Mercury Retrograde is more playful than cruel: though the crux of a prank is that it feels cruel, if only temporarily.
*
Last night I had an interesting experience which was ultimately a good attitude adjustment, put things in perspective (reminded me that just to live is a great gift), hopefully brought "daddy" ("It's kinda sexy," he said) and I closer together. E. came over (I hadn't seen him for nearly a month) and was surprisingly supportive. I slumped into the bed reading while he listened to music or slept or played guitar on the couch. We walked to Goodwill in the storm and I got four books for six dollars, then we went to Shaw's. We got a ride home from an acquaintance of his who smoked with the windows up. I covered my face in a scarf and when I got home took a shower. I noticed that my stomach was covered in dark purple splotches. I tried to was them off in the shower, but they stayed. They were on my back as well, just a ring of dark bluish-purple. E. said it could be internal bleeding, that he'd never seen anything like it. My mom came down and said I ought to go to the emergency room. I called D. and he met me on Water Street. I made light of it as much as I could, said "It's hard to stay calm when you've turned purple!" He said he felt bad but also, "I'm sure you're body's doing exactly what it's supposed to do considering what's going on with it. Of which I have no idea," or something.
So we went to the ER. My complaint? "I have turned purple." The triage nurse said she'd never seen anything like it and paged the doctor who got very serious and said it looked like internal bleeding. All my vital signs were perfect, though I was anxious.
I was ushered back immediately (they weren't particularly busy when I first went in at 6 pm). I put on a johnny, which is a very natural and even strangely comforting thing for me to do, and got on the bed with a blanket, and D. sat on a stool reading "Your Baby's First Year." I didn't read -- a few lines from a poetry collection by Deborah Garrison "A working Girl Can't Win" -- but mostly I just fretted and tried to take deep breaths. It was actually very nice when the nurse and Doctor told me to breath deep for the stethoscope, since this was what I needed most, anyway.
I gave urine to a cup and on my walk up and down the hall stood tall in my johnny and wild tousled hair. I am, after all, a Leo Rising person, and not all wisps of cloud.
The Doctor said I might have a rare blood disease that can make the skin turn this color, hemophil-something. He said I might be bleeding from a cavity in my back. So my blood had to be taken, but this is the Augusta, Maine ER, as opposed to a medical establishment, so instead of just drawing their samples, the nurse did this: stabbed my valve, making blood spurt all over the sheets, then do it again with the other vein, trying to "thread it in" for several messy minutes, while D. almost passed out, and grabbed my bad foot (the nurse asked to see my foot to make sure my circulation was okay. "Let's not look at the right one," I said. "You won't like it.") in sympathy. Finally, not admitting any problem but that my veins were fickle and terrible - "Have you ever had an IV?" She asked. "I was on one continuously for a month straight," I said. What I did not say, was this: Plenty of times people have not been able to find my veins, but I have never, ever seen a horror show like this.
So with the IV messily (and therefore painfully, with myriad, superfluous wrinkles) taped onto the crook of my right arm, I requested some food and got a delicious bowl of Kraft macaroni and cheese with wheat toast and butter. I ate it with the contents of the little pepper packet on it, with a plastic fork in my left hand. D. offered to feed me. I gave him most of the toast and a bit of the pasta, hoping we'd be out to feast eventually.
The Doctor came in and said the lab results would take about half an hour. I think it was 8:30 or so by then. He also said, "You said you had a home pregnancy test that was positive? Well you tested negative here." "Oh," I said. D. put the book on Baby's First Year away and I said, "Well, I guess there's no reason you have to be here with me." To his credit, he said, "Nonsense." But he became distant, drumming his fingers and staring at my oxygen monitoring machine and droning about not having any "spirit."
They lost some of my blood and three nurses came in to draw more than decided they didn't really need it.
