The Nosey Narrow Minded

"So," says a perfect stranger, "have you had an ultrasound yet?"
"What?" I'm trying to get my lunch together, and was not expecting conversation not related to passing the salt and pepper.
"Have you had an ultrasound yet?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Um..."(None of your business?)
"Too early?"
"Okay." (Can I make it any more clear that this is none of your business?)
"My daughter's pregnant too."
"That's....great." (That is none of my business.)

I told my husband about this conversation and he came out with this gem:
"Yeah, I just had the ultrasound yesterday and it turns out that the baby has 60 fingers and no head. I've been crying about it for the past 24 hours and finally managed to think about something else until you brought it up just now. Thanks for asking."

The same person accosted me later in the kitchen and asked me about whether I know about "belly bands" because her daughter has some. I told her I had, and that I had it "all under control." She finally got an inkling that I wasn't really appreciating these conversations, since she said "I'm going to ask alot of questions" to which I replied, "Well I might not answer, I feel this is my thing." To which she finally replied "Okay, I won't ask." Which implies I finally got through her thick head.

Or maybe I should have stared at her and said: Are you trying to tell me I'm fat??

I am treading on thin ice because I want to be known as the competent, professional, well-adjusted career woman, but instead my co-workers, especially the female ones, want to drag me down into the realm of un-reasonable, tempermental, rude pregnant woman. I don't think they do this intentionally, but they remember their experiences as the pregnant woman at work and they've read too many pregnancy guides and somehow they have bought into the idea that everything that a pregnant woman does is related to pregnancy. And that every pregnant woman wants to talk about ultrasounds and sore breasts at lunchtime and stretch marks and maternity clothes at break. That I don't find these topics of interest or something I want to discuss with people outside my immediate family is a source of frustration and mystery to them. My male colleagues do not have the same reference point, and so even though they are prone to making dumb comments they do not have the same intensity of feeling or the force of opinion or the need to say anything at all unless I bring it up. Is it any wonder, then, that I have few female friends?

I feel sorry for these women, I really do. It must be so sad to live in a world so narrow.

It Takes a Village

I knew that pregnancy was an obvious condition, but I was unaware that most people consider it a community project.

I was working on something (I forget what, but the key is that I was working, because I was at work) and a co-worker came into my office to hand me a "hilarious" book which she found very helpful and very funny and even now, she was giggling as she handed it to me. It is called The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy: Or Everything Your Doctor Won't Tell You, and it is just that, everything you would discuss with your Girlfriends, if you had Girlfriends, which I don't. And, having glanced at this book, I'm glad that I don't. Nosey busybodies. But I accepted the book with good grace and thanked the woman profusely, who then proceeded to stand in my doorway for fifteen minutes and offer random bits of advice, from bottle feeding to the benefits of co-sleeping, all without my having to say a word. She ended by offering to give me her entire five year collection of Child Magazine. I asked her to let me borrow just one.

Having handled that burst of well-intended but unsolicited advice, I went about my work-day. An hour later I received a phone call from a nice but rather dull woman who works part-time downstairs. I hardly know her, but she was calling me from home to offer me her daughter's entire collection of maternity wear. "I know you've got a male colleague sitting with you there," she said, "So you can just say yes or no. We'll keep it low-key." Bewildered at both the offer and the secrecy, I said yes. When I hung up I started laughing hysterically, which got my (male) co-worker's attention. "What's funny?" he asked.

I tried to explain that I found all the generosity extremely funny, but he didn't really get it.

Clothing Issues

With a rapidly expanding midriff, getting dressed in the morning has become an issue. I should say "properly dressed": since most activities require something more substantial than sweatpants. The problem isn't that they don't make clothing for pregnant women, obviously they do, since pregnant women don't go around naked (we'd noticed this). It probably isn't even really a problem for most women, since by all accounts most women not only gamely wear their maternity wear, they are apparently eager to do so and get upset when they're not showing fast enough. But it is a problem for me, mostly because Carhartt doesn't make maternity clothes.

