A Pregnancy Poem

This morning, my bff Farrah sent me this poem about pregnancy via text message. We spent some time analyzing it and commenting.  How fun!  Here's the poem, and some of my thoughts.

Metaphors

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.  

I am 7 months preggo right now and reading this poem made me laugh.  It is a dark humor, one that you can best understand if you have gone through what she had gone through.

I really believe this poem is ambiguous- she is both happy and sad, amongst a huge cocktail mix of other things.  As a pregnant woman, there are many feelings and emotions going on. 

One of the biggest thing you notice when pregnant is just how HUGE you feel!!  My favorite line is "a melon strolling on two tendrils."  I visually pictured this and it was very amusing.  Also, the terms "elephant", "ponderous house", "fat purse", and "melon" all refer to feeling massive, bloated, gigantic!

There are also lots of terms that refer to feeling fruitful: "o red fruit", "loaf's big with yeasty rising", "money's new-minted."  Newly formed, fresh, growing, etc. 

 One of the lines, "I'm a means, a stage" makes me think she was feeling very much like she was only a vessel in which to bake a baby.  She also felt like she was the big show that everyone was watching, since everyone always comments on the "baby bump" and how you look when pregnant.  Then she says a "cow in a calf." At first I thought that should be reversed (like that she feels like she is a cow that has a calf in her)...  But now it makes total sense to me.  She felt like a calf in a cow- she feels like a small child inside a big mama's body.  She probably felt anxious, unprepared, too young to really be having a baby.  I have felt that way at times, although I am not too young.  Even through pregnancy you can feel like a little kid at heart still, nervous that you wont exactly be ready for motherhood. 

When she says "I have eaten a bag of green apples, I can really relate to that!  I have eaten lots of green apples since becoming pregnant, #1 because I have craved them, #2 because they're healthy, #3 because they relieve heartburn.  But she is also speaking of feeling like she has just eaten a bag of plump, round apples and they are filling up her belly making her feel swollen, ripe, perhaps even leaving a sour taste (like green apples do). 

Lastly, when she says she has boarded a train and there is no getting off… I don't believe that she actually wanted to end her pregnancy or that she was unhappy with being pregnant.  I do believe that just like any pregnant woman, you realize how life altering of a thing pregnancy is.  There is no turning back.  You will be bringing a life into the world.  I experienced this feeling toward the beginning of my pregnancy.  On Facebook, an old friend commented saying, "You're going to be a mom!?  How do you feel about that? Are you ready?"  And my response was… "well, no going back now!"   There won't ever be any going back to a time and a life where I was married with no kids, and not pregnant.  Which is a good thing!

One pretty sweet fact about the poem:  there are nine lines,  and nine syllables in each line. 

Overall, love the poem and love Sylvia.  She sure had a way of expressing herself!

Psychology Class

Years ago in college, in my psych class (I was probably 19 or 20 at the time), my professor gave us an assignment. We had to write down an age that we would like to be and why. I wrote down the age 26, because I would most likely be married and settling down and starting a family by then. The whole point of the assignment was to show how most people would choose to go ahead in life and be older than they are rather than going back in life and being a younger age. But I never forgot that assignment... and now, being 26 years old and married with a baby on the way, it seems that I knew deep down from that earlier age that I would be in this place in life at this time. Sometimes I worry about missing out on things once the baby comes. Heck, I already missed out on the FC at Kili. However, I do NOT want to miss the next one!! I cannot get preggers again! HAHAH! The next one is April 2013 and they are still trying to confirm for sure the location, but I know that no matter what I want to be there if I can. I know I will have a nine month old baby, but I am hoping and praying that it would work out that she can be taken care of while I am gone. I also worry about things like money and where we are in life to be having a kid. Phil is at an entry level job and in school. I am going to be working part time from home. Neither of those jobs amount to making enough to really support a family... we are really going to need to rely on God for help and provision, which is hard for me to do. I worry about date nights and the possibility of losing romance with Phil. I really want to feel like a young, happily married couple still rather than old hags with kids who never go out. I want to be able to say, "Yes, we CAN go to that rock concert," or "we just went out to the most fabulous place last night." I worry about being one of those mom's who only talks about her own kid and doesn't keep up with the media or news. I know I will talk about my kid, post WAY too many photos of her on facebook, and brag about her every accomplishment ("my kid rolled over for the first time today! Woohoo!"). Haha. Right now those things seem so... trivial and silly to me, but I know when it is my kid that I will feel differently. But I really do want to have a LIFE aside from just being a mom... and I am not even a mom yet!!! I think I have just been jaded. I have been told by too many people, "You won't care about doing that when you have kids." (Mostly referring to climbing a mountain for the FC). Well, you know what? I am predicting that by the age of 30 I will have climbed MORE than one mountain, made leaps and BOUNDS towards a better career, had a second and possibly third child, and be in a place in life where I am willing to let God lead us to wherever He wants us to be. I predict that I'll be a mom who LOVES her kids with her entire heart, but also loves life, culture, experiences, travel, adventure, and most of all people.