dueness

Sometimes semesters creep along and then with a whoosh they are over; time moves unevenly, even erratically, crushing us midway and not really letting up until finals week. This semester, though, is different. Time seems to be moving steadily, as I track the weeks with my little "i-pregnancy" app, and as our graduate seminar marches chronologically through Kenneth Burke's decades of writing. The semester is about 15 weeks behind my pregnancy, so that when we met our first class no one except for my co-teacher knew about my "condition," and now at week 22 (week 7 of the course) it's hard to imagine how anyone wouldn't have noticed. The halfway points of both are neatly correspondent.

There is a new physicality to the passing of time. Each week brings more wiggly, fluttery movement, or new positions I can't sit comfortably in. The increasing swell probably also serves as a reminder that paper topics are due soon. By the time the deadline for the papers themselves is looming, the sticky heat will have given way to frozen ground; Burke will have aged nearly fifty years, his theories fitting together a little better, though still not perfectly; and the movements inside me will feel less like fluttery, wiggly calisthenics and more like squirmy, crowded kicks. Most everything comes due; it's all a matter of waiting, marking growth of all kinds with patience and even a little glee.

Comments

[lisa]

This is a beautiful post. I was pregnant while writing first book, so people used to ask "how far along are you?" I would automatically think that this was in reference to the book, then realize that people can't tell you're writing a book by looking at you, but they can usually tell if someone's pregnant.

Will you belt someone if they try to touch your stomach? Maybe because I am small I got more hassling that way. Anyone who did it only did it once, I tell you what.

[dhawhee]

Thanks, Lisa. No one has tried to touch my stomach yet. That impulse seems so bizarre!

[Joshie Juice]

I understand the impulse, because I'm one of the people who like to touch your book. In progress. I cannot write a book, or at least not that way.

[Susan Davis]

It used to really bother me when people tried to touch my pregnant belly -- but after two pregnancies I began to think that people instinctively want to connect with that new life -- by touching. Still, keep an umbrella handy.

Seriously, I was amazed that my kids used to bug me (right into menopause) to have more kids -- every Christmas, they demanded a baby. I've decided it was just a kid instinct to have more kids around, more life, more family. They didn't until much later understand the rationale for a small family.

[Johanna]

This is wonderful - even the post itself has a kind of prosody toward fulfillment.

I am inexplicably facinated by rhythmic time--predictable holidays, deadlines, conferences punctuating the academic year. Fall is a good time in Chicago to notice seasonal change... I confess that I am also guilty of the stomach touching. But I stop myself and generally ask first :)

[bonnie]

i've been so out of the loop, i didn't know. congratulations! is there nothing you can't do?!