Only one person besides Scott knows about my delicate condition. A woman I work with—let’s call her Diane—catches me as I’m coming out of a stall in the office loo. “Can I tell you something? A secret?” she says. “I’m pregnant, due in early July.”
“Congratulations!” I say, and mean it. It had been a rocky baby-making road for her and her husband, both of whom desperately want to be parents. They strike me as more fit for babies, mostly because they are Republicans, than Scott and I.
“But don’t tell anyone,” she says. “We’re not telling anyone yet.”
“I won’t,” I say, “and let me tell you a secret. I’m pregnant, too.”
“Congratulations!” she says, and, I assume, means it. I don’t tell her how quickly it happened and how I’m still a bit stunned and unworthy and woozy. Diane positively glows, now that I look at her. I look like phlegm.
Since I am convinced that I’ll miscarry during my first trimester, we don’t tell our parents until just before Christmas. I have decided to take to my bed for the day because I’m too woozy to be of any use. Our bedroom is decorated in a style I call Early Tenement. Smoodges of dried panel adhesive dot the walls, which also have big gouges in the plaster where we’ve tried to remove these stubborn glops left over from a hideous 1970s renovation that involved faux-pine paneling covered by textured wallpaper. For the last four years we’ve been working on our charming fixer-upper, trying to undo all of the damage that the previous owner had wrought. We have managed to complete only the bathroom and figure the “nursery” is the new priority. But our personal sanctuary will have to wait—and I heave a little suffering sigh each time I clap eyes on the walls of the “master” bedroom.
We call my mother, who is beside herself with glee. She then starts to tell me about my birth, about how my father was a real shit during labor. When she winds down and rings off, Scott calls his folks—we’re certain we can hear his mother’s whoops of joy from Upstate New York even without the aid of the phone. I’m fine, I’m fine, I assure everyone when they ask how the first trimester has gone. I’m just a little woozy.
I call my father. I don’t want to tell him, strangely, as if letting him know I’m pregnant is tantamount to having sex in front of him. It’s not that my father is a prude, just that I’ve always been nervous to be a grown-up around him. When Scott and I moved in together, my father went ballistic. “It’s not what good girls do,” he said. I lacked the balls at that point to remind him that it was no longer 1953. Regardless, I don’t even like kissing Scott in front of my dad. Telling him I’m knocked up makes me feel fourteen instead of thirty, like I’ll be grounded. My father is, of course, thrilled, although he doesn’t emit eardrum-smashing whoops of joy. My relief is accompanied by a wave of vertigo, and I flop back down on the bed and wait for it to pass.
The next day, I tell my boss, who is also elated.
“So you are coming back after the birth?” he asks, after an appropriate amount of pregnancy-related questions.
“Of course,” I say. The idea of staying home with the tot lacks appeal, but I don’t tell anyone this. For my generation, who were weaned on Susan Faludi and Bust magazine, it’s hard to know how one should do the mom thing. There is only one rule anymore, which is that you will be shunned in any given circle no matter what you choose to do. Some of my friends would be appalled that I don’t want to breast-feed for five years and homeschool. Others would be pissed that I didn’t immediately go from delivery room to conference room. And yet there’s still more shame than ever attached to admitting that I would rather be dipped in hot lava than be a full-time mom. Like I shouldn’t even be having kids in the first place.
“Good,” my boss says. And we’re done.
News travels fast in Knoxville. Most folks with a bohemian bent know one another. By the turn of the year, my secret isn’t one. I don’t care, really, but am getting tired of always acting elated every time someone congratulates me. I want to tell them the truth, that I’m sick and scared, that I didn’t quite realize how damn physical this whole baby thing would be. In the last dozen weeks, I’ve lost eight pounds. I don’t really sleep deeply anymore and only doze for an hour or two at a time, then stare at the ceiling until it’s time to go to work. No one wants to hear this. They want joy, which I give them, or I just say that I’m fine and move on.
