Little Moses

I've had a couple of ultrasounds this week and we've determined that little Moses has my nose and Josh's dimpled chin. Two weeks before his due date it's odd to see him so well on the inside. He's breech so far, but I have high hopes for him turning and being born in the water at home.

Moses means "drawn from the water."

 
From my favorite poem about birth (thanks to the friend who long ago passed it my way), Galway Kinnell's "Under the Maud Moon," from his collection The Book of Nightmares:
 
6.
 
The black eye
opens, the pupil
droozed with black hairs
stops, the chakra
on top of the brain throbs a long moment in world light,
 
and she skids out on her face into light,
this peck
of stunned flesh
clotted with celestial cheesiness, glowing
with the astral violet
of the underlife. And as they cut
 
her tie to the drakness
she dies
a moment, turns blue as a coal,
the limbs shaking
as the memories rush out of them. When
 
they hang her up
by her feet, she sucks
air, screams
her first song -- and turns rose,
the slow
beating, featherless arms
already clutching at the emptiness.
 
 
The feeling of loss that gives way in the days leading up to the birth of a child, the sorrow in the joy of birth, the fear and love... are here understood by the poet, though he never gave birth. This emptiness colors everything -- gives meaning to all of it. I keep thinking of the "ache" in an essay I read in Robert Vivian's collection "The Least Cricket of Evening."  The ache that moves through everything is perhaps itself the root of joy.

And here is my sort of awful confession...Will I feel as though I didn't give birth if I end up having a C-Section? The thought is so personal, so intimate, that I refuse to voice it (except here)...mainly because I don't think there is an answer to this and whatever someone tells me will only be an attempt to ease me.