You Can't File for Divorce on a Sunday

You can't file for divorce on a Sunday.  I think that government offices are closed on weekends in order to curb the number of separations.

A few weeks ago, I cursed this government office policy.  Because I desperately wanted to file.  With all of my heart.

Who goes on a bender the night before an early-morning Sunday newborn parenting class, you ask?  Well, look no further than my husband.  My life partner.  The father of my unborn child.

But maybe, partly, this is my fault.  I was trying to be "cool." I said, sure go out, have some fun tonight, I'll just stay home, all pregnant, and you have a high school reunion party with your friends.

But I didn't say drink gin all night and don't get home until 3 a.m.   I laid awake, alternating between wanting to kill him and worrying that he was in a hospital somewhere.

I guess I'm not as cool as  I hoped I was.  Because if I was, I would have taken pity on his hungover ass the next day.  I would have said, oh honey, you look terrible, you just stay home and I'll go to this newborn parenting class all by myself, I don't mind.  Instead, I just wanted to shoot him.  Or put a permanent end to this married union.  Anything to forget that I had volunteered to live with this man in sickness and in health.

But I didn't say a word.  Instead, I woke up at 7 a.m., showered, dressed, and threw shoes down the hallway until the blob under the blankets began to move.

Rise and shine, HONEY, I said.  You didn't forget the newborn parenting class did you, sweetie??  (of course he didn't, I told him like five times the night before). Here, I'll make you breakfast!  He practically reeled when I presented him with scrambled eggs and toast.

But still, I said nothing. I made no mention whatsoever of the fact that his eyes looked like roadmaps.  Or that his pallor resembled a corpse.

Oh, I know that he didn't want to attend this class, that's for sure.  What are we going to learn at this thing, anyway, he had said weeks before.  But we're going, I said.  And we've got to learn the swaddling, I reminded him.  And that was that.  And here we were, in an airless, fluorescent-lit room in the basement of our hospital.  Waves of food smells from the cafeteria next door kept wafting in.  The special that day was chili con carne.  Even I was starting to feel queasy.

You've never seen a more pale, worn out, nauseous, and miserable-looking person than my husband on that day, a doll propped in front of him, awaiting swaddling.  His eyelids flickered, and he smelled like a distillery.  He kept his jacket on the entire time.

He said barely two words, but somehow, he made it through the three hours and  the swaddle techniques part of the stupid, inane, parenting class.

Then he disappeared.  For the next three hours, the seat next to me was empty, and all the other couples kept glancing at the chair.  I was mortified.  The teacher took pity on me and didn't ask a thing.  And angry beyond words.

I found him in our car, still wearing his parka.  He was snoring.  I put the key in the ignition and once again wished  there was a way to file for divorce on Sundays.  But I didn't have a leg to stand on. The class turned out to be really stupid, designed for people who have lived outside of civilized society since birth.  The only thing worth knowing was the swaddling.  And I could have looked that up on the Internet.  But still, I hated him.

So I didn't mention his absconding to the car, he didn't say I told you so about how ridiculous and inane and unnecessary the class was, and we drove home in silence.  Barely three words were spoken the rest of the day.  When it was time to go to bed, I was still fuming -- angry at myself, at him, at the class.

Sometime during the early morning hours, he rolled over and faced me.  To this day I am not sure if he was awake or asleep.  But he took my head in his hands and kissed me all over my face.  Then he rolled over again and went back to sleep.  I sighed.  I would no longer file for divorce on Monday.

Money is no object.

My stomach is in the way.  By this I mean that people have stepped aside on the sidewalk to give me wide berth as they flatten themselves against buildings.  Strangers ask me when I'm "going to pop."

And if I saw a $20 bill in the street, I'm not sure I would attempt to pick it up.

Lipstick ruined. And I would do it again.

Do not F--- with a pregnant woman.

Today I parked at the mall for a bit of Christmas shopping.  When I got back to my car, I discovered that some a--hole had parked their over-priced heap inches -- I mean INCHES away from my car door.  And when I say inches, I mean that I was unable to open my car door enough to even fit my hand.  Who does that?  I looked for scrapes along my car, because that's how close this other car was to mine.

I was going to have to go through the passenger side to try to get in and weasel my fat pregnant ass into the driver's seat.  Do you have any idea how hard this is?  Do you know the pain involved?  I looked around and even considered asking someone to crawl in and back the car out for me.

Oh, but I was so damned angry, so mad, so frustrated, so pregnant.  I found a scrap of paper and a pen and I decided that I would leave the owner of this car a note, telling them just want brand of jerk I though she or he was.

Just then my pen ran out of ink.

But brilliance struck.  I pulled a lipstick out of my bag and proceeded to write out, in the plum tones of MAC Viva Glam VI, exactly what I thought this person was.

And I wrote it right across the windshield.

