In the process of taking care of our 7 week old daughter, I see my husband for a total of about 10 minutes a day. Our encounters are limited exclusively to blearily handing over the baby for the next shift, and reporting any new helpful techniques we’ve discovered that may or may not have coincidentally calmed or entertained her.
At 12:15am: “She’s just been changed, and I discovered if you rock her gently from side to side while at the same time jiggling on the balls of your feet, she’ll go to sleep.”
At 2:22am: “Here, you’re turn. She likes it if you hold her tightly with her stomach turned towards you while bouncing up and down on one leg and holding the pacifier in her mouth.”
At 3:58am: “Take her. I haven’t eaten in three days. Oh but I found out that the best way to get her to burp is if you get in a crouching position, hold her arms over her head and roll her from side to side while humming.”
“Wait - humming what?”
“Steve Martin’s The Thermos Song or Carly Simon’s version of Itsy Bitsy Spider but NOT Cat Stevens or she’ll scream.”
At 5:03am: “I tried what you said, hopping up and down on my left leg and chanting “rigatoni, rigatoni” but she wouldn’t go to sleep.”
“Did you spin around clockwise three times first?”
“Oh, CLOCKWISE? I thought you said counter-clockwise. No wonder she was so upset.”
The books don’t help at all. They make suggestions for soothing what must be NORMAL babies, but not OUR baby, because none of the suggestions ever work or even make sense. “Establish a bedtime routine to teach Baby when it is time to go to sleep, and the difference between night and day.” Well, her bedtime is 7pm, 7:45pm, 8:30pm, 9:45pm, 11pm, etc. So when, exactly, should this routine be performed? “Sleep when the baby sleeps.” Yeah right. That sounds terrific in theory and yet is impossible to do. After spending two hours trying to get her to sleep, she finally conks out, at which point you run around like a maniac trying to get all the piled-up chores done so that you can lie down too. As soon as you lie down, a little light goes off in her baby brain and she starts wailing.
I know my husband is the other person in the house who is an adult and wears a bathrobe, but that’s the extent of our relationship now - vague recognition in the hallway as we pass the baby back and forth along with our newfound theories, each one more ridiculous-seeming than the last.
Meanwhile our daughter also seems to have no idea who WE are. While she eats she gazes up at me with wide eyes that seem to say, “I appreciate the milk. Do I know you?”
“I’m your Mommy,” I remind her with false cheer as I struggle to keep my own eyes open.
“Hm, no, sorry, not ringing any bells,” her eyes say. “Where would I know you from?”
“Um, the womb?”
Her gaze doesn’t waver but appears apologetic. “Nope, sorry. Maybe you have me confused with another baby? You do seem nice, though.”
And just when it seems hopeless - I will never again curl up with my husband on the couch to watch inane TV, my daughter will never catch on that I am the same person who fed her two hours ago not to mention gave her life - she’ll throw us a bone in the form of a tiny smile that may or possibly may not have been gas-related. But it’s enough to keep us going for a little longer.
And we three strangers struggle on towards the very distant hope of a full night’s sleep.
I am too tired to be clever, or to try to be clever, so mainly I am writing to announce the birth of our beautiful daughter so that you can all stop worrying about me. I’m sure your concern for my labor probably dampened your holidays this year more than the depressed economy. So now you can ring in the New Year assured that I survived the ordeal, as did our daughter, although we were both a bit battle-weary from the experience.
Want the whole bloody story? Well, sorry. I vowed I would not be one of those women who tortured people with gory tales of her labor unless specifically asked. I will just say this: labor kind of sucks. I told Tom that our daughter could forget having a sibling. We’ll just get her a dog. I can’t imagine why anybody would go through that more than once. My friend and mother of two says just wait a bit - I’ll get ”Momnesia” and want to do it again. I say whoever claims you “forget” the pain was probably high on cocaine and never felt any.
But enough about that. What I meant to tell you is that I have not had time to fill you in on the joyous arrival of our offspring because our household revolves around two things: the baby and sleep, in that order. Any downtime - and there really isn’t any downtime, more on that later - is spent in tense anticipation of when she will make her next demand. When we hear her little “a-heh, a-heh,” warning cough we react as if to a five-alarm fire.
“YOU - get the pacifier!” Tom shouts to my mother, adding hand gestures to aid in the rapid direction of household traffic. “YOU - clean diaper! I’ll get the burp cloth. MOVE PEOPLE, MOVE! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!”
