The Gnome Gnotebook

In October of 2006, my mom came to visit as she usually does around my birthday every year. This particular visit was special because Sean and I had just moved into our very first home (the same one we're in now) and of course, we needed my mom's curtain rod hanging expertise and designer's advice (are you sensing a pattern here? I promise she's not ill-used). Come to think of it, my mom's birthday visits are always timely--the year before was pretty special too, as it was the weekend just after Sean and I had gotten engaged and we were able to go to Suky Rosan to pick out my wedding dress. Good timing, mom! Anyway...

She always brings a bag of beautifully wrapped birthday presents--usually handmade scarves and jewelry from her friend Carol's store, Badawang, or candles or a bound journal or a really great book or two. This time she also brought The Gnome Gnotebook. In the living room of the house on Briarwood where we lived from the time my brother was born until I went to college, I often saw this book sitting on one of the built-in shelves that flanked our fireplace. But I never really knew what it was, I don't think. It didn't have pictures, and therefore, it didn't interest me. And besides, we had another book of gnomes that was far more captivating.

In any event, I suppose she thought that the buying of our first home together signified that Sean and I were ready to start a family, and what better way to acknowledge that than to hand off the record of that very same time in her life? Er, actually, she definitely thought that, as I just realized that the inscription from October 2006 reads "...and now that you and Sean are getting closer to starting your own family, I thought this would be the right time to finally give it to you." (I'm very insightful.) There were no blogs in 1978, after all, and so she had to hand write everything in pen in this little hardbound journal. The pages are ruled in blue with pink margin lines and a little drawing of a reading gnome sits in the lower outer corner of each page. There are 100 pages all together. The first page lists the vitals of my birth--time and date, weight, length, location, a description of my hair and eyes, and this: "with all 10 fingers, 10 toes, and lungs in very good working order!" At the bottom of the page is a tiny lock of hair.

The first entry is dated April 30, 1979, when I would have been six and a half months old. It's a recounting of the day before (my aunt and uncle's wedding), the day of, and the day after my birth. Clearly, enough time had passed that her memory of events had been veiled in the haze of euphoria that is new motherhood (read: exhaustion or denial, or both). She writes, "...the doctor told me to "push." Then, at 12:06, POP! You showed yourself to us for the first time." She also describes my Grandma and Dad, red-faced and perspiring, and says, "as hard as we worked, they worked even harder!" Woah, mom. The truly amazing thing is that I bet she really believed that, too. She was probably even apologizing at the time for the terrible inconvenience.

My family's pediatrician, Dr. Sundaresh, told my mom a poem when he came to examine me. The poem goes a little something like this:

A son's a son
Till he finds a wife,
But a daughter's a daughter
The rest of your life!

Huh? Sweet, I suppose, for 1978.

There are so many revealing entries in this journal--I can't wait to explore more in future posts. And I guess it stands to reason that a lot of what's written is about my mom being proud of me as her daughter and about our relationship as mother and daughter. It would have been a completely different story if I'd been a son. Revisiting the Gnome Gnotebook and seeing it from this perspective has made me think really hard about the sex of our baby. There was a slim possibility that the tech could have determined the sex from yesterday's ultrasound, but it wouldn't have been conclusive until later anyway. I think about whether I have a feeling, one way or the other--whether I have the slightest inkling or instinct about what the sex will be, or whether I have a preference. Part of me, a very large part, hopes for a girl because I am girl--a first born to a first born--and that has so shaped my relationship with my mom, which has in turn been so central to who I am as a person. I think in so many ways and for so many reasons that I'd be a better mom to a little girl because I KNOW it, I lived it. On the other hand, every person is different. Even if my first born is a girl, there's no telling what my relationship with her will be like since her personality will be different than mine, and mine as a mother is different than my mom's was. We're also in such completely different places in our lives, my mom having me at 20 and me having my first at 30, and with completely different family situations, my mom being surrounded by her family in her hometown and me not having any family nearby at all. Too many variables to guarantee that anything would be the same.

