s arrival. The being is due to enter the world on the first full moon of 2016. A Capricorn.
I took the first bath of this pregnancy today. I hadn't taken one before because I had been anxious that the water will raise my body temperature and harm the baby in some way. But now I am almost 36 weeks and I couldn’t not. I set up some beeswax candles and kept the water a steady warm temperature with a candy thermometer. It was the first time I had visualized my birth, seeing the water between my legs floating around my protruding belly. I visualized us in the water—the being emerging out of me with me. As the baby rolled inside me I imagined it rolling in the water, smiling.
Labour is the only thing I have not been anxious about since I found out I was pregnant. To be unabashedly wild (during labour) has the ultimate appeal.
After I got out of the bath and silkened my skin with coconut oil, I saw that Sabrina Scott sent me a long email on what I could/can/should do based on some feelings I sent her I have been dealing with in the pregnancy. She offered to either use some of her powers or send me a spell. Her focus was on water—bathing.
“Once a day if you can stomach it,” she wrote. She also insisted no specific directives can come from her because smells like lavender may not work for her, but “lavender may work for you because of some childhood memory”. She couldn’t have known I put lavender oil in the bath because it is my favourite flower plant scent.
All this makes sense.
The labour seems so near. I am not scared. I am scared of having a baby. No, not a baby, a human that will be under my care, my responsibility. That my time will no longer belong to me, my quietude, my anger, my whims—not in a way, like, oh, I wish I had accomplished more things before this happened (because I will never stop wanting more and I also feel ready) but more like the banality of life will no longer be there as it was and even as it is now.
Why did I want to have a child? I remember Mitsu Hadeishi laughing at me years ago when I started the first phase of my baby obsession. He laughed and continues to laugh at my desires for being pregnant and having a baby but not ever admitting/acknowledging that being pregnant also means having another human to take care of for a long time. And I don’t. I never considered it and don’t consider it. Maybe today, in the bath, I wanted to try to make sense of why I would want: a child, a baby, another being to take care of to make me exhausted and to restructure my life.
It's impossible to imagine a body made from my body no longer also my body.