Anonymous

So far my mother is the only one who knows the joyful news. We've wisely decided to wait until the high danger of miscarriage is over to tell our family members. Me, I'm waiting until I actually look pregnant to break the news, mostly to dispel notions that I am getting fat.

But, admittedly its nice to have someone to be able to confide in, especially since she's (obviously) done this before, and (obviously) all parties survived the experience. So we had dinner with her on Saturday and she handed us an Expectant Motherhood book with a 1940 copyright (which, by the by, tell us with confidence that having alcohol is completely harmless--see sentence about us all surviving the experience) and what she called the most important book of all: Name Your Baby.

Since we don't yet know what species of child we shall have as yet, we just flipped through it for a while and announced names at random. "Brunhilde" was rejected out of hand, as was "Gunther." But then I came across: Hilaria, which means, "always cheerful." I fell in love with it at once. What better name with which to command your offspring to be happy and prosperous? What name would roll better off the tongue? Meet Hilaria, my always cheerful daughter.

"Yes," my husband said, "but what if it's a boy?"

"Why then," I replied, "we would name him Hilarius." And to prove how wonderfully apt this name would prove to be, I then cracked up. Simply imagining the introductions brought tears of joy to my eyes.

"Hi everybody, this is Hilarius."
"What's hilarious?"
"He's Hilarius."
"He thinks he's hilarious?"
"No, he really is Hilarius."

My husband brought me back from my joyful reverie to ask me what I thought of the name Stanley. He was clearly trying to bring us back into the fold of normal society and I wasn't buying it. Besides.... Stanley?? But I agreed we could name the boy Stanley if I could choose his middle name.

Stanley Hilarius. I see a shining future ahead.

Sick of the Morning

They call it "morning sickness" like they expect it to go away after 11:59 am. But like most things this is a misnomer. Morning sickness can occur at any time during the day.

When we found out we were pregnant, we started reading up on things. It's hard to weed through the quacky material and get to sensible advice, so I ended up with the statistic that almost 80% of women experience some morning sickness, while my husband had read that only 50% did. We argued about this for a little while and then I finally said, "Well, I still think we should have saltines in the house. That way we'll be prepared."

So we bought saltines. This is basically the advice our knowledgeable, worldly pregnancy experts give. They don't know what causes it, they don't know what helps it, they don't know why it goes away. Here, dear, just eat some saltines.

It started at a worktime lunch where I was gamely munching on a chicken caesar salad. I have chicken caesar salad every day at lunchtime. I like chicken caesar salad. Normally. But this day the salad tasted like cardboard with dressing, and I ate less than half of it. I saved it for the next day, and around 10am (when I normally start thinking about the lunch I will have two hours from now) I thought about my perfectly good chicken caesar salad, and felt instantly nauseous.

This is what they mean by "morning sickness"?

I cast around in my head for something that was not insanely gross like chicken caesar salad, and settled on a local Mexican restaurants side order special called simply "rice and beans." It's rice, beans, and cheese, all nicely cooked up and melted together. Together with some chipotle sour cream, it's a delight. This odd concoction was okay for me to swallow, while lettuce and chicken had become utterly unpalatable, to the degree that the mere thought of it made me sick to my stomach.

This was my new relationship to food. The choices I had became extremely narrow, and quite specific. I asked my husband to bring home hot and sour soup from the chinese restaurant, and he, deciding on his own to be creative, brought home seafood hot and sour soup instead of regular. That sent me on a downward spiral. It wasn't really all that different, but it was not what my narrow palate could eat. And this wasn't the famous cravings of pregnancy, but rather my settling on a food which didn't make my stomach curl when it was thought of.

Also, about this saltines thing. Don't bother. Saltines have nothing to them which make them the miraculous morning sickness cure. The only things that got me out of this slump was real food, and by real I mean; meat and potatoes. Protein. Carbohydrates. Stuff you aren't supposed to eat on a regular, singular basis.

By now the morning sickness has faded. The narrow palate hasn't. And so far I think I've kept my secret pretty well. I've switched my lunchtime meal from chicken to steak tips, caesar dressing to italian, and though my lunch mates have noticed the change, they haven't gotten suspicious about the cause. They'll know, of course, soon enough. Sooner or later, it'll become obvious. If they have the hindsight to look back at my sudden change of eating habits, the women in the group might do a mental "Ohhhhh!" But by then the scenery will have changed, I suspect. We'll have other fun symptoms instead.