Merry Christmas

Friday was the ultrasound and I got to see the healthy little baby inside of me.

I have never seen anything so amazing in my life. My husband and I just stared dumbfounded at the screen where we saw this little thing with a HUGE head and the sweetest, tiniest little hands and feet.

Merry Christmas to everyone. I think this is my best one ever.

The Big 2-8

I got a lovely card from the husband and some very thoughtful gifts. Was yesterday’s incident just a ruse? Who cares. I have an amazing husband who cooks and cleans and makes sure I am happy and comfortable, especially when I felt liking puking my guts up a few weeks ago.

The ultimate birthday present would have to be an ultrasound this Friday that shows a healthy baby. I feel different today. I seem to be getting headaches a lot (apparently a result of the extra blood production) but today I just feel heavier. I shifted in my seat a few minutes ago and felt a definite ‘something’ in there. There is a weight to it now. I also feel really tired and really hungry. My pants are definitely a little tighter now too. I think I’ll stop worrying so much after the ultrasound.

Anyways. Happy Birthday to me.

grumblings

There is no snow on the ground. I do not have a Christmas tree because our puppy will eat it. My husband and I are not getting each other presents so we can save money and run off to Mexico again someday.

So how do I know it’s Christmas?

All of the “Catholics” I know are suddenly skipping the weekend binge breakfast at the local Mexican place every Sunday and going to church instead.

I have received Christmas cards from the guy at the dealership who sold me my car, our financial planner, our bank, the breeder who sold us our dog, the president of my company, the chief of my husband’s fire department, the parents of friends I have not spoken to in years, and a myriad other faceless corporations and people I never think about.

The charities are after me.

The mall is busier and filled with even more redneck, backwards, morbidly obese carnival freaks than usual.

I have to attend the orgy of greed that is Christmas at my father and his girlfriend’s house.

I get emails from coworkers with gay sayings like “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away!! ”

I am grumpy.

On another note, tomorrow is my birthday. My husband just called me to complain, literally complain about the fact that he cannot find anything to get me and that he does not have enough time to get something.

I have one thing to say to this: This better be an act and something nice better be in the works.

I have mentioned several things that I like and might want for my birthday over the last week. I am not hard to please. I do not want diamonds or expensive things. I would even be happy with a thoughtful card or some nice Vanilla Spice Body Butter from the Body Shop. But to call me and angrily tell me that you are “getting shafted” because I am “not easy to shop for” and “did not give you any hints” just hurts my feelings. There is nothing loving or special about that.

My advice to you would now be to get thee to the Body Shop and get me the fucking cream that I oohed and ahhed over last week, then take your ass on over to the dollar store and pick up a god damn card and write something in it. Might I suggest one of the following:

“I love you”

“To the mother of my child, thank you for making yourself sick, giving up red wine and cigarettes and ruining your skin to have my baby”

“Happy Birthday to a hell of a wife”

I would like to remind you that for your birthday, I do not ask you what you want. I just get you something nice and thoughtful.

Week 11

There is a pulsing in my uterus.

I noticed it a couple of weeks ago, mostly when I was lying in bed trying to go to sleep for the night. I would arrange the pillows, pull the covers up, snuggle in and then it would start. It was like a little engine turning on. Then for awhile, it stopped, and I started to worry. But last night, it started again.

I asked my mother if she remembered feeling anything like this but she said she cannot remember what happened to her 28 years ago, so I am assuming this is normal. She does not seem to think that I should be feeling anything but I swear I can feel something going on in there. All the books say that yes, the baby is moving at this point but no, you cannot feel it. I know this is not what I am feeling. I think I am just feeling “activity”. Stuff growing, moving around. I never felt any of this the last pregnancy. In fact, I felt nothing the last pregnancy. I had no nausea, and hardly any breast pain. This time is totally different and I hope to jeebus it’s a good sign.

I’m also moody.

Case in point: When I got home last night I started opening the Christmas cards that we have been receiving over the last two days. One of the cards is from a guy from my husband’s crew. Actually, the card is from his wife really. My husband is pretty close with this guy, and he and his wife just moved around the corner from us. Nice people. Anyway. I have met her once and him twice, so I don’t really know them all that well. I open the card from them and a letter and a picture of their 9 month old baby fall out. Huh.

Before I go on I must preface this by giving a small background. This coworker and friend of my husband’s and his wife are both each others second marriage. She is around 36 and I think he is 40 or so. So anyways, they get married and start trying to have a baby. It’s a long and complicated process but finally she gets pregnant. This is all my husband’s coworker/friend talks about at work. Right down to her boobs during the pregnancy. As my hubby and I were then thinking about trying at the whole baby thing, he would come home and regale me with tales of her boobs and whatever else was going on with her pregnant body. Slightly inappropriate I thought, but whatever. My husband thought this would be helpful information for me to have.

