One Hundred and Twenty Five

Also, apropos of nothing, please note that THIS year’s list of 125 Christmas Gift Ideas Under $25 Dollars is going live today at Style Lush, so be sure to check it out.  If for no other reason than to buy yourself some ribbon candy.  You know you want to.

Well, That Was Fun*

And by *Fun, I mean: That sucked.

So last Monday (a week ago), Mr. E, because he is a saint among men, got home from work, ate a ham sandwich, took the grocery list, and went to the big cheap far away grocery store to do the Thanksgiving grocery shopping.  He got home about 9 ish, bearing bags of cranberry sauce (jellied AND whole berry) and a smallish Butterball turkey and all excited about finding gluten free chicken broth- I was sitting in the living room and he kept running in to show me things while he put them away, and I really did try to muster up as much enthusiasm as I could for the mini tube of Apricot Face Scrub he had purchased, but right about this time, I was starting to really really really not feel so good.

My “morning sickness” always gets worse as the day goes on, but this was my regular morning sickness with the dial turned up.  I sort of staggered off the couch and into the bathroom and that’s when I started to throw up. And I threw up every few hours, all night long, until about 6:30 in the morning.

The first time I threw up, I figured I’d eaten something weird or  I had a 24 hour virus or something – it didn’t occur to me at ALL that it had anything to do with morning sickness because when I was pregnant with Eli I hadn’t thrown up the entire time.

But meanwhile, I threw up, all night long.

When Tuesday morning rolled around, I still felt horrible, like I would probably throw up at any moment, but I wasn’t actually throwing up anymore, so instead I just laid around in bed and hoped for death.  It was a really fun Tuesday.

As the day wound down, I tried to eat some applesauce, and then I threw up again.

At this point, I was sort of lost as to what to do.  From everything that I’ve been led to believe, throwing up is totally normal in the first trimester of pregnancy.  My sister in law threw up every morning for her entire pregnancy.  And my doctor knew I was feeling sick and I’d never had a doctor act like it was a big deal – they either told me that since I was still gaining weight, I was obviously fine, or else that it was a really! great! sign! of a healthy pregnancy.

And also, here’s something you may already know about me.  I am…not good with authority. I am not good at saying “No.” I am not good at making a stink, at standing up for myself, at making demands. I am a rule follower, the quiet one in the corner who often goes ignored. I don’t want to make anyone mad or stress anyone out or cause any problems or make anyone feel….god forbid, UNCOMFORTABLE.  I tend to suffer in silence.

So here’s what I did.  You’re gonna laugh.  But I sat there, sick as hell, and I dug down deep, and I channeled A’Dell.  I don’t know who among you has been lucky enough to get to know A’Dell, but I got to hang out with her at The Blathering this year, and let me tell you, the woman? She takes no shit.  And there were about seven times when I talked to her or got emails from her or just watched her out of the corner of my eye – that I said to myself “Self, if you ever need someone on your side in a battle, that is the woman to have.”  And so I was lying there, absolutely miserable, throwing up applesauce, and I thought “Would A’Dell take this shit?  Would A’Dell lie in bed for 48 hours wanting to DIE when they make ACTUAL medicine for this?  She SO would not.”

And so I channeled A’Dell and I called the night nurse at Labor and Delivery.  I was pretty convinced that they were going to either tell me to 1. suck it up (pregnant women throw up! Deal with it!) or get me a prescription for something over the phone.  Instead, they asked me a bunch of questions and then they told me I had to come into Labor and Delivery right the heck then.

And so we bundled up Eli and we drove to Labor and Delivery, and let me tell you, it only took a tiny little detour through the ninth gate of Hell Med Center Emergency Room to make me really really really grateful for my health insurance, for the fact that I didn’t have to sit in that emergency room, that I live two minutes from a great hospital, that I didn’t have a broken arm or the swine flu two days before Thanksgiving.  That emergency room at 9 oclock at night was a sight I hope never to have to witness again, and then when we got to Labor and Delivery and it was so…quiet and peaceful and clean and empty and calm and dark…it was like ascending into heaven.  I felt both horribly unworthy and profoundly grateful.

