Small Talk

Dear Wonderful Coworkers,

I love working with you. You believe in what you do, you support your friends at work. You have the best intentions. So when you see a pregnant lady, you ask her how she is doing. How she is feeling. When she is due.

I answer these questions about fourteen times a day.

So, I am going to get a T-shirt printed, to answer these questions. The words will be printed on the back of the T-shirt, because the front is rather bulbous at the moment and will make reading difficult. I've considered bold font, highlighting, playing with the colors, but after consideration, a consistent font and black text will suffice, especially since you will have to read it as I am walking away.

How am I feeling?

Well, since you asked, do you know what a pelvic floor is? Mine hurts.

I have to pee every half hour, which means I have to run into people in the halls, which means I have to answer questions.

I'm hungry all the time. In fact, if you are reading this, it is likely I just ate an entire package of chocolate covered donuts from the vending machine.

My current theme song is "She Bop" by Cyndi Lauper since my husband won't have sex with me.

A little irritated when someone says "You're so big, it looks like you could give birth any day now!"

Yes, I have four and a half weeks left. No, I'm not ready for it to happen right now. This little girl will come when she's good and ready. No, I'm not worried about the pain. Are you?

I'm feeling

wired

uninspired

tired.

Thanks for asking. Love, Me.

Bodily Functions, Whether I Like It Or Not

I feel like I'm at the end of my rope.

Between furloughs and no pay raises for two years, and with the baby coming, I have stopped taking online writing courses.

I haven't slept well since September. I currently have bronchitis and am getting four or five hours of sleep a night, well below what I need to feel sane. I have been suffering from depression. I have been cringing when I look in the mirror, because of the weight I've gained in the past three months. Between sinus infections and bronchitis, I haven't consistently exercised in three weeks.

With no writing goals my creative outlets are narrowed. I refuse to look into medication for my depression because it feels like a capitulation, and I don't want to give in, although if therapy continues to fail I will take medication rather than enter post-partum depression. I feel less like myself than I ever have.

There are ludicrous, hilarious, sometimes beautiful moments juxtaposed to all of this.

For example, last weekend I took The Kid to a birthday party at an indoor playground and he peed and pooped all over the play equipment. He rarely has accidents, so I did not have any extra clothes for him. He was very upset and I held him and rushed him to the bathroom where I cleaned him up. He wanted me to leave him there, go home, and get extra clothes for him. He did not want to stop playing. Another mother offered me her extra clothes - she had a little girl, so they were pink pants.

Me: "It's either your dirty jeans or these pants."
The Kid: "I don't like the color! Those are girl's pants!"
Me: "Well, you can't play naked."
The Kid: "You go home. Get me clean pants. I stay here, wait for you."
Me: "I can't leave you here alone."
The Kid: "You go home."
Me: "Which ones? The dirty ones or the pink ones?"
The Kid: "I don't like those girl pants!"

We are in a restroom stall where other mothers can hear us. Both of us are getting increasingly upset at this point, and he is crying, and I'm about to cry. I take his little bare-butt body in my arms, and I hold him. He instantly relaxes and his breathing becomes even, calm. I wrap his jacket around his waist, and we go home. I ignore offers of birthday cake. At that point, I really don't want to sit with a naked kid and eat birthday cake, especially when I'm about to cry.

I was embarrassed that my son had an accident, embarrassed that I wasn't prepared with clean extra clothes, embarrassed that I couldn't get him to wear the clean pants. But also, proud of him that he can assert himself: style evidently comes before practical considerations. And so grateful that I can comfort him and choose to accept him as he is, and convey that to him, and make him feel loved no matter what.

And this bronchitis. Because I am seven months pregnant, when I cough or sneeze, I pee. Involuntarily. Cough, cough, cough. Pee, pee, pee. Great huge jets of it, even though I go to the bathroom every five minutes to keep my bladder empty. High barking coughs. Flooded pants. Maybe it's because I'm at the end of my rope, or maybe I'm just going crazy enough to find this funny, but it makes me laugh every time it happens.

The Old Man is doing extra laundry just to keep up with the two of us.

Raw

"Even raw and messy emotions are a form of light, crackling, bursting with energy." - Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

The veil between the mask I use to protect myself from the outside world and the animal self on the inside is thin.

I have raw

cravings
sarcasm
sexual desires
dreams
anger
savage moods
fatigue.

I'm supposed to be glowing right now, apparently, and buying baby blankets.