Anyway, she has the kid. Then all I hear about (again through my husband) is about her nipples, breastfeeding and how depressed she is that she still has five extra pounds of baby weight that she cannot lose (yeah, I wanted to strangle her too). At this point, I am pregnant and I begin to feel the shine is being taken away from me because all my husband does is come home and tell me about some other woman’s baby. Then I have a miscarriage. My husband is then banned from talking about the other couple and their perfect little baby. Actually, I believe it was in the midst of a breakdown that I said “I am sick of hearing about their perfect little fucking life. Do they think that everyone in the world is as interested in their baby as they are?”

I recover.

Back to the letter. I open the letter. It is one of those letters that people send out to their families every year that gives an update on what happened to their unit over the last year. Reading this letter is difficult not only because of the bad font she used, but because my eyes are now fighting me to roll back into my head while I am trying to read this thing.

To summarize it: we’re so happy, baby is so perfect, we couldn’t be happier, we just moved in to a giant new house and all of our family lives in the neighbourhood too and isn’t that just so perfect because we are all together and everything is so wonderful, oh I better run I have to redecorate our entire giant new house and then I am going to the gym to work out for 2 hours and I am so perfect this is making you sick.

I realize this is going to make me sound a tad negative but WHAT THE FUCK AM I GOING TO DO WITH A PICTURE OF YOUR FUCKING BABY? I have met you once. Why are you sending me the letter that should only be sent to family members and close friends who give a shit what you are doing? My husband thinks I am being bitchy. Fine. He did however agree with me that the letter was pretty gay.

I know what it is that’s bothering me. Since my hubby has become close with this guy all I hear about is how much money they make, what a high up position she holds in the company she works at, how she is obsessed with going to the gym, how they are both perfectionists, every sordid detail of her pregnancy and birth…I could go on. These are people that think everyone wants to hear about everything they do. As a private person, this sickens me. As a not so perfect, realistic, somewhat misanthropic, brooding type, it makes me want to scream.

I find myself wondering sometimes if my husband would prefer me to be more like those women. The ones who scrapbook everything; who know how to bake and to sew. Who look even better after they give birth; who don’t know what cellulite looks like; who never have a negative comment about anything ever.
I know he knows who he married. But sometimes I worry. My mood is up and down at the best of times. I’m not a sad person, but I am not in a perpetual state of happiness either. When I tell him things about my mood and how I sometimes feel like I am going downhill a bit, he just tells me to lighten up a little and try to be happy. Maybe it’s just the pregnancy that is making me feel this way. I am finding that I am extra sensitive to things. Perhaps this is just a funk that I will get over. No other pregnant woman I talk to seems to remember feeling this way.

I am ever the black sheep.

Presents

It does not feel like Christmas here. We have not had even a flake of snow and it is 10 degrees today. Thank you global warming. Everyone else seems to love it, but I miss winter.

On the Christmas presents front, my husband and I are finished all the shopping we had to do. Well, except for my sister in law’s present. Given that I barely know her, it has makes shopping for her difficult. For my husband’s family, everyone draws one name and that is the only present you have to get, which is a pretty good idea. Generally, both of us end up with garbage, thoughtless presents and every year we ask that whoever gets us to make a donation to a charity for us. No one ever listens. I swear when I get some time I am going to take a picture of some of the things I have received and put it up on my blog.

For example: I like Calla Lilies. I had them as my wedding bouquet flower and I plant them in my garden. So my mother in law figures that since I like this flower, she will go out and get me something with this in mind. My gift last year was a puke-coloured ceramic vase with fake moss at the base of a fake, single calla lily. I’m pretty convinced that she got this either at the dollar store or at Sprawl-Mart. It is the ugliest fake flower I have ever seen. It is now in a box in my basement.

I don’t understand. If someone tells you that the best gift you can get for them is to donate to WWF or some other cause why wouldn’t you just do it? It seems like a huge waste of money to me to buy them something you won’t even be sure that they will like.

Oh yeah, I also got a diet cookbook too. Nice.

We are hoping to be able to tell everyone that I am pregnant with a healthy baby this Christmas. My first ultrasound is on the 22nd of this month and I am getting pretty nervous. I’ve noticed a little bump starting to stick out just below my bellybutton, and my boobs are still killing me. The morning/all-day sickness seems to be going away though.

I have no idea when I am going to tell my boss. I think I might try and wait until I can’t hide it anymore. The other woman in my office who is pregnant got a pretty good response from everyone here, including management, so it looks good for me. I am definitely going to push telling them until my probation is over at the end of January. I don’t know if I’ll be able to hide it that long though.

Why Do I Bother?

