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Tibetan doctor I have been trying to get an appointment with for months. She’s in town for only four or five days every two weeks. Her office was in a cramped suite at the top of a dark stair in a nondescript building on an exceedingly plain street. I chatted a little with a woman in a wheelchair in the waiting room, who told me she has been seeing the doctor for years and swears by her. Everyone else I talk to about her says the same thing. That she comes from a long line of doctors—her father is one of the Dalai Lama’s private physicians—and she’s incredible.
    After forty-five minutes, she appeared and invited me into the inner office. I sat at the foot of the examination table in a wooden chair and told her I was pregnant and super-nauseated and super-tired and maybe just a tiny bit more anxious than usual. She nodded and took my pulse. Then I said, Well, maybe I am way more anxious than usual, and a bit depressed, and she nodded again and asked me to stick out my tongue. She asked me a few more questions about my diet and what times of the day I feel best and worst.
    Then she said that there is still a chance I can lose the baby, and that I should keep my stomach and the rest of my body warm. She gave me a list of warming foods to eat, and herbal pellets to quiet the nausea, ease the anxiety, and clear my system of damp, cold, and clogging elements. She told me to make a drink of pomegranate juice, ginger tea, and honey, and to take 300 mg of liquid magnesium a day. She said I should consider going off the antidepressant.
    Uh, really?
    When I came out carrying my little silk bags of herbs and a sheaf of instructions, Glen was waiting for me. He was skeptical about the herbs. He wanted to make sure they wouldn’t hurt the baby. I got upset and told him that this doctor has been treating people for years and years and that I didn’t think she would give me something that would damage the baby. I told him what she said about the antidepressant, and he said I should choose one doctor and follow him or her. He said that all of this doctor-hopping was really just a manifestation of my fear of my life changing and how overwhelming and uncontrollable it all is. He said that if I am not careful, I could end up hurting myself or the baby, or both.
    I burst into tears.
    He may be right, but it’s weird to have to listen to someone else’s concerns about what I do with my body. Even though I get theoretically that it’s Glen’s baby, too, at the moment it’s still a bit abstract. Yesterday he reminded me, after I called the baby mine one too many times, that I am appearing on national TV and radio promoting my latest book on masculinity and saying that men need to be more involved with every aspect of domestic life and women need to let them.
    Which made me wonder, am I being a hypocrite when I think, Just let me deal with the baby in my body, you go get food and protect me while I’m doing it? It feels sacrilegious to think it, blasphemous to write it down, but maybe there is something to this whole biology thing.
    Needless to say, I had a splitting headache by the time I got home. I took three of my new pellets, one of each kind. I had to crack one of them open with my teeth and chew it up. It tasted like dirt mixed with, I don’t know, cyanide?
     
     
    I HAVE BEEN sleeping for eight hours and now I am starving. I find the incessant desire to eat, no matter how shitty I am feeling, both fascinating and annoying. It’s as if the baby doesn’t care what I am going through, she’s going to make it here no matter what.

May 8
    On what I can already tell is going to be the first of many outings in search of pregnancy clothes that don’t make me look like an infantilized suburban housewife, today I went to a shop called Japanese Weekend. It was recommended by one of my more stylish friends, and so it was in anticipation of the Prada of maternity wear that I made my way up Powell Street. What I found was a modest