My body is raw. It is open for everyone to comment on how big I am and how much weight I've gained - I'm a maternity shirt on display. Too big? Not big enough? Ornery? Ornerier than usual? How am I feeling?

How are you feeling? Would you like to be asked this question 12 times a day? Would you begin to formulate creative answers? Would you avoid people, or would you love the attention?

I had this crazy notion last night while I couldn't sleep from 2:30 AM to 3:45 AM, that perhaps I should embrace all these changes, stop trying to keep the wolf on a chain and just let her out. After all, I can't control the way I look. To pretend I can is a waste of energy.

There is energy in this. Energy in the cravings and the strange sleep cycles and the dreams where I'm taking swimming lessons with past boyfriends. Directly beneath the fatigue, so close to the back of my eyelids, a restlessness is bubbling up. I feel it in the kicks and turns of my little girl.

I sense that there is some wild energy that needs to be let out, that I need to relinquish control - to give in to the cravings and the fatigue and even the rage - because it is something special that I will only have while this little life is inside me.

Pop Culture wisdom

Last night The Old Man cut me loose at 6:00 pm, probably because I was horizontal and half-lidded on the couch. While he and The Kid played and continued the potty training downstairs, I went upstairs to read and write and sleep. I did sleep, starting at 7:00 pm, but during that hour of reading/writing time, I discovered something.

I had been thinking about Shelly from Northern Exposure because reruns are playing on PBS. Season 5, Episode 11: Baby Blues. Shelly has a baby shower which reminded me of mine. Incredibly awkward and horrible. When people try to guess how big around you are, it's never a good thing. Shelly takes off from her baby shower and meets a circle of women in the woods, including Regina King as Mom Nature. Mom Nature gives her a dose of reality. She's not going to tell her it's all rosy, but it's not all bad either, being a mom. It's real talk - no horror stories, but no denial either that it's an incredibly difficult time in a woman's life. Acknowledgement that if it weren't for the cuteness of kids, parents would likely throw them out a window.

(And yes, I do get my wisdom from pop culture. You should see my dog-eared copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy).

Shelly got me thinking about my aversion to advice. She was navigating two different kinds of advice. One kind was poison and was making her baby blues worse, and the other kind was a group of women sharing the reality of momhood.

I know the advice to discount off-hand:

You should quit your job. Oh yeah, genius? And then where will we live? In a trailer home in Dacono?
You should give up your officer's commission. I would want my wife to stop doing law enforcement. It's just too dangerous. Well, old white guy, I've got some news for you. Husbands don't run the world or makes decisions for their wives. Now get out of my face.
Children in daycare are raised with substandard values. Only a man whose wife stopped working when they had kids could sit there and smugly say this. (I happen to like The Kid's daycare. The teachers are awesome and The Kid learns and plays and is exposed to a healthy routine every day.)

I'm worse at listening to the good advice. I think I should be super-woman, and not need to hear guidance from anybody. Since when in the history of the world have women raised kids on their own? Only in this current, rich, developed society (particularly white culture) are women isolated and expected to do it all - although in our household it translates to two parents expected to do it all, because my husband is a full-time dad as well as a full-time game warden.

So, thinking all these things, I cracked open Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and she set me straight:

p. 179 "The older women were the arks of instinctual knowing and behavior who could invest the young mothers with the same. Women give this knowing to each other through words, but also by other means....The instinctual self always blesses and helps those who come after. It is this way among healthy creatures and among healthy humans. In this way the child-mother is swept across the threshold into the circle of mature mothers, who welcome her with jokes, gifts, and stories."

And mature mothers can be of any age, and don't even have to have kids. Annie's a mature mother, because she has this uncanny ability to read people and understand their particular psychic/spiritual predicaments.

p. 181 "Even if you had the most wonderful mother in the world, you may eventually have more than one. As I have often told my own daughters, "You are born to one mother, but if you are lucky, you will have more than one. And among them all you will find most of what you need." Your relationships with las todas madres, the many mothers, will most likely be ongoing ones, for the need for guidance and advisement is never outgrown, nor, from the point of view of women's deep creative life, should it ever be."

I have mastered the ability to sift out the negative, judgmental advice. But I am a novice when it comes to opening myself to wisdom from the people around me, especially the women.

Crazy how when Shelly or Buffy tell me something from the television, I internalize it, but when women I know and trust try to do the same, I reject it.

Hey baby in my belly. You have no idea how much you're shaking up your ma's head.