{"id":1438,"date":"2026-05-10T04:12:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T04:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=1438"},"modified":"2026-05-17T14:51:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T14:51:33","slug":"apple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=1438","title":{"rendered":"Apple"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
For some of us, like me, motherhood was a road long traveled before reaching the destination. \/ It took more than years of trying in the wild. \/ It took more than countless doctor appointments and blood draws and sample counts. \/ It took lying in a gurney at Walter Reed Army Medical Center while a practitioner shot X-ray contrast dye through the cervix, ferreting out who was to blame. 
\/ It led to heavy financial commitments. \/ The journey took us through sitting in a wide, unprotected waiting lobby, before finally being called up to say our partner's social security number and Tricare ID while holding a murky sample cup. \/ When that didn't work, it led to some of us pushing forward, seeking private sector fertility interventions with what would have otherwise been retirement money. \/ Another round of waiting, endless calls to insurance and pharmacies, the regular and the compounding ones. \/ And then the jabs, so many jabs, \"please help me this hurts too much on my own,\" alcohol swabs and fridge-chilled injectors and needles piercing plump skin in the dining room. 
\/ Somehow that got some of us to the stage of unseen but palpably swollen hyperstimulated ovaries, \"like grapefruits,\" a fellow would-be mother sighed to me. \/ To be so lucky, if we got to proceed to distant contributor collection vials, to being wheeled in on another gurney to another OR. \/ Success, for some of us: retreivial of multiple ova. \/ Off to the laboratory cryopreservation tank to a tilt-o-whirl centrifuge to a steamy incubator-coddled petri dish. 
\/ Every two days, we would wait with bated breath as the fertility nurse called with updates. \/ Sixteen ova became thirteen embryos. \/ Thirteen embryos became nine. \/ By Insertion Day, there were four candidates left, for me, and some lucky ones. \/ The doctor selected one, in a darkened room, my legs up in stirrups. \/ To get this this warm autumn day, to have this chosen one join me on the journey, a point to where others may be blissfully unaware of events unfolding in the depths of a warm, dark home, yet we had already lived each microsecond. 
\/ For some of us, like me, every moment awake from the first injection to the ride home from the fertility clinic was spent worrying about the bundle of cells dividing \u2014 or are they not? \/ Are they growing \u2014 or have they stopped? \/ Should I have demanded two embryos implanted? \/ How could I have placed our bets on an entity the circumference of one tiny period [.] at the end of the biggest sentence of my life? \/ Soon on calendar, forever in the heart, the impossibly small speck. \/ I stare at the scrap of a scroll I was handed, perfunctorily, by a tired Lab technician. \/ Looking down now, I see it is a receipt, proof of creation: a curled blueish-grey print-out, which captures my universe in grainy pixels.\/ These pixels soon become a poppy seed. 
\/ Then, if Beyonc\u00e9's Internet is right, this thief of my attention and energy grows to the shape of an apple seed. \/ There must be some biblical allegory here, right? Eve in the Garden, an apple seed at the heart of a new and irrevocable future? \/ Deep inside us, if we are to be so lucky, that orchard seed blooms into legumes: into a lentil, to a sweet pea. \/ At last, on this endless trek, some of us make it to hosting a guest the weight of a blueberry. \/ Seconds tick into hours, which melt into days. \/ The phenomenon inside our wombs continues, achieving the size of a raspberry \u2014 what it looked like, ironically, way back at the blastocyst stage, as captured on the curling photo taped to the French Door of my Kenmore. \/ And then off it goes to a grape tomato, a spring strawberry, a summer fig, a Southern lime. 
\/ Throughout these tense days, I get to know my birth month cohort of fellow \"Mamas\" on my secret pregnancy and baby group. \/ As week four, day two becomes week eight day four, becomes week eleven, day six, we lose more and more members of our flock. \/ Not all of us, you see, get to make it to June with our tiny passengers intact. \/ For every handful of \"I got to hear their heartbeat!\" posts, there are teary \"Goodbye, Mamas! I am so sorry to say, there is no heartbeat. I guess I need to leave this group, I love you ladies, stay strong.\" <\/em>These departure messages, from strangers aligned solely by shared gestational dates, pull at the soul, wrench the brain, raise the blood pressure. \/ These life-changing fare-thee-wells induce a kind of deep-seated panic, of which the mounting pressure requires a swift release before our own stowaways are at risk, too. \/ Some of us had long announced our expected futures at work, at church, at temple. \/ Others of us hold this sacred information tight, tight, tight, a bud in suspension, wrapped like so many enveloping arms around the kernel, the truth. \/ If we speak it aloud, this long awaited hope, this news of a maybe-baby on board, some of us worry, then our truth will disappear, like so many past occurrences. 
