My mom likes to tell a story to illustrate the personalities of my siblings and me growing up. If we were not doing as she asked, one of her parenting methods was to count to five, and if we didn’t do it by five, then there were Consequences.
My sister is the eldest. Mom only had to threaten to count and my sister would dissolve into tears. “Don’t count, Mommy! Don’t count! I’ll do it!” And after the drama subsided, she would run along. That’s probably why she practiced her music so diligently, later earning medal after medal at music festivals in preparation for a successful career in music, and why she never got suspended from boarding high school.
My brother was the middle child, and he discovered that Mom was soft enough to use fractions: “One. Two. Three. Four. Four and a half. Four and three-quarters.” Probably when Mom broke out the sixteenths, he’d go do whatever it was he was supposed to do, knowing that she’d lose her patience as the math got progressively harder. This early scientific probing into the limits of possibility combined with the mathematical education it offered is likely what propelled him to medical school and beyond.
And then there’s me. The way the story goes, my mom only tried counting with me the one time. She put a hand on her hip and held up a finger: “One.” And then I piped up, “Two! Three! Four! Five! Hmph!” and planted both hands on my hips and glared back at her, Consequences be damned. (This from the same child who cried when she wasn’t allowed to leave the table before eating her lima beans and finally, an hour later, still sitting at the table, took her dad up on his offer to “give you something to really cry about.”) My utter lack of concern for profitable outcomes sufficiently explains, I think, why I majored in English.
I bring this up because we’ve reached the end of the pregnancy countdown: The baby is forty weeks today (“Thirty-eight,” Matt would say), and I fully expected to have him by now. But it seems that he has a little bit of me in him, as just right now he’s doing a headstand on my bladder and, instead of counting contractions, he’s keeping score of his kicks to my spleen: “Two, three, four, five, hmph!”
Internets, that first trimester wasn’t much fun. (Well, the second week — REDACTED.) I’ll spare you the details on morning sickness (“morning” — ha!) and its constant, accompanying queasiness, but I will say the fatigue that goes along with it must be what it’s like to be on horse tranquilizers: Getting out of bed in the morning took a Herculean, gravity-defying effort; cooking and cleaning seemed a lifetime ago; class prep usually involved digging up last quarter’s notes in the ten or fifteen minutes before students arrived. Suffice it to say, not a shining quarter for me, although I’ve been very pleased with the quality of student writing I’m seeing, despite my sub-par energy level.
Then there were the cravings and aversions. I’m not militant about my diet, but Internets, it was a little distressing to go off coffee, chocolate, alcohol, and cheese all at the same time. Not because I wouldn’t have had them, but because I didn’t want them, and experienced (and am still experiencing) the strongest aversions in my life. So my diet for the past three months has consisted of whatever I think I can keep down, and it seems to mainly consist of Cheerios, Eggos with real butter and boysenberry syrup, fresh fruit, and my mom’s kick-ass Gravenstein applesauce. And occasionally a prenatal vitamin, when I can get one down. (Speaking of horses, have you seen those fucking pills? Do the manufacturers not understand how the sight of one of those brick-sized supplements triggers nausea in a pregnant woman even faster than the thought of a moldy cheese sandwich?)
But there have been some good parts that range from okay to jaw-dropping. Finding out we were pregnant can be filed under jaw-droppingly happy: I took about four home pregnancy tests that were so slightly positive that I thought them to be inconclusive, so I finally went to a clinic for confirmation. Joy. Finally telling the family and friends was also more fun than it probably should have been, thanks to the rampant skepticism on the part of, oh, everyone. (I believe my mother-in-law’s reaction was one of the best: “Seriously? Really? Seriously? On purpose?”)
Another pleasant development has been how great The Husband has been about everything, although it’s not surprising because he’s generally awesome: He’s cooked and cleaned and held my hair back and gone to the store at 10:30 p.m. for grapes, and he talks to my belly, even though I don’t think the baby can hear yet (which is probably a good thing because he once played Ziltoid for it, the poor fetus).
On a related note, I understand the shock and surprise many of you felt at our announcement, and I will admit to decent amounts of guilt for misleading you all, especially if I said anything over the past X months about “never having children.” It’s just that when we changed our minds, we didn’t know what the future held, didn’t know if we would actually have the baby we wanted, and therefore didn’t want change any expectations. A self-preservation thing, you see. But it was totally worth it for the looks on your faces when we finally did announce our news. And that guilt? It’s not weighing too heavily on my mind.