Why do I bother talking to idiots? Why do I insist on torturing myself this way? The flu shot clinic is here in our building today and of course all the women are nattering on about who will get their shot and who won’t. There are the usual morons who claim that they won’t get it because, and I quote “the flu shot actually gave them the flu”, which is, as we all know, impossible. You are being injected with an inactivated vaccine, which is a killed virus. Hence, it is impossible for you to get the flu from it. They tell us this every fucking year. It’s on the news, on television commercials, on posters around the city, it’s everywhere. So the loudmouth (the god-loving loud-talker who has dealt with almost her entire divorce over the phone at the office and now everyone here knows every detail of it) is standing beside me at the photocopier and another woman in the office walks by and asks her if she is going to get her shot. She says, “I don’t believe in the flu shot. If I’m gonna get it, I’m gonna get it. I don’t care if I barf everywhere.” So I turn to her and say “The flu and a stomach bug are two different things. You don’t throw up with influenza. And if you don’t get the shot, and you get influenza, you can pass it on to other people who really cannot handle getting sick.” This is the woman with a terminally ill mother who she looks after. HELLO?!?! Why would you risk passing the flu on to her? She shrugs and restates that she does not believe in the flu shot. I guess jeebus will protect her.

On the pregnancy front, I seem to only want to barf my guts up in the evening, which now leaves the days free and clear for food consumption. Excellent. Though I must say that most things are totally unappealing to me. Just for the hell of it, here is a small list of foods that make me want to gag until I have no organs left in my body:

Coffee
Tomato-sauce based pasta meals
Garlic
Garlic and parmesan flavored rice (husband cooked it one night, I discovered how disgusting I found it)
Anything with curry
Pickles (ironically enough)
Chicken, prepared most ways
Tuna

There are other foods that I can’t eat but they don’t come to mind right now. I’m all about the peanut butter and jam toasted sandwiches with a glass of orange juice right now. And I’m a big fan of Cheerios for dinner. I actually wouldn’t mind if my appetite didn’t get much better throughout the pregnancy. I really do not want to gain very much weight. I figured I would set the limit at 25lbs. I’m still exercising and I did lose a bit so far with being sick. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up being a big fat cow. Yay.

Ramblings

A woman I work with here giddily told me today that she is pregnant. She has not told anyone else in the office other than her direct boss, who is just such a ridiculously awesome person there are no words to describe her. Anyways, she is really happy, obviously, and she doesn’t care that she has only been here since May this year, so that made me feel better about my situation. I know it shouldn’t matter and I should just snap right out of that worker-bee drone like mentality if I feel like the corporation is more important than my future children, but still. I guess I am still clinging to that dream I had of getting into this business and rising to the top, or close to it, and living the life of a fabulous editor-in-chief. Not to say this could never happen, but who am I kidding? I want this baby, and I want more of them after him/her. This means that I will be stalling my career and probably will not be able to put in the time required to get to the top the way I wanted to. I have mixed feelings about this sometimes. I imagine that many women do.

The other night I was watching 60 Minutes and one of the stories was about a small group of Tutsi women in Rwanda that narrowly escaped being raped and then hacked to death by the rusty machetes of the Hutus. These women hid in a priest’s home, in a tiny bathroom for something like 3 months. All of them survived, but are deeply scarred by the experience. They have gone on to live back in their villages, after having lost their families, side by side with the murderous Hutus. One woman, who lost her father, mother and two brothers, was able to meet with and forgive the man that slaughtered her family. When the interviewer asked her how she could forgive such a person, she talked about not wanting to poison her heart further with rage and the need for vengeance.

When I think about all the little worries I have, in particular the one with my unborn child and my career, and I compare it to the experiences of a woman like that, I feel very small. And I am. All of us are. I still have to live my life and experience my experiences, but I am beginning to see things from a different perspective now. To me, this new view is the difference between being anthropomorphic and seeing nature for what it is and how it presents itself to us. I watched that movie about the guy who goes to live with grizzly bears every summer. In the end, he and his girlfriend are killed and eaten by one of the bears that they live with. The bush pilot that picks them up and drops them off every year was the one who found them, or what was left of them. The narrator of the story, someone famous but I can’t remember the name right now, philosophizes as the camera slowly zooms in on the eyes of one of the grizzlies that the man and his girlfriend lived with: he says something along the lines of not understanding what the dead man saw in the eyes of the bears, about how the man romanticized the animals and placed his own emotions on them, creating a false one-sided bond with the beasts. The narrator muses that what he sees in the eyes of this bear is nothing more than the cold, clear gaze of nature; emotionless and unapologetic.