\/ At fifteen weeks, this mystery is a hefty quarter pound and apple-sized. \/ An actual apple in the orchard, I search up, can grow from blush-pink bud to pie-ready fruit in as little as fourteen point three weeks. \/ Oh, to be done by now! \/ But no, here we go, the slog and stress continues: sixteen weeks, an alligator-skinned fruit \u2014 indeed, this elder millennial cannot escape the aspersions and permanent associations with avocado toast. \/ Incidentally, by this time, eating anything green is not a capacity many of us have. \/ I nibble on dry toasted bagels, I bite away at Annie's gummy bunnies. 
\/ Some of us, if we are so lucky, have entered what feels like an endless stretch of nausea, vomiting, wiping bile from our mouths, and tears from our cheeks. \/ Some of us, if we are so lucky, proceed towards new shapes and sizes: sweet potato, mango, banana. \/ At last, twenty weeks! \/ I feel safe enough to acknowledge this miracle of science and faith and steel will. \/ A Facebook post, broad cheeks, smug belly, heart-felt message, tag the co-creator. \/ I try to make it known that this was a hard-fought battle, a journey through hell to get this far, but surely, positively, someone out there felt punched by my 'happy' news. \/ Pregnancy is hard; hearing about others' can be even harder, sometimes. 
\/ Some of us, who get this far, get to see the traces of a life form bouncing and floating about on a grainy ultrasound screen. \/ Some of us, if their medical providers deign to tell, and the fetus deigns to reveal, will share with us their best prediction of the being's genitals. \/ In that moment, that the doctor shrugs and says, \"Not that this is medically relevant AT ALL, but, it looks like you're having a girl,\" the world spins away before it returns to its axis. \/ A Girl! \/ Tears, so many tears. \/ \"She's here! She's really on her way.\" \/ The concept of gender, of an anchor into human culture, somehow provides a testament that there is hope this will end well, that a happy beginning is closer to reality. \/ All the same, my long list of names becomes a shorter list of neutral ones; ones that could fit any identity this being wants to become. 
\/ Speaking of names, the June Baby Mamas list loses more members; some tell harrowing stories, some just quietly delete their accounts in the early morning hours. \/ Statistics about pregnancy loss and birth rate success are rendered concrete as our group dwindles from 768 to 732 to 700 members. \/ Not all of are lucky. \/ Even those of us still in this marathon, our soles are burning and our hearts are not sure we can keep pumping sufficient blood to oxygenate our own tissues, let alone the tiny ones growing inside of our vehicle of life. 
\/ By week twenty-five, my fickle pomegranate is growing weary of her confines. \/ I end up in the Emergency Department, then shuffled to the Labor and Delivery room. \/ They strap me up with belly monitors and pulse ox and string an IV bag, while I sob: \"I'm not supposed to be here! It's too early! Bring me home! She's not ready! I failed!\" \/ Dry-heaving, mind spiraling, I imagine going home with an empty uterus and an empty crib. \/ Some of us, that is the end of the journey. \/ I know this, I know this and am haunted by the facts. \/ I am given a shot to help protect her immature lungs, in case this is the night of her birth. \/ Not all of us, who find ourselves in early labor, make it out of the hospital a mother. 
\/ Some of us, though, those who are lucky, who are still haunted, get to go home, abdomens still swollen with our little flipping, punching would-be escapee. \/ Some of us, who are so lucky as to have avoided loss, get to upend our lives and take on an immediate, mandatory bed rest for the remainder of our pregnancies. \/ Some of us, who are so lucky to be vessels still, must forgo the traditions and rituals of a sisterhood, of showers and parties and celebrations, to lay inert, restless but in resting pose, for the next fifteen weeks of our nanosecond by nanosecond lives. \/ As I lay, soul rotting, my little passenger, she becomes a butterleaf head of lettuce, a turnip, an eggplant. 
\/ Somewhere in between turnip and cauliflower, I was allowed to leave my sofa bed on the first floor, be escorted gingerly to the car by my own mother, and be transported to the city hospital to endure a three-hour glucose challenge, to rule out gestational diabetes.\/ As if I needed additional drama; I think the cosmos knew that I was all set on diagnoses. \/ And so, some of us, we are so lucky as to tolerate the thick orange goo that we have to gulp down in five minutes or less, and escape another label. \/ Some of us, we found that motherhood began far before our unseen charges became papayas, pineapples, spaghetti squashes, mangosteens. 