Anyway, they made me pee in a cup, and as soon as she SAW my urine, the nurse started shaking her head and beginning the process to get me hooked up to an IV.  And then they asked me a million questions and took about nine blood samples and listened the heartbeat and filled me full of IV fluid and then I threw up AGAIN.

So I got a shot of Zofr@n in my IV, I ate some pears a few hours later, the babys heart rate went down, I was pronounced fine, the baby was pronounced fine, and I was sent home with some prescriptions and feeling really proud of myself for finally speaking up and saying “Um, hi, is this ok?”  If you can call that speaking up for yourself.

The bad news is that I’ve been hearing about this Zofr@an for two pregnancies now and I kind of thought that the second it touched my lips I’d be instantly transported to some mountain in the Swiss Alps where I’d be running through fields of wildflowers singing “The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuusic” and it doesn’t quite do that for me.  But it keeps me from throwing up and I feel less like I want to die as long as I keep on top of the nausea and that’s really all you can ask for, I guess.

The other good news is that the retail price of 3o Zofr@n is $375 dollars and I paid $5, and if I was grateful for my health insurance before, now I am really really really grateful for my health insurance.

Oh, and we had another ultrasound this morning and the baby is totally 100% doing fine and also really likes to wiggle.

The other bad news is that the morning sickness kind of got Thanksgiving.  I looked down at my plate of mashed potatoes on Thursday afternoon and I just felt sad.  But the GOOD news is that Mr. E?  IS SUCH A ROCK STAR.  He stayed home from work for two days and he did every single thing that needed doing for a week and he cooked us an entire Thanksgiving dinner AND cleaned the entire thing up and he didn’t even bat an eyelash when I didn’t eat too much of it, and he’s just…he’s the best.  Really, there are no words.

Anyway, let’s hope things are on the upswing.  I’m very hopeful the morning sickness won’t get Christmas.   And if it tries, I’m totally going to sick A’Dell on it.

 

 

 

About A Boy

Now that the whole world (including my next door neighbor!) knows I’m pregnant, everyone keeps asking me the same thing – do I want the next one to be a boy or a girl?

And of course, because it’s me, I can’t answer that question with a simple yes or no.

Before Eli was born, I really really really really wanted a girl.  And I wanted a girl until the minute he was placed in my arms, and then of course as I have stated one hundred million times since then, I wouldn’t trade him for all the girls in all the world.  I mean, honestly, I couldn’t care less – he could be a girl, a boy, an iguana, or Stuart C. Little, he’s my Eli.  He’s not what I had cooked up ahead of time as what I wanted, but luckily, someone else is in charge, because he’s what I got, and man, he’s so so so so much better than what I thought I wanted.

The best way I have ever been to able to describe it is that sometimes I look down at this little blond creature lurking around my knees and I think “Oh. You.  Yes!  It’s YOU.  If I had known you were going to be YOU, I wouldn’t have worried at all.”

So this next time.  I don’t know.  If I have a boy, I will be thrilled, because it will be a brother that Eli can drink too much beer with some day and who can give him a scar over his eyebrow and I have a perfect boy name picked out and because when I think about NOT having a boy, not having another gummy toothed chicken legged snicklefritz, I feel sad.  Plus I already have all the clothes.

But oh, a girl.  I am not sure how to say this, but I just…I think of not EVER having a girl and that feels impossible.  It doesn’t have to be NOW, but some day I want to buy EVERYTHING in the little girls department of Target and make pinafores and take a little girl to the Nutcracker in a new Christmas dress.  I want to share Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Frankie Landau Banks with my daughter and I’m sure this is some kind of horrible thing to say but I just can’t see Eli curled up with Rilla of Ingleside, you know? So.  It doesn’t have to be NOW, but some day.  Because I just can’t imagine not having a girl ever.

So if this is a girl, it kind of takes the pressure off.  I don’t have to HAVE a third kid, a third kid can be like, optional or a fun accident or whatever!

And I won’t lie, I think it’s a girl.  Even though I have a bad track record in this particular area, it feels like a girl.  When I talk to the baby, I talk to her, and I call her K Dub, and I remind her that I am totally not going to let her wear any makeup until she’s at least sixteen as revenge for this terrible morning sickness.  (although to be fair Eli is totally not allowed to wear any makeup until he’s sixteen either.)