We all leap up and crash into each other in our haste to accomplish our assigned tasks, for we know that we have approximately 12 seconds from “a-heh, a-heh” to full-fledged, ear-piercing, gutt-wrenching, soul-crushing wails. It is our top priority to prevent full baby-cry escalation from occurring.
When we are not catering to this 8-pound person’s needs which, despite being as basic as they can possibly be, somehow still manage to consume an entire day, we are trying to get some sleep. Here is a conundrum: if the baby sleeps an average of 16 hours a day, how is it I am lucky to get four? That defies all logic. And yet even the dog isn’t getting enough sleep, and she is a real pro at sleeping through anything. So what am I doing during all those hours? I’m not cleaning, that’s for sure. Our house looks like it’s occupied by ten college freshmen boys. I’m not completing - or even starting - her birth announcements. I’m not working. I’m not shopping. I’m rarely bathing, and certainly not doing my hair. Where does the time go?
I think I can account for about ten hours spent just staring at her. She’s fascinating. Just like a real person, only tiny. The rest of the time is spent doing laundry. The baby owns approximately ten outfits that fit. I own about five pairs of pajamas. That means that I am doing laundry roughly twelve times a day.
So here I sit, surrounded by filth, in pajamas stained with breast milk (pre- and post-consumed), twigs sticking out of the snarls in my hair, purple bags under my eyes, next to this clean, fed, gorgeous little baby who will one day be embarrassed to be seen with me. I can’t imagine why.
I am down to the single digits. It seems like only yesterday I was shocked to learn it was 99 days until my due date - double digits. And now here I am, waiting to give birth. And yet I still don’t believe that I am pregnant, despite a belly that sticks out into the next time zone. I guess I have to assume the doctor knows what she’s talking about, that the belly isn’t, as I suspect, just made up of all the cookies I’ve eaten over the past nine months.
So to humor the nice doctor I am proceeding as if I will in fact have a baby sooner rather than later. I spend a lot of my time, time that should be spent working or paying attention to where I am walking, wondering what this new, unfamiliar ache or pain might be. Last night I sat up as a sharp pain hit my side and thought, “Oh my God! This must be it! I should wake Tom!” Then I farted. Turns out it was not labor, just the broccoli I’d had for dinner.
In my defense, my organs are so randomly distributed at this point that it really is difficult to pinpoint previously obvious sensations until they manifest themselves somehow (oh, I have to pee! when I go a little in my pants or oh, I’m hungry! when I pass out at my desk, etc).
Tom and I have been spending all our free time preparing for the birth by reading endless books and pamphlets that helpful institutions send us on a regular basis under the assumption that we are two babbling idiots who should never have procreated. We get literature from every direction - the doctor, the insurance company, the hospital - daily, explaining to us using small words that we should feed our baby a lot and not poor hot water on it. Once we had those basics down, we ventured out on our own and bought a slew of books on child rearing, each with a contradictory approach, all of which make complete sense, which is enough to turn you into a babbling idiot if you didn’t start out as one. I want to give birth just so I can stop reading all this theory and put it in practice before I forget everything. It’s like studying for the SAT - although you feel compelled to continue cramming until the last minute, at some point your brain is full and will hold no more. You just want to take the fucking test already.
So with all this cramming and aches and pains and memorization of factoids (no pacifier until 2 weeks old. No wait, 2 months. No wait - Time’s up! You get an incomplete on the “Things Baby Can Suck On That Won’t Scar Them for Life” portion of the test) is it any wonder I can’t sleep? And as long as I can’t sleep, I might as well be taking care of a newborn. Yet I am still 9 days away from my due date, and we all know babies are rarely punctual. Plus, this is Tom’s baby, and if she follows in his footsteps she will definitely not be on time. So I wait. And spend a lot of time with my head cocked to one side, reaching deep within myself to determine if this current little tug in my belly heralds the onset of the most challenging event of my life, or just lactose intolerance.
I was devastated when I found out the due date for my first baby is Christmas Day. I hate to think that my child will have to compete with the holidays on her birthday every year - combined presents, her special day getting swept aside by the excitement of the season, the difficulty putting together a birthday party when all of her friends will be out of town. How could I have done such a terrible thing? “Great,” I thought to myself when one of those online calculators revealed the date. “Literally my first act as a parent and I fucked it up.” (Note: don’t have unprotected sex in early April. Nobody told me that they start counting the 40 week gestation period before you actually conceive - what the hell kind of sense does that make? How could I have known this? And now my child will pay for my ignorance every single year of her life.)
