Seeing You

I can't believe you're in there. Just chilling. Lying on your back, with your hand up by your head, which incidentally is how I sleep. I start on my side and wind up on my back with my arms over my head. It is also how your grandfather sleeps. And presumably your great-grandfather. And everyone else.

You don't even exist yet, and yet you do. In there. I look down at myself, and I can tell, and people who know me well can tell, and my pants are getting snug, but if you are a stranger on the street you are a secret.

I'm at the library today, and I bumped into my friend W, who you will come to know, because you will follow his daughter around and crave her approval every Christmas when they come to visit. I had your ultrasounds in my handbag and so I showed him, spreading them out on a cafe table in the lobby of the central research building, which you will come to know when I bring you to activities in the basement. I pointed out your hand up by your face, explaining that's how I sleep, and a somewhat unstable woman one table over hollered "Are you pregnant?"

"Yes," I said.

"How far along are you?"

"Ah.... about three months."

She eyed me, and then said "Good luck."

"That was inappropriate," W said quietly when she had turned away.

"Yep," I agreed.

Then I told W how during our scan when some pressure or something disturbed you, you punched me. I didn't feel it, because you are too small and weak. A little silkworm in there. But I saw it.

Last night I dreamt that I was in my father's parents' house, at a luncheon crowded with old people I didn't recognize. I understood it to be a family reunion, but everyone was old, and I didn't know anyone. I got into a heated argument with a woman who was trying to talk to me about patrimony and New England, and I shouted something like "There were people here first! We stole their land! That's nothing to celebrate!" And then I stormed off in a huff to sulk in a study with a huge fireplace, high ceilings, lined with books and portraits I didn't recognize either. I understood that the house belonged to me now, though I couldn't understand what I would want with a house in Conroe Texas (which is where the house this dream is based upon was), or what I was supposed to do with it.

Your father thinks I had this dream because I am thinking about names, and heritage, and what family means. If I were a more superstitious or magically minded person, I would wonder if I weren't at the center of some ghostly confabulation, a discussion amongst the dead over where our family should go, and what it should mean. These strangers, haunting us, in ways seen and unseen. Both of us asleep with our arms over our heads.