I just have this vision.  A vision of five or six years down the road, on a hot summer day somewhere in the great state of Vermont, of a skinny girl in a faded one piece yellow swimsuit, standing on the dock of a lake with a strap hanging off of one bony shoulder.  She’s turned half way away from me, this girl with Mr. E’s dark hair and blue eyes, and I can see one drip of water slipping off one dark wet flip of hair, and I know that she is my daughter.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to let go of that girl, even if she’s not mine to know in this life.

I think I kind of just said I want both.  Did I say that?  It’s so true.  I want a girl AND I want a boy.  But since I am fairly certain I am not having twins, I’ll just say that it makes no sense and it isn’t really fair of me to say this since I am getting a BABY out of it either way, but I think whatever I’m having, I’ll have to say goodbye to a some one, a dream, one way or another.  And I think I’ll be really sad – there is real loss there.  Whether you are saying goodbye to skinny boy chicken legs and JKF Jr. rompers, or saying goodbye to pigtails and pink ribbons, it’s loss.  It’s still goodbye.

And I hope to remind myself of Eli – of how I look down at him and know that he is just who he was meant to be, just who I need, just as he is.  That what I wanted had very little to do with it.  That it’s just his Eli ness, really, that matters, not the dresses or the rompers or what books he’ll love, or any of that.

And also?  I really can’t wait to meet you, whoever you are.

From A Land Down Under

What is up!?

We got back from Australia on Wednesday and let me say right off the that bat that we only took six pictures because we suck and also I think Mr. E may have dropped the camera half way through the trip.  It was a very interesting trip – one thing you might not know about me is that I like to have a lot of space between international travel because what happens is that it turns out that I don’t really like international travel so usually trips to places like Mexico or France start out with me sitting on a plane thinking “Fuck! I hate travel.  Why am I doing this?” and then I spend the next 14 days hyperventilating about how I don’t understand one damn word anyone is saying to me and how I just want to be able to order a hamburger on a bun from the children’s menu and why does everyone in this country smoke so much?  So it takes like three years for me to forget how much I hate international travel and this is why I space things like this out.  Because I hate everything.

Anyway.

I will say that I did enjoy myself – mostly because Australia is pretty much like visiting LA or America.  They have seven dollar lattes, yes, and some weird candy in the grocery store, but mostly everyone knows what you are saying when you ask for ketchup for your fries and it makes a nervous traveler such as myself feel right at home.  However I would like to recommend not traveling anywhere farther than your local McDonald’s Play Land when you are six or eight weeks pregnant since one day long ago I decided to go to France when I was six weeks pregnant with Eli and then just now to go to Australia when I was eight weeks pregnant with Noodle Number Two and both of these rotten decisions culminated with me hunched over an airsick bag moaning Hail Marys in my head as I tried not to lose my lunch on the tarmac at LAX.  I will forever consider the breakfast served to me by Delta Airlines on my return flight from Australia to be one of the great atrocities prepetrated on me – and all of humanity – for all of  time.  When the customs man asked me if I had any airline food with me I jauntily replied “Oh, no, I am 100% certain I left ALL my food on that plane” and luckily Mr. E hauled me away from that interaction before I had to time to get “FOR SURE HAS SWINE FLU” stamped on my forehead by the US Department of Homeland Security.  Nevertheless it should be noted that after I tossed ALL my chunks at the end of that first flight, my wise and understanding husband elected to bypass the next plane to Salt Lake City and the plane after that to San Francisco and the BART ride to Oakland and the car ride to San Francisco and we rented a car and drove for five and half and hours and then  voila we were home and my babyeeeeee was burying his little blond head in my neck and then god laughed and turned the morning sickness up another two notches.

One final word regarding travel and pregnancy – and don’t say I never give you any free advice – because here it is, my best piece of advice of all time.  For the love of god, for all that is holy and right with the world, don’t get yourself good and knocked up and travel to a country which routinely serves people BAKED BEANS FOR BREAKFAST.  Gag.

After we got back from Australia I had to go have a quicky ultrasound on FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH because my OB decided that right after she noted in my chart that I am on ANTI ANXIETY MEDICINE WHICH I TAKE FOR ANXIETY that she would look for the baby and then she would not find the baby and then she would decide to tell me that she could only see the heartbeat but no baby so maybe my dates were off by a few days or ELSE there was no baby and or if there was a baby the baby would die and I would have a miscarriage in Australia but not to worry because she’s never heard anything bad about their medical care down there hardly ever! Fun!