Neither does Orvis or Cabela's. What gives?

Where am I going to find a solid pair of work jeans? A truly warm jacket that covers my belly? Who's going to stack the wood and plow the driveway? And who says I can't go fishing while pregnant? Well, I can't... but only because I won't find waders that fit.

Clearly we all need to go back to the wrap around bearskin concept which was such a fad back in the Ice Age. Bearskins were the great equalizer. You can wear a bearskin however you'd like and call it acceptable clothing whether you're male, female or that other gender, pregnant. They were warm in the winter. In the summer, you'd wear it if you required protection from something, like bugs or the sun. Otherwise you'd just go around bearskinless. It didn't matter. Who would care? The fig hadn't been cultivated yet, and Adam and Eve hadn't been invented yet, so the whole must-wear-clothing thing was a long way off... things must have been simpler then.

Meantime, I'm making do with unzipped pants and various bands to hold them up, and hoping the clothing situation doesn't get too ridiculous. If I'm having trouble now, I can't imagine what it'll be like three months from now. Maybe by then I'll have procured a bearskin, and maybe a cave. I'll grunt at people who try to talk to me. They'll think it's just hormones and let me get away with it. I knew I could play that card someday.

Baby Business

We went to our next pre-natal appointment and the registered nurse confirmed the existence of the other being by finding the fetal heartbeat. It was pretty neat. WHANG! WHANG! WHANG WHang...whang.... WHANG! WHANG! WHANG WHang...whang.... the kid wouldn't hold still long enough, apparently, for the nurse to get an accurate count of the heartbeat. "It's the pressure," the nurse explained, "the fetus is trying to get away from." Thereby re-affirming the truth of the old adage like parent, like kid: Stanley Hilarius doesn't like all this attention any more than I do.

While we stood at the appointment desk to schedule the next visit, a chiming sounded and the women behind the glass, in a display of excessive sentimentalism which immediately made my hair stand on end, all sighed in unison. Apparently the father of the very new child gets to inform the world of his achievement by pushing a button which rings this chime. Great. As if enough perfect strangers didn't know all about the impending birth. What happened to a woman's right to privacy? Wasn't that the crux of Roe v. Wade?

I had called ahead to confirm the time for the appointment and while the woman on the other end brought up the information, a soft bell could be heard in the background. "Oop!" the woman said, "A baby has just been born." "Really," I said, mostly to make polite conversation. Then a new mother and her newborn apparently stopped by the desk and the woman started cooing. She's beautiful, she said to the new mother. This of course is a complete lie. Babies are not beautiful. After they've been in the outside world long enough, they're cute in a funny looking way, but they're not beautiful. And newborns are just plain ugly. There's really no other way to describe them. They look like any other human who might have been sitting in water and in the dark for the past nine months and then squeezed through a small opening. It's just not the way we're supposed to live our natural lives, and while I admit that this is the way we all come into the world I rather think it's not so much the way it has to be as a matter of poorly thought out design on the part of some busy fertility deity who forgot to add the finishing touches. If newborns were meant to be beautiful, they wouldn't be waterlogged on delivery.

Still, the women who sit behind the glass at the OB are in the baby business, after all, and presumably they are in the baby business because they genuinely enjoy babies. Many of them probably think full grown humans leave something to be desired in the beauty arena. So perhaps I should forgive them for being more sentimental about this baby business than I could ever be.

Of course Stanley Hilarius will be a paragon of human beauty his/her entire life. That goes without saying.

Let the Games Begin

Knowing that at some point things would become obvious, I finally made an announcement to my co-workers during an all-staff meeting. Congratulations were extended, etc, and really, that should have been the end of it. Right?

Wrong.

Now every conversation I have is tinged with references to either pregnancy woes or to the headaches of having children. People don't like to impart good news, apparently, just the bad stuff:

Me: I slept pretty well last night, except the dog barked in the middle of the night.
Female Co-worker: Oh, that'll change. Just you wait a few months.
Male Co-worker: Yeah, and then you won't sleep for six months after the baby's born, heh heh heh!

