30 weeks

writing on growing a summer cantaloupe

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February 28, 2024

I’m 30 weeks pregnant this week. That’s 210 days. Nearly seven months. 2,880 hours. I’m trying not to count.

Months before I knew I found out I was pregnant I started to look around for the baby. This was back in February, March, April 2023. While making coffee with the pour-over I’d have a guttural instinct to look in the pantry for the baby. Driving my car with the window down, I’d glance in the rearview mirror for the baby in the car seat, and feel my stomach drop when they weren’t there. My therapist told me some people believe that’s how souls work, they show up and tell a person when it’s time for them to come into the world. Maybe. It could also be my way of prepping and knowing it might be time.

I realized I was pregnant on August 29 during an after-work yoga class. Halfway through the class, I knew something was different. I couldn’t hold my balance. Lying on my stomach felt wrong. My hips wouldn’t open the way they normally do. I wasn’t nauseous and my boobs weren’t sore (yet), but I knew something was different and I unequivocally knew it was because I was pregnant.

I was so sure I didn’t feel like I needed to take a pregnancy test. When I got home I did anyway, but I didn’t look at the result and took a shower instead. When Matt came home I told him and then we looked at the test together. I was right.

But that was all the early days. Since then, I’ve ridden the waves of pregnancy. I meant to write a sentence a day as some kind of record of this time, but of course, I haven’t. It seems these days I don’t write. I want to change that.

Here are a few sentences and thoughts I have managed to write down in my journal between work to-do-lists and strange scribbles during these last 30 weeks.

Hi Baby. I can’t wait to meet you my little poppy seed.

Mothertobaby, look at that website for medications.

Maybe realizing you are afraid to write because it might bring you back to the place of depression.

How do I turn this around?

Baby growing.

Warm yoga maybe okay. Heartrate no more than 108. (30 seconds, 75 beats.) Don’t lift more than 20–30 pounds.

How to let go of the whole movie theater thing. Of caring for others. What do you want Hannah? You are growing a child. This is your life.

The heartburn might mean it’s a girl? But the weightgain might say a boy? I like sleeping on my right side, that means boy. But my skin says girl? I think it’s a boy.

I’m angry. I’m frustrated I move so fast.

For the next 40 days, try quiet in the mornings every day.

My knees ach so bad and it feels like growing pains. Do people grow taller while pregnant? Is that a thing? The internet doesn’t have any answers. I’d like to get taller.

Teo doesn’t even realize I’m pregnant. Instagram dogs lie.

Later this afternoon go to prenatal yoga or walk either outside on on the treadmill. And a healthy dinner — chicken?

Revisit deadlines and goals and objectives and realistic timelines.

Thinking about parallel lives. If I hadn’t gone to grad school. If I hadn’t taken the job. Maybe I should go to New York this weekend too.

It’s not peak foliage season yet, but I’m starting to tell people I’m pregnant. Feels right.

Start with the stories.

Stop trying so hard to not try so hard.

Add nuts for more omega-3. Tums are okay. The perscriptions are okay.

Baby, baby, baby, will you like me?

Grocery store: Ketchup

I can’t wait for the baby smell and the little toes.

I think what I’m most terrified of is being sleep deprived.

When I switch over from bonding time to medical leave do I continue or recalculate based on the amount of leave?

It’s impossible to picture 2024 because of baby. Because of body. Because of leave. Because of unknown.

It feels like my stomach isn’t big enough yet. I stopped gaining weight. I would ask at prenatal yoga, but I stopped going because it was more like stretch and bitch than actual yoga. I miss the before, but also can’t wait for the after.

I don’t deserve my friends.

This is the babys first time feeling the sun. My belly has never been in direct sunlight before and the baby kicked like crazy with I first wore my bikini. It felt like dancing.

I really don’t want hemorrhoids. Need to order magnesium.

Don’t go to the hospital when the water breaks — wait. When do they put the IV in my hand?

Listen to more music. Read more poetry.

I don’t have gestational diabetes. I think I can prove the doctors wrong.

The app says I’m supposed to be more emotional these days. It also says the baby is the size of a summer cantaloupe. Now all I can imagine are the coyotes that come out at night as soon as the fruit is ripe in the back fields in the summer. The animals know the fruit is ready before Matt can even tell. Maybe I’m a coyote. Maybe I’ll know the baby is coming before anyone else. But that’s two months away. Slow the fuck down, Hannah.

How many times in my life will I need to tell myself to slow down? One hundred? One thousand? Infinite seems right.

The best way I’ve found to describe being pregnant is that I’m living in limbo. There’s no baby yet, but there also is. I’m working, but know I’ll take an extended leave beginning in early May. I’m not a mom, but I do think about what actions I take and how they affect the cantaloupe growing inside me. I can plan what I want my writing career to be, but I don’t know if I’ll ever figure out how to be a mother and an artist at the same time. I’m sitting in a waiting room without any windows. The magazines aren’t great, but they aren’t horrendous either. The pictures are nice to look at. And for everything this limbo waiting room has that’s stress, I really just can’t wait to meet you, baby.

Talk soon.

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This letter wouldn’t exist without my grad school friends who have been constantly writing their substacks. You are the reason I am back here today—I love you!

Larissa’s yield guide (formerly on substack, now on buttondown)

Marge’s Twin Flame Vernacular

James’s semantics

Alyssa’s a body of work

Zoe’s One Girl’s Trash