Also adding to the fun was the fact that I had to give a urine sample during that visit and after I did my business I flushed the toilet and Eli was in the bathroom with me and due to the fact that the toilet flush at the doctor’s office is the loudest toilet flush in the history of known time, he burst into hysterical tears.  Then when the nurse was done dicking around with my urine, she gave it  back to me to flush down the toilet.  I couldn’t hold the worlds heaviest bathroom door open AND flush the worlds loudest toilet at the same timea, so Eli was once again trapped in the bathroom with me, and at the sound of the worlds loudest toilet flushing for the SECOND time, he LOST HIS MIND.  The  nurse opened the worlds heaviest door to see who was killing a toddler in the bathroom and smacked it right into Eli’s head.  So by the time we headed in for the physical exam where the doctor was ready to give me a big list of things to be anxious about, Eli was in a sad state, alternating between silent tears and moaning “I want mommy,” and the only thing that would shut him up was a Dr. Pepper Lip Smacker I had in my purse.   He sat next to me, smearing lip smacker across his forehead and into his cheeks and into his chin as he moaned and clutched my hand – I was lying next to him on the exam table half naked with my cha cha up in the air – and this was when they decided to tell me that they saw “No baby!” but Not To Worry I could just probably have a miscarriage in Australia! With their excellent medical care!”  On the bright side, the thick coating of Lip Smacker covering Eli repelled tears like water off a ducks back.  And he smelled really great for the rest of the day.  Just like Dr. Pepper!

Needless to say I am still sick as a dog and we had an ultrasound on Friday THE THIRTEENTH and holy smokes, there’s a BABY in there you guys.  With legs and feet and TINY TOES.  It is the strangest thing on earth – I am so sick all the time but it never feels like it’s because I am having a BABY.  And yet, there it was, noodley as could be.

The morning sickness totally pisses me off – I feel like gak every minute of the day and all I can do is feebly try to calculate when it may have ended or abated or tapered off or quit RUINING MY LIFE the first time around but as best I can tell I think I have like, four more weeks of this, at least, and when I think about that I want to die, and it just pisses me off, I feel like it’s stealing all the stuff I love to do and it’s stealing months of Eli’s life and it got Halloween – we didn’t go to the pumpkin patch and Eli wore his Batman pajamas instead of a real costume and he couldn’t even carve a pumpkin because the one we got him from thhe cardboard bin at the grocery store was half rotten.  The morning sickness stole Halloween and it makes me mad and it makes me feel guilty and so now I am concentrating all my might on not letting it steal Thanksgiving.  As god is my witness I will make that GODDAMNED burlap table runner or else!  But I’m not gonna lie, I think about stuffing and I kind of want to slit my wrists.

All I can say is that this kid?  Better be smart AS HELL.

 

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Wow.  Yesterday was really a low point.  Thank you so much for all of your understanding and sympathy – it says such good things about all of you that no one felt it necessary to tell me to quit complaining and to be grateful for my miracle.

Speaking of miracles:

It would be nice if I could write ONE THING EVER that didn’t contain the line “because of my childhood”, but alas, today is not that day.

Although heck, maybe it’s not because of my childhood, maybe it’s just a personality flaw, but for whatever reason, I tend to get really nervous about STUFF.  Having the right stuff and having enough stuff.  When we were waiting for Eli, I bought FOUR hooded baby towels and I was worried that wasn’t enough.  I am well known for giving too many Christmas presents, making too much food for parties, taking on too many projects.  I like to yell out “go big or go home” while I’m picking $37 dollars worth of blueberries. I’m the girl with 46 tank tops, even though I only ever wear the top four on the stack.  I like to be prepared.

For this reason change can be really hard for me, and really expensive.  What I like to do while I am trying not to spend money on all the things in the world is to worry about how I cannot afford all the things in the world even though I obviously need them.  When Eli was on his way, it was not reassuring to me to be told that I did not need a Pottery Barn Kids rocking chair.  I FELT as though I needed one, and all I wanted to know was how I was going to get one.

