nobody tells you how it’s going to feel

They might try, but then one morning you’re there working. Your computer is open. You’re writing something, emailing. Outside it’s starting to rain. There’s bird-sounds. An early Spring rain. Last night your wife washed the dolls and their clothes. You see them out there on the line, moving in the wind, the raindrops making small dark spots. You go out there, unsnap them from the clothespins. Some of the dolls are new. Some of them have been with you since your daughter was born. They’ve moved with you to three different houses, in and out of boxes,  rolling on floors, thrown at the dog, put up on shelves, slept with, lost, found later under beds or behind bookcases.  Now they’re out here in the rain. Everyone else is still asleep. It’s just you out there. You’re taking them off the clothesline. You never could’ve imagined this precise moment in your life occurring.  You never could’ve imagined how it would feel.

tocando la panza

Some things you know you’ll always remember. The way Jesi touched Lau’s panza today: lifting her shirt slowly,  her fingers circling softly, pressing in gently, saying how beautiful it was, taking time before pulling out the doppler to listen to the heartbeat to just touch and caress and feel where the head was, the back, the cola,  slowing everything down, all of us quiet there in the small bedroom following her fingers and thinking of what’s inside.

 

the first burial

a kind of patagonian sparrow. corn-colored feathers on its breast–the rest of its body black, its head clawed up. i’d heard thumping at the door last night, 2:30 AM, opened and saw muchacha playing with it. i’d forgotten.

now layla saying ‘look this pa’ro, look this bird.’

‘ah, muchacha killed it last night. pobre.’

‘muy lindo este pajaro.’

‘it is beautiful isn’t it? should we bury it? should i get the shovel?’

‘si.’

‘everything goes back to the ground you know.’

‘—‘

‘come with me let’s get the shovel.’

behind the house mami is putting clothes on the line.

‘papi esta ‘garando el shovel. muchacha killed a paj’ro.’

we go back around. i scoop it up slowly. the sun is on the wall, the feathers, the dry blade.

‘where should we put it? should we put it in the back where the flowers are?’

she follows me back there.

i lay the bird down by where all last year’s apples have fallen.

‘see it all goes back in the ground. just like we’ve planted everything. it all comes from the ground and goes back into the ground. ‘

i dig the hole.

‘before we put it back in, do you want to say goodbye?’

‘GOODBYE!’

i don’t really have a name for what i believe in.

but the way she said this had it right there.

glasses of water too heavy to pick up

yesterday while mamá was at the doctor’s layla and i pretended we were eating dinner. we had woodblocks on the table as pieces of meat. we cut them apart with scissors. i couldn’t pick up the glass of water. it was too heavy. layla laughed and passed me more meat.

later we cut out cardboard and shaped surfboards for her hippo dolls. attached them with electrical tape. baby hippo was pulling rodeo flips off the side of the table.  gravity works all the same.

meanwhile, across town, mamá was at the doctor’s hearing baby’s heartbeat.

standing by the stove with her this morning. rolling up her dress a bit and grabbing her thighs in between pancake flips. a sense of possibility.

earlier layla’d helped mix the batter.

being pregnant is scarier than launching off waterfalls

this pregnancy has been so much harder. lau’s panza is so round and beautiful and good to touch, but still.

she doesn’t sleep. her tits are massively swollen and painful to touch. the midwife lives in another town.

we’re by our fucking selves.

that’s the reality.  there’s no support network around.

it’s all on the computer.

sometimes i make myself try to believe that being down in patagonia is this kind of access to something we wouldn’t get to access otherwise.

you can drink out of the rio azul.

but having a family with no other people around makes me question all of that.

those ppl that came across the plains that willa cather wrote about:  some of them lived alone and had kids with truly nobody helping them.

at some point there must’ve been a father back then who must’ve gotten up from where the newborn and his wife were there in bed. he stepped out for a second where there was nothing around but prairie and sky on all sides.

or what if it was all darkness out there?

i think it makes you a little bit crazy to be so alone there with your family.

this morning i saw the across the street neighbors’ maid leaning out the windows and cleaning them.

i thought ‘that’s what we need.’

but it’s not.

it’s so much fucking more than that.

muchas nenas

Layla and I walking Julio around the neighborhood. Layla is barefoot. Right down at ground level. She’s in the details, all of them. Julio’s leash. The brick sidewalk. Geckos scattering in front of us.

I’m up in these other details. Getting ready for the move to Argentina. Calls to Bank of America. There are all kinds of distances people make between each other. They start with their own children. Their own parents. It doesn’t matter how far away you live. It doesn’t matter if you sleep in the same bed.

“Juilo’s goin’ to Argentina,” I tell her. She knows.

“. . tina,” she says,

“Who else is going to Argentina?”

“Mami,” she says. “Papi”

“And LAYYYY-LA,” I say. I hear this last part come out in a voice that doesn’t sound how I feel. Then I say, softer, “You know what’s in Argentina?”