The exam room is dim during my first sonogram, with the only light pooling around a computer station, where there is one monitor. I lie on what looks like a dentist’s chair and push my pants down enough to expose my belly. The tech squirts lukewarm Ghostbusters’ slime all over it and starts running a cigarette pack–sized receiver through the goo. The Hub and I can see all of this on the second monitor, the one that is above my feet.
And then we see a blob of phosphorescing dots on a screen. Here is a little hand, with five fingers, waving. Here is a tiny foot. There is a weeny skull and a blur of a face. We have made this little person. It is profound. Most telling is that I can’t even come up with a clever little analogy for how gobsmacked we are. We simply watch with our mouths hanging open, letting in flies. I don’t love the baby then, but I am amazed by biology.
The tech is capturing screen shots and computing measurements. All seems to be in order. Then she says, “Do you want to know the sex?” We do, going on the theory that the fewer surprises there are in the delivery room, the better. “It’s a girl,” she says, and shows us the baby has her legs up and open, giving us the perfect shot of her crotch. “I hope she isn’t doing that as a teenager,” Scott says, nervously. And we all laugh.
The lights are flipped on and I’m given a wad of paper towels to mop up the goo. (The wad is inadequate and I spend the rest of the day pining for clean underpants.) Pictures of the sonogram images are handed to us, as is the video, which is now full of what we were seeing during the last fifteen minutes. We leave the office with our arms around each other and float back to our jobs.
“Look, look!” I grab the first person I see and flap the pictures in front of him. “There’s a little hand. There’s a little skull. How cool is this?”
My boss is looking at me like I’ve spent my morning smoking crack. “It’s great,” he says. “How can you tell that’s a skull? It looks like a hamster.”
The women in the office see it immediately and are dutifully excited, circling me like a litter of puppies, eager to sniff my most recent treasure. I give up on the guys. Poor things. The Y chromosome sucks out their sense of romance.
“Don’t you just love her?” Diane asks me a week and a half later, after she has had her first sonogram. She’s having a girl, too. Everyone in the office now knows about her blessed event as well. On the whole, we are polar opposites in terms of handling the whole gestation thing. She panics at the slightest twinge and rushes to call her doctor. I feel guilty because I tend to ignore just about everything but outright pain and fear that this will make me an uncaring mother, just like my mother and her mother before her.
“Of course I love her,” I say. But that’s not true. I haven’t felt some upswelling of maternalness, where I gaze serenely at every small child and rush to wipe her nose. What is true is that this whole baby thing is now real to me. There is a person in there and, eventually, she’s going to want out.
By February, even my fat clothes won’t fit. One advantage to my having explored a wide range of weights over the last decade is that I always have something to wear, no matter what shape I currently hold. None of my normal clothes, however, are designed for a body that is rapidly becoming one of Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches. By this point, even the size 16s won’t meet around my middle and the big shirts button only to the bottom of my rib cage. And, so, into the maw of hell that is the modern maternity shop.
Yes, I know that togs for the pregnant set have greatly improved in the last thirty years. And, yes, I know that my generation is lucky, that mothers past had to make do with belly bows and Empire waists, which they had to walk for miles through deep snow
to purchase, uphill both ways and barefoot. Yes, I thank my stars (or, at least, I would if I knew how) that I am pregnant now, in a time when double-knit polyester is shunned for the aberration that it is.
Still, the clothing options are not vast for the knocked-up, especially the knocked-up who aren’t willing to fork over obscene amounts of cash for something to wear for just a few months. At the mall, my shopping options are limited to one store, which is so packed with froufrou monstrosities that it is like shopping in Stevie Nicks’s closet. I am the only one there alone. Two giddy young women—they can’t be more than twenty—are with their mothers, who keep flinging more outfits over the changing stalls’ doors. “Here, honey,” they implore, “this’ll look so cute.” And, without fail, these tiny-tummied girls look adorable, like poster children for the maternal glow. They are radiant.
