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.