my precious October 4, 2008

Scene: I am driving to work, listening to NPR as I always do. StoryCorps comes on. Yay! I love StoryCorps. The interview is between a young woman and her brother-in-law, about how she met her husband and started dating him, then what happened when his cancer came back and he died. I tear up. There was this touching moment when she shows him the dress she wants to wear to his wake. I start to sob, and must pull off into a little condo complex to cry. (There’s a put-baby-to-sleep methodology called Cry It Out, and I frequently feel that the universe had instituted a CIO program on me.)

Does it ever feel to you, when you reflect on the people in your life, what a terrible risk it is to love? Lately I am hormonally obsessed with how deeply I have wandered into this dangerous ocean of emotional attachment. So much of my psyche was terrified of loving and committing to Tom; the even more permanent commitment of motherhood sometimes seems impossibly perilous.

Don’t get me wrong: I know, in my blood-choked brain, that the risk of loving is far outweighed by the rewards thereof. But my heart has floated far away from logic on this tidal wave of hormones, and lately I am dogged by fear of the love for my daughter that grows within me just as she does.

What do you do with that?

waterworks September 30, 2008

Can I just stop wanting to cry for about 2 hours, do you think?  If I’m not fully in Functional Mode, like at work or while interacting with Normal Society, I am a huge, weepy, unpredictable mess.  Everything sets me off, and there is no reasonableness to the tears.  If I’m not crying, I’ve got so much tension around my jaw that it feels wired shut.

The girl is jumping about and frolicking like a champ – like a champ made of fresh hot popcorn and sunbeams – but all I want to do is find a bottom to the unplumbable sadness in the world.

gah.

ridiculous, hold the sublime September 29, 2008

My midwife had recommended last week that I take some prenatal yoga classes, mostly to get me meeting other pregnant women and stop feeling so fucked up. Sounded like it might help.

I looked up the classes at Yoga Yoga, marked them on my calendar, and finally found time to make it to a class this afternoon. I left with plenty of time, even though I had never been to this studio. I had all my yoga clothes. I had researched the route.

And then I confused Burnet Road and Braker Lane. I travel both of these roads, not often, but often enough. I drive Burnet rather frequently – there are various print shops that I use for work on Burnet, as well as my new favorite Indian restaurant.

By the time I realized that I had taken Braker and not Burnet off of Mopac, it was 20 minutes until the class started – which was not enough time to find the studio, buy a card of ten classes, and change clothes. So I just headed home and went grocery shopping instead.

These are the moments that I feel completely unqualified to be a mother. I’ve lived in Austin for over 3 years now. I should be able to find my way to a yoga studio located just 10 minutes from my office after looking up the route on Google Maps. The only thing keeping my fingernails on that last shred of sanity is the shaky belief that this is still the hormones working. That, and the rather less dramatic realization that getting lost in my own backyard is not the worst thing that could have happened to me today,

peace, love and barbecue September 1, 2008

What a delicious long weekend in honor of my birthday! Our small get-together on Saturday was relaxed and delightful, with good friends and excellent brisket made by Tom. We slept late on Sunday morning and then drove down to the Hinze Farm in La Grange, to catch up with Tom’s mother’s side of the family. They were also barbecuing (go figure – it’s Texas) and so we had some more brisket as well as some simply delicious beer-butt chicken that had me going back for thirds. It was hot, but I napped periodically in cousin Jeremy’s air conditioned RV (yes, Texas again), following the example of Jeremy & Suzanne’s simply adorable 3-month-old daughter Samantha.

Today, though, I am celebrating Labor Day by doing nothing more laborious than a little laundry, reading The Deathly Hallows (lent by a friend), and eating leftover party food every 2 hours or so. It’s the perfect kind of birthday to have this year, even if I didn’t have cake for breakfast as Tom suggested (and ate).

As I turn 37 (which is not an unfamiliar feeling as midway through last year I forgot how old I was and decided I must be 37 until my friend Becky, who was also born in ‘71, smacked me upside the head), I am overwhelmed by my good fortune to have so many and such loving friends, as well as a truly fantastic husband. As we start our own family, I become more grateful for family, and the incredibly generous and fun family of friends we have gathered to us. Abject thanks to everyone in my life who is fabulous, and even to those who are troublesome, for adding enough conflict for the plot to develop. I can’t wait to see what this new chapter brings! (It’s starting on a mushy note, but what the hell.) I love you guys!

email to a friend before tonight’s party August 30, 2008

I only have 2 bottles of throw-away wine – thought I had more! So if you have a box or jug you want to kill, please bring it over. I can use some better stuff if need be – just makes the Sangria better, arguably, but if you have some cheapo stuff you want to dump, please bring it. (classy party huh?) For fruit I got a pineapple, Valencia oranges (because it’s sangria), strawberries, one nectarine and a cantaloupe. I have Tito’s, dark rum, and brandy here at the house FYI. Also have OJ concentrate if you need OJ.