And then of course in the end we had all that we needed and more, and it turned out that things we did not have, we bought. I found a chair just like the one from Pottery Barn Kids from Walmart for $200 dollars, but even if I hadn’t, Eli didn’t really take to being rocked.

And yet, none of that stopped me from worrying about not having those things ahead of time.

This time I am less stressed, in general, because we already have the rocking chair and the car seat and the kimono snap shirts.  We’ll find a way to buy a trundle bed and a double jogging stroller.  There is lot less worry about BABY things, but I enjoy transferring these feelings of distress and so this time I worried about what in gods name would I wear.

For reasons so varied and mind numbing it would take a year to go through them, I weigh 50 more pounds this pregnancy than my last.  This means that my sad collection of maternity clothes from last time mostly don’t fit me, and some of the things I borrowed last time are packed up because my friend is moving, or because someone else was wearing them and I haven’t gotten them back yet (and I am sure they are too small anyway).  The minute I found out I was pregnant my non maternity jeans stopped fitting me and this means I have spent the last month wearing two pairs of sweatpants and a pair of paint stained pajama pants.  I put hundreds of dollars worth of maternity stuff into my online cart at Old Navy, but right now, we just don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend on maternity sweatshirts.  I mean,  I could have squeezed one or two pairs of Old Navy maternity jeans into the budget, but it wouldn’t have been pretty.   And then I would have had to try on maternity jeans.

Lots of worry about this.  Especially lately, when I realized that all I had to wear in Australia were sweatpants and summer dresses.  (And you might well wonder how we can’t afford PANTS when we can afford to go to Australia, and the reason is that our tickets were free, and we made the reservations before furloughs were announced, and now we’re going to Australia anyway even though we can’t really afford it.)

Anyway.  A few days ago I was IM’ing Maggie about how I was already too fat pregnant to wear my non maternity jeans and how I had nothing to wear and she just casually asked “do you want to borrow my maternity stuff?”  and I replied yes as fast as my swollen fingers could type YES and that is how this morning after my walk with Eli I returned home to find an enormous box FULL of clothes on my front porch, more maternity clothes than I could wear in eight pregnancies, like, a million dollars worth of maternity clothes, and Maggie refuses to tell me how much this GINORMOUS BOX cost to mail so I can send her a check, but all I can say is that it is things like this that make me think back to my post about belief and how god provides and feel truly amazed by life.  And normally I don’t like to assign these things to God, because I think we can all agree that in this case it is MAGGIE who is the awesome, rather than the LORD, but all I know is that all of those jeans fit me and Maggie is like nine feet taller than I am and today I ate a cheese sandwich and I am not wearing sweats and I am not wearing pajama pants I AM WEARING JEANS and I feel like a human being again and whoo boy, from where I sit, it sure as heck fire feels like a miracle.

There aren’t really words for how it feels when someone lifts worry from your shoulders with nothing more than the goodness of their heart, simply by hearing what you need and making it happen, but I will try anyway:

Thank you Maggie.  Thank you so very much.

Storm

Try tropic for your balm,
Try storm,
And after storm, calm.
Try snow of heaven, heavy, soft and slow,
Brilliant and warm.
Nothing will help, and nothing do much harm.
— “Of the Properties of Nature for Healing an Illness” by Genevieve Taggard

 

I spend my days with clenched teeth.  Breathe in and out, slowly.  Try to figure out minutes left – to figure out whether I can make it to naptime, whether I can make it through naptime, whether I can play another episode of Sesame Street, whether it’s worse to have to change a diaper or to keep smelling an unchanged one.  Mr. E calls and says he missed his bus and I want to cry, I haven’t prepared to make it to 6:15, only 5:35, and I think of the scene in Terms from Endearment and I want to stand in my kitchen and scream “GIVE MY DAUGHTER HER SHOT!” but I simply recalculate, 45 more minutes to make it through.

And I clench my teeth and I calculate how many days and minutes and seconds might be left until I don’t feel like sick hot dragged from the bottom of the trash can mess.

It’s a tricky business, complaining about a blessing, but I can only warp my true nature into so many optimistic frames before things break.  I am not an optimist when it comes to my body, because I spent fifteen years blacking out and throwing up every month and nothing not nothing could fix it, and because in the 1st grade I was the shortest and in the 8th grade I was the shortest and now I am almost always the shortest, and because I can’t eat real bread and because I cried on the boat trip to Alcatraz because I felt so sick in those fifteen minutes I truly wanted to throw myself overboard and I knew I’d have to get back on the boat to come home.  Or live at Alcatraz forever, which I did in fact consider.

