A blurry look inside my uterus

Good thing they put that arrow there.

So, I can’t find my camera, which means I can’t post that picture of me being happy with an umbrella, so I thought I’d post this here instead.  When this picture was taken, I was indeed smiling, please do believe.

This morning I spent a rather boring 45 minutes in the midwife’s office waiting to hear the heartbeat on the doppler thing.  I picked up Time Out Chicago from December 2009 and read all about good food that was served last year.  Then I read some Better Homes and Gardens and was genuinely happy I don’t have that much house to clean.  Then, finally, the midwife came and after some forgettable chit chat, I stretched out on the table and let her prod about right above my business looking for a heartbeat.

Prod prod prod.

Static.

Midwife: This usually takes some fishing around.

Me: That’s fine!

Prod prod prod.

Static that sounds vaguely like a slow heartbeat.

Midwife: Well, I can hear your heartbeat!  That’s your body pumping blood into your uterus.

Me: Huh.

Prod prod prod.

Static.

Prod prod prod.

Static.

Prod prod prod.

Prod prod prod.

Me: This is sort of terrifying.

After about four more minutes of that, she notices I’m crying my pathetic eyes out as I imagine calling Chad at work, and she says, “Let’s see if we can swing in for a quick ultrasound.”

And we do, and in roughly .4 seconds I am watching a sea creature dart around inside me, and it. is. great.  The picture really doesn’t do it justice.

The ultrasound-midwife says, “Oh, the little one was just being a little stinker and hiding from us,” and I sort half-think, “Don’t call my kid a stinker!” but am too mesmerized by the really-fast-darting-around on the screen to say anything.

Why I haven’t been writing

I don’t feel the way I expected to feel.

But then, I’m not sure why I expected to feel happy and light and excited and giddy and immediately loving and optimistic.  Did I expect to be overtaken by the proverbial body snatchers?

Truth is I’m terrified and weepy and miss my mom more excruciatingly every day.  I have vivid dreams about talking to her and saying things like, “I’m so relieved you’re not dead!  Can you believe I thought you were dead?”

Because it still doesn’t seem possible to me, even after 29 months – and it’s 29 months this Wednesday – two years, five months.  And it still seems wrong to me.  It’s wrong to not be able to tell her, or to be able to ask her how she felt when she was pregnant.  All I know is that she loved it.  I remember her saying she loved being pregnant, and she loved nursing – she got wistful when she said it. She loved being pregnant and so I thought I would, too, because I am more her than anyone else.

But in addition to fear and sadness, I feel a doubt that I cannot wriggle my mind out of with statistics or probabilities or “stop being ridiculous”.  I doubt I’ll be any good at this. I doubt Chad will be as patient with a child as he is with me.  I doubt I’ll be able to maintain any sort of independent identity.  I doubt I’ll do the right things and protect my child the way mothers supposedly naturally do.  I doubt, every day, that “everything will be okay.”  Because I know that there are no guarantees of that. Not to belabor a point I know I’ve made before, but I’ve seen things turn out not okay.  And really bad things happen to really good people every second.

I didn’t make it that way.  I’m just pointing it out.

****

What you should know, however, is that I’m not usually a giant drag to be around.  I get on just fine most of the time, and I can actually be pretty pleasant.

When I get home tonight, I’ll post a picture of me looking really happy with an umbrella to prove it.

****

A couple weeks ago I went out to Seattle to visit some0ne who is a little bit family, a little bit old friend, and still a little bit stranger.  I was delighted to be there, to be somewhere I hadn’t been before, to kayak in the cold rain and see creepy little seal heads rise out of the grey waves and regard us briefly before diving down again.  It was all mist and dark green hemlock and city-built-with-deference-to-hills.  I thought, Some day I’ll tell the kid, ‘Do you know what I did when I was pregnant with you? I kayaked in Puget Sound and spelunked in a lava tube.’ That’s right, kid, your mom had mildly adventurous days.

We ate vegan donuts and many varieties of chowder and played scrabble and drove a little rental car into a big boat that crossed a span of ocean.

But even that trip didn’t turn out all okay, because when I confided in my companion about what my body was busy doing, and why I couldn’t go out for late night cocktails, I was met with silence.  Not that I need giddiness from other people – I really don’t.  But I suppose I do want support from people I love.  And even when pressed, my companion couldn’t help but tell me how he really felt.  That he is not happy about this. That he thinks I will be a good person, but as for a good parent – eh, who can say?  He loves kids.  He hates all parents.  Kids scare him.  How patient will I really be?