My mind raced and I thought maybe the psychic medium, who saw me getting more education, and not getting married until I was 30 and having three kids, was suddenly right, and I felt a strange mixture of relief (MFA, here I come. Champagne and several bong hits, I move towards you) and emptiness (so my love, my blueberry love, with his tortured cries and his brilliant little piano ditties, his stupid garage rock voicemail signature scream, his huge blue eyes, is not actually my fated course; and I know reproducing does not equal destiny, random hookups and barnanimals and all that, but he & I, we have religious aspirations/deeply buried values and pine for children, and so this was rather a deciding factor, for a few days) -- except that I of course still had a mysterious and possibly life threatening blood problem. People kept asking if I was woozy and/or dizzy but of course I was due to the anxiety and skipping my customarily gigantic dinner for a few bites of Kraft.
D. decided to meditate but I got angry and said that was no way to support me. So we chatted a little. After absorbing the news about the negative test and deciding I must have had a very early miscarriage, and everything could go back to normal now, I reconsidered and said I still thought I was pregnant and that their test just sucked or they mixed it up with someone else's or something.
The Doctor came in around nine with my results and said I didn't have a weird blood disease, or any issues with my blood count ( I really was starting to worry, the way my blood was flying everywhere, and then not filling the sample tubes, but let me tell you something about the people who work at the Augusta ER, ohh man, they said I'd be out of there & 'back on my feet' in no time when I showed up with a 10 by 10 cm, deep hole blown out of my foot, and spent a hideous long time trying to insert a needle into my spine to administer anesthesia, and reprimanded my discomfort as the result of me being high on marijuana, and and and), but that I was pregnant.
D. got visibly ecstatic and grabbed my arm and said, "You're pregnant!" "I told you that," I said, practically rolling my eyes.
The Doctor said he didn't want to do an x-ray because of the pregnancy and that I would most likely be sent home since I was stable, and they couldn't access the ultrasound equipment until Monday, and that I would just come back if the strange condition got worse or I developed other symptoms. He said he was going to have the next Doc on duty check me out before I was discharged.
He left and I had D. draw the curtain. I was pregnant again, so I told him there was no more morose bullshit to be had. (He is struggling to accept his lack of ambition in the face of some very fantastical visions and a great deal of undeniable talent in the area of music. He wants to start a "theoretical theory" group for music but is afraid he is too ungrounded and no one will care. I told him last night that it was stupid to wait until everything is perfect to do something for yourself, that the group itself could ground him, and that it is very possible to help others while still a mess yourself, as I've done in many small ways.)
While we waited and waited, a jovial, hip male nurse came in. He was kind of hefty with a shaved head and contagious good energy. He said the Doctor was talking about my case out in the hall and on the phone with specialists, and that he wanted to try something. I showed him my torso and back, he took out an alcohol wipe, rubbed it against my stomach, and the wipe was covered in the bluish purple. He did it to my back and the same thing happened. D. laughed, and I exclaimed, "You are the greatest genius there is!"
So all was well. The serious Doctor didn't even crack a smile, and said, "So it appears the problem was not coming from the inside, but actually from the outside."
We walked home in the storm, mostly in the roads since there were few cars. D. shoveled the steps at my apt. and I cooked a huge feast, my eyelashes covered in snow. D. said grace and although he is not at all epic and booming and hypereloquent like my very own father, he did note that we had an abundance compared to many: which is very, very true. Then we watched the TV show we are currently obsessed with(about self-appointed, weed-growing Canadian trailer park "managers") while devouring huge ice cream sundaes, and barely touching each other, therefore coming one step closer to living the American Dream.
But seriously, it will be a good story to tell Rotaria, or whatever her name is (last night I dreamt, not at all restfully, of name after name. And of one of my favorite female students reading something so brilliant all present burst into loud, spontaneous clapping, and I cancelled the rest of class and all my comments on their writings were erased, apparently by the resounding goodness of what she had done, at least for that session): the night you were there, and I turned purple, and hiked in the snowstorm and was the buzz of the whole ER, and then you weren't there, and then you were, and the purple was just dye-- even though it was a shirt I'd worn and washed before with no problem. I must start writing poetry again.