I don’t know if it’s possible to explain how much I hate being pregnant.  I am a prisoner in my own body.  I walk into my kitchen and turn around and walk out.  Nothing can fix this, if I want to keep upright I can force down some rice and some green apple slices but NOTHING can fix this never ending nausea.  I am always cold and sick and things feel down right fizzy.  I can’t breathe, I stagger from the shower, gasping.  My belly button hurts.  I hate the clothes. I grow larger every day.  I have to pee all night long, and I hurt and my skin itches and every plan for the future has to be put off for another year and I have to think “next year I’ll get to do that, if I’m lucky I can run a half marathon NEXT YEAR” and through it all I am FURIOUS that this is how it works, that I will have to go through this  however many times I want to have children and I am reminded again why it took me over three years to want to do this again, and best of all you aren’t really supposed to complain about this because some people can’t even have children you ungrateful wench.

And you try to tell anyone, everyone, how being sick every waking of every minute feels and you ALWAYS know they are thinking “Well, that’s a little bit rich, isn’t it?  She’s taking things a little far this time.”

And still.  Clench clench clench.

I hate this, so very muchly.

 

About Last Night

An email I just got from Mr. E:

I’m just remembering now, but, last night… did we actually spend a not-insignificant amount of time designing a bra for female horses? And was it called the “Gal-Up”?  I mean, did we actually do that? Well, if so, I don’t know if there are two people more suited for each other in the whole world…

Sick of It

I’m wondering if this gluten free thing can be compared to the five stages of grief, or if it’s just that it’s fall or if it’s that I’m pregnant or what.

Whatever the reason though, I am here to tell you that for the first time, I am well and truly sick of being gluten free.  I really really hate it.  You could say I’m in the anger stage.

My favorite thing in the whole world is a cold crusty doughy bagel with cream cheese.  I ate one every single day when I was pregnant with Eli, and I want my bagel, dammit! I want to be able to go to the Pita Pit and get a chicken pita and a smoothie and I don’t want to have to order a salad. I am tired of pancakes and pizza with a weird funky after taste to them. I want to eat fudgy slices of chocolate cake with thick chocolate frosting and I want to be able to walk into Trader Joe’s and throw 14 premade dinners in my cart and to not have to think twice about it. I don’t want to spend an hour and half making dinner or an hour and half feeling guilty because my husband had to make dinner AGAIN while I sit in bed moaning about why in god’s name it’s called MORNING sickness.  I want to pick pumpkins and eat a cinnamon apple cider donut along side everyone else.  I want to be able to eat a box Kraft Mac and Cheese for lunch if that’s what I want to eat.  I want to be able to call up Pizza Hut and half an hour later have a Veggie Supreme pizza arrive at my door.  I want to be able to go eat chinese food again, any chinese food, and I am not talking about the sub par gluten free menu at PF Chang’s, I am talking about crab ran goon and dumplings and greasy noodles and fried orange chicken.  I want to go to breakfast without having to smile wanly over a bowl of fruit while everyone else piles into pancakes and waffles and french toast.  I want to have big, soft, pillowy rolls with my Thanksgiving dinner, and I want to eat a hot dog ON A BUN at the ballpark and a pretzel dipped in mustard at the mall.  I sit down to one of seventeen new fall soups we’ve tried this fall and every single time I think “WHERE IS MY CRUSTY BAGUETTE THIS JUST ISN’T THE SAME WITHOUT A CRUSTY BAGUETTE.”  I want to eat roast beef sandwiches at Panera until I make myself sick and yes, sometimes, I just want to have a beer with my corn chips and salsa. (not while I’m pregnant, obvs, geez.)  I want to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on soft fluffy wheat bread, not flat, heavy, damp toe breaking gluten free bread.

Even more infuriating are the prices.  I am tired of paying $4 a bag for pasta, and $17 a bag for flour.   I am sick of ordering every kind of gluten free oatmeal on the market only to have to throw all of it out when it makes me sick, over and over again. I am tired of checking my receipt only to discover that I’ve just paid nine dollars for a loaf of gluten free bread.

