Mumbling Madly

I’ve always loved shopping…loved it. But imagine that instead of an entire, wide, big store filled with choice after choice you are now relegated to a tiny corner behind the children’s section across from the bathroom. Hence the tragedy of maternity wear begins. OK, I know I’m lucky: fashion has never been this baggy, this unshapely, this ugly…peasant tops and empire waists abound. But pants are a no-win situation. They have to be bought specific for maternity and depending on the bells and whistles–many of them slide right down. Panels, drawstrings, all the usual trappings meant to accommodate are typically uncomfortable and slippery.

And I didn’t recieve the memo: Ugly, khaki, cargo capris seem to be the unspoken dress code for expecting mothers.

During the poundings of a very loud Beatle’s cover band at River Days in Detroit, MI, the baby started kicking spiritedly. I say ‘kicking’ but they were really ticklish flutters in what I soon recognized as tiny arms and legs thrashing about horizontally across my navel. Detroit spread out in festival form while I waddled around the various crowds, food stands, and rides. I ignored the need to go to the bathroom valiantly, but inevitably ended up in a porta-potta.

While waiting in line for the bathroom a teenage black girl looked me over and said, “You’re pregnant…and it’s a boy.” I was surprised and pleased that a stranger was recognizing my bump as baby instead of overeating. “Yes, it’s most likely a boy,” I said, thinking of the ultrasound tech’s speculation. “I can tell,” she said, “You’re carrying it very high…girls babies are really low,” she patted her pubic bone in demonstration. I smiled. Then I spent the rest of the night in strange contemplation: was this a definite sign? The baby is a boy? And why did that worry me? Maybe a boy baby won’t like me as much, won’t relate to me, won’t understand me because I’m a girl and I won’t understand him…foolish thoughts but concerning all the same.

When I went to the doctor’s office, I was all geared up to get on the scale. I am embracing weight for the first time in my life! I don’t own a scale and typically turn around when being weighed at the doctor’s office. Instead of bemoaning my tragic fate of preggo weight gain I am hugging it fiercely. So at my last appt I hop on the scale and….I have lost a pound since my first visit at 8 weeks pregnant. Here I am at four months and well, this puts the total weight gain at around five pounds. Lost a pound? Really? The doc seems mildly concerned and upon hearing that I am still nauseous after eating prescribes: Gatorade. Yup. It goes down better then water, contains calories, and is low in sugar. Wow…this is awesome! I don’t really like Gatorade but still, this is great!

Nothing is more incredible then hearing the baby’s heartbeat. It chimes in near my own, a steady and fast chug, chug, chug. Today I also learned that my uterus has reached just below my belly button (a far cry from the pubic bone) and that the baby now sits a few inches below the naval.

We continue to browse a gigantic baby name book for boy names. The funny and horrible names always shout at us first (Hershel, Folker, etc)…decent boy’s names are actually harder to find with hubbie’s last name. We have created a very short list containing several exotic names and two ‘old’ names from Josh’s side of the family. When I say ‘old,’ I mean that there isn’t a single person under fifty with these names…

We learned that “Michael” is probably THE most popular boy’s name in the country, spanning decades as the number one or two name on the list.

My dad jokingly suggested the name “Wolfgang” as a great partner to Josh’s last name. It’s pretty sensational and made the short list–if only to remind us of what we want: a name with an impact. While watching “Die Hard” we realized one of the bad guys was named “Wolfgang” (pronounced wolf-gong by the stereotypical villainous Europeans with the terrible hair). When rated on a baby name site, “Wolfgang” received low marks under “Friendly” and “Youthful.” Huh…

Before the conception I’ve been rambling on and on about was a bleak period of infertility. Within a year I had lost the cheery idea of conceiving on a whim, quickly, or before any deep thought about what I was actually doing. It is a dark, bizarre, and deeply painful period when one wonders if their supposedly God-given right to pro-create may be compromised. I spent many anguished nights writing in my journal questioning my purpose in life if I wasn’t able to conceive naturally. Sounds dramatic, I know, but infertility taps into a very primal and personal space inside a soul. Because, currently, I spent more time trying to conceive then actually pregnant and I still have a lot of insight about the topic of infertility. Insight and anecdotal input:

Written in January of 09:
Sitting in this rusty doctor’s office in a scrappy part of Renton. This is the clinic I go when I have to see someone the same day. It is a walk-in clinic with a kindly Indian doctor who is fast and efficient. His nurses tend to be round, homely, women in Disney print scrubs. This time around I’m there because I have horrible mouth sores due to (what is later diagnosed) as a bacterial infection in my throat. While the nurse takes my blood pressure she asks, “Are you on any medication?”
“No,” I say. “Oh, wait…I’m taking prenatal vitamins.”
“Are you PREGNANT?” the nurse is all bug-eyed.
“No,” I say, shortly. I pause, and if by explanation say, “It’s taking a long time.”
“Oh,” the nurse seems unsure of what to say. Then she bursts out: “Well…do you want one of mine? Heh, heh, I have two boys…”
Do I want one of hers? WTF?
“Ha heh,” I garble, awkwardly. My throat is killing me. The nurse trails off…first about her boys then about, what? I don’t know. Why does it offend me that she jokingly offered one of her offspring as a consolation for my infertility? I don’t know, but it does…