Ultimately, I know it’s a reflection on him.  I don’t think he has any truly positive relationships with any of the people that were parental figures to him.  His childhood, from what I could tell (and I wasn’t always there), was an exercise in pointless power-struggles, resentment aimed at him, expectations created and changed without notice, and harsh words.  I don’t think he ever experienced the unconditional support and truly boundless love that I did from my mom.

It’s really sad to think about.

And he’s so smart, I suppose he can look around and see all the potential-bad at once, without thinking of the potential-amazing.

Even with all my sad, terrified doubt – I still know there’s potential for amazing.

So all that potential-bad talk was hurtful to me.  Because I’ve considered it all before.  And decided I can do a lot to make it as amazing as possible.  And I decided to try.

Basically real words spoken in our apartment yesterday.

Chad: Your mascara is running.

Me: You think I’m ugly because I’m pregnant and gained two pounds!

(pause while I run to bathroom to scrub violently at my face with non-salicylic acid face wash)

Me: Do you think those two pounds I gained are all in my boobs?  Say yes or I will cry.

Chad: Those two pounds are all in your boobs.  Your boobs are great.

Me: Don’t just say that because I told you to!  I hate you!

Chad: I know you didn’t mean that, so I’m just going to hug you now.

Me: I feel slightly better.

Chad: I want to ask you about this computer I might buy and if you think it’s too much money to spend right now.

Me: What?  This obviously demonstrates that you have spent more time googling used macs than you have googling baby stuff and, again, I hate you.

I promise

…to never refer to gestation as “a special journey.”

I can get spiritual about some things, but I genuinely promise to never, ever do that to anyone who happens upon this blog.

The days are just packed.

I am taking a computer programming class.

I have no idea why I’m doing this. It’s not going to help me in my current job, and I frankly have no real ambition, per se, to do anything else in particular. But I’m taking a programming class and I’m learning JavaScript, which is, um, hard. I admit to you (yes, you, the no one who reads my blog because I haven’t told anyone about it) that I was arrogant enough to think this class was going to be easy for me because the topic was so tactile, so straightforward and unambiguous, so follow-the-directions-and-get-the-right-answer-only-morons-can’t-do-this type of thing. I really thought that all the critical theory and thinking about things and searching for the right verb that evokes the right feeling that I did in grad school was really, fucking hard and so this programming stuff would be simple.

Who. Knew. that programming actually involves a lot of logic-type problems and that I have to, often, figure shit out that has not been thoroughly explained to me. Ugh.

Anyhow, I’m writing about this class because I have a midterm tomorrow night and instead of studying, I am looking up used boppy pillows on craigslist. This baby stuff is really screwing with my priorities.

How was the doctor’s appointment yesterday? Well, it was, in a way, a disappointment. The nurse who checked me in and took my pee (they give you a funnel now! smart!) was super sweet and I rather liked her, but the MD was, as Chad said, “clinical.” Clinical to the point that she discouraged me from natural childbirth, told me she didn’t think I was “going to get what I wanted” from a midwife experience, that 97% of women at her hospital have an epidural, and a “high percentage” of women are given pitocin, and if I wanted to labor for 20 hours having unproductive contractions (instead of having pitocin and having “good” contractions for 2 hours), that was up to me. Um, yeah, it is up to me. She made it pretty clear that once you’ve been in the hospital for a while and not progressed the way they want you to, they make you progress because the hospital is so high volume.

Doctor: Women who think they want a natural childbirth experience need to keep an open mind, because it doesn’t often end up working out that way.
My Inner Monologue: Health care professionals need to have an open mind about natural childbirth.
My Outer Voice: I’m just really freaked out by the idea of being strapped down to a bed and not being able to move.
Doctor: Well, that’s often the reality.

I don’t know if I can do it like these women did, but I want to be given a fighting chance to try. So long as I continue to be low-risk and blah, blah, blah.

So, thanks but no thanks, fancy university hospital that is a sister institution to my employer, we’ll be leaving now, I think. (When we were actually leaving, I literally said to Chad, “I shaved my legs for that?”)

We spent the rest of the weekend with my dad and stepmom who drove down from Milwaukee to play scrabble and cards and go to the aquarium with us. (This is our third visit to the aquarium in the last two months, and I’m just about done with the underwater wonder of it all.) Now Chad is out doing two weeks’ worth of laundry (When will we ever have laundry in unit? Please, apartment gods, please?) and I need to go study while eating birthday cake with a spoon.

Oh yeah – I’m going to try to do this – even though I missed the first two days.

stasis

I did not expect to be so freaked out.