This is how I have begun to see things. How you end up in a first world country in front of a plasma TV in your heated house and how you end up in a tiny bathroom somewhere in a war-torn third world country on the wrong end of genocide hiding for your life is not a matter of luck, of god or whatever; it is what it is. I don’t believe in a balance of good and evil anymore. I don’t believe that there is a philosophical or spiritual reason why I miscarried my first child, it didn’t happen to teach me anything, it happened because there was a mistake in the code and my body (thankfully) did what it had to do. Something about the absence of reason and emotion in the universe is oddly comforting to me. Things that happen on this planet still make me sad and angry and wish that all the people doing all the harm would be destroyed, but in moments when I don’t think about those things I find peace in the amazing things that happen in nature.

So when I started worrying today after talking to my coworker that this baby in me isn’t going to make it, I stopped and asked myself “What if then? What will I do?” and the answer is that there is nothing I can do.

Nothing is predestined.

The future does not exist yet, and nature does not have a grudge against me.

Christmas Balls and Night Terrors (and a little ranting).

So my poor little Charlie loses his balls this morning, I know it’s a minor surgery but I always worry about anesthetic. I guess because I used to work at a vet clinic years and years ago. We had the cutest little pug puppy in for a neuter and he died on the table because his heart could not handle the anesthetic. I cried for weeks, literally. It still makes me sad when I think about it. Okay enough about this, I’m working myself up.

In other news, I have night terrors. Yay. On an almost nightly basis, I have a dream that someone is coming after me. I however, think that I am awake and I swear to jeebus I can see them in my room lunging towards the bed at me. This results in me screaming my head off and trying to jump out of bed and turn on the light. Normally, I don’t remember any of this and my poor husband has to wake up to find me screaming in the corner of the room and try to snap me out of it. It’s getting to the point where I am afraid to go to sleep some nights. I don’t know if this is a pregnancy related kind of a thing or what, but I wish it would stop. I’ll have to ask my doctor about it.

Things have been slowing down at work. Not only for me but for everyone else, which worries me sometimes. I have been told that this business is up and down. The other day, one of the HR people had to send me a list of the people in my department for some survey thing I volunteered to do. Anyways, she ended up sending me a list of everyone in the company, their pay-scale number (a rating system that goes from 7-22, but is very easy to decode when you know your own number and how much you make), and the date they started. I’m pretty sure I was not supposed to get this list, but whatever. I took a look at it and noticed that the majority of people, and I’m talking 90%, all started in the year 2000 and up. I mentioned this to my coworker, she is contract here but has been with the company on and off for the last ten years and she told me that as soon as there is a downturn in business, they lay people off like crazy. Great. It used to be that in a big company they would try to find jobs for those lay-offs in other parts of the company. Companies are not accountable anymore. They really do not give a shit about their staff. This is why when I hear the old hens at work criticizing other women for having their babies and taking time off I get mad. Don’t these people get it? You might as well live your life the way you want to and have your family when you want to because the company does not care about you. Why would you feel so loyal to a corporation like that?

Mindless drones.

Happy December

It’s still raining here, which is kind of depressing. I like snow, especially around this time of year. My husband and I decorated the outside of the house with lights and garland but it just doesn’t feel as festive without the white stuff.

Life is changing yet again. I thought for awhile about whether or not I should write about this and I thought – hey, why not? The only other person I know that reads this blog is Teh Mommeh and I feel perfectly comfortable sharing things with her as she is such an open and honest person, even in her blog. So here it goes. I’m pregnant again. It’s still early, I’m only in the beginning of my third month, but I think that since this blog is such a cathartic thing for me at times, I am going to document what goes on in my life. I have tried to keep a journal, but this blog is always way more up to date and I want to remember who I was in my twenties and beyond when I get older so that I can share it with my children and grandchildren.

So I was a little nervous for awhile when I found out, but I’m feeling more at ease now. The one good thing about this pregnancy (though it doesn’t feel so good) is that I have been sick as a dog with nausea and vomiting and my boobs are killing me like never before. My doctor tells me that this is a very good sign. I had very little symptoms with the last pregnancy and in all the books they say that women with few symptoms are at greater risk of miscarriage, which if obviously what happened to me. I have my first ultrasound on December 22, and it will hopefully be a happy and healthy early Christmas present and late birthday present for me.

I’ve kind of been dragging myself through the days at work with being so ridiculously tired and sick, but I’m still happy. I think I am going to wait to tell them until my six month probation is up at the end of January. I know I am going to be the target of much office gossip because there are a bunch of clucky hens around here with nothing better to do than criticize other women for having babies and going on maternity leave. But I don’t care. It’s hard to explain but I have never felt so focused on one thing in my entire life. It’s like I already feel like a mother. Strange.

Anyway, that’s it. It feels good to get this out. I have only told my mother (and my husband obviously) and we are going to wait until after the ultrasound to tell the rest of the family. So for now, all is well. I hope it stays that way.