I sit in my stall—the big handicap-accessible one, which is the only changing room not occupied by these mother-daughter pairs—and try on the same outfits, hoping a bit of adorable comes my way. But adorable is harder to find once you’re over thirty. Nor is the cause helped by a rack full of outfits skewed toward the tweenie set. Others capture some sanitized ideal of what maternity should look like—bland, chaste, and functional, in a tasteful floral with a tummy panel. I look like a milkmaid, all frump and Glamour Don’ts.
What doesn’t look ridiculous on me is simply enormous. I could smuggle watermelons in the overalls and can’t ever imagine that they’ll fit. Padded, detachable tummies hang in the changing room to be stuffed down the fronts of your outfits so that you can get a sense of what you’ll look like in four months. They don’t help at all. I can’t ever imagine being large enough to fill out the circus tent I’m currently wearing.
I wish my mom were with me. This same strange melancholy, a vague feeling that my mother should be involved, descended on me while I was shopping for a wedding dress. It is a complete, hallucination-level fantasy, given that my mom and I have always disagreed on clothes and what makes me adorable. It’s not actually my mother I want, not really. If she were here, I’d be sulking in the changing room while she sighed outside, practiced her martyr face, and complained about how difficult I am. While I know that my mom loves me, I strongly suspect that she doesn’t like me very much. Really, I want Erma Bombeck or June Cleaver to come help me. You know, a “mom” who could scan the racks and find the clothes that would make me look adorable.
Before my actual mother found out she was going to be a grandmother, we’d reached a nice relationship plateau, which we’d managed by not talking to each other very much. This accord took most of my lifetime to achieve. At several points, I feared that I’d have to call in Jimmy Carter, who could broker a detente and bring us peanuts, all in the same visit. Instead, we got around the many, many emotional relationship swamps by shutting up. Dysfunctional yet functioning, for the most part.
But with the news of the impending grandbaby has come increased conversation. She has started to call weekly, asking about my nausea, then launching into one of many stories about how unpleasant my father was when she was pregnant. For each new milestone I have achieved, she has had to top it with a yarn about my insensitive pop. Her morning sickness tale revolved around a party they were supposed to attend. She felt too ill to go yet he forced her to anyway. And there she stood, green and exhausted, while he had a good time. If the Catholic Church knew of my mom, they would give her a feast day.
I vow, right there in the changing room, under the fluorescent lights, in my too-big overalls, that I will do this maternal dance perfectly. My girl-child and I will never drift apart. I will be with her when she buys her wedding dress and maternity clothes. She won’t hate me. There will be no distance. I will be everything she could want for a mother, everything that I never had.
Like cellulite, dreams come easily.
During my annual pilgrimage to Atlanta’s largest antiques show, I find the perfect prints for the baby girl’s nursery. Whimsical fairies perch on flowers, delicate and sweet. I am sure the baby will be sweet and delicate as well. That is what babies are, after all.
I appraise every mother I pass. Some look like the ones on the magazines with angels strapped in strollers, bundles of joy who are content to watch the world go by. Some push writhing, whining anacondas, red-faced and undulating over the carriage’s sides. My baby and I will be the former, of course. Perfect moms never get frazzled.
Scott and I dream about the nursery, which will take over my makeshift office space in the second bedroom, and concoct an infant fantasia of fairies and purples and twee. The realization of the fantasy requires hard work. My mother and stepfather drive up from Florida and help us sand walls, since the Early Tenement look is in full force in this room as well. Magically, Mom and I don’t kill each other, but I think this is due more to everyone being completely worn out by sanding and painting and cleaning than by any great leaps in maturity.
Not even my mother’s continual recitation of her Pregnancy Trinity gets on my nerves, further proof that those late-pregnancy hormones rival heroin when it comes to smoothing out life’s rough edges. Her Pregnancy Trinity goes thusly: 1. My father wasn’t very helpful. 2. She didn’t wash her hair for a month or so after coming home from the hospital but was otherwise in the pink, mentally. And, 3. She was visited by an angel the night I was born.