Before I was pregnant, I was sometimes all gooey, obnoxious with Chad: “Let’s have a baaaaaaaybeeeeeee!”

And now that I am pregnant (as evidenced by a continued period of non-bleeding, and a couple other mildly unpleasant “signs” that I will not type here), I am completed freaked out. I don’t know what to do. I can’t talk to people about it. I don’t know who I should or can tell. I’m at that proverbial roller coaster apex, not knowing if we’ll creep over the edge into a face-shredding drop, or if we’ll just sit here for a while more.

Some things I worry about:
1. Chad and I will never go to Europe together.
2. I will never spend many solitary days writing.
3. I will quit my job and regret it.
4. I will keep my job and regret it.

Some things that happened recently:
1. I turned 29, yesterday. Ate cake, homemade avocado ice cream, and received gifts: a little video camera, a nature-y weekend in Michigan in June.
2. I scrubbed the kitchen on my hands and knees. (Yes, this is notable for me.)
3. I started reading a truly terrible book that talks more about how pregnancy makes you fat (gasp) than what it actually means to be pregnant.
4. I continued my typo-habit of typing “pregnany” instead of “pregnant”.

Tomorrow, the doctor.

The size of a poppy seed

So, I’ve peed on two things and they have both given me the plus sign.  Doctor’s appointments have been scheduled.  Yes, appointments, plural.  When you say to the woman at the front desk, “I peed on something and it gave me a plus sign,” she’ll take it upon herself to schedule four appointments right away, even when you say things like, “But this could still be a maybe, right? It’s not for sure, right?”

I’ve scheduled the following:
a “pregnancy verification” appointment,
an appointment with a nurse practitioner,
an ultrasound, and
finally an appointment with the ob-gyn I wanted to see in the first place.
Next Saturday we go for verification.

Hypersensitivity?
On Tuesday night when I skulked into the drug store at 9:30 pm to buy pregnancy tests there was but one lone checker, a lad who looked to be about 19.  And here I am with my pregnancy tests.  For context: I never bought the condoms on account of that’s something I just couldn’t get over.  I know if I were a checker, I’d take special notice of the people buying sex-related items, and I expect others to have interests as prurient as my own.  The lad was a bit overly friendly.  I gave him my old Montana phone number so I could get my card discount, and then he tried to chat me up about the west and why did I move here, to Chicago?  I wanted to say, “For the father of my poppy seed-sized zygote, that’s why!”  But I didn’t.  I said it was for the mild winters.

When we had completed our transaction, he looked me earnestly in the eyes and said, “I hope you have a good night.”  Seriously, drug store checker?  Back off!

I couldn’t help but think what he might think. There are so many possibilities! For all he knew, the potential zygote was a love-child from an affair with my married professor, or an unintentional byproduct of one-night stand, or maybe I had been trying to conceive for years and the peeing on the stick was just a habit I knew would yield disappointment?

I wanted to say, “Look, I’m lucky – I’m stable, but this is just a bit earlier than expected.”

Socialization
Last night we had two couples over for dinner and played Trivial Pursuit. Chad made an orange-glazed chicken, Jacques Pepin potatoes, and a big ass salad. Such gatherings make me happy I insisted on an apartment with a dining room, and a dining room table. So civilized.

And now for something completely different

Things I learned today:

1. It’s really hard to take a nice, sharp picture of a pregnancy pee test.

2. It appears I’m possibly pregnant.

3. I’m the type of person who will post pictures of something on which she peed online.  To my half-assed blog.  With four posts.  And no readers.  But, yay for the urine-saturated image!

I’m basically going to half- pretend that this is a mistake until someone in white gloves tells me it’s not.  By that I mean, I will still drink coffee today.  I won’t drink booze or smoke cigarettes or do most of the things on this terrifying list.  And I’m not telling people.

The other half of me that is not pretending is going to read a lot of mommy blogs and order crazy-making books online.  And then tomorrow morning, I’m going to pee on another object, and if that one looks the same, it’s to the doctor I go.

I did tell Chad, of course —  sent even blurrier pictures to his phone, and when he called me back I cried and said I wasn’t sure we were ready.  He said we were.  The conversation actually went like this:

C: So, what I am looking at here?

A: It looks like a plus sign.

C: And that means?

A: Well, a plus sign is supposed to mean, if it’s right, it could indicate, I think it’s supposed to mean (unable to say what it’s supposed to mean)

C: Oh, really?

A&C: <weird laughter>

A: Are you okay?

C: Yeah!  Are you okay?

and at that moment commenced the crying.

Now you’re all caught up.