I used to think that I LOVED being forced by my body to eat nothing but FRESH MANGOES! and CELERY!.  I said that if and when they invent the gluten antibody pill I wouldn’t take it.  Now I laugh hysterically at that notion.  Please note, I’ll be the first in line, reaching for that pill in one hand and a bagel in the other.

Invite Sixteen Bloggers Into Your House and Look What Happens*

And please accept my apologies for those of you who guessed and who I blatantly LIED to, I am really bad at keeping secrets.

Due Date:  June 12th.  As in, ridiculously early for me to be telling the internet.

But Junebug is making me sick as hell and I need support from the internet so that when I tell you that I am about to start a nation wide campaign against telling pregnant women to nibble on saltines you can join in my cause.

Also, I have my first real doctors appointment this afternoon and I’m TERRIFIED and I need emotional support.

Things I am nervous about:

1. I will get yelled at for being too fat.

1a. I will get yelled at for the Lex@pro even though my brain doctor and I both think the benefits outweigh the risks.

2. I will get talked down to about feeling sick.

3. I will get rude looks for bringing Eli.

4. I will have to take off my pants.

5. They will be able to tell just by looking at me that the baby is dead and they will shake their head sadly and push me back out the door. I know! Horrible of me to even think.  But I really really really want this baby and wanting something so much is making me scared.

Sigh.

any calming words you have would be most welcome.

*Yes, I was pregnant at the Blathering. No, I had no idea.  If I had known I might have, uh, blathered a little less, if you know what I mean.

Jesus Obviously Knows How I Feel About Storage

So since October is traditionally the month where I post every day and run out of interesting things to say by day three and then post something really long winded, overly emotional, and controversial, I thought today would be a good time to tell you about how a $30 dresser brought me to God.  (And…Maggie just snorted so hard I heard her all the way in Sacramento.)

But let’s start at the very beginning.

I am not sure how a white bread Californian such as my father came to such a place, but I have the feeling it had something to do with my waspy New Englander mother.  Regardless, a tiny version of me was baptized an Episcopalian at two weeks old, long white dress and bonnet and all, and for the next eighteen years or so, I went to A LOT of church.  There were many weeks where I went to church twice – during the week in Catholic school we had the kind of mass with felt banners and hand shaking and singing about Eagle’s Wings, and then every Sunday without FAIL I was in the pew at St. Mark’s for the kind of church with latin and incense and genuflecting.

To be honest with you, I am not sure when I fell out of believing in god and church and what would Jesus do.  I do know that my parents raised me to question things, and I am not sure that they meant for me to question the things that THEY believed, but that’s what they got anyway.  I can’t honestly remember having a strong belief in  god or in jesus or heaven or hell, despite all the church I was attending.  I remember thinking that abortion was the killing of babies and that the Russians were FOR SURE going to bomb us, but that’s most of what I felt strongly about, wrapped up in a nutshell.  Mostly I didn’t like the fact that I had to get picked up from sleepovers at 7 am on Sunday morning, and that I wasn’t allowed to watch any movies that weren’t rated G.

What I do remember is that one night I had a dream I still vividly remember – I was an 8th grader, and I had to sit on the edge of the bathtub in my parents house and tell my father that I was pregnant.  It was the most vivid dream I’ve ever had.

I’ve never forgotten that feeling, and my feelings about killing babies were never the same.

And then I started to wonder at this world in which a man stood up in a pulpit and told us that Jesus said to love everyone, EVERYONE and to wonder how it matched up with the world in which my father railed about fags and anyone who looked different from us.

Maybe that’s when I started to question.

When I moved to Chicago to live with my mother, we didn’t celebrate Christmas. My mother and my step father aren’t big on god, and although sometimes we lit the Hanukkah candles and I still went to Catholic school, I had great social acceptance in my family to be an intellectual, to not believe in anything.  The Catholic school I went to was so confrontational, and so old school, I think it pushed me even farther away from god.  I was attending a school where it was ok to post pictures of aborted fetuses in the halls, where girls were kicked out for getting pregnant, but the football players who got them pregnant weren’t.  Where the same students who covered the walls with pro life banners argued violently for the death penalty and dropping bombs, and the irony of it all made me righteously furious in my non beliefs.  It felt so very much like I was right and they were wrong.

