For me, pregnancy was a waterlogged and murky state. The simultaneous endings of graduate school and my job plunged me into a dense swamp of stunned inaction. My memory dulled, my emotions saturated and overflowed, and my dreams rose up around my ankles, their imagery and messages suddenly vibrant, crystal clear, and invasive. The need for sleep threatened to overtake every other imperative. Bloated, elusive, moody, and strange, I became a sea creature. From July on, I tried to spend as much time in swimming pools as possible. I carried in my mind a map of all available public restrooms ranked by cleanliness as well as a rotating roster of pools, both public and private, in which I could swim laps or just float. This was not a miserable time. Quite the opposite. While I didn’t feel like I emitted any kind of glow, I did feel like I was engaged in some kind of constant secret conversation with my body and the tumbling presence inside. I was never alone.
One night stands out in particular. I lumbered from our little white-walled house on Hellcat Court to the small pool at the new community center on base, which Ross and I joked was the community center that was built right by the other community center because we needed more centers for community. The pool was only four feet deep and maybe ten meters long, but having the entire thing to myself, at night, in silence, more than made up for its size. I swam a little, short laps back and forth that shook the underwater lamplight and sent zigzags of bluish gold slicing across the tiles and licking up the concrete walls of the cabana. The water tasted a little salty, and crepe myrtle blossoms floated like flattened fandango skirts on the surface among drowning bugs.
Eventually I stopped in the middle of the pool, put my kickboard behind my head, and floated on my back. I never floated well until I was pregnant. I usually have to keep my arms and legs spinning in a slow gallop to stay afloat. With each deep breath in, I floated higher until my belly, with our still-unnamed boy’s knees tucked just underneath, broke the surface; and then as I exhaled, he submerged again. I looked up and saw satellites. I think they were satellites. I couldn’t tell if they were moving or if it was my own slow drift. The light from the pool below me washed out the dimmer stars, but the ones I watched seemed to flash red and blue in alternation. I know some stars do this, but I preferred to think that what I was looking at could look back, that far away some automatic camera was recording a tiny, lighted blue postage stamp with a dark kicking speck in it—me, bug sized, among the other bugs. In between me and the satellites, I noticed jets coming and going, formation flights, and I made note of how each wingman was lining up. Between me and the jets, closest and hardest to see, were little brown bats darting around and zipping bugs out of the air, bugs drawn by the refractory light and the smell of the pool.
If I were a poet, I would write my son a poem about this moment, this long series of moments, where I lay on my back and felt him moving slowly inside me and I took note of satellites, jets, bats, and bugs, things flying and things submerged, when I felt perfectly at peace and in balance, when I could have broken down crying at the richness of everything I was feeling, the luck and beauty of it all. I would end by thanking him over and over again for how he magnified the world for me and made me feel less alone in it, how I would miss him when he wasn’t living within my body anymore. Even without a proper name, he had changed the meaning of everything I knew.
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A crib, a bassinet, a giant pile of blankets, a breast pump, a feeding pillow, baby carriers, maternity clothes, a shelf-full of books, and a patient accumulation of advice based on experience—these are the gifts Stella and Jake passed on to us as Ross flew and I floated through our year with no time. And while it’s true that Ross and I were apart for much of my pregnancy, it’s also true that I found myself initiated into a tribe of women, military mothers, who rose up to fill that gap. Advice and hand-me-downs and diapers galore came from everywhere, often uncannily timed so that as soon as I realized I needed something and began to worry, or had begun to formulate a question, the item or bit of advice showed up unbidden with a quiet knock at the door of my house.