Epilogue:  I've gotten so many questions asking what I wrote on the windshield:  
I wrote "A--hole."  But I think that the best part of all is that I had the presence of mind to write the word backwards, so that the person could read it across her/his windshield from the comfort of the drivers seat. 


Also, a big "thank you" to the devoted reader who sent me a replacement lipstick for my birthday !  A perfect, poetic end to this troublesome moment.

Vent: Pain & Liquor

My back hurts and I want a margarita.  Easy on the ice, easy on the lime.

Let's Talk Donuts

I hear and read about things such as "baby brain" and about crazy cravings and I wonder, "who makes this shit up?"  I'm convinced it's simply another way of pigeon-holing women as strange creatures with little in the way of common sense.

Except I have had an occasional freak-out if I cannot find a donut store within a short time frame.  It happened a few weeks ago, and I thought little of it then, but it happened again today, when I scoured the town where I work for one, measly, donut store.  By "scoured" I mean that I drove up and down streets looking for the word "donuts" on any building in town.  For a full thirty minutes. 

I concluded that there are no donut stores in this town.  Can you imagine a place without donuts?  An entire population without access to fried and sugared dough.  It's nothing short of a tragedy.  Luckily for this place, I'm quitting soon, never again to return without the armature of an apple fritter to protect me.

So maybe I have some cravings.  Maybe.

Baby brain -- well, I have always thought this to be something made up by the same people who invented PMS.  But now I have reason to worry that it might be somewhat accurate.  Just last week, I was eating a banana, and I set it down.  Moments later, I COULD NOT FIND THE BANANA.  And let me tell you, I searched high and low for that thing.  Hours later, I found the half-eaten fruit in the trunk of my car.  Oh, yeah, THERE.  Of course.  That makes sense.  Incidentally, it was a really hot, sunny day.  Not good.

Pregnancy is a funny thing. And I don't mean miracle-of-life funny, I mean funny as in odd, and mystifying, and truly hard to relate to from a distance, in my opinion.  I never thought I would turn into a sugar-craved, bumbling idiot.  But when I tell these stories to friends who have been pregnant, they say, "Yep, been there.  And there was this incicent with a chocolate cream pie..."

Which is all to say, that pregnancy is elusive and weird and but it has its moments, like when you don't give a rat's ass if everyone sees you stripping the meat off a drumstick while wearing a bikini.

And then it slaps you in the face with a rotting banana.

Truisms: Standing, Sober, but Not Hungry

A Few Truisms

1. It absolutely sucks eggs that you can't drink.  No two ways about it.  I know that popular thought, current research, and the French consider it OK to drink a small-to-moderate amount of alcohol while pregnant, but the act of having to moderate at all makes drinking wholly unsatisfying to me.  Every small sip I take is a reminder that my little allotment is near its end.  And this makes me want it all the more.  When my husband and I walk past the bars and pubs in our neighborhood, I sometimes stop at the doorways to leer at the bottles behind the bar, while I plot my future drinking lineup.  I can't decide if my first postpartum drink will be a pina colada, a margarita, a whiskey sour, a gin and tonic, a martini, or a jug of sangria.


2. If you are on a crowded subway train/bus, the only person who will offer you a seat is not the dapper gentleman in a three-piece suit, but rather, the tired-looking woman on her way home from a job where she's been on her feet all day.  That guy thinks that reading the Wall Street Journal and trading cow patty futures entitles him to extra time on his ass.  Meanwhile, you're busy populating the earth with new life so that humanity doesn't fade away into the ether.  But you have to stand in a hot, crowded subway train while doing this.

3. The bad news: your stomach is enormous.  The good news: your ass now looks small by comparison.

4. The urgency to urinate is inversely proportional to the amount of pee that actually leaves your body.  I feel like a 70-year-old man with an enlarged prostate.

5. So far, the best, and only, perk of being pregnant is not having to suck my stomach in at the beach.

Last weekend, I was chomping on fried chicken legs and throwing them over my shoulder, sucking down lemonades, and gobbling chocolate chip cookies, all while sporting a tiny black bikini, legs akimbo, stomach hanging down over my beach chair.  All without the slightest worry that I might have to inhibit my intake of oxygen in order to appear smaller than I really am.

It was absolute freedom in a bikini, for the first time in decades.

Guilt, Party of One, Your Table is Ready

So I scheduled the amnio.  What else would I do, really.  Statistics don't work for me.  That I might be the one in however many thousands who might hold the (defective) bean is something my psyche could not stomach.  And the anxiety, crying jags, shakes, and erratic behavior set it.

I made the appointment and told no one besides my mothers-in-law, my husband, and my best friend.  I didn't want to hear one more bit of advice, read one Internet anecdote about an amnio gone bad, or have one more person telling me that they "had a friend who..." I needed radio silence.  And I was smart enough to know that the people I told respected my decision, or even outright supported it.  I was tipping the scale in my favor with absolute impunity.

