Moving

Yesterday ended up being an anxiety day. I find myself moving between high anxiety and resolve towards patience. I started the day with resolve. I wasn't having a baby for a while so I might as well get stuff done. I caught up on grading, note taking, and commenting on on-line forums. I made soup and burritos for supper. I fed beastie children. I did lots and lots of dishes. I even went shopping, with all three beasties and no H. It was a productive day fed though by a restless, anxious energy that finally exploded after a phone call from my midwife.

She had emailed me suggesting acupuncture and I hadn't responded because I wasn't sure what to do about it. I can't afford it is the bottom line, and I know my insurance won't cover it. Plus I'm a bit skeptical about it's effectiveness. She's concerned that I'm overdue for me, that the baby is getting really big, etc. And she was worried that the baby might be in a bad position making real labor hard to get into. Of course I told H who also grew anxious and kept saying "Maybe you need to go a Doctor." So we fussed around feeding each other's anxiety which only got worst when we got a call that H's dad was coming today (it's been changed to Wednesday).

I spent the evening doing pelvic tilts, hanging around on my hands and knees. Drinking raspberry leaf tea. I pondered the nasty mysteries of Castor oil. I used my breast pump (I have milk dear god). I worried that the blueberry wanted to come out but was stuck. By 11, I was a mess. I made dh put in 30 Rock so I could laugh. I need to get that energy out of me. This fear, this restlessness, this doubt about my body and the blueberry.

After laughing, H, without prompting, put on our birth music: Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass's Passages. I love this cd and had wanted to give birth to Piper during it but she came quick and to Glenn Gloud's rendition of Bach (not a bad thing at all). So now I have a new chance to use what I consider the perfect birthing music. As soon as the music started, I began to feel the tension leave. I started to move my hips to the music (good positioning move) and once I started moving, I felt myself leave my head and just exist in the movement of my hips, the heavy weight of the baby in my womb. The more I danced, the more I felt lost in my body's movements, caught up in s space where it was all material, all centered on the way the music soothed me, sent the anxiety away.

And right before bed, the blueberry did some rather painful big movements that took a toil on my back but I slept really good (for me) afterwards, and when I woke up, the blueberry was low and centered. I could feel tiny hand movements that were no where near the head.

H and I had been talking earlier about how the problems with theories on the body is that they are so cerebral it's hard to think about bodies while reading and contemplating said theories. There's a lot of talk in many theoretical circles about "writing the body," "performing the body," histories/knowledge dwelling in the body" but how does one touch this? Is there a way to understand that reading/writing will never capture? I don't know but for me when I am this heavy with carrying life, a breath away from one of the most intense bodily experiences, I have no patience for "intellectual" argument about the body. The words hammer at me until I want to crawl under something to avoid their insistence for debate and argumentation.

Right now I want to wrap myself in music and the way it moves my body through the material imagery of birth.