When someone finds out that I am due on Christmas Day, about 7 out of 10 of them exclaim delightedly, as if I did this on purpose as a special treat for myself, “Oh, what a wonderful Christmas present for you!”
Now, I admit that I am not completely familiar with all the Christmas traditions. My family is Jewish, although not religiously - we have chosen to retain the guilt and anxiety but skip the holidays and belief system - so I didn’t even celebrate Christmas until junior high or so, when my mother remarried a gentile who brought with him the lovely tradition of gluttonously opening all your presents at once on a single day. My brother and I embraced this change with all the exuberance of the spoiled American child with no sense of or interest in any deeper purpose other than self-involved consumer fulfillment.
So, while I have thoroughly enjoyed the traditions of trees and cookies and gaining 10 pounds and presents galore, I admit I have not actually read up on any background to the Christmas story or could in any way be considered an expert. Don’t get me wrong - I do understand it has to do with that guy Jesus. But more importantly for me it heralds my Aunt-in-law’s annual peanut butter balls.
However when it comes to gifts, I’m pretty clear on what constitutes appropriate. Gifts after all know no religion. I’ve been receiving them for years and years. Therefore, despite my lack of knowledge regarding the origins of the Christmas holiday, I would like to list here the Top Ten Reasons Why Having a Baby Does Not Qualify As a Christmas Present.
1. One is not usually expected to make one’s own gift.
2. Christmas gifts are usually wrapped in shiny, attractive paper and festooned with ribbons and bows. They are not wrapped in blood and mucus unless you are a family of vampires.
3. Unwrapping/unveiling the gift should not cause hours or days of excruciating pain. If it does, either a) you are doing it wrong or b) whoever gave you this gift doesn’t actually like you and you should probably not be their friend anymore.
4. While a really awesome gift may include packing a bag and leaving at a moment’s notice for an overnight stay somewhere, the somewhere should not be the hospital.
5. One should not be expected to carry around one’s own wrapped gift for nine months every single place one goes, even while one sleeps, before being allowed to open it.
6. After opening your Christmas gift, it is not acceptable that that gift then be the only recipient of all future gifts, Christmas or otherwise, instead of you (or anybody else in your household) for the rest of your life.
7. Usually a Christmas gift should not immediately demand to suck on your boob. Unless you’re into that sort of thing. Whatever floats your boat. Hey, I’m liberal!
8. A Christmas gift should never EVER have anything to do with the phrase “bloody show”.
9. Your Christmas gift should not cause you to gain 50 pounds. Five, even ten pounds are acceptable under certain circumstances (a 2 lb box of See’s candy, for example), but by no means is 50 pounds okay.
10. A Christmas gift should never make you threaten to murder your husband. Unless he gives you a blender. Then it’s okay. Or a steering wheel cover. Okay, SOMEtimes a Christmas gift might make you threaten to murder your husband. That one isn’t a good qualifier. So one more.
11. Generally, you should not be required to expel your own gift from a bodily orifice which you would normally never discuss, let alone display, in public. I say generally because I understand different families have different traditions, and far be it from me to judge. Like how some families open presents on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas.
So while I have little knowledge of Christmas, and even less of babies, I do think the points detailed here are inarguable. Therefore nobody is off the hook from getting me a present this year just because I might birth a baby. Keep in mind I already have a blender.
Pregnancy is a beautiful thing. There is glowing involved. Unless of course you happen to be me. I should like at this time to expound upon the ways in which my body has revolted. Or, more accurately, has become revolting. If you’re a “shame on you, you should feel blessed by every discomfort” kind of person you may not want to read further because it’ll just annoy you.
Starting from the top. It’s a commonly known fact that a pregnant woman’s hair gets thicker. This is because older hair doesn’t fall out, but new hair is still generated. However, several years ago my hair decided to stop growing. So my hair is essentially only accumulating more hair that refuses to grow, rather than growing longer, creating a Jew-fro appearance about which I can do nothing because I do not have the stamina to stand at the sink for an hour in an attempt to tame it with product and appliances. Nor can I afford losing that extra hour of sleep, because then I would only get 11 hours a night.
On the bright side our drains aren’t backing up anymore from the accumulation of my DNA.