And then I left for college and no one talked about God anymore.  It just never came up, and when I met Mr. E, it was a non issue – neither of wanted to go to church or make a big deal about any of that sort of hoo ha.  His parents sort of wished we had been married by a priest, but no one really cared much one way or the other that we didn’t go to church, that we didn’t talk about god or say grace.  They don’t do any of that stuff either, anyway.

But every time I had to go to the doctor and fill out a seven page form about something, for my laparascopy or for when I was pregnant with Eli, I still wrote “Episcopalian” on the blank line.  And one year I made Mr. E go to the Rite One church for Midnight Mass just so he could see what it was all about, but it wasn’t the same.  You can’t go home again, I guess.

I have always loved the pomp, the circumstance, the rituals, the intense organization of church.  I have a rosary collection.  I’d love to see the Holy Land.  I have a Mary night light and I still say a “Hail Mary” when I hear an ambulance because I spent 12 years being taught by nuns and old habits die hard.  But you can say a thousand rosaries, you can know the Our Father backyards and forwards, you can know the story of Our Lady of Fatima like you were there yourself, and it still doesn’t add up to belief.

Everyone (and by everyone I mean two people) said that when I had a baby things would change.  That it’s impossible not to look at those tiny fingers and those baby eyelashes and to see yourself blended into a miracle and not know that something greater than you is out there, running it all.  And so I waited for some kind of mysterious light to shine itself into my soul, to make me believe, and still, there was nothing.

And in the mean time I worried.  I worried and I harbored all sorts of crazy making anxiety and I whipped it up into a frenzy of angst that anyone would have crumpled under, and pretty soon the worry over how we would afford heat and a rocking chair and diapers and why wasn’t our baby growing and was I doing something wrong and was I bad mom and why did I feel so angry and had I made a terrible mistake deepened into this depression that felt like a pit, a crack in the world, and I just wanted to crawl inside and hide away from it all and for awhile I did and through all of this, at no time did I think of god. He was, for whatever reason, the last thing on my mind.

And then I started to climb out of that pit.  I started to find friends.  I started to talk to someone about how I felt.  People told me that they knew exactly what I meant.  That it would get better.  That they would sit on the phone with while I called the doctor.  And then every day I took that tiny white pill and it took a really long time, there were fits and starts and steps entirely backwards but it did get better. It is so so so much better.  Now, I can look at my son and I marvel at him.  I watch him, fascinated, for hours.  His face is like a lightning storm or time lapse photography – an endless movie reel I never tire of.  It took me two plus years but I finally feel that wave of love I’ve been hearing about since the day talking about your baby was first invented.

I laugh at bad jokes and I almost never cry anymore unless I am watching narrated documentaries and I feel genuine moments of joy many times a day. I feel like my life has a purpose.  I feel like a good mom.

But most of all, I feel like someone is looking out for me.

When I start to worry and make lists and wonder about how we will pay for a new dresser so that some day we can fit two kids into one bedroom, for the first time in forever it feels like maybe if I step back and quit worrying about it, somehow it will all work itself out.  There’s a voice in my head telling me to let it go and it will be ok.    And somehow, crazily enough, it has been working out, it has all been ok, and sometimes it has worked out in a way that is better than anything I could have twisted and forced and made happen, and as much as I would love to remain a too cool for school non believer for the rest of my life, it just feels like somehow, something is different now.

I am sure that it horrifies those of you out there who are following all of the god rules to hear about my version of god light, but I can only tell that this is how I came to this god of mine, and that these things sometimes have to build slowly, and I am still figuring just what it is that I think about God.  I can only tell you that I searched all over the known universe of furniture stores for a long, low, wood dresser with tons of tiny drawers and then one day I wandered into a random parking lot and there it was, a long low solid wood dresser with fourteen drawers,  and when I asked how much it was and they told me it was $20 dollars but they’d have to charge me $10 to deliver it, somehow I felt like there was an order to the universe that was beyond even me, and I still do not know why god kills moms and dogs, I still do not go to church, I still am not going to send my kids to vacation bible camp and I still will always always always support a woman’s right to choose, but somewhere under and in between and through all of that – I believe.