when the going gets tough, the tough want fic recs

[psocoptera]

Let me say: it's not that tough. At a day shy of 37 weeks, I am still crazy in love with my big round belly and the blorping, twitching, bulging creature inside of it. While I have started to feel a shift from "no way am I ready to have the baby!" to "getting excited about finally meeting this person face to face", I'm definitely not at that "I'd like pregnancy to be over, already!" stage. (Yet.)

That said, I'm getting to really dislike the heartburn, and I have to remember to put my feet up so they don't swell, and sometimes when I'm tired I get kinda whiny about all the random little aches my pelvis comes up with, and did I mention the heartburn? Right now, I am cranky about the heartburn. It seems like it keeps coming on just a little bit earlier and a little bit stronger and then it'll let up a little and I'll think, ok, this isn't so bad, and then there it is again more annoying than ever. I mean, why can I wake up at 3 am and feel ok and then wake up at 5 all burny? Having last eaten at 10 or 11? Probably from having dared to drink a little water. Stupid heartburn. I'm actually having a little trouble making myself stay properly hydrated because drinking water often makes it worse. And is it just me, or are Tums more effective against burnyness than against that awful pressure feeling?

So, yeah, while there is absolutely nothing in the world that can compare to the amazingness of being able to cup my hand around a big solid wodge of baby, or of feeling the press of little lumps surfacing and gliding around and submerging again, I think it is time for some inspiration. And by inspiration, I mean fanfic. And by fanfic, I mean mpreg and kidfic recs, mostly slash.

I can only kick off this list with MPREG, the mother (or, I suppose, the father) of all mpreg fics. Rhys. Popslash, Chris/Lance, 322K, Chris gets knocked up. Look, I know that even the fanfic readers among you are sitting there getting squicked out right now, but if you can suspend your initial dubiousness, this is just really well-done. I love how *real* it manages to be, for such a cracky premise, how not-sentimental. This fic is the source of "no tapping the fish tank", which I've only ended up using once because I am apparently immune to uninvited belly-touchers, but have had ready as my response since I started to show. And I'm just a teeny bit disappointed that pregnancy to me has never felt like I ate a rancid elephant head, because man, that is still the best line ever.

Get Loved, Make More, Try to Stay Alive. Dira Sudis. Torchwood, Jack/Ianto, 68550 words. Also starts off as mpreg, which I guess sort of spoils the initial reveal, but it's at least as much about, hrm, parenting, and not parenting, and time travel, and other things like that. One of the things I love about this story is that so many mpreg stories skim over abortion as just unthinkable, even to characters who don't seem to have any of the other beliefs or values that often go along with being pro-life, or magically rule it out, or in the worst stories, never even address it at all, when it so often seems like the obvious solution to an unwanted, medically risky pregnancy, but here for once someone has what seems to me a more "normal" and in-character reaction.

The World Turned Upside Down. Shalott. Master and Commander, Aubrey/Maturin, 109K. I don't even read this fandom, but it's Shalott, so. More mpreg. Here's the thing. I know some people object to mpreg because they see it as male appropriation of uniquely female experience. But I *like* it because when well done it can cut so deeply and directly into questions of sex and gender. Like this thing you see in mpreg stories where breastfeeding is the last straw, that putting a baby to a milk-producing nipple is more feminizing than growing one in a big round belly - that's interesting stuff, there!

A Beautiful Lifetime Event. More Shalott. Stargate:Atlantis, McKay/Sheppard, 29500 words. Not mpreg! But still slash. I could easily do a whole mpreg/kidfic recs list just out of SGA fandom - funny, fucked-up, heartbreaking - but I'm going to stick with just this one for now, possibly my favorite kidfic ever. Classic "first comes the baby, then comes marriage, then comes love" romance novel.

A Deeper Season and its sequels, particularly What Passing Bells. Vorkosiganverse, Miles/Gregor, two 110000-word novels. I would never have thought that any other pairing than Miles/Ekaterin could possibly work for me, but this is just an incredible AU. Only marginally counts as kidfic, via some of the short sequels, but the possibility of m/m baby-making is key.