I no longer have any differentiation between my neck and my chin. It all just sort of flows out of my cheeks, Jabba-the-Hut-like. (Note: I can say this about myself but if you call me Jabba you will lose a testicle, as one unfortunate and not very bright friend has already learned.)
Need I expound on the size of my chest? It has become udderly (misspelling intended) ridiculous. I don’t even know if anybody makes a bra big enough for these things. When forced to wear one, a requirement which I am relaxing further and further as I make it my primary goal in life to wear no clothing that involves bands, hooks or restrictive elastic, the best I can do is find an approximate size. And I am constantly losing things in my cleavage. Not just crumbs, but the entire muffin. Some people may view this as a handy place to store keys and loose change, particularly since most maternity pants do not have pockets (perhaps they assume you don’t need them given your abundant cleavage?) but that is uncomfortable.
The flab on my underarms stops waving hello about five minutes after the rest of my arm does.
My belly is actually quite attractive, I have to say, and I take full credit for this. I attribute the lack of any new stretch marks to the fact that my body is already used to expanding with weight gain and then contracting through dieting on a fairly regular basis, so a giant belly is one thing for which I have been preparing and training for decades. Rather than new stretch marks I am just digging deeper grooves into the pre-existing ones.
I won’t go into my ass. I may never find my way back out again.
I think I’ve covered my painfully unhinging hips, which by now I could probably fully detach from the rest of my body without too much effort if I so chose. Despite the pain, I choose not. I’m fairly certain they are necessary evils.
My thighs are two barrels atop my knees. I give new meaning to the term “cottage cheese thighs.” They hang over my chair, halfway to the floor. If I were allowed to fly, Southwest airlines would make me buy not two but three seats - one for me, one for each of my thighs. I would request for them the special kosher meal, just because one has to get one’s jollies where one can when one’s thighs are fucking monstrous.
My ankles are reminiscent of the Pillsbury Dough Boy’s. It is fun to see if I can sink my finger in all the way up to the first knuckle.
My feet… I don’t know. Maybe someone else can fill you in on those. The other day I discovered I can officially no longer tie my own shoes and I had to ask my husband for help. As an aside, I also can no longer vacuum, which is another task my husband has had to take over, but you won’t hear me bitching about that one.
My immune system is shot. I’ve had a sinus infection for 3 weeks or seventeen years, I’m not sure which. People already part like the Red Sea when they see a big pregnant belly coming at them, as if pregnancy were contagious. Although I think with men (particularly those without children) it’s more that they become struck with a confused Madonna worship. As if they are simultaneously overwhelmed by the creation of life and at the same time horribly embarrassed because they now know for a fact you’ve had sex at least once. They avert their eyes and give you a wider-than-necessary birth. (Haha, birth) But add to that the coughing, hacking, sneezing, nose-blowing delight of a year-long cold that WILL NOT DIE and you pretty much find yourself alone most of the time.
I require twelve hours of sleep per day and still can’t focus properly on my work. I have perfected the dumb stare. I grunt when I get up, sit down, bend, walk, climb stairs, think hard or breathe. My throat makes funny bubbly noises that are beyond my control and when I am hungry I make this loud, also uncontrollable, hiccup sound, almost always in a very small, very crowded space such as the elevator at work. Think loud, alarmed parrot when trying to imagine this sound in your head. I sweat from just sitting. I cry at everything, including this blog. I forget to put on socks and can’t understand why my feet are so cold.
All that being said… I wouldn’t trade any of it. I could be sobbing my eyes out (no, no reason) but one kick from this baby girl and I’m grinning like a fool. She got hiccups yesterday for ten minutes and I was so delighted by this clear demonstration of talent and genius that I was high for hours.
Did I mention the mood swings?
I have always been an obnoxiously responsible person, to the point where I’ve managed to take most of the joy out of life. But now I realize I was a mere amateur.
“You are the most organized person I know,” my best friend has told me on more than one occasion. I feel sort of smug about that, despite the fact that “organized” can very often, especially in my case, be easily replaced with “anal-retentive,” which isn’t so much of a compliment. I wow the world with my spreadsheets and budget analyses, my three-month forecasts and multiple-variation contingency plans. My husband long ago happily relinquished control of most of the household since I am a better planner and also it isn’t a fun job, something he’s always known but nobody ever told me.
