Far Bird

I am 18 weeks pregnant and thinking about perfection. I don’t have a job. Granted, before losing my job, I worked only two days a week and the rest of the time I did as I’m doing now, sort of pottering, sort of trying to find work. To be honest I can’t remember what I spent my time doing, though it felt like a full enough life. I made just enough to keep myself in medical aid and cheap bras.

I went through my old papers, letters written in high school, poems scrawled on till slips, blurred photographs of myself at 12 and 16, my whole life behind me, my whole life in front of me, utterly who I was in a crop top and braided hair, trying to look fierce already, holding my hands up to the camera, my sunglasses and my pimples dating me. I stuck these in a book, and composted the poems or ceremoniously burned them. I wrote letters to old boyfriends and burned them too. I tried to reset, to finish a part of my life, to become complete and to be somehow renewed to move on.

I was once again in an in-between state, something that seems to characterise my life every so often, as I swung again round the cycle. 

I studied an honours degree, looked for work, was appalled by the state of things I would have to do, then scrambled back to the university for a master’s degree. Finished that, travelled a bit, worked a bit, again got appalled and did a doctorate. Almost went on to do a postdoc, but that didn’t work and I got this two-day-a-week temporary position that I ended up staying in for four years while I read books on the afterlife and thought about writing.

Now that temporary/long-term job is over and again I am launched into the world, again I am appalled at my prospects, again I think about studying or retreating back to the academy. Except this time I am also in the liminal space of pregnancy. 

Somehow this is all tied into perfection. I want to be perfect so I can be perfectly loved and loveable. Adorable. I had this thought: you can’t manipulate the universe into loving you, especially if the universe, or “God” loves you unconditionally already. That means you need do nothing, nothing can win favour; nothing brings on disfavour. What a strange thought – and one that comes close to a perspective of Ricky’s I’ve always found somewhat distasteful: the universe relates to each of us with a kind of benevolent disinterest.

I have always resisted this, insisting on love. And yet, perhaps I have mistaken love, or at least unconditional love, because if love is unconditional it means it is not interested in your actions, good or bad. So then what if I didn’t have to be good, or productive? What would be the important thing then? Only to be myself, I think. Only to be who I am without the pressure and patina of goodness besmirching and clouding over my original face. I read somewhere that authenticity is no longer having to be good. 

Now I have an old man’s beer belly and protruding, dark areolas and nipples that curl like prunes in the morning. Ricky doesn’t want to have sex with me, saying he simply cannot interfere with the baby. I don’t buy it. I whine at him about being a fertility goddess, fecund. Does he not find it sexy, this rotundness, this burgeoning lifeiness? No. I haven’t wanted to have sex either, to be honest, after a brief spicy spell some weeks back.

I float in an in-between place. Every day I go online and apply for jobs that make my insides feel like a hot new desert. I cannot yet feel the baby, though its reality is more apparent now that I can’t easily zip up my jumper. My doula tells me that in the kundalini tradition, the soul enters between 18 and 19 weeks. I wonder, who is coming? Who will be with us new and newly in the world?