Ha. Ha. Who asked you?

Or this exchange after a rather beligerent co-worker had an inappropriate outburst at another meeting I conducted:

Female Co-worker: I thought you handled that very well, you never got defensive and you never lost your cool.
Me: Thanks. I didn't see losing my temper as being very productive.
Female Co-worker: Of course, with the little one on the way your hormones will probably take over and you might not be able to keep your cool, so if you ever have to blow off steam you can come talk to me.

Oh, give me a break. Not the Hormone Defense again.....

And, my favorite, sudden scrutiny over my eating habits. I've been pregnant for almost four months with nobody the wiser, now all of sudden when I eat a late lunch they assume I must have eaten before and now I am "eating for two."

Male Co-worker: Oh, eating again, eh?
Me: Uh... no.... I've just managed to sit down for lunch now.
Male Co-worker, oblivious to previous statement: Well, once you have the kid, you won't have time to eat so you should eat all you can.

I'm sorry... what?

Given that I'm not even really showing yet, I can't wait until I do so I can get all sorts of inane comments regarding pregnancy, my personal appearance and what the future holds. Maybe I should start commenting on my overweight co-workers appearance too. Oh, eating for two, eh? Or how about the woman downstairs who has a noticeable limp? Maybe I should start commenting on that. Hey, can I touch your leg?

Or, maybe I should just keep my cool, raging hormones or no.

Spilling the beans

Having exhausted the excuse of only being in the first trimester, la de da, we finally broke the news to the assorted elongated Family this past weekend.

Our first call, to my husband's sisters, was relatively calm and orderly, since they had both already guessed what was up. One sister-in-law had come up to visit us and brought as a gift a bottle of wine. We love wine and it was a perfect gift, only; we had stopped drinking. My husband made up some story about how we were watching our weight and my sister-in-law let it pass, but the gig was up. Another sister-in-law was engaged in a genealogical discussion with my husband, when all of a sudden he wandered off subject to talk about prenatal genetic questionnaires. So she was understandably suspicious as well. When we finally all got on the phone together, they were prepared.

Then we had to call my assorted family. From this I can tell you that everyone asks the same questions:

1) Are you going to find out the sex?

2) How are you feeling?

3) When are you due?

and they say the same things:

1) You must be excited.

2) I thought this was never going to happen.

It's hard to maintain a sense of excitement over and over again, especially in my case; if I had my way no one would know until the whole thing was over. But this is the beginning of my getting to be a public figure. Everyone will think they have the right to ask me questions they would never ask anyone else. People will try to rub my belly. Strangers will ask me when I'm due. And I will have to grin, bear it, and resist the urge to kill them.

On the other hand if we don't tell anyone we can't have a baby shower; and I plan to tell everyone we're having a boy even if we're not so I get alot of Tonka Toys. Baby showers are supposed to be for the baby but I have to test out all this stuff first to make sure it's safe, right? Any responsible parent would do so.

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.

Be vewy vewy caheful...

I went to my first pre-natal appointment and was told by the registered nurse that I could not do the following:

1) Eat deli meat, hot dogs, soft cheeses, or tuna fish
2) Drink acohol
3) Touch a cat
4) Play softball
5) Drive a motorcycle

I pressed her on items 1,3, 4,5. We've already surrendered on item number 2.

Item number one: Why can't I eat these things that I love?

Answer: Bacteria accumulates on food which is left out for too long. Tuna has too much mercury.

Me: So it's not about the food itself, but where it is and how it's prepared or where it's taken from.

Answer: Well.... yes.

Me: So I can eat deli meat. I just have to be sure the deli hasn't left it out for longer than they're supposed to. And I can have tuna as long as it is certified to be mercury free. So really, these are not things I should just not do while pregnant, it's things that people should do in general. Right?

Answer: Well, yes, ideally...

Me: So why not tell me this important health news before I was pregnant?

Item number 3: So you just said that toxoplasmosis is bad for the fetus?