\/ Some of us felt each moment, lived each dread, fretted at each over-silent moment, poured dreams into every bony kick to our kidneys. \/ Making it through another child-free Mother's Day (\"this one doesn't count yet!\" He would tell me), stretch marks (\"No, Mama! You don't have stretch marks, you have Tiger<\/em> Stripes<\/em>!\" Pinterest would tell me), and sweat stains and limp hair, still engorged and waiting, felt like a chore of its own. \/ Making it to week thirty-five with this life force still inside me, felt like a victory, now we are in the home stretch. 
\/ By this time, my Baby Mama group has begun to self-select to reveal a little too much about their home lives, one too many flagrant nursery room photo spreads that separating the Buckhead or Calabasas Joneses from the Brattleboro or the Middleburg Johnsons. \/ We begin to realize that being grouped simply because of our shared due dates is perhaps not great enough a bind to keep us tethered indefinitely. \/ As the picture albums become rife with enormous baby showers, I find myself pulling away, turning to curating and watching and turning and rearranging my baby lists on Amazon and Buy Buy Baby. 
\/ Bedrest is isolating, daunting, boring, devastating. \/ I become an observer of life via Facebook; I do not feel connected. \/ Somehow, in between doctor check-ins and impatiently whiling the time away, one morning I wake up to wet bed sheets. \/ She's decided to come \"early,\" which by calendar means a month prior to my cohort, although by day count her arrival is not medically concerning. \/ Emotional readiness is a different matter. 
\/ On this May day, she will free herself from my sanctuary, her ten perfect untrimmed claws outstretched wide, leaving a trail of tears in her wake. \/ And in so doing, she makes me a Mother, a parent, on paper as attested in the public record. \/ But I can tell you, those of us, we who are so lucky to craft our own humans, we began this role long, long, long before our babies drew their first breath of earthly air, cutting through the delivery room with their first cry, pass their first unearthly meconium into NB size Pampers, generously (insidiously?) donated in the Welcome Baby kit from Procter and Gamble that some of us were lucky enough to receive from the hospital. 
\/ Her first onesie, once home, is an organic cotton one, with three snaps, and a pattern of non-toxic printed green fruits, stylized Granny Smith apples. \/ From apple seed to apple fashion, this child is real, she is here, she made it through. \/ And now, I, and those of us lucky enough to make it this far, need only to worry about out little ones every further millisecond for the rest of our lives. \/\/
\/ On this day, United States Mothers Day Observed, where our macro culture allows us to pause an honor the creators of the world as we know it, I hope we remember the intensity, the terror, the trauma, the tenacity, that it took for each of us, ourselves, to be here today. 
\/ Whether your Mother is yours by birth, by blessing, or by happenstance, remember the sacrifices to which you have been the beneficiary. \/ To Mothers, to us, to the nurturers and defenders, the strongest creatures on this planet. \/ Happy Mother's Day.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cApple,\u201d an accounting of the endless moments before motherhood officially begins, written Sunday, May 10, poem 130 in a series of 365 poems written by Diana Ludwick in 2026. Photo, “Baby and Mother’s first photo,” by Diana Ludwick (c) 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1651,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,311,290,4,2,666],"tags":[866,1048,1047,1027,1025,970,1021,1029,1060,1051,1040,1041,1024,1059,1057,494,1050,1020,1026,1019,1031,1044,1046,1043,1053,677,1033,1032,1039,1054,865,1038,1028,224,1056,1045,1058,667,1018,1052,1034,1036,1049,1022,1055,1023,1042,1030,1035,1037],"class_list":["post-1438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2026-poetry-challenge","category-generational","category-homage","category-long-form-musings","category-poems","category-reminiscing","tag-866","tag-a-girl","tag-avocado-toast","tag-baby-mamas","tag-bed-rest","tag-beyonce","tag-blastocyst","tag-blessing","tag-breath","tag-calabasas","tag-cells","tag-centrifuge","tag-cohort","tag-creatures","tag-defenders","tag-elder-millennial","tag-emergency-department","tag-fetus-as-produce","tag-gestational-diabetes","tag-glucose-challenge","tag-hospital","tag-incubator","tag-injection","tag-internet","tag-isolating","tag-ivf","tag-ld","tag-labor-and-delivery","tag-mama","tag-mangosteen","tag-may","tag-mother","tag-mothers-day","tag-motherhood","tag-nurturers","tag-petri-dish","tag-planet","tag-pregnancy","tag-procter-gamble","tag-public-record","tag-raspberry","tag-spaghetti-squash","tag-statistics","tag-stretch-marks","tag-tenacity","tag-tiger-stripes","tag-tilt-o-whirl","tag-trauma","tag-turnip","tag-welcome-baby"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1438"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1674,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438\/revisions\/1674"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}