I am my evil doppelganger

Being pregnant is like suddenly becoming my worst self, all my faults magnified and my virtues occluded. I am become even more negative, even more whiny, even more forgetful, even more volatile, even more self-centered, even more scattered, even more unproductive, even more weepy, even more ignorant, even more bitchy, even more lumpish and slow.

Cross your fingers and entreat your deities, people, that I have twins in the oven. Because I want two children, but I don't want to be this person ever again, particularly not if trying to parent a small being at the same time.

Medical bitchery

Well, I just wasted a good hour and a half of my life.

Drove to the doctor. Got there on time. Sat in a room and read a stupid parenting magazine cover to cover, for like, fifty minutes. Suddenly the nurse pops in: "Oh, well, the doctor said to tell you she doesn't do prenatal care." WTF. So I tell the nurse, "It would have been nice to know that when I made the prenatal care appointment." I ask her doesn't my primary care physician have to refer me anyway? She doesn't know, so finally she goes to get the doctor.

Turns out they don't have to refer me, but it can take weeks for a change in my primary care person (and hence my area of coverage) to go through, on account of the move. This occasioned another call to my HMO (~15 minutes) the upshot of which was "call back later." The doctor gave me the name of a doctor who does do prenatal care...and then I spent ten minutes trying to get my co-pay back from the idiot at the front desk who made the appointment in the first place.

The OB/GYN whose number the doctor gave me didn't want to see me because I wasn't 8 weeks pregnant yet (all the books say to make a doctor's appointment as soon as you know you are pregnant, argh!) but grudgingly found me a spot on the calendar for next Wednesday, at which point I will be 8 weeks 1 day. I thought there was supposed to be an ultrasound around this time in the gestation process, but I wasn't given any preparatory instructions, so now I'm not sure.

My mother-in-law is coming that Saturday, and we need to tell her what's going on, but I want to make sure I'm actually toting around a viable fetus before we do that. And I think, from what I hear, that I need an ultrasound in order to do that. Am I wrong? The books have nothing to say to me about when I should or should not time my ultrasounds.

Figuring out medical care is enough to send me into a depressive spiral. These fucking parenting books! "Interview a variety of providers," "go on hospital tours," "make sure you get the care you want." Do I need a fucking M.D. to be pregnant? How the hell should I know what kind of care I want? I want it not to hurt, okay? Minimal discomfort and then magical *voila baby*! And from everything I read, that ain't going to happen, so basically I'm choosing between kinds of pain, which just freaks me right the fuck out.

My partner says I have the lowest threshhold for pain/discomfort of anyone he knows. And it's probably true. I've never broken a bone, I whine if I get a papercut, I squirm and complain in small airplane seats, and I come home early from work if my cramps are too bad. I have enough to deal with with my cyclical depressions and bullshit without having my body be in pain. So this whole natural-v-medical birth thing is just kind of like, "huh?" As far as I can tell, they both hurt. Period. One hurts with someone you have known for a while, and a little more flexibility. The other hurts with total strangers and more gadgetry. Um, whatever.

Though I guess if I wanted the "none of the above" option I shouldn't have gotten pregnant. But really, I never wanted to be pregnant. Don't get me wrong, I want a baby. (Actually, what I really want is twins, but that's another post.) And adoption isn't really an option I want to consider, for personal family reasons. But this pregnancy part? The part I have to suck up in order to get a little human critter of our own (who will likely tell me it hates me and I ruined its life, thirteen-odd years from now)? No glowy earth-mother reports from me, no sir. And thus far, knock on wood, I am having an easy pregnancy.

You may wonder why I am not angsting about parenting. Dude. Parenting. I know I'll screw it up sometimes, I know we'll muddle through anyway, and above all, I know that developing preconceptions about it is useless. I'll freak out when I get there, or not. But pregnancy? Here there be dragons. Shit is happening to my body and it is going to hurt and there is not a whole hell of a lot I can do about it.

