the rest is səɪlence

M and I have spent the last nine weeks, the entirety of her third trimester, rehearsing and performing Hamlet in the "original pronunciation," that is, not imposing an accent but adhering to the phonology and vowel forms of late sixteenth century England. I was rather skeptical of the endeavor at first, especially since to my mind communication with the audience is the primary goal, and our student actors have, in the past, had a hard enough time getting to the point where they knew what they were saying and could find a way for their character to impel and require those particular words for specific purposes. This is the first and foremost goal of Shakespearean acting, and I thought that "OP" would simply be an obstacle to that. And it was, but not an insurmountable one.

The bigger obstacle, and an entirely predictable one, is that the play has gone into M's full-term period. We toyed with the idea of a pregnant Gertrude (or "Gɑɹtrəd ") back in March when we conceived and she declared that she wanted to audition anyway. It absolutely works for the play, and inserts many new colors to the usual ambiguities about her character, and of course the poisoning is horrific to watch. What it also does is make my wife unsure whether her legs will hold her, after an eight hour day and a six-hour performance (with warm-ups, fight calls and dance calls).

We have one more performance, starting in a couple hours, and while I will miss the ensemble bond, I will be very VERY glad to have some rest and silence.

Prodigy

My son gets to play his first Shakespearean role at the age of negative one month, this coming November. There aren't many lines in the role of Hamlet's unborn brother, but I feel as though it's more of a physical part, anyway. And you know what they say, no small parts, only small actors. In this case a small actor, all of whose parts are also quite small.

I must admit I'm a little torn about playing Claudius to M's Gertrude while she's in her third trimester. I love being onstage with her, and it's likely to be a really excellent production, but I can think of better ways to nest than a sure-to-be-grueling rehearsal process for one of the most challenging tragedies ever written. At least it's not Macbeth. And then there's the metadramatic aspect. Playing a would-be father to a hostile young man who refuses to play the role of a son, who idealizes the absent father that I can never be will either be a wonderful way for me to play through some of my own anxieties about fatherhood, or it will just fuck with my head.

Pregnant Gertrude. If you think about it long enough, it kind of works, and brings lots of interesting issues in the play to the fore. And if nothing else, it'll really give certain lines punch: "Gertrude, do not drink!" springs to mind as an example.

We are not making this name up

In the interests of educating the various people who seem to believe that we’ve invented our forthcoming baby’s name like a pair of society-defying hippies, I hereby present a morning’s Google-search of evidence that it's a respectable and lovely name with a long pedigree:

Literature and Film

Sire Degarre (c. 1325): hero of the anonymous “Lai of Sire Degarre,” in which a foundling boy is named Degarre because it means (the poet tells us) “lost” or “stray” or “almost forsaken” (related to the French verb égaré). Sire Degarre (i.e. Sir Diggory) kills a dragon with a club, wins the hand of a princess by out-jousting the king, and defeats a fairy knight—narrowly avoiding killing his father and marrying his mother, like Oedipus. This character and his story get passed on as “Degarre,” “Degore,” and eventually Digory or Diggory. He is incorporated into Arthurian legend in some sources as a knight of the round table. The Winchester Round Table lists “Sir Degore” among its twenty-five names.

“Captain Digorie Piper his Galliard” (c. 1604): a dance for lute and viol composed by John Dowland, lutenist to King Christian IV of Denmark. Digorie Piper is unknown, but you can hear performances of his galliard on YouTube.

Diggory, one of Hardcastle’s awkward servants, in Oliver Goldsmith’s play She Stoops to Conquer (1771).

Sir Diggory Drysalt, a satirical character in Samuel Warren’s “Blucher, or, the Adventures of a Newfoundland Dog,” published in The Merchant’s Clerk and Other Tales (1836)

Diggory Venn, in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native (1878): Venn is a “reddleman,” i.e. a seller of reddle, or red ochre, a dye used to mark sheep. He thus looks, Hardy writes, like the devil, but is in fact an altruistic and heroic character who repeatedly saves the day.