The lowest of the low, written at 10 Weeks Along:

You see, it’s the fog. The interminable, bizarre, definitely pregnancy-related fog. It’s similar to the feel of a stiff ache that follows the flu, you know, when your body is still going back to its stretchy healthy shape? But at times this fog can be blissful, like the moment when you close your eyes while watching a movie on TV–I’m just going to listen to the movie with my ears, I think, not watch it with my eyes. The flickering of the TV blinks beneath closed lids until I’m floating on a narrow planet. I can’t imagine getting up, my body is so so so very very heavy.

I wander from room to room sometimes, alone, and unsure. This is usually after a full day of exertion, animation, children in classroom and in studios. There might be a glimmer of hunger, but it’s overwhelmed by a choking, suffocating, nausea in my throat. I pick up cans of food, listlessly, since my ability to prepare multiple ingredients in some sort of semblance of dinner has long been abandon. My husband comes home and looks around. I’ve placed a can of chili and a can opener on the kitchen counter. In the living room I reveal that I have eaten three russet potatoes, mashed. “That’s all I’m having for dinner,” I claim, still unsure if the potatoes will be ok…or maybe I will be haunted by them in the middle of the night. That is what happened with the pizza…the terrible, terrible, pizza from the place just down the block. So convenient! So close by! And yet the sauce was a travesty, the cheese scarce, and I don’t think peperoni was the right way to reintroduce meat into my diet. I woke up twice in the middle of night, the pizza lurking in the back of my throat, threateningly. I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself back to sleep. I’m never eating that pizza again, I swear. Just one look at the pizza box the next morning sends me down.

Josh has gone down to Vancouver to tell his mother the news. I should be with him but a very important rehearsal takes precedent; my old life still hanging around like everything is normal. Without Josh, there’s no one to feel normal with. There is no one to keep an eye on me as I wander around the house trying to outrun my illness. I try and work in the garden but the wind makes me feel sick. The sun gives me a headache. I wonder when I’ll stop being an insufferable pregnant crank. The kid must be doing some serious growing this week, Week 10, the first week the fetus looks sorta like a baby instead of a tadpole. While taking modern class the other night I caught a glimpse of my profile in the mirror and panicked. ‘I don’t want to get bigger!’ ‘I’m going to get wide’! Mirrors and scales might need to be avoided–or at least only used as a necessity.

‘Whatever,’ I think, dreamily lying down in my car with the the driver’s seat pushed all the way back. I’m in the parking lot of a community center, early to teach by about 15 minutes. I’m stunned at how easy it is to curl up in a ball in my car seat and almost fall asleep. Normally I would be too paranoid about someone walking by and worrying that I had died in my car. Lately, it’s everything I can do to get OUT of my car. Sometimes I put my head on the steering wheel just to gain the strength to pull myself, my purse, my dance bag, my book bag, and my keys out of the vehicle. I’ll take any opportunity to just sit and space off out the windshield at the world outside. There have been moments when I’ve debated pulling over to the side of the road and taking a nap.

The fog has been pushed most likely by my abstaining of coffee. This is really adding insult to injury, I know. Coffee no longer smells or tastes good…what’s the point? Maybe I’ll pick it up again, maybe not. The headache withdrawal has been crushing, and sometimes I think I might be crazy to pass it up. Every since I’ve been producing more saliva I seem to forget my own thirst. When you’re constantly over salivating–and I mean really, like sometimes I have to spit some of it out because my mouth seems to fill up–you forget to drink! And would you believe that sometimes even water or even my own overabundant spit makes me feel queasy? What is going on? So, you can see why I would want to forget about coffee when even swallowing water has become an issue. Yeesh.

