I am the least intuitive person alive, which is why it’s strange that I am so crazy-obsessed with prenatal yoga. I am not exactly world-renown for living life thus far in my body. In fact, for the most part, I’ve always been more or less just a brain with big hair, someone who could go all day on three cups of coffee or walk around for weeks with a sore neck, never even feeling it. I secretly prided myself on how low-maintenance all this disembodiedness made me. I never sugar-dipped, got carsick, or slept badly on somebody else’s futon.
But pregnancy has changed that completely. Suddenly, I’m at the mercy of terrifying hungers or fits of weariness that approach narcolepsy. I had a rather alarming incident during my first trimester, in which a wedge of processed cheese tasted so incredibly good that I began to weep uncontrollably and couldn’t stop. My body—no matter how much I’d tended to neglect it—is completely running the show now, and my brain is sort of flailing behind.
I started prenatal yoga because all the demented A-type lawyer-mommies I knew were so into it. Yes, this is strangely counterintuitive. Not surprisingly, I started out approaching yoga like law school or a job, making me the most competitive yoga-ist alive. Following a four-day silent yoga retreat this winter, I couldn’t stop crowing that I’d “won” it because Aaron had talked and I didn’t. What I thought I’d like most about yoga was the freaky feeling of being in a room with nine other people, while really being in a room with 18. But yoga last night reminded me how great it is to take a few minutes to explore ancient, primal forgotten rituals—like, er, breathing—that you can forget about completely in the rush to have a life on this planet. And yoga reminds me that there is nothing unseemly about turning inward toward small things, like a baby, even when the world is on the brink of war.
Don’t get me wrong. There is also no place better than prenatal yoga for learning what to do about your farting/hemorrhoid/heartburn/spreading pelvis. And when it’s time to complain about the fact that the baby’s putative daddy is incapable of reading the one childbirth book you’ve assigned him, no one can better commiserate than your yoga-mates. But yoga has also helped me achieve this weird spiritual connection to our baby—one good downward facing dog and I can always feel him or her start to hum inside. I am increasingly sure that this baby knows a lot more about what’s important in life than I do.
Last night was Purim—the Jewish version of Halloween, but with slightly more mayhem. I dressed up as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, although people tended to think I was some kind of a pregnant Donald Duck. Two different women asked if I was carrying twins last night; one of those questions—like “Are you pregnant?”—that you really want to avoid with the pregnant, unless you know something for certain.
Sleep in the last weeks of pregnancy is virtually impossible. Not just because there are great pounding lists of things that need doing keeping you awake. You just finally become so heavy and uncomfortable and full of heartburn that you basically stop sleeping until the baby comes, and then you stop sleeping even more. The other thing is that the sweet little angel who used to kick you gently inside to reassure you that all is well and blessed with this pregnancy is suddenly heaving its whole massive self from one side of your abdomen to the other. At around Week 33, “kicks” stop feeling like gentle tapping and start to feel like the baby is maybe renovating its kitchen, with steel girders and sheetrock. I imagine that if a small bald stranger was punching you that hard from outside your belly, you might just be tempted to haul off and punch it back. But since it’s your baby and you love it (see, e.g., circle of life, etc., from yesterday), you just try to pat it reassuringly and get back to sleep.
Here is a list of things extremely pregnant ladies do at 3 a.m. when they can’t sleep:
- Get up, take Zantac, return to bed.
- Wake partner, try to talk about relative merits of changing table versus dresser.
- Wonder for thousandth time if baby is boy or girl. Attempt to clear mind in manner of great yogis to determine same. Give up after three minutes.
- Wake partner, ask if this kicking might be contractions.
- Take What To Expect When You’re Expecting downstairs to look up “butt pain.”
- Eat Oreos.
- Play computer games.
- Return to bed and worry about war.
- Begin yoga breathing, loudly, so as to wake partner, who moves to guest room.