Tom and I (and by “Tom and I” I mean “I”) had everything calendared out: big move, home purchase, baby. And with the exception of a few months here and there, everything pretty much went according to plan. I had the crib picked out the moment we confirmed a heartbeat. I had it put together before I reached my third trimester. I put it together myself because Tom was assigned the less romantic task of cleaning out the garage so that everything previously stored in the baby’s room could be moved out of my way. We still had four months to go, but I could not wait a day for Tom to finish the garage before I got started on the crib. This was the way the schedule had to go, because I said so, and I am the Most Organized Woman Ever.
Or at least so I thought. Because a few weeks ago, still with over three months to go before my due date, I started looking into daycare.
“Wow,” those of you who don’t have kids yet are probably thinking, “you won’t need daycare for another seven months and you’re already thinking about that?”
Or at least that’s what I thought when I started doing it. “Look at me!” I thought. “I am so far ahead of the game! When this kid is born I will have EVERYthing in place and a statue will be erected in my honor - World’s Most Organized Mom!” Yeah, right. Every single place I called has a waiting list of at least - at LEAST - a year. The place most highly recommended, which literally costs per month the same as the mortgage on a summer home would, does not anticipate openings until the end of 2009.
“So,” I said quasi-casually to the very nice woman on the phone, “if I were better prepared, I would have gotten on your waiting list before I got pregnant.”
There was, if you don’t mind the blatant metaphore, a pregnant silence. A silence I took to mean, “Oh, honey, you are SO naive.”
But wait, there’s more! In order to get on the waiting list you have to take a tour. And the TOURS were booked for a month out. So I got on the list to get a tour in order to get on the waiting list. But wait, there’s even more! Once you have the tour, in order to get on the waiting list you have to pay $100. Not for any reason. The $100 will never be refunded or applied to your first month’s tuition should you be so fortunate as to be called at some point in the distant future before your kid goes to college. It’s just because they can do that if they want to. I guess I should be glad they don’t charge $1,000 because, really, what’s to stop them? $100 is quite humanitarian of them. They are givers.
Several of my coworkers raved about this place or I wouldn’t have bothered. There was also the fact that ALL of the places operate this way, so I might as well reach for the stars. Prior to my tour, about which I was as nervous as if I were taking the SATs again, my friend and coworker advised, “The Director is deaf in one ear. No, wait, both ears. Oh, I don’t know. But speak up.”
So when I arrived at the front door, eager to make a good impression, I yelled, “HELLO! I AM HERE FOR THE TOUR!” to which he responded, wincing, “I’m sorry the Director had to leave early today, but I’ll be happy to conduct your tour.”
Lovely. Off to a perfect start, we headed towards the “infant room.” This is where, you may have guessed, the infants hang out. It looked pretty nice. There were even a couple of infants in there, who all looked wise far beyond their years, like lifers who were about ten years into their sentence and pretty much resigned at this point. I think they were trying to tell me something with their eyes as I passed - but what? “Lady, are you really going to pay $100 to put your name on a list that, as far as you know, is totally bogus as soon as a friend of a friend of the deaf Director wants to get his kid in? Really. You have GOT to be smarter than this. I can barely sit up and I get it.”
At the end of the tour I thanked the guy and left, thinking, “Well, that seemed like a nice place.” But what do I know? As far as I remember, that was the first time I’d set foot in a daycare center in 32 years, at which time I had a very different perspective. All daycares are terrifying anyway.
So while I continued doggedly to make absolutely no headway on the daycare business I went about the next Really Responsible Task on my list - creating a will. “Why do we need a will?” Tom whined. “We don’t OWN anything.” Which isn’t exactly true - we own a lot of debt. That is to say, we own a house. Plus, I had to explain patiently to him, as he is the kind of person who would rather enjoy life than be Really Responsible all the time, we were now going to be parents, and we had to make sure our daughter would be taken care of in the unlikely event of our untimely demise. Tom looked completely shocked when I said this. I guess it hadn’t occurred to him. No wonder he’s such a happy guy. I wish these things didn’t occur to me, either.
A few phone calls revealed that the business of writing down, “I want my spouse to get it all and my kid to not be raised by creepy strangers,” can cost you anywhere between $1000-2500. It seems to me that when a court is involved, a lawyer is justified in charging a shitload of money for his services. Because courts are really, really scary. Attorneys are like the Indiana Joneses of the legal system, swinging out there on a rope in front of all the danger to bring you back whatever it is you needed to get or defend. But to write stuff on a piece of paper - stuff we TELL them to write, not stuff they come up with on their own - which doesn’t even have to be filed with a government entity? $2500 for that? Come ON.