About 36 weeks to go, and no, I don't want my life to diminish to a countdown, but all things considered: so far, so good. I am eating impressive amounts, even by my standards as a retired "binge-eater" who could put anyone, really to shame-- but mostly very healthy. Not one drag of tobacco. Although my main source of calcium is peanut butter cup ice cream, I have had a taste for stirfried onions with lots of curry and cayenne, with nuts and/or black beans sauteed into the dripping pan, brown rice, baked chicken thighs, broccoli, nonfat yogurt with maple syrup, frozen berries.
I've been battling depression and fear, per usual, and with new features of knowing that I must find better-than-ever ways to manage these innate parts of my temperament mixed with worldview but there seems to be a core of peace within me. (Although my syntax is seriously disturbing me.) My life is not the most precious one out there, even when it's natural for the ego to assert such a thing. Rather, all lives are precious, and largely experimental: and since I have been flirting and agonizing with the decision to take this huge leap of faith for years, I am doing it.
I am repeating myself, of course, but what I am most afraid of, still, is no longer becoming a kind of artist, of losing my connection to the energy of eros; the deep melancholy of holy solitude I feel when I listen to Dylan or Leonard Cohen or any music that moves me. This will have to be transformed. Soon, and even now, I will no longer tread the earth in the same way. For years now I have walked along and had my hand suspended in the air beneath and to the side of my hip, imagining with longing and even anguish that I held a little hand. Well, these things cannot be imagined but only experienced. My tendency to cognitively skip, to speculate, and to intellectualize, really does not serve me. No matter how many posts angles fantasies re: the "issue" I expose myself to, only living it will teach me. Also, all this angsty ambivalence seems to be a very modern phenomena, all this moaning and groaning that it will ruin your life, and you will be lost. All my parents had to say about it was, sure, it is distressing to have a baby with colic (my younger brother did), and take a sick little one to the ER, but overall, kids are great, are beautiful, are funny and fascinating to watch; they even, & I pray I will experience this too, bring people together.
The following is an excerpt from
http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-932360-64-6
"The story of editing this book is a story that all mothers who are artists already know by heart. It is a story about hiding out in a room while a child calls out for assistance, answering back, Just one more minute! .... It is a story of starts and stops, of catching time, forcing time, making time whenever we could get it. Sitting in a car, waiting for school to let out, frantically scribbling something on the back of an envelope before the kids descend. Compromise, planning, and hard work.
We know this story, we live this story, we sit over tea and coffee, watching our children, and worrying this story, shaking it out, smoothing it down, telling it over and over with all the other mothers we know.
How do you do it? we ask each other. Do you think we’ll ever do it again? Is it worth it? Is it possible? Is it better? Is it worse? Will we ever have the time, the brains, the skill, the will, to do it the way it should be done?
We collect other mothers in our minds – mothers who have published books, mothers who have opened shows, mothers who sell their art, mothers who act in movies, mothers who sell millions of records, mothers who go on the road.
We repeat their names like a prayer: Diane di Prima, George Sand, Kristen Hersh, Erma Bombeck, Mary Wollstonecraft, Patti Smith, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Ursula Le Guin, Muriel Rukesyer, Diane Arbus, Maya Angelou, Lorrie Moore, Louise Nevelson, Sally Mann, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Exene Cervenka, Kim Gordon, Bjork, Sinead O'Connor.
We think of Shirley Jackson writing "The Lottery" in her head as she pushed a pram to the market.... We look for examples from history of women who did not have our advantages growing up after the massive educational and cultural reforms rendered by second wave feminism.
We see ourselves in the words of Angela Carter when she writes 'there are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.'
We are respectfully amazed by the example of the Carter Family transmitting a musical legacy across generations of strong women. We scan magazines looking for contemporary examples of powerful, successful female artists and find Yoko Ono, who lost one child in a custody dispute and raised another on her own after her husband was murdered. We see ourselves when she says 'work is something I love, and is what comes naturally to me. Business is harder. Motherhood is extremely complicated and difficult, though I suppose some mothers would say it's as natural as breathing.'"