Happiest Place On Earth. Het! Specifically, a short story from BarbC's sprawling and fantastic Buffy/Spike-verse.

Adulthood of a Modern Dynasty. More het. This is a chapter from a much, much longer (and unfinished) Ranma 1/2 series, and I seriously doubt it will make any sense without the rest of the series, which is, hrm, highly variable in quality. When it's good, though, it's a lot of fun, and stands out in my mind for being one of the relatively few stories I can think of where a het couple grapples with infertility - there are a million fanfic stories about oops pregnancies and really not so many about *not* being able to get pregnant, and I think that's interesting, since I would guess the demographic realities of fandom include a bunch of women who have faced infertility. Maybe it's just too real and painful a thing for anyone to incorporate into fic. Anyways, in this somewhat goofy, but interesting take, Ranma has been split into three people, one of whom, now married to Ukyo, has acquired a curse that cycles him through a bunch of different forms, while Ukyo, who's been involved in fighting the alien invasion, is... you know what? Read it or don't. ::grin::

So, that's my starter list.* Now it's your turn! Please comment (if you read fanfic) with a rec for at least one story involving pregnancy or parenting. Come up with something I've never read and I'll have something to cheer me up next time the heartburn gets bad.

(*I'm pretty sure there was at least one more story I wanted to include, so I'll comment too if I ever remember it.)

Comments

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Speaking of mpreg and gender stuff... I know someone through fandom who came out as socially male and immediately thereafter got pregnant (on purpose). Ta (I feel really odd using male pronouns for someone who is actively engaged in being a biomom) just gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Ta's comment on the whole pregnancy thing was that a big part of ta's previous sense of gender dysphoria was the sense that various bits were useless, and this was greatly mitgated by the knowledge that said bits were actually in use.

The person in question is very nifty and I would be happy to put you in touch with each other in your capacity as approximately contemporaneous fannish moms who can have interesting conversations about gender theory.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

They do indeed sound nifty (or at least like they have a really cool and unusual perspective on this whole pregnancy thing ::grin::) and so thank you for your offer to put us in touch, however I am a sadly terrible correspondent and already drop far too many conversational threads. ::sigh:: Yay for new baby though!

[gannet.livejournal.com]

Damned heartburn. I've never eaten so many smoothies in my life (before or since). On the funny side, I'd also never been prescribed smoothies, either.

I haven't read any fic in a while, so I don't have any good recs, but now I'm feeling tempted to go read the ones you list...

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

They're almost all really long, so there's a lot there if you're looking for things to read...

The smoothies idea is interesting, except I don't like fruit. Is there such a thing as a non-fruit smoothie? I do eat yogurt every day and it does seem to help sometimes, or at least not make things worse.

[gannet.livejournal.com]

Hm, I think smoothies have fruit by definition (unless you want to substitute sweet veggies instead).

On the other hand, given that my midwives told me to eat smoothies made with whole fat yogurt and ice cream as well as the fruit (when I hit the heartburn stage I had trouble gaining enough weight to suit them), I expect that you could probably make something like a milkshake - a chocolate yogurt milkshake? Don't know if that gives you any inspiration.

You could also go for non-sweet things. Yogurt with fresh mint? Yogurt blended with raw spinach?

Blended soups might also suit the situation. Butternut squash soup with cream?

[gannet.livejournal.com]

Smoothies made with yogurt and cooked carrots? (Assuming you like carrots, of course.) Makes me think of carrot cake somehow.

And that makes me think of zucchini bread. I wonder if there's something along those lines that you could do with the basic smoothie principle?

[bhadrika.livejournal.com]

Well, of course Tums works better on the burn than the pressure. The burn is caused by acid, which it neutralizes. The pressure is due to a giant parasite you have in your belly. But keep popping the Tums -- I have heartburn with Wolf and lived on them, and also have better blood pressure with that pregnancy than with my non-burny first, just in time for research to come out about the fact that increased Calcium reduces prenatal hypertension. Cool. Oh, I'd also heard from less scientific sources that lots of heartburn indicates a baby with a full head of hair, which Wolf did in deed have (until all but the Mohawk fell out). So, comfort yourself as you lie awake in pain with the fact that you'll soon have a furry child to play hairdresser on....