Digory Kirke, in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56): Kirke appears as the Professor who takes in the Pevensie children in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, as the title character in The Magician’s Nephew, and in The Last Battle.

Digory Rendell, a handsome and dashing stranger in Charlotte Louise Dolan’s pulp romance novel The Counterfeit Gentleman (1994). Rendell was named for the author’s Cornish ancestor, Digory Baker.

Cedric Diggory, in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1995-2000): a talented and generally decent student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This is what you’ll get if you Google the name, because Cedric was played in the film by a teen heartthrob.

Diggory, title character of Philippa Gregory’s children’s story Diggory and the Boa Conductor (1996).

Diggory the Dog in Jane Buxton’s children’s book A Home for Diggory (2002).

Digory, reluctant child hero of Digory the Dragon Slayer (2006) and Digory and the Lost King (2007), by Angela McAllister.

Diggory Compton, a character played by Eric Potts on British soap opera Coronation Street (2005–): a beloved elderly bakery shop owner who experiences increasingly poor health.

Diggory Franklin, young lawyer hero of a serialized digital novel, The Surprising Life and Death of Diggory Franklin (2008–)

History

More common as a surname, Diggory has always been rare, but not unknown, as given name. It seems to have been most popular in Kilkhampton, Cornwall in the mid-sixteenth century, when parish records indicate that it was as common as Thomas (though not as common as John).

Digory Priest (c. 1579–1621): one of the original 102 pilgrims aboard the Mayflower and a signer of the Mayflower Compact.

Digory (Digoreus or Degoreus) Wheare (1573-1647): head of Abingdon school and first Camden Professor of ancient history at Oxford University.

Digory Sargent (1651–1704): early Cornish emigrant to Massachusetts, married by Cotton Mather, scalped and killed by natives.

Digory Docke (d. 1657): a name recorded in the burial records of Kilkhampton, Cornwall, just possibly influencing “Hickory Dickory Dock,” the nursery rhyme.

Sir Diggory Forrest: Mayor of Plymouth, 1815-16

A few currently living Diggorys (thanks, Google!)

Diggory Bailey: Senior Assistant Parliamentary Counsel at Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, London.

Diggory Brooke, LL.B: a legal consultant living in Melbourne.

Diggory Gordon, television art director.

Diggory Kendrick: reggae flautist.

Diggory Laycock, tweeter, some kind of minor British aristocracy, and great-nephew of James Bond creator Ian Fleming.

Diggory Orr-Ewing, documentary producer.

Et Cetera

“Diggory,” a variety of the snowdrop (Galanthus plicatus) with puckered, rounded outer petals.

Diggory Brown, a bespoke kilt-making business in the Outer Hebrides.

He hit nemnede Degarre.

Despite all the advice not to tell anyone what you name a child until it's out and wearing a tiny stocking cap, we're sharing this. In December, we're hoping to introduce Diggory Owain to the world.

Diggory is such a rare name that Wikipedia lists only find three examples before the character in Hardy's Return of the Native: two English clerics and a Welsh war hero. It's such a rare name that in the Middle English romance where it originated, the poet spends five lines discussing what it means and why anyone would name a child that -- see the transcript below from the Auchinleck MS's "Lai of Sire Degarre" (above). Associations with characters in 20th-century fiction (C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling) are best left unmade.

-------------------
Excerpt from the Auchinleck manuscript (National Library of Scotland):

He dede vp þe glouen and þe tresour
And cristned þe child wiȝ gret honour
In þe name of þe trinite;
He hit nemnede Degarre.
Degarre nowt elles ne is
But þing þat not neuer whar it is,
O þe þing þat is negȝ forlorn also;
Forþi þe schild he nemnede þous þo.
(fol. 79v)

He put up the glove and the treasure
And christened the child with great honor
In the name of the Trinity;
He it namèd Diggory.
"Diggory" nought other is
Than a thing that knows never where it is,
Or a thing that is almost forsook;
So thus he named the child he took.
(my translation)

What a twist

M woke me up this morning announcing that the baby was being born prematurely. And sure enough, when I looked, there was his little head, his eyes blinking up at me and everything. So I went and called the doctor, apologized for waking him in the middle of the night, and explained the situation.