Ooh. That last bit just flagged for me. Do you think I'm a control freak? DO YA THINK?! *sigh*

I just cried for like half an hour - am still crying - and screamed at my husband - full-volume, all-out screaming - for the first time since we have known each other.

Pregnancy? Sucks.

Feeding the fetus

I've decided to just post as I go along. I'm so used to having a blog to tell about my life that this waiting period seems surreal, like it's happening in a vaccuum. We have five weeks to go before we can properly tell anyone we're pregnant (though we'll likely tell the family as soon as we confirm a heartbeat) and my head is trying to wrap around it all in between work and moving and fandom and everything else.

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When I was in college, we had this thing called the "Scrounge Line". If you were a "scrounger" (a college student living off-campus and low on funds or otherwise frugal) you could go sit in the commons in front of the place where people took their trays in to the dishwashers. As they passed you, you could point at the leftover food on their trays and ask, "Gonna eat that? Can I have it?" They'd tell you if they were sick or just didn't want to feed you, or they'd give it to you. There was a whole etiquette to it, actually. It was all very cool. I subsisted that way for the better part of a year once, until I asked someone for something on her plate and she said, "No, I have mono." I figured it wasn't worth it, after that.

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. The point is, I ate really well doing that. The food all tasted crappy anyway, so I looked at plates and instead of thinking, "Hey, pizza! Look, sandwich!" I thought "Hey, fiber! Look, iron! Some calcium!" Since I was eating for sustenance rather than pleasure, I got a really varied and rich diet from other people's leavings. It was great.

For the last week, since thank all the Gods in heaven I do not (yet) have morning sickness, I've been feeling a similar feeling. I wake up and have my one treasured cup of coffee (which now feels like a luxury, not the taken-for-granted necessity it has always been) and think to myself, "What shall we feed the fetus today?"

This grosses my partner out. :) He says, "It's not a pet! Don't talk about it like that!" But I persist, if only in my own head. I mean, what is pregnancy, anyway? You feed the fetus, take it to the vet doctor, and shelter it until it's ready to move on and become a baby. Essentially, I'm just a walking, talking chrysalis right now, for something that's about half an inch long at most. There's not a lot of stuff I can do in this scenario, and passive waiting makes me crazy, so I am very focused on the part I can control. Except for the childbirth part, which gives me fucking hives and which I am just not thinking about yet. Shut up. It is the first trimester and I have time.

So anyway. Fetuses like: whole grain, beans, certain fishes, meat, cheese, yoghurt, milk, broccoli and other greens, veg, fruit, potatoes, nuts, and other healthy schtuff. Fetuses do not like: a diet composed of nothing but starch and cheese (damnit), tuna, lunch meats, caffeine, alcohol, lots of refined sugars, or, apparently, salami and garlic. Just the smell of the last two is...yeah. Eccch.

I've been eating like a fucking queen. Today's bean salad (1 head steamed broccoli, cut up; ½ can black olives, cut up; 1 can dark red kidney beans; 1 can garbanzos; 1 tomato, cut up, ½ lemon worth of juice, ⅓ C salad dressing, serve with cottage cheese) was awesome, and the morning was yoghurt and granola and blueberries and orange juice. I miraculously have almost no sugar cravings (rock!) and an infinite desire for cucumbers on bagel with cream cheese. I haven't eaten so many fresh fruits and veggies in ever. Also, spicy South Indian food. Yum.

So, thus far, pregnancy kind of sucks (I cried all the way home from the office yesterday, for no reason at all, and slept 10 hours last night) but the food is fantastic. Who woulda thunk it?

Summer thunderstorms

While the coasts have many advantages, there is one thing you just can't get in Oregon or California that comes every year to Midwest states: warm summer rainstorms. On the coasts, all our rain is cold.

The rain is pouring down outside, here in Illinois, and the clouds are racing across the sky. Thunder booms overhead and the prairie grass flattens down under the weight of the water. This is a necessary rain; the level of the pond was sinking and the fruit trees were getting dry.

