Well, thus far it's been a great pregnancy for Lis. Not a lot of morning sickness, good blood levels and tests throughout, maybe a bit of itchy belly here and there, but all in all things have been pretty darn smooth. There comes a time, however, when you're suddenly carrying around a giant, heavy beach ball on your stomach and things get a little on the awkward side. Lis has been a trooper. We're still making it out to work at coffee shops, one of our favourite pastimes (We're at one right now). We visit with friends and family. We zip around town for errands, explorations, etc., but we're slowing down.

We've stopped doing things like running for busses. Simple things like putting on pants and socks are generally taking a lot longer, and Lis notices that she's losing the sense of how far out her belly extends. It seems impossibly far, and her mind is having a hard time keeping up with how rapidly she's expanding outward. She has a theory that her body's teaching her patience because she's going to need it once junior arrives. All I can do is sit there in awe at the whole thing at this point. It's beautiful and amazing from the outside, but I'm sensing that it might feel a little more cumbersome when you're actually experiencing it.

We went for an ultrasound last week, and learned that our boy is up to 4 1/4 pounds now -- heavy considering he was the size (and general appearance) of a raspberry seven moths ago. All's a healthy go for the delivery when the time comes. I'm not sure when the pregnancy switched from being hypothetical to so very real, but I've been able of late to picture what he'll be like so much more clearly. It's, I don't know, more weighty, somehow.

I've also been able to imagine more solidly the day when Lis goes into labour. There's a good chance I'll be starting a new job right around then, and the thought of leaving work for such an extremely rare event is just thrilling and kind of wacky. In around a month and a half, our family will expand from two members to three. We've got a little bit of Christmas and a new years between now and then, not to mention Lis's birthday, but my goodness, things are looming large.

Ugh. It happened again! Lis and I went for a seat belt safety class last night, which had some really great information. We learned all about the safety labels, expiry dates, weight and height restrictions, installation techniques and more. Did you know, for example, that kids are now required by law to stay in booster seats until they're 4'9"? For a lot of kids, that can be as old as 12 or even more. I'm so happy we signed up for this, because we're now feeling extra secure (haha) in our car safety knowledge.

What we didn't sign up for, however, was the lesson in gender discipline that came along with the class. There was a lot of, how shall I say it, peripheral instruction going on about who we were supposed to be as men and women. Apparently all men install car seats, and they consider it a point of pride, but they always get it wrong and should find this very humiliating. It's their role, after all, to do everything requiring technical ability, and to screw it up because they're really just a bunch of barely functioning brutes. Women, on the other hand, are a bunch of harried, overemotional hens whose only purpose in life is to peck at their husbands and worry constantly about all of the things that their bumbling male counterparts are too stupid and stubborn to realize. There was a real undercurrent of hate in the the instructor's thought, and I found it infuriating. She was relentless. It was a peculiar version of hell on earth.

I felt, in fact, like I was stuck one of those horrific Leon's furniture commercials. You know, the ones where the wife fakes a headache until her husband buys her a fridge? This is what adult relationships look like without an awareness of egalitarian politics. This is an all out war of the sexes where nobody knows what they're fighting for, they just know they want the other one dead. We will claw and kill and maim just to get the upper hand. We will ridicule and humiliate and belittle any way we can think of, because the thing that matters is not the relationship but the person who has the power. Be forewarned, love is an illusion, and anyone stupid enough to believe in its power will be culturally scorned and socially ostracized.

To be honest, I don't have any problem with other people playing out their relationships however they want, but to impose such a worldview on others is both oppressive and offensive. It also has no place in a car seat belt safety course. Relationships should be configured however the couple sees fit, and this can include women or men occupying whatever roles they like (technical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, fashionable, physical). There may be tendencies, but there are no inherently "masculine" or "feminine" traits; binding activities to bodies is a dangerous practice, in no small part because it distracts us from learning about the things that matter.

First: an announcement! I've just started a fundraising campaign for an online multimedia project that I want to start working on called A Living City. Please have a quick look at the proposal by following this link. Now on with the show!

So I FINALLY got around to reading the dads' chapter in What to Expect When You're Expecting and I have to say: dads are a bunch of whiners. Not actually, perhaps, but they sure are depicted that way in this highly influential guide to parenting. Here's a sample section header: "My wife is breastfeeding my son. There's a closeness between them that I can't seem to share, and I feel left out." Now, I totally get that this may represent a legitimate feeling of recent fathers, but at the same time, I can't help but to think it harkens back to that idea that women are supposed to take over where men's mothers left off. The subtext of this quote seems to be "Now that the baby's the baby, who's going to treat me like a baby?"

I know that's probably not the intention, and I could be reacting a little defensively, but there does seem to be a lot of a highly specific tone of birth-condescension both here and more generally in North American culture. In trying to be understanding, such commentators as the writer of What to Expect come off as (irony of ironies) patronizing. When did it become okay to constantly put down men as these intellectually inferior beings whose supposedly "natural" emotional stunting turns them into objects of pity and tacit scorn? Helloooo? It's cultural, people! There's nothing natural about it. And more importantly, couldn't such condescension ironically lead to an abrogation of men's responsibilities? The assumption underlying it, I think, is that generally men are emotionally incapable, and when they do have a tired, hormonally charged emotional moment, they'll be encountering such crazy woman feelings it for the first time. Ugh. Can you tell I'm pissed off? Is there a chance that at least some of us -- maybe one or two -- developed our relationships based on mutual respect, emotional bonds, and genuine knowledge of our feelings? (A third of the chapter is on what men can expect sexually -- what am I, life support for a penis?)

