07.09.03 - 11:20 pm

my unborn child vs. a $300,000 machine.

my neck bent backward looking up at a small television screen while sarahs stomach area was being videotaped, from the inside out.

it was as if the images were being filmed underwater, with light beams penetrating the surface and glittering over the rocks below. it was a mass of objects and fluid and unrecognizableness. an abstract painting thick with blue hues and circles and lines apon lines. kidneys, stomach, umbilical cord, hands, nose, bladder, spine and ribs. only the latter were recognizable.

"everything youre seeing, do you know what it all is?"

"yes."

with thirteen years under his belt, parish was quite able to decipher the visual medley of organs, of nothing, of life. and with those thirteen years of ultrasounds for thousands of couples just like sarah and i, comes an innate boredom of seeing the same images, both on the screen and on the faces of the parents, over...and over...and over. and parish let us know.

he showed us a tour guide of our developing child. two small half eaten oatmeal cookies....the kidneys. the small black hole....the bladder. the coiled spaghetti tubing....the umbilical cord. the faint outline of an oval...the slice of a torso. he moved his hand and his wand across sarahs glistening belly and across the television screen the road map of a baby. his machine took photographs too. looking up at my babys face from below the chin line, i could easily see that sarahs nose had been reused in the genetic makeup. sarah is in denial as of late. the babys eyes were tightly closed, but its mouth was open. tongue flicking out, lips practicing for sucking. moving down lower we could see our babys hand. clenched in a fist at first, then extending a single finger. and by single finger, i mean, my baby is already a jerk. we crossed back around and caught a glimpse of the heart, pumping rapidly, and audibly. there was no end to what this machine could do. everywhere we went, parish was pulling up lines and circles and performing measurements and calculations of heart rates and estimating weight and lengths of femurs and, it was ridiculous the extent of functions this machine could perform just on images. over an hour of traveling through and around my child visually. i cheated. i peeked before i was supposed to. but it was worth it.

i really enjoyed that.