Waiting games

It was a time of waiting. What does one do while they wait? They read the News App on their iPhone, scroll Gmail, eat saltines from the cupboard. They call their sister, and walk their dog, and stream barre classes from their living room. In a time of such cataclysmic change, we wait. Everything is slow, and yet the world feels like it’s hurtling toward an imminent end.

I dream of the baby almost every night now. He’s always a boy. He’s happy and somehow, I simply know how to take care of him. But in the morning, my belly still hasn’t grown. Only eleven weeks, but it feels like so long that he’s been inside there. Twenty-nine to go, each day, waiting for my belly to extend, waiting for him to arrive. When I think of the baby, I dream of holding him on my hip and hopping on an airplane, going to a faraway place that’s impossible to get to now, in the heart of the pandemic.

“We’re halfway through I bet,” I say to my husband, of the pandemic, as we sit on the couch one night. “It’s’ been eight months, and I bet we only have another eight to go.”

I say it as a reassurance. How different it was eight months ago, when we hoped it would only last a few weeks. Waiting to hug my friends without fear of infection, and now, I’m carrying a child. A life to protect, which makes me stay in my home that much more, peering from my windows and walking the streets alone with Scarf, masked, a safe distance from anyone who passes, a smile from one stranger to another. Although neither person knows if the other one is smiling.

I dream of the day I hop on an airplane and fly to Chiang Mai, or Tokyo, or Oslo, and somehow things are back to normal, and the rest of the world doesn’t want to murder me for simply being an American, and I eat Pad Thai and I see the fjords and go to the beach and ski in Hokkaido.

But I am waiting.

I am waiting for a president to be named, sitting in the abyss of a neck in neck race with a current leader who wants to suppress the vote, who claims to have won before votes are even cast, who wants to keep us quiet and voiceless. I sit and a I wait. Will it be him again? Will we have to go down this road for another four years? Denying the climate crisis, defending the Proud Boys, putting our lives at risk, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans due to a virus that could have been contained. Why? Why do we choose to be treated this way? 

I wait for the pandemic to be declared over, and the masks to come off and the sun to come out. I dream of eating tacos in restaurants and seeing music in warehouses. I miss my family so much it aches, but while I wait, I pretend that Facetime is good enough.

But mostly, I wait for him. For my belly to grow big and for him to be healthy. To look at his face, to see if his head has hair, to see what his soul is like. To find out what color his eyes are. To see if he has Justin’s olive skin (preferred) or my fair, freckled complexion (not as preferred). I wait to see if he’s crabby or even tempered. Will he be calm or wild? When I dream of him he’s sweet. And happy. And rambunctious. I wait to hold him in my arms. To see what his soul is like.