Calm, listless, quiet.

Calmness was forced upon me during my week on the couch, and it continues. I used to walk almost everywhere, and quickly, in discharging my daily duties, an hour or two a day. Now I plod at a snail's pace to bus stops where I wait and then lumber on and sit back to try to enjoy the ride, not easy when calmness can feel guiltily like laziness and the voice in your head whispers, You should at least be getting a little exercise.

But the back has almost healed and the crampy contractions have mostly stopped and I've been "clean" (i.e., conscious) for almost three weeks now. If guiltiness is the price for that, I'll pay it.

***

Being calm physically has turned me limp and listless mentally. I settle in to read and can't be bothered to pick up my book. I look at a screen but have no energy to type. I put on my coat to go out to do something, anything, and then change my mind and flop on the couch and just sit there, all bundled up, until an inquisitive word (or meow) pulls me out of my reverie.

***

So I'm quiet, because what else is there to talk about? Not much. Banalities that are hardly scintillating. Choosing a pediatrician. Thinking about health insurance. Buying a baby-friendly-mobile (minivan-esque but so much cooler). Searching, seemingly impossibly, for part-time childcare in a country where the majority of citizens indicate through voting their belief that a woman belongs at home with the children, where nurseries have waiting lists of five times as many infants as they have places for and estimated wait times mean that baby will no longer be that but rather a toddler by the time a space opens up. Et cetera.

Banalities, but ones that I am so happy to have to deal with.

limp like plucked dandelions.