"It's entirely ordinary for expectant parents to have dreams like this," he said. It's a reflection of your reaction to your loss of control over your life, and your partner's safety and that of your baby.

"You don't understand; I'm not describing M's dream. This is happening in my bed, right now. There are witnesses!"

Then I realized that he wasn't talking about her dreaming, but me. I was having a dream. The baby was still comfortably gestational. I went back to bed really embarrassed about having woken up the obstetrician in the wee hours with a stupid dream that I should have recognized as such.

Then, as you'll no doubt expect, I woke up to my own voice explaining to M in my sleep how silly I felt, and realized that I had dreamed calling the doctor, as well, so the twists cancelled each other out.

Then before I could give Leonardo DiCaprio the combination, the van hit the water.

Foetal Spectre

Seeing ultrasounds of an approaching baby is a lot like watching one of those ghost hunting shows. There's an alleged "expert" who asserts that he can tell you what you're looking at, a lot of equipment that seems impressive, some viscous goo, and then when your nerves are jangled by the atmosphere, there's a grainy black and white image of something that just might be humanoid, lurking in the darkness, with its own terrifying, implacable motives.















What do you want from us? Why do you haunt this abdomen?

Heartbeat

One hundred fifty-one beats per minute. We have a centimeter-long baby, with a head bulge and an ass bulge and a heartbeat that you can hear by using machines. It's got two chambers. I spent lots of yesterday afternoon smiling until my cheeks hurt.

Week seven, I guess

The parasite is roughly blueberry sized. There's no predicting M's bodily weirdness. Tuesday she spent feeling hung over, and yesterday she nearly cried from the agony of a close encounter with someone's oyster-based lunch.

I canceled my class Thursday -- Marlowe's Jew of Malta -- in order to go with M to the first ultrasound, about which she's understandably nervous, since the last one she got revealed that she'd lost half her blood volume and was "About to Die" (a phrase that must be pronounced in the voice of the narrator from the old arcade game Gauntlet -- "Red Warrior needs food. Badly!")

Somehow we're still going to run the half-marathon together. She's been cleared for that, but told not to overheat, so now she's apologizing that she'll slow me down and saying I should run ahead at my own pace. As if I'd pass up the opportunity to run 13.1 miles with my 8-weeks-pregnant wife.

Apparently we're well on the way to becoming those people. I am having a hard time thinking of anything but the pregnancy. It's edging out my book projects, my classes, my anger at Arsenal's willingness to pee away points at every turn in late season league play, my grief over the loss of a beloved university president. I apologize in advance for the fatherhood brain that is likely to make me utterly insufferable forever.

And here we go again

The dog's food bowl almost made M puke today. A few days ago she was lamenting her backne and her breast sensitivity. Recently she asked me to bring her an orange and a pickle. She is become, in other words, a hilarious caricature of someone about six weeks pregnant. So I gently suggested that she take a pregnancy test, even though she very recently had both a negative blood test and a period. You know, to be sure. So she got a positive result on the pee stick, of course, and we went for a run to ignore it, then she got another positive result on another pee stick.

Last time, this made my knees go wobbly and prevented me from thinking straight. This time, I just said, "Huh. Looks like you're pregnant." I think the difference has something to do with the last positive pee stick being followed by M almost dying nine days later, but maybe it's also an indication that my attitude toward fatherhood has changed for the mundane. We'll find out soon whether it's another ectopic pregnancy and then maybe I'll start getting scared or excited again.

In other news, I had a great conference last week. I chaired a seminar attended by both my PhD advisor and my current PhD student, which was quite touching. I found out my tenure is approved, finally. And I've been awarded a distinguished professorship that, among other things, will make having a bairn easier to do.

In the negative column, though, the current round of my state's barbarism -- unwilling to tax corporations, perfectly happy to destroy the state infrastructure -- means that my university may be cutting French, Philosophy, Theater, and Dance. Soon we'll have to start calling it a "university" instead of a university.

