Week 1: Drummer's war cry

too soon to tell . . . 

the slight swelling 

of a flower bud   

                          Susan Constable

I did the perfunctory barn dance but I haven't allowed myself to rejoice yet. Today is the 65th day of my pregnancy and it is only now that I have gathered up enough courage to write about it -- something I have always wanted to do. I know if I delay writing any further, poof! it will all be gone and I will not be able to capture even a whiff of what I have felt in the past two months. I have been wanting this experience from so long and have dreamed about it so deeply and so often that when I got the first inkling that it might be happening for real, I was scared to my bones. My deepest wishes have come true before and they have always unnerved me. My utterly naive, childlike and yet unshakable belief in the Universe and God wrestles with that little cynical imp who is never too far away and whose laughter is always sniggering. He doesn't achieve much though, except giving me terrible anxiety attacks and converting my inner monologue into a tired, trained parrot. "Is this happening? I hope this is for real. Oh God, let it be for real. (The tempo increases)  Please God, make it real!" Ah there it is. The demand, the supplication. The pleading. That too is hard to keep away from. However much your faith (which is really MY deeply private, completely mish-mashed, totally logic-free faith that confirms neither to religion nor to anything else) tells you to receive without demanding. And so it goes. Rinse, repeat.

On April 28, when my lower abdomen (or was that the pelvic bone) started throbbing in what felt like a drummer's war cry before the big battle, I wanted to desperately believe that it indeed was the heralding. I began devouring pregnancy symptoms websites on the net; ate it morning, noon and night. Every twinge, every snick, every turn felt like a pregnancy symptom and added to my heart beat. The inner parrot was unceasing, unwavering, unstoppable. I gave up on myself and spent that week in a haze of anxiety, fear, scaredy-joy with my inner life, itself sweltering with need and anticipation, simply taking over all my other lives. Oh! the tottering imbalance of an 'almost there'.

How I wanted to experience all the symptoms! I wanted to feel the pain... I would get more anxious if the back and the hip pain and the pelvic bone stopped conversing in the feverish way they were.  I was in a hurry to start puking -- the one universal symptom that all websites spoke confidently of. Please God, let me puke. Let this be for real....rinse, repeat. And then I discovered that little device -- the home pregnancy test. In a span of 5 days, I must have done at least 7 tests -- all bought from different medical shops in my area. Medical shop assistants/owners, poor things, are a decent lot; they desperately try to hide their curiosity but mostly you can make out the eye twitch.  Of the 7-odd tests, only the last two were kind to me and revealed faint to decently pinkish lines. 

The drummer was being serious. 

Note: Every blog post will begin with a relevant haiku and a piece of music that corresponds to the emotions and feelings the post will describe. So there's the haiku in the beginning and here is the music -- 'Reunion' by Ravi Shankar. So long!