I think it was a stroke of luck that my husband couldn't accompany me to the doctor's office that day.  Not that he's not supportive, but he's not as, say, indulgent, of my fears as my friends or my mothers-in-law.  I needed someone who could coddle me, not by feeding my fears, but by acknowledging them.  Someone who would allow me to own and hold these fears, and then just BE THERE. I think we all know what I'm talking about here:  I needed a woman by my side.

I got two.  Boy, did I hit the jackpot in the wedding lottery.  I hear mother-in-law horror stories all the time, but I have none of those.  If there was a divorce, I know who would be on MY side in the courtroom.  Seriously, I couldn't have dreamed up a better Amnio Dream Team.

One mother-in-law, who I'll call Mother Hen, sat in the waiting room and tried to remain calm by pacing the waiting room while the other one MIL did bedside duty.  Nurse Reddi, I'll call her. You want Nurse Reddi, or someone just like her, at your bedside.  Nurse Reddi was the one who held my hand and watched the doctor like a hawk.  Nurse Reddi was the one who whispered to me, conspiratorially, "I like him, he knows what he's doing.  I feel really good about this" when the doctor briefly left the room before the procedure.  Nurse Reddi also had the presence of mind to ask questions and remember the answers, like, when the tests would come back, if we could order a rush on them, and even asked about checking on some random birth defect even I hadn't heard of.  Nurse Reddi does online research prior to taking her place next to the bed.  I recommend you find your own Nurse Reddi and hang on for dear life.

I'm not a queasy, or easily grossed out sort of person.  I love looking at the needle when I'm having blood drawn.  If there was a full-time Surgery Channel option on my cable subscription, I would definitely add it.  In HD.  I can talk about knee surgery or a bout of diarrhea at the dinner table as I shovel steak into my mouth.

But I was unable to stomach the thought of watching the amnio needle enter my belly for this test.  All I could do was apologize silently to the fetus for what I was about to do.  A sharp object was about to invade his warm, wet, haven, and I had signed the papers to do so.  I am so sorry, I said.  But momma needs to sleep through the next five months without the assistance of opiates.

I'm not going to lie.  It hurts.  Not a lot, but it's a pain that I've never experienced before, I guess because it's not every day that your womb cramps up from being punctured with a 22-gauge needle.  In case you are wondering, that is incredible thin.  I had assumed it was going to be about two or three times as thick as a strand of spaghetti.  In actuality, it resembles the sort of needles used to draw your blood, maybe even thinner.  Also, I had mistakenly thought that the needle went into the belly button.  Again, not so.  The doctor uses the magic ultrasound wand to look for the best pockets of amniotic fluid, and then constantly looks at the screen to help him guide the needle to the fluid.  As soon as the needle goes in, the uterus reacts by cramping up -- there's the pain.  I pictured a jellyfish contracting in the water when I felt this.  The remainder of the time was spent pain-free, but it was the longest 60-seconds or so of my life.  That's when the doctor is piping out a couple of test tubes' worth of amniotic fluid.  (It takes so long because the needle is so thin.)

And then, that's it.  I was allowed to go home and rest for before resuming a somewhat normal life -- no heavy lifting, sex (that this would even be a remote consideration by a husband after an invasive procedure, is, in my opinion, a precursor to filing for divorce), or air travel, that sort of thing.  Oh, you also have to check for signs of leakage or blood.  I thought that the leak would come from my stomach, the place where the needle went in -- again, I imagined a sea creature, this time a whale, spouting out amniotic fluid from it's blowhole.  But no, the leak comes out the vagina.  These are the lessons learned by warm glow of an ultrasound screen.

So I was released on my own recognizance.  But I still had Mother Hen and Nurse Reddi, the ultimate Recovery Tag Team.  They all but took me out in a fireman's carry.  On the way to the car, there was much debate among the two of them as to whether or not I should proceed along a short incline or walk down small set of stairs.  I took the stairs while they evaluated.

The rest of my day was spent on my couch.  Mother Hen delivered my favorite foods and Nurse Reddi filled my water glass and they both spent a full six hours talking with me about every subject under the blue sky -- except amniocentesis.  If there is a medal for "Care in the Service of the Neurotic" these two earned it twice over.

After my Florence Nightingales left me in the ahem, care of, my betrothed, my night was once again, sleepless.  This time it was because of my trips to the toilet to check for leakage or blood (there was none), and because I would not leave the confines of the couch.  The remote became my talisman, the television, my companion, late into the night, while I monitored the cramping that the doctor had warned me about, and which he emphatically reminded me was perfectly normal.  Two Tylenol later, I finally nodded off under the watchful glow of Iron Chef.

The next two days would be a reprise of the first.  Bathroom, couch, kitchen, couch.  Though I was told one days' rest was sufficient,  I convinced myself that three days' rest would more fully insure me against the worst.  Three days passed, then three more, then three weeks, then five, and the memory of that morning fades more and more as the fetus slowly morphs from "it" to "him."