When I stepped out onto the porch, I could feel the air cling, moist and electric. It made me want to leave work and just run right out into it, get soaked. I had a conference call, and I'm getting over a cold, so I prudently came back in instead, but there's something intoxicating about a summer storm.

One of my favorite memories is, cheesily enough, of dancing in a rain a little like this. The rain was sheeting down, until it didn't feel like drops anymore but like a constant stream. It made it almost hard to breathe; it felt like I might drown standing up, if the lightning didn't get me first. And the night was warmer than this, or at least, that's what I remember; memory may have romanticized it all a bit, though I did a fair job of romanticizing things in the moment at the time.

I was seventeen and on my own in the People's Republic of China. I'd gone up to the rooftop of my dormitory with some friends to marvel at the storm, but they were from Minnesota and so it was only a few degrees off familiar for them; they left me there after ten minutes or so. I stayed for more than an hour, ten stories up in the dark, twirling and leaping (gracelessly, if empirical observation tells us anything) and laughing like a loon, all by myself in that crazy warm torrential downpour. I swear I've never felt closer to God.

Um, that's sort of embarrassing to admit.

Though, you know, it's sad how the slow (very slow in my case, my partner would tell you) encroachment of propriety and taste robs us of some of the more cheesy or ridiculous enjoyments in life. There is really no way to pretend that one has danced ecstatically in the rain with any level of irony or detachment. Good thing I got it in early, then, before I got all Gen-X self-conscious about such things. Because really, I wouldn't give up the memory of that night for the world.

i am no friend to the undertow

I just found my first grey hair. And then I found another one. Damnit.

Lately I feel as though events in my life are conspiring to change my focus, to say to me, "you are paying attention to the wrong things." This is a message that makes me want to stick my fingers in my ears and say lalalala, I can't heeeaaar you.

I have to stop rebelling against the inevitable, or against my own choices. I need not to think so much about myself, about what goes wrong, about failure, and to think more about others, what I have, what is possible.

But I am not happy with change. Some large part of me would like to stay solitary and/or sedentary all my days, despite my complaints about the current state of affairs, rather than move onward. I recognize this even as I take the steps to make change happen. I'm not sure if I'm pushing or pulling myself, but there is a serious amount of resistance.

London calling

This reminds me of The Lathe of Heaven, where Dr. Haber keeps having George dream things to make the world a "better" place and what he gets is all subtly or overtly wrong, and when he tries to fix that it gets worse, and all the time he gets richer and his office gets larger.

Dear America, fuck you and your long history of ill-considered foreign interventions. There are ideals and ideas that make my stolen country great, but they so rarely get put into practice, it seems. I mean, yes, I understand personal agency; people choose individual reactions, etc. But the focus on that individual will is in some ways a very American one, blinkered by our national myths. Social forces shape us all, and we are culpable for the meddling we do.

And now for more escalations and a growing sense of righteousness. Those Bad People And Their Bad Religion, as though we haven't been doing the same thing on a wider scale for years. Perhaps World War III will not be a nuclear apocalypse, as all of us who grew up in the Cold War were led to think. Perhaps it will be a global guerilla war of ambush and deception and rhetoric and lies. Perhaps it has already started.

Love to all in London. My thoughts are with you.

Aliens

"The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love."

        — Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Sandra Day O'Connor resigns

Oh, fuck. God knows she's to the right of me on many a decision, but we need her. I quail to think what sort of reactionary right-wing stooge Bush will try to cram into her place.

Oh god. Roe v. Wade. Oh God.

Why not Rehnquist? He's got the health problems! And replacing him, all same-same more or less, judicially. Why a moderate? Whyyyyy?!

I remember when I was growing up, my mum had a t-shirt with eight "men" stick figures and one "woman" that said "One down, eight to go." Bush hasn't indicated his nominee yet, but the rumored short list looks mighty male. Not only is O'Conner an essential swing vote, her appointment marked an important step forward in women's history. Are we going to take three steps back, now?