“—“

“There’s all kinds of rios there. And mountains. We could walk like this and maybe see a ciervo. “

We keep walking.

“You know what else there is in Argentina?” I ask.

“Muchas nenas,” she says. Lots of little girls.

“Muuuuuchas nenas,” I say. “Muchissimas nenas.” I say this and we keep walking. We’ve been broken apart these last few weeks. Mami and Papi screaming screaming. Not as many trips with her to play with nenas at the parks. I look at her hair. I’m telling her what I want and she’s telling me what she wants.

We get to the end of the sidewalk and I ask her “cross the street or go back?” Julio stands there panting.

“Go back.”

eyes changing

Looked at Layla’s eyes today and thought ‘they don’t look like a baby’s eyes anymore.’ For maybe three seconds I could actually feel us moving downstream. When this happens you remember what it looked and felt like upstream too.

music

Mamá needs us out of the house to pack our clothes and picture into suitcases. She’s done this so many times. As always it doesn’t all fit. Layla and I go to the bookstore. On the way over we listen to the Caribbean show. Driving with your two year old daughter is all about musical education. “This is called Soca,” I say. I turn up the bass. “What do you think?” She says it’s good. Almost anything I ask her–she says good and she means it too. She always pauses just the right amount before she says it so that you know she’s really listening.

At the bookstore we see three adolescent girls. They’re laughing and jiggling and scared and pretending not to be aware of how loud they are and that they want everyone to look at them. They go towards the bathroom and then laugh even harder. Layla pauses again and says “nenas silly.” On the way back the Caribbean show is still on. “This is a like a reggae remix of this kind of cheesy song called Lady in Red by the Neville Brothers or something,” I tell her. “What do you think?

” ….Good.”

After she says that I reach back and give her a sneak attack squeeze on her feet, belly, hands. They play some other songs. One by Luciano. I press the button that opens the gate at Silver Oaks. For a few seconds I think of a poem I could write about all the different times you could listen to music. Music before paddling over a waterfall. Music while drinking the third glass of wine. Music played just before the bombs start falling.  I can’t think of one that would be right for waiting as the gates open to your parents’ gated community.

The gate finally opens though and the song changes to something else. Layla looks sleepy in the rearview mirror but we sit in the driveway for a couple more minutes anyway just listening to the song finish. I want to make this part of the day last a little bit more.

7 Oct 2009 – no flow

“when it gets like this she stops taking pictures.”

that’s the line i thought of today.

lau asked me the other night if i’d keep this blog going.

i told her claro que si.

before it’s all about not having any fluid loss. spotting. blood.

now that’s all we’re waiting for.

waiting for all of it to rush out in blood. gestational sac. embryo.

if this doesn’t happen they have to ‘vaccuum it out.’

if not there is risk of bleeding disorder.

the doctor comes ‘highly recommended.’

when it gets like this my default mode is anger.

middle knuckle of right hand swollen.

we’re visiting the accupuncturist again today.

this feels ‘totally desperate’ to me.

but there’s no flow.

lau is scared of going to surgery center.

they say 1 in 3 women have miscarriages

i’ve been repeating that too.

one of my friends have told me “this will get better.’

he mentioned ‘the duality of life.’

i understand how we’re still moving downstream ‘in spite of all this’ but it doesn’t ‘help’ at all.

my parents are on a Mediterranean cruise right now.

the people living here have no connection to us.

that’s the worst for me–there’s nobody around; it’s all on the fucking internet.

i hear them right now, my girls, opening the door to the pool.

layla is calling for food, queso, then changes her mind.

she wants to give the dogs a treat.

in 40 minutes we have to get in the car.

1 Oct 2009 name

Since Lau got pregnant again we’ve had premonitions. Lau said something was wrong. This was early on. Pain. Spotting. She told me she’d had bad dreams. A baby born feet first. I told her it would all be fine. But I also felt like something was wrong. There just hasn’t been a good flow since we’ve been down here. We’re down here to see my parents but if we’d had enough money we would’ve figured out some other way to make this transition down to South America. I hate writing that but it is true.

La naturaleza es sabia is what we’ve been teling each other. When we walked into imaging place I thought ‘this is where people get really bad news.’ At that point I’d already gone into movie-mode. Everything you look at compressed down to two dimensions. There were several obese elderly women in the waiting room. An older black man came in and got a barium shake and instructions on drinking it before coming back tomorrow. Even on the drive over it seemed like I was watching a movie of us driving. I  put on some P-Funk to try and make us levantar el animo. Lau said she was nervous. When the technician cut on the ultrasound there was no heartbeat.

Yesterday I was looking at our old weimeraner Kali. She’s almost 14. I remembered her as a young dog. Thinking about the litter. How crazy! She’d been inside her mother once too. Now she was so old. She’d never had a chance to give birth.

It doesn’t feel like a movie right now. The ceiling fan is on high. The shade is pulled down. It’s already October. The embryo was 1 cm long. Some of us never get a name.