I have now ended up making (because I am genetically unable to leave well enough along):

tabouli
deviled eggs (better than Easter, I swear – those were awful)
baba ganouj
grape salad (kind of like waldorf)
… and I have two packs of pita bread.
and I got some kalamata olives and a block of feta cheese which I will cut up for snacking.

Oh, and chocolate raspberry truffle cake from CM.

I think that’s it.

Nope, also stuffed grape leaves (from a can – I’m not idiot enough to try to make that myself)

It occurs to me that I am celebrating the completion of my Mexican tile backsplash with a Mediterranean feast and brisket. Am I always this discordant, or is it the pregnancy, I wonder?

See you soon! Can’t wait!

PS – Barney’s here, but he’s leaving tonight evidently so if we want to stay up late we can. Fair warning, Tom has five hour energy drink.

A

Verklempt August 28, 2008

I have been reading books about labor with a lot of verve lately, including Ida May’s book, and have been thinking about my upcoming labor off and on because of all my reading. Haven’t been feeling scared necessarily, despite the fact that I keep getting almost double-edged compliments about how brave I am to have a home birth. On the contrary, I’ve been allowing myself to daydream about my ideal labor experience, in hopes that I could manifest that for myself as well as I’ve done with all this rain…

And yet, when my midwife asked me about some of my self-confessed labor daydreams, I became suddenly and surprisingly incapacitated by tears. Granted, this is a super-hormonal time for me, with intense rushes of emotion one minute and weird drunken energy the next. But I’m getting choked up again, just thinking about how I was getting choked up.

What gives?

These dreams August 9, 2008

more cat pictures

OK, I had another dream where I give birth so painlessly or unconsciously that I don’t notice, and then feel guilty about not letting my midwife into it, and then the baby turns into a cat.

Is this a typical pregnancy dream? Because I keep having it. In different incarnations, of course – this time, I took a pair of jeans in to a tailor and asked him to put a stretchy panel into them and while he was at it he delivered my baby, without me noticing, as a surprise to me (thus eliminating the need for the panel jeans, but OK) – but it seems awfully coincidental, doesn’t it? And the baby turning into a cat? WTF?

Why do preggos have such intense dreams anyway? Is it all the hormones? I have always resisted “hormones” as the reason for things, resenting the implication that I was irrationally angry about something just because my period was about to start. It’s always seemed a way of invalidating women’s emotions to me.

But in my first trimester, when hormones turned me into a nauseated zombie for 14 weeks, I felt perhaps they were more powerful than I had previously given them credit for. That being said, certainly progesterone doesn’t give one baby-turns-into-cat dreams, does it?

Spike attentive, Max indifferent

Anyway, Amelia makes a charming cat. Not a kitten – she’s always full-grown – and with different markings every time she transforms. Surely this is just my subconscious assuring me that I will be able to mother her as easily as I do the inimitable Spike & Max.

And I think it’s awesome that they have self-feeding, litter-trained babies now. Maybe both Tom & I can go back to work after all! The boys look fully ready to raise our daughter as one of their own, don’t they?

5 months along or possibly just fat August 8, 2008

I think it’s interesting how women mostly notice my mid-sized belly whereas men are mostly oblivious. Really, I wear the big tent-like maternity tops from time to time that I think make me look like I’m due (what an odd term, “due,” as if I am a term paper) next week, and men still don’t seem to see me as pregnant.

What brings this to mind is a visit I made yesterday afternoon to an old workplace that I left for my current workplace about 6 months ago. The women all already knew I was knocked up, so it wasn’t truly fair, but two guys that I worked really closely with for over a year completely failed to notice my (to me) bulging belly. Until I made reference to having the kid in December and ran my hand down my stomach, evidently they just assumed I had been drinking a lot of beer?

It’s positively adolescent the way my changing silhouette makes me self-conscious like this. I cut much of my hair off last weekend, too, and the guys also failed to notice that. Perhaps I am behaving like A Big Silly.