And just to be clear: I am not advocating that men become macho jerks as a remedy to this condescension. The problem that I had with the chapter was not one of content, but of tone. Reactive machismo is the fundamental flaw in a lot of men's responses when it comes to push back over perceived gender slights: their reasoning proceeds along the lines of why do women get all the breaks -- what about my breaks? And then we're back to where we started, men acting like a bunch of emotional idiots.

Instead, I'm suggesting that we drop the pretense of emotional irresponsibility on both sides and start acting like adults, forming our opinions and perspectives on a highly contingent case-by-case basis. Perhaps it's time that we drop the dialogue on masculine and feminine traits altogether, and start approaching this crucial adult moment in terms of the birth-giver and non-birth-giver (awkward phrasing -- how about birthie and dearthy?). Yes, there are probably some pretty powerful instinctual things that happen based on one's relationship to the baby, body chemistry, etc., but to attribute this solely to bullshit along the lines of men being from Mars and women from Venus becomes restrictive and reductive. What the hell is someone supposed to expect if they don't fit into these rigidly defined stereotypes? Where are gay couples from, the moon? How about single parents, Pluto? And don't get me started on the interstellar divide inhabited by trans people, adoptive couples, shared parents, more communal cultures, grand-parenting, etc.

What to Expect pays lip service to diversity, but in truth its efforts seem pretty flimsy even for lip service, and it's not enough anyway just to uncritically cover your asses by listing off token alternatives. Multiple experiences need to be integrally accounted for when it comes to parenting. In my not humble opinion, it's important not only to understand our relationships to each other, but to the culture that produces the very conception of "us". It is important, for example, to warn men and women not just about what they'll be experiencing in terms of the birth, but what cultural and social pressures may be put on them to behave and be certain ways. What to Expect should have a chapter about What to Expect When You're Reading What to Expect When You're Expecting. I could write that.

One of the interesting things I've noticed in the past few weeks is that Lis and I have both, very naturally, started digging through our own old baby books, photos, etc. I posted the picture of chubby baby me last week, and I've been wondering what I was like back then. It's funny because when you have a kid, that little person is going to be having an experience that all adults have had but pretty much no one remembers. When we look at those old artifacts of our own infancy, I wonder if we're really looking to see if we can recall what we were thinking and doing back then. Pictures turn us into objects, flat little images that supposedly say 1000 words, but can't really tell us much of anything in other ways.

Isn't that strange? Our children start their lives in a state that we cannot really understand. I'd imagine it has everything to do with the fact that we don't start with words. How could you recall anything if you couldn't parse it into language? The world must just be a wild and frankly terrifying blur of color and sound when you're an infant, and the word infant actually derives from the Latin infantem, meaning "not able to speak." Our entry into the world of humans is marked at its core by a kind of alienation, which is kind of sad in a way, but I'm sure it's also a good motivator to get our little selves up to speed on culture. We have our social drives to help us along, which you can see in infants' ability to focus on faces before pretty much anything else (by the by, I wonder if this has anything to do with the difficulty that high Autistic-spectrum children have acquiring language). Anyway, the fact that we get where we do is one of those stunning and gorgeous feats of biology.

I'd imagine that I was mostly just pondering food, based on that pudgy little version me.

So we've been living in Vancouver for two months now, and it has been supremely awesome in nearly every imaginable way. I feel inspired here. I've taken in all sorts of sites and events, and I've experienced a glorious variety of people and perspectives. We're constantly out exploring, and we find great restaurants and coffee shops without even trying. Case in point: we were hungry Friday evening and we knew it was going to be a trek home before we could eat, so we decided to bite the economic bullet and got out for some chow downtown. I'd noticed a cute little diner place on Granville, so we decided to give it a shot. Well, it turns out that it had spectacular vegan and vegetarian options and was surprisingly affordable. The vibe was amazing (it's called the Templeton if you're ever in the vicinity). It was literally the first place we walked into on Granville, and it was divine.

The only hitch to this whole plan has been that I am still out of regular work. I've been grinding through papers for a pittance, and picking up a little freelance this and that, but I'm looking to found the career that will pay the bills long term. More concerningly, the baby's due at the end of next month, and I honestly have no idea what the heck we're going to do if I'm still out of work at that time. I hate this recession business. I've got a ridiculous variety of skills and talents, and yet I can't get anything decent going.

Part of me says that I should be panicking right about now. Most sensible people would. And yet I'm not panicked. I feel awesome. I don't think this is mania or anything bad; I just really do believe that this will work out swimmingly, because I believe that when life feels right, things go well. I don't see the point in stressing out when we're having such a good time. If the two months tick off the calendar and I'm still in this nebulously employed situation then all I can think is that I'll get to spend extra time with our son. It would be irresponsible just to sit around and do nothing in the situation, but I'm doing everything I can possibly think of. So why beat myself up?

I think that it's been several years of uncertainty, and my worry circuits are just fried. I can't help it. I'm stoked on our child, and I think he's going to have an awesome life. I think he's going to grow up in a household with lots of love, and I think that this is the most important thing. We live in a weird time. I know a lot of people with ridiculous talent that's essentially going to waste. Very few of my close friends have any kind of permanent employment. It'll be an interesting time to be born in, and I wonder if eventually our children will talk about this time like our grandparents talked about the Great Depression. Either way, I don't see how I can complain when I have nothing but abundance all around me.