Then there's the part of me that's always imagined having a son that I could raise to be tough and sweet, smart and wise, and who would teach me to let go a little more. I've often thought about what it would be like to have had an older brother to stand up for me and protect me and to look up to. I also think it would be an amazing insight into the secret life of my husband--the part of him that I don't know because I didn't know him when he was little. He is an oldest son, and to watch him parent an oldest son would be like having a window into his life that he couldn't possibly know how to open otherwise. Talk about a two-for. That would be a really amazing gift.

I guess the point is that it doesn't matter, which is probably the conclusion that most expectant parents come to nowadays (since hopefully there aren't too many people espousing the sentiments of my pediatrician's poem anymore). Still, it doesn't make me any less curious!

The Baby is Out of the Bag!!

What a relief.

We spent a beautiful day in New Hope yesterday, stuffing our faces and enjoying time with family. And finally, we were able to tell Sean's brother and sisters, though unfortunately, two were by phone anyway. Grandma Diana is thrilled because she's been keeping our secret (along with Grandpa Len) for the last seven weeks, and now she can shout it from the rooftops! And the baby got it's first presents--a Big Bird doll like one Sean had when he was little, a beautiful frame with spaces for pictures of each of the first 12 months, and a baby bootie bank with a crisp $20 from Stef's dad. Today I'll email this link to as many people as possible, and hopefully they will all take a look at The Littlest Wilson and catch up on all the fascinating stuff that I've been writing about and write comments and VOTE on the sex of the baby. I know for sure that Derek can't wait to read all about my doctor's appointments and Fetal Nuchal Translucency...

The first thing everyone asks when we tell them we're expecting is "How far along are you?" I guess there are two schools of thought when it comes to breaking baby news. Either you tell everyone you know as soon as you find out, whether that be at five weeks or twelve, or you wait until you're out of the woods, which is commonly known to be after the first trimester. Turns out that Sean is from the former school, and I, the latter. I made the decision to tell my bosses at work much earlier than I would have liked, but in an effort to explain why I had been acting so strangely as of late (tired all the time, cranky, peeing every two minutes, and my memory and ability to multi task right out the window). And we told specific people like our moms and dads and siblings and grandparents and closest friends as soon as we reasonably could. But it was really important to me to be able to wait to make it "public" until now (and I'm not even technically in my second trimester yet, but we just couldn't keep it to ourselves any longer!).

The more I think about it, the more interesting the difference in the two ways of thinking seems to me. Stef (Grandma D's fiance, henceforth known as Papou Stef) said "the Greeks don't tell anyone till after three months, and after the baby's born, no one comes to visit unless they're specifically invited until the kid is a few months old." There's a profound regard for the sanctity of the new family, almost like intruding would burst a protective bubble. Of course, that only applies to non-family! It's funny because I always thought of it as a personal preference thing, but I'm sure he's right--it's got more to do with culture, and that's just how my family was. Even my mom's side, which is more Jewish than anything, subscribes to that way of thinking, but then my Grandma (and consequently, my mom) always had a really intense respect for privacy and a person's right to share what they want to share when they want to share it.

For me, there is a line (albeit fine, and seemingly arbitrary to others) between what I feel comfortable sharing and what I don't. Sean doesn't get it sometimes and thinks I'm just really sensitive, and I admit that sometimes I do go a little overboard. If someone asks me a question that I'm not comfortable answering, I'd think it was an inappropriate question, whereas someone who doesn't mind sharing that kind of information would think it was perfectly fine. It's a really hard thing to gage, so as a rule, I err on the side of caution. For example, I always felt comfortable sharing that Sean and I want kids...but not whether we were trying for kids. I feel comfortable discussing the emotions that are involved in trying to conceive in vague terms, but I feel really uncomfortable when someone asks me how long it took Sean and me to get pregnant, and I would never ask anyone else that question. I might be more sensitive to that than the average person, but what those uncomfortable situations have reinforced for me is that you just never know. You never know what a person's comfort level is, and you never know what private difficulties they're dealing with.

Luckily, we're beyond all that! Now I just have to get comfortable with people touching my belly...