The Green Room

Some days, just being able to get out of the bathtub without help is the biggest victory you can ask for.

It only took me eight months, but I have finally reached the ’swollen fingers’ stage of pregnancy. I should have known I wouldn’t be able to escape it.

I know the traditional response to finding out that one of your husband’s customers is posting missed connections ads about him would be raving jealousy, but instead I find it highly amusing. Now at least he knows what it feels like to read one of those ads about yourself, and he agrees with me that it’s deeply, deeply strange. I kind of want to go hang out at Freddy’s so I can meet her when she comes back, compliment her on her good taste, and tell her the story of how Ryan and I met on missed connections in the first place. Probably shouldn’t though, it would be an awkward conversation to get right so that she didn’t end up feeling hurt or threatened. Which is too bad, because aside from the fact that she smokes she sounds like the kind of person I’d like to know.

Yoga was interesting this morning. A lot of positions that I usually have no trouble with were just slightly out of my reach today. (There are already lots of positions that I can’t do anymore, or can’t do well. This is a new round of positions that I apparently can’t get to anymore.) I don’t know if that’s because I pushed myself too hard yesterday trying to do yard work, or if that’s just how things are now. Thank goodness that pregnancy is not a permanent condition, and that there is some hope that my joints will eventually recover. It’s just so frustrating that I’d been working so hard, and my joints had been getting better, and now it’s all gone again. My doctor keeps trying to cheer me up by reminding me that it isn’t all for nothing, that the pain has a purpose, because at the end of all this I’ll have a baby, which is true, and it does help to think about it like that, but she’s also hedging a bit about how long it might take me to be able to move comfortably again, and I wish she’d just come out and tell me whether I’ll start feeling better as soon as the weight comes off, or if it’s going to take a few years of hard work and more physical therapy. At least then I’d know. But maybe she doesn’t know either. Bodies are mysterious things, after all.

What I should do right now is get dressed, call up some people and go down to Saturday Market. What I think will probably happen instead is I will continue to sit here in my bathrobe, eating ice cream and playing with my new computer.

Things I am looking forward to doing once I am no longer pregnant:

-Flopping down on the bed. Or on a chair. Or generally making any kind of sudden, unsupported movement.
-Wearing clothes with non-stretchy waistbands.
-Breathing without pain or difficulty.
-Having a glass of Scotch, neat.
-Hopefully, being able to hear again. (My doctor promises me that my ears and my nose should stop feeling so stuffed up after the baby is born. I really hope she’s right.)
-Being able to reach my feet and pick things up off the floor.

I would add ’sleeping comfortably’ to this list, but then I’ll have a baby to look after, and who am I kidding if I think I’m ever going to sleep again?

We had a doctor’s appointment last night (they’re every two weeks now) and I am very pleased to report that I have started gaining weight again, so I think this ‘relaxing’ thing might actually be working. The baby has also been head-down at the last two appointments, and the doctor thinks it extremely unlikely that it will go to all the trouble of sitting up at this point, so that’s another piece of good news. My google homepage is counting down to my due date, and there are only 48 days left, thank goodness. (Not that there’s any guarantee when it will actually arrive, and statistically speaking first babies tend towards being late rather than early, but whatever, it’s a light at the end of the tunnel and I’m clinging to it. I am so done with being pregnant.)

I am hereby taking today off from life.

I finally figured out at childbirth class last night something that’s been bothering me about the way a lot of people talk about pregnancy. It has to do with the idea of support. The instructor was talking about it a lot, about how important it was for dads to be supporting moms through labor, and I kept getting more and more annoyed. I know that due to the nature of human physiology, I have to bear the lion’s share of the physical and hormonal burdens of pregnancy, but being pregnant is not something that I am doing and Ryan has to help out with. Being pregnant and having a baby is something we are doing together. When we decided to get married, we resolved that this was going to be an equal partnership, or it wasn’t worth doing, and having a baby is exactly the same. Either we’re in this together, completely and equally, or something is very wrong. Having to listen to all this talk about me being supported makes me feel so alone, like I’m having a baby all by myself, which is not what I want to be doing at all. And before anybody gets the wrong idea, this is not in any way meant to be a criticism of Ryan or his behavior or attitude, but a criticism of a lot of the pregnancy books I’ve been reading, and the way in which a lot of people I’ve encountered seem to talk about pregnancy. And yes, if my situation were different this might not bother me at all. If I really were having a baby on my own, I probably would be wanting someone to support me. But I’m not on my own, and I’m not leading while he follows, this is a partnership and we are doing this together, side by side. Sigh. I suppose I’m pretty lucky to be able to make these kinds of complaints. It probably seems silly, I know my mother would say I’m just worrying about semantics again and I should go worry about something real, but words represent ideas and attitudes, and they shape the way we look at the world, and it’s important to me to try to get them right. And right now, in this situation, I don’t want support, I want a partner, and I’m very, very thankful that that’s what I’ve got.

Google Reader is now presenting me the news in French. Not all the news, mind you, but about half of the Google News feed now comes in in French. I’m not really sure why or how this happened, although appropriately enough it did start happening on Bastille Day. My reading comprehension is still good enough that I can get the headlines pretty easily, but it does take me awhile to get through an article. It’s kind of fun getting half my news in French, I used to read Le Monde to try to keep in practice but I haven’t done that in a long time. Now, since I don’t know how it started happening and don’t know how to stop it, I guess I have no choice but to brush up on my verb forms. Vive le Google!