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

But the giant parasite is there all the time, and the pressure is only there when the heartburn is being particularly bad. Maybe "pressure" is the wrong word - "stabby sensation"? "Pain"? It's not *exactly* pain, though, or rather, "pain" seems too general.

That's interesting about the calcium, I hadn't heard that but have been trying to get lots on general skeleton-growing principles. (And my blood pressure has been great, so, hey.)

I think Josh was pretty bald in his baby pictures so I suspect I've been picturing the meeple that way - my sister was born with this great thick spiky black hair, there's this early picture where she's sucking on my dad's finger and it looks like it's a live wire or something the way all her hair is standing straight up. Hee hee hee maybe I will have a little electrified meeple myself!

[bhadrika.livejournal.com]

Hey, Jazz was profoundly bald until he was over a year old (and then had a strange phase when he looked bald, yet had bad hair days...), so we were assuming we don't make hairy children. I'm glad the midwife said she felt hair when checking dilation -- since I was asleep for the c-sec, I otherwise might have woken up to the hairy Wolf and assumed they'd made a switch.

[scottsch.livejournal.com]

Wow, 37 weeks! Good luck with your imminent bippy!

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[carnap.livejournal.com]

It's already 37 weeks? That means your due date must be like, impending. Or already past? Good luck with labor!

Do you have a name for it?

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the good wishes! Due date = 40 weeks, so, close, but not quite yet. Anything between 38 and 42 weeks would be considered normal though. My personal guess is that I will either go exactly a week early (39 weeks), which my mom did with both of her deliveries, or a week late (I've heard first-time pregnancies are likely to go past their due date) but not in between. That's just my little attempt at fortune-telling, though, there's really no way to know at this point.

We have thoughts about names but won't decide on anything for sure until we actually meet it. (For one thing, in our big dramatic nod to gender norms, we do have different names in mind depending on whether it is a girl or boy.)

[amyprime.livejournal.com]

I only read one fandom, so make of that what you will. But one story I keep going back to is about fostering. And adoption. And evil scientists.

Anybody's Baby (425K)

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the rec! I dipped my toe into Lois and Clark fandom sometime last summer, and I thought it was really interesting the way the stories "felt different" than what I might loosely call lj-based media fandom - it was like there was a whole different set of conventions about POV, pacing, sources of dramatic tension, etc. I'm not sure I'm explaining this well but I thought it was neat how you can get these different cultures of "what a story is like". (Like here, the big declarations of love happen more or less as set-up for the real plot, and that struck me as not something I would see in many stories - that they happened "onscreen", but not as the focus of the story.)

On another topic, I don't know whether this is something you would be interested or comfortable talking about here, or perhaps in email, but I found myself kind of uncomfortable with some of the portrayal of adoption in this story, and would be curious to hear your thoughts about it. I've never been any of the people in an adoption relationship and am surely reading things through my own biased lens as a bio-mom-planning-to-parent, but I found my sympathies more with Lucy than I think I was maybe intended to, and the eventual resolution did not entirely work for me. I don't remember Lucy at *all* from the TV show, although TSOR suggests she was in a couple of episodes, so that is probably part of it, but, I don't know, in the first scenes with Lucy it seemed very clear that she wanted to keep her baby but was having a problem with lacking sources of emotional and financial support, and it seemed very obvious that someone needed to get this girl a new mom's group and a social worker, stat, and then at the end she has this realization that she doesn't *really* miss him and besides, Lois and Clark are just So Much Better as parents, and, ok, there are two of them, they have established careers, they have Clark's perfect parents for extended family, but maybe there's something problematic with the idea that happening to have these things means they "deserve" the baby more than someone who doesn't? It just seemed very convenient that there was simultaneously this whole "Lois and Clark are better parents" thing and also this "Lucy's love for the baby isn't as deep as theirs" thing. I mean, I don't know, I guess I feel like everyone got a happy ending by chance or authorial fiat, when it would have seemed just as plausible given the story for only the first of those things to be true, and then what. Wibble. Does that make any sense?