But they do, because they can. I guess I should just be grateful they don’t charge me $100 to get on a waiting list to see a lawyer to pay him $2500 to write a will.
Next week’s task: write a plan to eliminate the National Debt. I just need to focus on something simple for a little while.
I couldn’t help but notice the excruciating hip pain I’ve been experiencing during the night. I noticed it mainly because my body makes sure I’m awake for it. God forbid I should sleep through any really interesting pain.
I explained the hip pain to my doctor who responded, typically, “That happens often in pregnancy.” My doctor responds this way to most issues I raise with her (and you may not believe this, but I am not a problem patient; I do my reading, and only bring up a concern on the rare occasions I haven’t found the answer myself). I could say, for example, “Yesterday while I was typing, three of my fingers fell off.” And she would respond, “That happens often in pregnancy,” and would most likely prescribe Tylenol. They (the “They” assigned to all Very Important Decisions) have determined Tylenol to be the one medication unlikely to cause instant death to a pregnant woman, so doctors like to dispense it liberally. “Take Tylenol,” sounds better than “Just deal with it,” particularly when addressing concerns like missing limbs.
She had an actual explanation for the hip thing though: my joints are loosening to allow my pelvis to widen so I can accomodate my growing baby. Now, that’s pretty cool, I admit. What the human body just automatically knows to do without my having to read it on babycenter.com first is pretty amazing. However, a reason is not a solution to the problem. Agreeing that this is, indeed, a very wise course of action for my body to take does not make it any less painful in the middle of the night.
In addition, the shifting and growing that is going on has managed to land everything on my bladder. Now, I am the kind of person who already had to stop at every rest stop on a road trip “just in case.” I have a terror of being too far from a bathroom, something that has always been inate in my makeup but was made worse by a situation in Costa Rica on my honeymoon involving no outdoor toilets, a lot of mud, and poor balance. Anyway. Suffice it to say that my life has now become absolutely consumed by bathroom locations. I have to know where the closest toilet is at all times, because I never know when this darling little girl will decide to start using my bladder as a trampoline. I realize there is very little to do in there, what with no TV or ipods (we run a tight, boarding-school-like ship in this here womb), but her new-found hobby has become increasingly stressful for me. I spend most of my time either going to the bathroom or thinking I very urgently need to go to the bathroom.
The thing is though, it doesn’t matter if you have babies or don’t have babies, it will all fall apart eventually anyway. “Use it or lose it” and “Use it and lose it” are nature’s mottos when it comes to women. If you have a baby, chances are good that later in life, due to all this stretching and pulling and realigning of parts, you will sneeze one day and your uterus will fall out, causing you much embarrassment at the public pool. However if you don’t have a baby, They say you have a higher liklihood of getting breast cancer. I managed to beat all the odds: I am having a baby, but not until the age of 35, which means my uterus will fall out AND I am more likely to get breast cancer.
The rules extend further than baby-making parts. For example if you don’t exercise, you’ll have a heart attack and die. If you do exercise, your hips, back, knees, feet, legs and torso will have to be replaced later in life. My mom has to have reconstructive knee surgery. She was stupid enough to be really healthy when she was younger, and ran marathons and irresponsible things like that. So now she must pay the price by slowly (and painfully) replacing each of her body parts with prosthetics. She is extremely creeped out by this, but I think it’ll be cool to have the Bionic Woman for a mother. When she leaps onto rooftops I will stand on the ground with my own busted and useless knees, thinking of the day I, too, will become part Terminator, and encouraging her by making the requisite ”DA-na-na-na-na,” Bionic Woman sound. That’s only if they let her through security at the airport though because apparently prosthetic knees can sometimes be mistaken for weapons of mass destruction. But then, so can a tube of toothpaste so you might as well have bionic knees.
What is my point? I don’t really have one. Except to say that one way or another, everything will fall out or off eventually so you might as well just do whatever you want, whether it’s birthing babies, running marathons or peeing your pants at work because your baby decided to solute Obama’s acceptance speech with a firm fist to the bladder.
I have to go to the bathroom.
“When I went into labor with my first I almost bled to death. I bled on the table for seven hours. I’m lucky to be alive.”
“You need to get wait-listed for pre-school NOW. In fact, if you had a brain in your head you would have registered your child before you conceived him. That’s not very responsible parenting.”
