Creaks

At nine months pregnant, I am still trying to arrive at a place in my mind where it is acceptable and even encouraged that some days I do nothing. Nothing typically consists of reading, tinkering about online, catching up on digitally streamed episodes of television shows I no longer watch for my loathing of the actual television set, perhaps a delicious afternoon nap. I have learned in my preference for silence, aside from ticking clocks, organic sounds that permeate the house walls from outdoors and the intermittent bleep of my cell phone, that this house creaks. The house is specific with its creaks saving most of them for the evening hours as the silence becomes muffled by the fading sun, particularly down the hallway. Numerous occasions have found my dog and I casting glances towards the hall in search of the entity causing the creaks, how they mimic footsteps. Our eyes'searches always turn up only the quick shadows of black and white photo's lining the long wall, silver and matte black photo frames of varying sizes and shapes. The silence and creaks, thought to reassure one that soaking in a lazy river of nothingness is acceptable at nine months pregnant, only validates my guilt. Things have been done. Over the past few weeks I have cleaned out and reorganized my pantry, begun painting the nursery, taken photo's, listed auctions, and shipped numerous packages, not to mention designed, photographed, and listed jewelry all in the name of extra income. I have hung up clothes that have remained in piles at the foot of my bed or dangling from an abandoned eliptical machine propped behind the door that I have also listed for sale. I have read several books, blogged recently, washed baby clothes until I was completely intoxicated with the delicately fresh scent of the bundle of joy floating around in my swollen belly that I am soon to meet. Despite all of that, the guilt of doing nothing festers in the small, dark corners of my stomach not already occupied by the baby. I am still trying to learn how to breathe which is difficult to do when you're suffocating.