Here’s the thing, with all this white flour and cheese I’m sure you’re wondering about, ah, bowel movements. And it’s widely known that constipation is a symptom of the first trimester. In the beginning the reason is pretty simple: You’re subconsciously afraid you’re going to push out the baby. You see, when trying to wrap my mind around the idea of having something growing inside me, I had all sorts of weird visuals in my head: a pumpkin seed attached to a stem, a seahorse with a baby in his pouch, and a grape attached to a stem. All of these ideas reflect a fragility, an impossible idea that such delicate systems could sustain the pressure of bodily functions. Sitting on the toilet, suddenly there’s a ridiculous thought: “What if the baby isn’t properly attached and poof! Out it goes!” And so the body clams up, releasing nothing for hours and hours. No baby is coming out of me! Well, not for a long long time anyway…

I think, ill-fully, about the Metamusil in my bathroom closet. We seem to always have a few cans of the stuff lying around. My dad swears by it–it’s how I learned about the fibrous powder you stir into water and drink. I don’t think it’s every been really successful in our household and is usually abandoned for ‘harder stuff,’ (i.e. the occasional laxative). I also recall my mother treating my baby sister with prune juice, a fact I bring up from time to time to embarrass her. She always had this little bottle of prune juice and back then I thought it was cute. (I still do). Now, I wonder: is it my turn for the prune juice? I compromise…I buy a big bottle of unsugared cherry juice instead.

At the beginning, the very beginning, during the zygote phase, the baby liked pizza. I was dreaming about pizza, thinking about it, craving it, watching it on tv and thinking: “That looks amazing.” Then the craving dropped and what was replaced was a strange sinking sick feeling. Even hunger was masked by this bizarre feeling of nausea and sea sickness–as if at any moment I was going to face a shipwreck. There were no cravings, only hopes…maybe, MAYBE, the baby likes spinach (it has so much folic acid which is good for baby’s brain!) And the baby did like spinach…for about a week. And then slowly, one by one, vegetables were rejected. I remember trying to choke down a vegetarian taco, all beautiful and yummy with beans, guac, and four different salsas from the bar. It was the tomatoes in the salsa fresca that did me in…I couldn’t bare them. And so, Mexican food was pulled out from under me…as was Italian and then slowly Thai. Foods I had always celebrated became bizarre and abstract. Trips to the grocery store became sad little forays with me averting my eyes at almost everything. Fruit barely clung, with bananas in my cereal in the morning and oranges making a miraculous sticking point. Ah! The baby likes tuna fish, I realized during week 7. Sort of.

And then I reached Week 8 and existed almost entirely on white flour and cheese. This was particularly fitting since the weekend prior I had gone to Le Pichet for the first time. Notoriously French, Le Pichet is full of baguettes, cheese, and glass bottles of water on each table. My brother claims it as his new favorite restaurant and since he was in town, this was where we went. I initially went into the restaurant certain I wasn’t going to make it: an array of uappetizing smells from the menu assaulted me.“Curley endive tossed with warm confit of duck gizzards, sweet pickled onions and aged Gouda” and “Radishes, herbed butter, wine marinated hard boiled egg and pistachio-pork sausage” smelled particularly alarming. Luckily, Josh picked the cheese plate and with non-stop baguettes delivered to our table, I ate with wild abandon. I even ate the cheese rinds. I was so satisfied, that I made a mental note to myself: the baby likes carbs. By Monday I had settled into my new diet: cheese quasadillas, bagels and cream cheese, mustard and cheese sandwiches, and bowls of the whitest cereal you can imagine.

Protein as I know it has disappeared. Chicken was tried and abandoned weeks ago. Slowly, I found myself on a carbohydrate only diet. It was against every fiber in my body to bypass the whole wheat bagels for the white and the 8 grams of fiber per serving cereal for Puffins. Doctor Oz from Oprah would certainly give me a free pass, right? I was eating the exact opposite of everything I’ve ever read up on. At one point, I visited two separate coffee shops in one day in order to stuff an overpriced white bagel with cream cheese in my mouth.

During Week 8, I tried to trick the baby by sneaking beans and guac into a cheese quasadilla–rationalizing that it’s mushy and therefore texturally acceptable. The baby punched up the nausea button right in the middle of my creative movement class for autistic children. It was already a bad day; the kids were angry and bored, the whims of movement class were lost on them–even though I brought musical instruments for them to dance with. The teachers are usually stressed and unsupportive. Most of them are desperate for a respite and will often disappear. It would serve them right if I vomited all over them–especially on the really unlikable kid who screams my name as if I’m beating him, “Miss. Maaaaarrrrraaaa, I don’t want to do ANY OF THIS!” (For starters, when will this school realize that I’m not a “Miss.” I’m a “Ms.” and always will be).

But I never vomiedt. Not once. A few times my throat closed in and threatened–a gag. A pathetic little choking sound came out and maybe a little saliva. A cough. A whiff of something strong–like Chinese food wafting through the University district–sent me into confusion: “Ooooh, Chinese food…oh, no, that smells AWFUL.” And thus the churning of the first trimester continued as one ethnic food group is knocked down after another….except for the French.

For starters, I’ve always bragged about having an iron stomach. I’ve thrown up a total of 6 times in my life–and my Mom was at my side for all of them. Even when I was 25 and came down with the stomach flu I managed to time it during a visit to my parent’s house. As if I were a little girl again, Mom was right beside me as I yakked into a waste basket in her bathroom. I’ve never succumb to so much alcohol that I’ve thrown up–although there were probably times when I should have. I would rather suffer through a really terrible meal or a case of over-eating then endure sore stomach muscles and bad barf breath. I certainly am not one of those women who constantly finds a reason to throw up because of, say, a head cold or stress or something silly. So, as you can imagine, this new round nausea is a strange beast to tame.

