Conception

Nate is hungry.

I know we have covered this territory before but let me say it again: Nate is hungry. For food, yes, but not just that. He is a hungry being and he consumes everything (from pureed pear to Loki's attention to my snuggles and Herb's coos) as if he might never get enough.

We are not supposed to compare our children.

I'm not sure who wrote this rule but we all know it.

We are meant to love them each, individually, in a perfect vacuum. But there is something so fascinating about considering them in juxtaposition. Maybe it is because I am an only child and so, while I have witnessed it, I have never lived the actuality of having a person drawn from the same genetic grab bag who is like me and different from me all at once. This fact of my children - their samenesses and differences - blows my mind. And they are still so young - who they are becoming becoming clearer everyday like a Polaroid sharpening. But it was true from birth and I would argue, perhaps, from conception.

Now that's something we don't generally swap stories about. "Oh, your little Suzie is so sweet. Tell me, how was she conceived?" Don't worry, Lori, I won't gross you out with the gory details. But it seems to me that the circumstances - or maybe better, the contexts - surrounding their conceptions connects to who my children are and how they are different in an interesting way.

I willed Loki into being. Herb was there too. But I feel as though I truly summoned him to be mine. I had had a heartbreaking miscarriage and a number of desolate months trying to get pregnant again. It was July, in fact it was this week in July (Canada Day weekend) and Herb and I had planned to visit an old friend of his who lives in a small, hippy-esq town just on the Quebec border (a place we had never been to before and will probably never go to again). The morning of our trip, I had scheduled an ultrasound just to make sure that everything was okay and back to normal following the D & C. I hated everything about that place - the waiting room filled with beaming round bellies, the distracted receptionists, the cold gel and the bleeping of a screen I couldn't see or make sense of. But the technician was kind. Everything looked okay, she said. "In fact, there's a ripe follicle right there." And that ripe follicle - that pre-egg - was Loki. It is odd to think that I knew him that way - the equivalent of a biological possibility, the potential for potential.

Just before we left that pretty little town in the middle of nowhere, I went skinny-dipping (alone) in the cold lake water near our hosts' house. Maybe it was the brightness of the morning or the coolness of the water, but I was filled with a calmness and a clarity that I had never felt before. In my mind, that communion with the lake marked the moment when Loki's life began. It was the universe responding to my heart's desire.

Nate, on the other hand, I truly believe willed himself into being. If Loki is the child we demanded of the universe, than Nate is the child that the forces of the universe conspired us to have. I had just returned from my first weekend alone since Loki's birth. I had gone to visit college friends in New York and had spent a surreal 48 hours childless, falling into a pre-baby self the way you collapse gleefully into a strange, crisp hotel bed, knowing that your real bed is at home waiting for you. Loki was just over a year old. I was done nursing, had lost the baby-weight, was starting to work again...life was good and balanced. Sure we wanted another but no rush...maybe we'd try in the summer, maybe in the fall. After the amount of energy spent on conceiving Loki, I didn't think it was even possible to get pregnant without really really wanting it, without really trying. Getting pregnant by accident seemed as likely as accidentally winning the lottery (especially if, say, you only buy a ticket maybe twice a month, because generally you're just too damn tired to go all the way to the store when you can just close your eyes and go to sleep...echem, if you know what I mean). In general, we were using the oldest method of birth-control (a toddler) and relying on the fact that probability was on our side.

Maybe there was something about going away and coming home - I seem to remember some odd fact from Psych 101 involving mice couples having higher conception rates after brief periods of separation - did I make that up? But it was more than that. Now, this is as graphic as I'll get...I promise: They say there are food people and then there are sex people. Well, just guess which one I am. I spend all day thinking about what to eat for dinner. My cravings are generally of the wine and chocolate variety. But for some reason that day, the day I was coming home to my husband and child, things were different and I'll leave it at that. A couple months (and six pregnancy tests) later, when the surprise wore off a bit, it occurred to me that we had been chosen by this child for this life.

I read a beautiful excerpt from Clair Bateman's story "Otherwhere" in Harper's that truly captures this feeling and the last line reads:

After a birth does occur, the mother gazes into her infant’s eyes with deep tenderness, knowing that it has chosen to die to countless could-have-beens in order to take the plunge into a particular is.

We are Nate's particular is and he is hungry, hungry, hungry for this life. I am so deeply grateful that the universe chose me to feed him.

Tonight's Dinner:

Nate: 4 cubes of pureed pear & apricot mixed with oatmeal, 6 ounces of formula, 2.5 boobs

Loki: Crunchy fish fillet & carrots

Herb & Me: Cheeseburgers, Potato Salad (Heather's fantastic recipe which involves English Salad Cream and chopped up pickles), neon-green coleslaw (that was all Herb, I won't consume anything that colour).