To take the liturgy point by point:
1. No, my father wasn’t very helpful. He and the OB spent the latter part of my birth describing the mechanics of a “force fit,” the engineering definition of an object that can only pass through another object in a specific, difficult-to-achieve way. I can see how this conversation would be irritating to a woman in labor. But it was also 1971 and men in the labor room was a relatively new occurrence. I don’t know that any of those guys had an inkling what they were in for, which doesn’t excuse his general unsupportiveness, granted. My father didn’t speak to my mom for a few days after my birth, just sat quietly in the corner, pale and mute. She has never forgiven him for that. It galls her that I don’t hate him for that, too.
2. Her denials that everything was fine, except for the hair-washing thing, are hollow, somehow. I just don’t believe her, since she has occasionally let slide tidbits of information like about how she had a brief moment when she thought about killing me. You know, little things like that are telling. But her story is that she was fine except for her hair. She’s sticking to it. And I have already been too crappy a daughter to want to pry further into this.
3. By nightfall of the day I had been born, my mother was alone, curled up on her hospital bed and feeling the exertions of the day. She wants her mom, Nell, who has been dead for a few years by that point. A nurse comes in and starts rubbing her back and stroking my mom’s hair, just like Nell used to. This nurse was my mother’s angel, sent by her God to comfort her in this time of need. She devoutly believes this—that God goes out of his way to constantly soothe her path through life and, every now and again, speaks to her. Yet she constantly insists that I’m the one who needs therapy.
Perhaps the smartest thing the Hub and I do during this time is hire a doula. While doula sounds like something you’d order in a Greek restaurant—“I’d like a side of doula with my souvlaki”—a doula is a woman who comes with you to the labor room. Her sole task is to make sure the laboring mother gets all of the mothering she needs during the birth process. Our doula already had five children of her own (four of them without drugs, no less), which, together with her years of training, put her on top of the whole birthing business. I was relieved to know that she’d be there. Someone in the room should know what she’s doing.
The doula was also a lactation consultant who would help me get the breastfeeding cha-cha-cha started. All of my college-educated bohemian buddies—very few of whom, I must observe, actually had kids at that point—told me that breast is best and chicks who formula feed are wimps who don’t care enough about their infants’ health to put up with a little discomfort
. One possible wrinkle in my plan might be the breast reduction I’d had a decade before. But my plastic surgeon assured me that her technique usually allowed for future breastfeeding. The doula was fairly confident that we’d “get milk out” of me. So I bought nursing bras and a Boppy, a crescent-shaped pillow, in preparation.
I am running out of preparatory things to do when two of my girlfriends throw a baby shower. Suddenly, I am the center of attention, cooing over tiny clothes while the baby somersaults in my stomach. By now, I fit into maternity clothes with ease, my belly jutting out enough that I can rest a coffee cup on the shelf it makes under my breasts. I start to wonder if everything will ever fall back into its previous location.
My head feels like it is floating near the ceiling for most of the shower, tethered to reality only by my giant belly. It is like an out-of-body experience, but without the death and the white tunnel, or the sense of peace and the reunion of lost friends. I watch the tops of heads of my friends as I unwrap everything. “Aren’t you thrilled?” they ask. “Of course,” I say, lying though my teeth. “It’s like a dream come true.”
No one has asked who painted my dreams, however. And I don’t volunteer the information because I don’t want to muddy anyone’s visions of what pregnancy should be. My dreams are more steel gray H.R. Giger than pastel Hallmark card. When I can sleep, all is blood soaked and violently erotic. But most nights, sleep is hard to come by. When I find a position that doesn’t make my hips ache and start to drift off, the baby squirms and I’m again wide-eyed. I don’t wake up Scott, who is working through his own fears and doesn’t need me to add to them. I don’t tell anyone. I am so ashamed of not being blissfully happy, of the darkness that is starting to lap up around me. Black circles under my eyes start to look like bruises. I am isolated by this big belly, which pushes the rest of the world away like waves breaking before the bow of the Titanic.
Hillbilly Gothic Page 4