“They couldn’t figure out why I wouldn’t stop bleeding but I was starting to see spots when the doctor finally showed up and reached up into my raw, oozing VAGINA and…”
“My friend waited too long to get waitlisted and ended up finding some random woman in the phone book who turned out to be a Jehovah’s Witness and her baby’s first words were, ‘For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth.’ No,really…”
“And you can’t buy just ANY crib, because up until 2005 the safety regulations weren’t carefully monitored and 9 out of 10 children get their heads caught between the bars and die every year…”
“…and YANKED the rest of the placenta out with her FIST while I screamed, ‘Holy Mother of God please take me NOW!’…”
“…then one day the kid comes home and says Santa Claus is the work of the devil…”
“… HUGE gush of blood all over the bed and the doctor and a bright white light…”
“…CRIB DEATH…”
“…and I am just so relieved I got him into daycare finally, because what’s $2,500 a month for peace of mind and a caretaker who wasn’t charged with manslaughter? Charged, not sentenced but still…”
“…and then they CUT OFF MY CLITORIS…”
“…forecasting college will cost thirty million dollars a year by the year 2020…”
“…fed it to some CHICKENS…”
“…college degree to teach finger-painting plus there’s Early Mozart and Intro to Physics and you’ve signed up for astronomy already, right? No? Who let you procreate? What kind of a parent are you?!”
“BUT ABOVE ALL ELSE BE SURE TO KEEP YOUR STRESS LEVEL DOWN!!! IT ISN’T GOOD FOR THE BABY!”
One of the truly fantastic things about being pregnant is that while I’ve always been a pretty grouchy person, I can now totally get away with being an overbearing bitch with virtually no repercussions. Well, except with Tom. He sees through me like a cheap Frederick’s of Hollywood teddy. But everyone else, when witnessing one of my red-faced temper tantrums, goes, “Aw.”
One of the things that has always gotten my goat (what an odd expression; yet fun) is when people don’t do their jobs properly and nothing can get me going faster these days than lazy ineptitude. Nevermind that I’ve discovered “pregnancy brain” is not a myth, and I can’t do my own job properly anymore. But maybe because of that it’s even more imperative that other folks do.
Take, for example, the mailman. The mailman has exactly two jobs (whereas I, I feel the need to point out, have about 70,000): Take the outgoing mail away; leave the incoming mail in the box. But it seems that our mailman can only do one or the other on any given day. Therefore, if I leave an outgoing Netflix movie in the mailbox, with the little red indicator flag up, the mailman will likely only be capable of leaving mail that day. Yet oddly he will have the presence of mind to put the red flag down, obviously forgetting what he was supposed to do BEFORE that part, which always fools me into thinking maybe he’s caught on to the other 50% of his job duties. But at the bottom of the pile will be the tell-tale red envelope his under-stimulated cranium neglected to register and it NEVER FAILS that when I first see it, despite there being NO WAY the new movie could have shown up simultaneously, I will get a little excited. And then inevitably disappointed and really pissed off when I realize it was the movie I was trying to return.
I have very little energy these days. My entertainment, particularly during the week when I use what little energy I do have to complete 9 -10 hour work days, depends solely on Netflix. When the mailman can’t do ONE of his TWO jobs correctly he has completely ruined a pregnant woman’s entire social life. So every afternoon I make the treacherous stomp up our steep driveway ranting like a lunatic because the mailman failed me once again. “Aw,” go the neighbors.
Another thing that really chaps my hide (not as fun as getting my goat) is that people just can’t let go of the fact that the Fourth of July is over. It’s OVER, people. In fact, it was over WEEKS ago. What this means, and I’m very sorry to break this to you, is that fireworks are NO LONGER ACCEPTABLE until December 31st. Normally I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if you wanted to blow out your eardrums all night long, every night, two doors down from my house, but my dog minds A LOT. And when my dog minds, I mind. Because this means she barks and carries on at whatever ungodly hour (because apparently people who worship the Fourth do not have to get up early for work the next day) you choose to titillate your unimaginative senses FOR THE FIFTEENTH NIGHT RUNNING with a few illegal explosions in our very quiet, very dog-friendly neighborhood.
