The end, my friends, is in sight. If the baby were born today, they'd let me take it home from the hospital. Crazy, huh?
Most people, by this point in their pregnancies, have their lives, or at least, their houses, in some sort of order. Not so here at QBM headquarters, where I am frantically cleaning out closets, rearranging shelves, and throwing away duplicate jars from my spice collection. Yes, it's true. I am nesting. But, in typical fashion, I have waited until the last moment. Will the carseat be installed before the baby arrives? Will the co-sleeper be set up in the bedroom? Who can say...
The good news is that my mother has arrived to help, and has gamely taken on the assortment of crappy tasks that I keep throwing her way. (Mom, did I say "thank you" for vacuuming the mouse poop out of that drawer? Because I really am full of gratitude...) And, even more valiantly, J has thrown his heart and soul into helping me get the apartment cleaned and organized. Love is so many things, and I feel incredibly grateful to have a partner who is equally game for taking awesome pregnancy photos (see above), snuggling in bed while feeling the baby kick, and helping me reorganize the kitchen closets.
In other procrastination-based news, I finally filled out the hospital pre-admission paperwork (which had a notice printed across the top to be sure to return all paperwork to the hospital before 36 weeks...). In addition to sections about dietary and religious preferences, the form asked me to list any other "cultural considerations" of which the hospital staff ought to be aware. How to sum up one's weird-ass tranny birthing collective family in a couple of sentences? I'm not entirely sure. After agonizing for half an hour over three sentences (sadly, I've already mailed off the form, so I can't quote them for you), I talked to my friend K, who is a maternity nurse at the hospital where I'm delivering. Her response? "Oh, those forms? I don't think I've ever actually seen one filled out." So, who knows what will happen when Team QueerBabyMaking arrives at the hospital.
That's the news here. The QBM family will be heading out to Cape Cod at the end of the week for ten days of fun in the sun. Yes, that's right. I'm going on vacation while 37 weeks pregnant. Oh yeah, just try and stop me...
7 comments:
oh I love the pic!! That is an awesome pic!! I can't believe it is time already for you! WOW!!!
What a beautiful pic! All the best!
Congrats on being so close. I agree, that's a great picture. Have fun on your vacation.
It IS a beautiful photo, and I am so glad that you have it.
I think that it is really significant and important that you are thinking around the challenges of queer babymaking on this blog. At the same time, the photo, while beautiful, is very gender normative (women's bodies as fertile objects of visual pleasure).
Now, I certainly think you have the right to have this celebration of your body, and that you should celebrate it in this way, but at the same time, it doesn't function to undermine normative ideals about women's bodies and pregnancy. In fact, in reinforces these ideals. I see you using the normative ideals of women's bodies and pregnancy in order to legitimize queer pregnancy. Sort of, "I'm queer, but look at how fertile and normative and non-threatening my pregnant body is." It's a difficult subject, something that feminist art historians interested in gender and representation have been grappling with since the 1970s.
Personally, I didn't even make it to 37 weeks and I felt like I had "failed" at reproduction because what I wanted was to be active, beautiful and fertile. To show the world that pregnancy wasn't a disability, and that I, a feminist woman, could do it all. Instead, at 37 weeks, I was in a hospital bed, suicidal and feeling as far from "normative" as one could. So far from "normative" that I felt that I wasn't worth the air I was breathing. After I had my baby, I didn't feel love for her because I had PPD. Try explaining to people why you don't seem just thrilled and elated about this amazing new life you just brought into the world. There are a lot of expectations for birth-mothers and very little understanding of how things can go wrong and how that affects birth-mothers' feelings about themselves and their bodies.
It's tricky. On the one hand, I think that there are specific issues with queer babymaking that desperately need to be addressed, and that you have very clearly demarcated the boundaries of your topic. On the other hand, I think that it is important to think also about how we can "queer" pregnancy more generally. I understand that my comments are somewhat tangental. I definitely support what you are doing and saying here.
In sum, I'd rather be in your queer babymaking world than my hetero-normative babymaking world any day.
As an aside, I think the other photo of you with Jack works better in terms of representing what queer families can and do look like.
Okay, I've been thinking a lot about Paper's comments. First, I should say that I chose this photo simply because it was one of a very few in which my face wasn't visible. Though there are face photos of me on this blog, the pictures from this session felt too raw, too intimate, too revealing, to be posted in a public forum with identifying characteristics. I may change my mind about this later, and indeed, I may eventually post the photos of me and J together, but right now, this is the amount of facial disclosure with which I'm comfortable.
In terms of how this photo reinforces or subverts feminist and queer notions of pregnancy and the body, I have a complicated response. It is true that it borrows from the trope of a typically feminine fertile body, and I acknowledge that that is an overused, problematic depiction of women's bodies and fertility.
However, I don't think that I'm using gender normativity to "justify" my pregnancy, or to make it seem safe. Conversely, one of the things that my pregnancy does, and my openness about my queerness does, is to disrupt the natural associations between femininity and heterosexuality, between fertility and hetero breeding. My pregnant body is marked as queer every time I explain I don't have a husband, every time I mention a sperm bank, every time I introduce myself as a queer single parent by choice. This photograph is a glimpse of that body. You may not read it as immediately queer. But I would challenge you to rethink your conceptions of what queer looks like.
One of the things that I spend a lot of time thinking about as a queer, femme-identified woman is the issue of queer invisibility that plagues those of us who look "typically feminine." (Whether I actually do look typically feminine is very much up for debate, but we'll leave that aside for now...) Those of us on the femme side of the spectrum spend huge and exhausting amounts of time assuring other queers that we are indeed part of the tribe, correcting straights who assume that we're het, and hearing comments like, "Well, you just don't look queer." We are recognized as queer when we are with our butch and trans lovers; somehow, they legitimize us as "true" queers. For this reason, I find the suggestion that a picture of me and J is more representative of what queer families look like to be very problematic. Do you mean that we look "more queer" when there's a transguy in the picture? Does J look "more queer" than I do? Is a butch/femme or trans/femme couple "more queer" than a single femme parent? I reject these readings.
There are many different ways to create queer family, and there are many different ways to have a queer and pregnant body. I have several friends who are transguys who are, have been, or want to be pregnant. I am thrilled and excited by the ways in which these models of parenting and reproduction challenge our gendered notions of biology.
This is not, however, my experience of parenting, and I am not willing to reject my body, my femme identity, as "not queer enough."
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