Never mind nevermind.

Nope. Not a miscarriage. Something much worse. M and I spent the night in the hospital last Thursday night, and M had surgery Friday morning. She's through it and for the past few days she's been resting comfortably at home.

So what happened? Well, she had an ectopic pregnancy, which means, in this case, that a fertilized egg implanted in her left fallopian tube instead of in her uterus. We think this is because of a chemical or structural fault resulting from a ruptured ovarian cyst ten years ago. Anyway, an embryo implanted there and started growing.

On Tuesday night, M woke up with a heavy blood flow, and we were very sad about this, but assumed that it was a usual miscarriage, the kind that's very common for early pregnancy. The plan was to rest up and try again in a few weeks; we though the worst was over.

Thursday night, she left a dinner party at our friends' house complaining of nausea and terrible cramping, and we got her home and into a bath, gave her some painkillers and started worrying. I got ready for bed. In the night, M got up to go to the bathroom and passed out very violently, hit her head and turned stiff and blue. I started panicking, but she came to and said she felt much better. We called up our friends and asked them to come over, and they stayed with us for a while as M continued hurting and occasionally losing consciousness. She was by this time pale yellow in the face. Eventually, she said she needed to go to the ER. This is, for someone who hates doctors as much as M does, the nuclear option. We knew it was serious. I'm very VERY grateful that we went to the hospital instead of just trying to sleep it off, because if we'd done that, the doctors said, I might have woken up Friday morning without her.

At the ER registration desk, M had some more unconsciousness and vomiting, and we spent many worrisome hours in the ER room waiting for her vital signs to stabilize, waiting for the results of blood test, waiting for some pain medication, and waiting for an ultrasound, which was very painful and invasive, and revealed not very much because her whole abdominal cavity was full of blood. The ER doctor (after more waiting, but also, blessedly, some morphine) explained that M was likely to need surgery, and fairly quickly, because she was bleeding out into her belly. When the on-call ER gynecologist showed up to explain, he turned out serendipitously to be the OBGYN who we'd already arranged to use for the pregnancy, so he already sort of knew the situation -- and now he's clearly the best choice for our reproductive needs from now on. He explained the ectopic pregnancy situation and the plan for the surgery: he'd go in and clean out the blood, assess the situation and quite probably have to remove the damaged fallopian tube. And that's what he did. I called important people and they prepped Emilie for surgery. She had, being her, quizzed the doctor as to her rough chances of something going horribly wrong and of her not surviving, so when I kissed her goodbye and sent her to surgery, it was hard not to consider the possibility. I was really glad that our friends were there to distract me by playing twenty questions.

In about an hour, we got the post-surgery report from the doctor, so we went and had a happy breakfast, and returned to find M feeling as well as she could be expected to feel. For the rest of Friday, we stayed home stoking the fireplace, with friends taking turns looking after M (and me), and repeatedly explaining everything to her through the haze of anesthesia and pain medication. People have brought food, loaned us the use of heating pads, made coffee, fed the dog, and made us feel very loved. We're in good shape now.

It's funny how people assume that we're very sad about losing the "baby" -- which, at the time it became a tubal suicide bomber, had neither a heartbeat nor an anus. I'm just happy that my wife is still alive and healthy, maybe even healthier. She's getting her color back, getting frustrated at being stuck in the house, forcing me to leave her alone for a few hours at a time.

M being alive is the best possible Christmas present. And in a year when I think I'm getting snowshoes, even!

Oops. Never mind.

Yesterday morning the blood results were in, so the doctor called to congratulate us on what looked like a healthy pregnancy. But unfortunately earlier that morning M woke up having miscarried in the night. The physical pain wasn't much, but since we'd done what we said we wouldn't and gotten excited too early, we were both surprisingly messed up about it.

The worst thing I ever experience is the sound of my wife's tears coming from the other room.

So we took a sadness day yesterday and stayed home from work (and stayed work from home, in my case). Walked the dog, followed each other around, experimented with levels of hug tightness, watched movies, ate pizza, built a fire.