And it’s not like she’s only bothered during the actual fireworks. My dog who normally has the memory of a gnat is now terrified of going outdoors anywhere close to dark. Despite the fact that the sun doesn’t set until 10pm at this time of year, Theo, to be on the safe side, boycotts the outdoors as of 4pm and retreats to her perception of safety: under the bed. Which means getting her to go to the bathroom between the hours of 4pm and 8am is a colossal struggle that usually ends in someone getting bitten.
The other night, when we hadn’t seen the dog in about two days, I, like a complete moron, stuck my arm under the bed in an attempt to coax Theo out and of course got my hand chomped. I completely lost my shit (haven’t I provided this dog with absolutely every possible luxury, including unending amounts of love and devotion? and this is how I am treated?!) and started screaming at the top of my lungs while simultaeneously slapping a yard stick hard against the tile floor about a foot away from her face, “GET OUT HERE GODDAMNIT! YOU’D BETTER COME OUT HERE! I’M GOING TO BEAT YOUR ASS YOU LITTLE SHIT!” I don’t remember the exact words, but you get the gist.
Tom came flying down the stairs at the commotion, gently wrestled the yardstick away from the crazy pregnant woman, and, amidst a lot of growling and snarling (Theo’s, not Tom’s) finally got the dog out and took her outside for a pee.
When he got back he said casually, “Next time you threaten to beat the dog while making highly suspicious slapping noises with a yardstick, you may want to make sure the windows are closed.”
Apparently several suspicious neighbors had heard my innocent little tirade and come out to investigate. I was mortified. I volunteered at the ASPCA! I donate money to animal shelters every year! I WORSHIP this dog! I’M the one who got bitten! And now all our rude neighbors who can’t give up their firecrackers think I beat my dog when I’m the one who should be getting the sympathy here. ME! Me, the poor pregnant lady who can’t get any sleep because her dog is busy barking and biting her!
“Aw,” anyone? Anyone?
I think my body’s newfound discovery that it can create life has gone to its head. Er, my head. Whatever. In any case, it has decided, completely independently of my brain, that if it can create a whole human being without any outside assistance, it makes sense to go ahead and try to take over the world.
My body, of which I no longer have any control (if indeed I ever did; I’m beginning to think it has LET me think I was in control this whole time as a part of its ingenius plan) is approaching this lofty goal via several strategic maneuvers simultaneously. The first is to cultivate my breasts into two giant, independent living organisms that will conquer, Godzilla-like, the planet Earth, one city at a time.
My body launched its plan almost immediately after conception. “Hey,” it said to itself (but not through my ears, lest the traitors relay the message to the conscious part of my brain), “if we can create a whole person in the uterus, why not in other parts? There’s TONS of unused space in the boobies! And - hey - there’s TWO of them! We can conquer the world twice as fast!”
Ever since then my breasts have been steadily swelling on a daily basis to the point where when I walk down the street, Asian tourists point at me, shriek, and run terrified in the opposite direction. Tom and I have nicknamed my twin Benedict Arnolds Pinky and the Brain (”What do you want to do today Brain?” I hear one whisper to the other in the middle of the night. “The same thing we do every day, Pinky - try to take over the world!”)
I think they’ve already succeeded with the male population. From what I can tell, I need only be within a ten-foot radius to render the male of the species completely helpless. That part’s pretty cool, actually.
Meanwhile, not the type of body to put all its eggs in one basket, it has launched the simultaneous Take Over the World By Emitting Deadly Gasses Until Everybody Is Dead campaign. Seriously, I’m surprised Bush’s minions haven’t arrived at our house seeking out Weapons of Mass Destruction. There is a green cloud that hovers over our home, and I think the dog’s dead. Tom says no amount of gas can make him love me less, which is very sweet, but I know a sense of self-preservation is going to kick in for him at any time, and he will understandably try to smother me in my sleep. My body has already thought of this and has it covered - it’ll just send the breasts in to hypnotize him, something that has become sort of a new-found hobby for my body which, I have noted, doesn’t seem to bother Tom a whole lot.
But while other people can always run away, I can’t. I’m stuck with myself. I try scurrying quickly to another room when I’ve dropped a bomb but there are only so many rooms in the house. I think perhaps this approach might backfire on my oh-so-clever body, because I’m feeling awfully light-headed, not to mention lonely.
So don’t panic yet; it’s very likely I’ll be the cause of my own destruction without anyone having to call in Mosura. However, if you see a giant tit coming at you, you may want to run away just in case.
P.S. for funnsies, plug the title of this blog into an online Japanese-English translator