The only real time my nausea leaves me is when I’m stuffed full…like when we went to a pub in Georgetown and I decided, YES, I’m pregnant and should really pack it in. This was a few hours before the dreaded hospital tour at Swedish. Josh was going because he was a champ, (although the idea of hanging around a bunch of nervous pregnant couples while traipsing around a hospital did sound a bit like hell to me too). Josh needed a beer or two before the tour. I was still riding high on my secret baby news and an enormous bub-style bacon cheese burger sounded like just the ticket (this was also only at 5 weeks along). After my burger arrived it was so sensational that a friend of Josh’s stopped by our table to admire my enormous dinner. “I just hate it when skinny people eat whatever they want!” She joked. “Har har,” I chimed, secretly agreeing with her, (and to my credit I did sub the fries for a garden salad…it’s just that the burger was so BIG).

I spent the tour in a bloated state of burger, bacon, and benevolence. Five couples attended the tour with us. One woman was so deathly afraid of hospitals she almost fainted (I know this because she was on my UW Hospital tour with me two days later and confided that Swedish almost did her in). I suppose I’m spoiled with my adequate experience with hospitals. You know, a surgery here, a surgery there…I’ve been visiting hospitals since I was 5 (tubes were put in my eardrums). I’ve had my tonsils removed (do they even do that anymore?). I’ve had tissue grafts (2 of them) on my right ear drum and finally a cartilage graft. I’ve been lucky: no experiences with malpractice, no terrible cases of mis-communication or wrong prescriptions filled. For the most part, my hospital experiences were efficient and fast. Oh sure, during my last hospital stint, my otologist was kind of an asshole and removed a keloid scar even when I assured him he didn’t have to. The anesthesiologist added a certain kind of medicine too soon to my blood stream causing me to gasp for air before finally going under. And I have never, ever, been able to accept an I.V needle gracefully. However, all this experience has provided a fairly healthy view of hospitals.

However, when you look at what’s a fairly natural phenomena: pregnancy, birth, infant, etc. and mix it up with the medical industry, I can see how some anxiety might build.

I am pregnant. Today I received word that my blood tests came back normal and my 14 week old in utero offspring appears to be healthy. I finally, finally, feel free to admit to the world that yes, this is happening: a baby in November (24 to be roughly exact). Not one to tell people the instant the home pregnancy test showed up positive, I stewed all through the first trimester in curious anticipation: Will it work? Conceiving was not a cheerful expedition–it took well over a year and was fraught with infertility fears. Thus my caution to broadcast the news too early and risk public devastation (something I thought had occurred at 8 weeks, sending me to the clinic, only to learn that thankfully everything was fine). I did, however, write multiple blog entries in anticipation of being open and out. I’m going to be frank about this, you guys….so here is the beginning of the this very strange chapter:
TRYING NOT TO BARF, Part 1

. A week or so before I found out, before everything became heightened, before my senses truly kicked in, I checked out “Eat This, No That” from the library. This is a well laid out book, straight from the talk show circuit, almost like a kid’s place mat at a restaurant: full color pictures of what to eat and what not to eat. Going to Ruby Tuesdays? Pick the steak, green beans, and sweet potatoes versus the Panko crusted chicken. (I admit: I took this book home largely because my husband is a visual learner).

“Eat This, Not That” is also totally barf-inducing if you’re a little bit pregnant. Just walking by the book sitting on my counter and catching a quick look at the glossy picture of a Big Mac versus a Whopper was enough to make me want to vomit. It got so bad, I had to turn the book cover-side down every time I ran across it. At some point, I tried to read it, through clinched teeth with the rational that it was library book…I needed to return it soon! How could I not educate myself (with large colored photos of sodas, sample bags of good and bad chips, and a lecture on corn syrup) if I couldn’t even get past the sensational cover?

“Ha ha,” I said, swallowing the urge to barf down, “This means our kid takes after me and doesn’t like Big Macs!” But even a quick look at the chapter on fruits and vegetables induced nausea. That day a sandwich made with raw yellow peppers went down horribly wrong, and now every time I look at yellow vegetables I want to slam the fridge closed. Am I really that sensitive? I haven’t actually VOMITED…just spent my days in a strange nauseous haze. Some women will tell you it’s because you’re hungry…that’s it. You’re hungry and instead of turning your hungry sensors on, you have your barf sensors turned up instead. But I’ve eaten, with wild hope, while nauseous and it leaves me about the same.

And yes, just writing about this damn book is making me feel queasy.