It's back to work today, having learned important lessons about important things. Thanks, briefly fertilized ovum!

Sickness and health

I’ve got a bugger of a cold now that semester’s over, as if my body decided that I finally had time and energy to devote to illness. M, on the other hand, has enough hCG coursing through her to stop the period of an elephant, apparently. We’re waiting for the blood work.

In order to distract myself from the moments when I stare out the window in panic thinking “I’m going to be someone’s dad! I can’t even sink a hook shot!” I have been coming up with nicknames for the maternal-foetal unit:

• “M&M”: i.e. M + Embryo
• “The Host”
• “The Astromech”: after an old nerdy roleplaying game in which humans fight each other by driving enormous armed androids
• “Wubbobubbin”: explanation neither warranted nor possible
• “Masterblaster”: Who run Bartertown?

I’m getting a little impatient that I can’t tell anybody. That’s why the blog is a good outlet. We’ve got about an 85% chance of not miscarrying, so the chances of a baby with a late August 2011 birthday are pretty good. 2011! Someday some professor will be shocked to realize that her students were all born in the teens. Twenty eleven. Four centuries after the death of Simon Forman and the first performance of Winter’s Tale. Three centuries after the invention of the tuning fork. The kid's due in the same month Obama turns 50.

Attempts at confirmation

We’re now at something like six positive pee-stick results. M’s nothing if not thorough. She is, however, prone to second guessing. So an actual medical professional will be weighing in today. Apparently there’s a thing called “chemical pregnancy” which means you’re not withchild after all, but rather with-beaker-full-of-chemicals. Or something.

I’m working at home today, through a cold. Out the window there’s a snowstorm sweeping over the mountains toward us, framed by leafless tree-branches. Bare ruined choirs and all that. A nice melancholy winter day. Hopefully I can crank out a few pages before talking to a doctor about things like cervical distention and yolk sacs.

So, in the past year: a possible mini-stroke, the appearance of gray hairs behind my ears and in other odd places, a new prescription for cholesterol medication, buying a house, a total of three mortgages, going up for tenure, and a possibly successful attempt at procreation. Oldness, decay, gravity. It’s a good day for a snowstorm.

Poppy Seed

I can't tell real people about this, so in a streak of wholly original thinking that has never occurred to anyone before, I am throwing it out anonymously to strangers on the blog.

A few weeks ago we pulled the goalie and started having unprotected sex (or “danger-tang”) for the first time in our lives. After an ill-conceived experiment with spermicide that revealed heretofore unsuspected allergies and is best forgotten, the sex has been kind of amazing, which is an interesting side effect. And somehow I think I turned a corner, from vigorous ambivalence about parenthood to active excitement about the prospect. Maybe some idiot-making brain hormones kicked in or something, but having a baby seems like a really good idea. We settled on a name for either sex, invested in prenatal vitamins, stuff like that.

Yesterday I was having a not-great day. Anxious about a book chapter deadline, struggling under a pile of essay marking, with a kink in my neck that was wrenching my spine. I went Christmas shopping and paid more than I should've for a present, and grumpily picked M up from work. She'd had a great day, apparently, and I didn't begrudge it her. I just wanted to go home, get back to work, and have a glass of wine. But she says "I got you a present, too."

"What?"

"Unwrap it. Take off my sweater."

Suspecting that this might be getting pleasant, I complied, and tied to M's abdomen with ribbon was a piece of oblong pink plastic smelling faintly of pee. With two lines visible through the little window and not one. So my knees got a little wobbly and we went to the store to get more pregnancy tests and booze. I can only imagine what the checkout guy thought our evening was going to look like.

Anyway, M passed (failed?) two more pee tests, so it looks likely that there is an embryo (we missed the blastocyst and morula stages—they grow up so fast!) the size of a poppy seed burrowed somewhere in the nutrient rich goo of M's bits. As she pointed out with fascination this morning, our potential offspring is the size of something that gets caught in one's teeth.