Answer: Yes. If you go to someone's house with a cat, just ask them to put the cat in another room.

Me: But you just said it was okay if I had a cat, just not to touch the litter.

Answer: Well, yes...

Me: Am I somehow more likely to get it from someone else's cat?

Answer: Well, no...

Me: And just how common is it for babies to be born with a defect caused by toxoplasmosis, anyway?

Answer: Well, actually... pretty rare.

Me: So it's really not an issue.

Answer: I guess not.

Item number 4: What do you have against softball?

Answer: You could get hit by the ball directly in the stomach, and that could cause miscarriage.

Me: I have never been hit directly in the stomach in my life. In fact, I'm more likely to get hit in the head; I'm the catcher. And I have softball tournament this weekend, and I intend to play in it.

Answer: Well at this stage it would have to be a hit the equivalent of a car crash to cause any harm, so I guess it's okay...

Me: You mean hard enough to cause internal damage?

Answer: Yes..

Me: Well in that case don't you think I'd have bigger things to worry about?

Answer: I guess....

Item number 5: I guess you noticed I rode my bike to this appointment.

Answer: Yes, I really think that you shouldn't drive a motorcycle while pregnant.

Me: Why not?

Answer: Well if you were to fall or be in a crash, it could cause a miscarriage.

Me: Well I certainly don't want to crash. Am I statistically more likely to get into a crash because I'm pregnant?

Answer: Well.... no...

Me: Then I guess we're okay then, aren't we?

And then there were three (one was very very small)

When I told the registered nurse at the OBGYN that I'd gone off the pill in order that my husband and I might get pregnant, she tried to reassure me by telling me that it often took 6 months to a year before one found oneself in such a state.

This is what my brain took from that statement: You will be pregnant in one year.

I could deal with that: it gave me plenty of time to prepare for the idea of being pregnant and, even more importantly, of being a parent for the rest of my life. Imagine my surprise one month later when it turned out that what she meant was: You have a chance of getting pregnant any one of the next 365 days.

I wish she'd been more clear.

Suspecting something was up, I went to the drugstore near the office after work in search for that which I'd never searched for before; a home pregnancy test. Consequently I didn't know where to look. This turned out to be a fortunate circumstance since a co-worker sidled up to me as I was aimlessly perusing what turned out to be the headache aisle.

"Whatcha buying?" he greeted me.

"Uh," I said. After he left I snuck out and went to the opposite side of town to another drugstore.


Home pregnancy tests are stored under "Family Planning," by the way. And you really can't miss them, because they are bright pink. That's right, an item that most people would probably want to buy discreetly is packaged in a color which screams BABY! BABY! BABY! all the way up to the counter. But they did do their thing; two lines showed up almost immediately.

I'm sure every expectant mother remembers with clarity the moment they learned they were pregnant. I believe my exact words were: Oh, fuck.

Which is how we came to be sitting there, after all, staring at a pink stick with lines on it. With apologies to those who have trouble conceiving, it was amazingly easy. I'd gone for years half-wondering if those organs even functioned, and three tries and one month later I had incontrovertible truth that I was fertile. Apparently quite so. Wham, bam. Thank you ma'am.

My husband, of course, was delighted. It was more his idea than mine anyway; in fact, if there'd been a way for him to be pregnant, he would have gladly done so. I wasn't so sure. I liked my life the way it was; why add somebody else to it? And I was definitely not on board with the whole nine months of pregnancy thing. I knew, for instance, that eventually it would be obvious to perfect strangers that I was pregnant, and all my actions would be scrutinized. (She's eating deli meat! Doesn't she know that's a no no??) The registered nurse had at one point tried to still these fears by pointing out that it was only for nine months.

"Nine months," I shot back, "is only three months shy of a year."

Still. After some doubts and some anger and some desperate tears, we've settled out some and we're ready for the long haul. Those wild hormones are no match for me. And though it seems like we've already been pregnant forever, we're only nine weeks along. Nine weeks is only three weeks shy of a trimester.