The wait staff eventually had to tear the cheesecake platter out of my trembling hands to clean up for the evening, so I jumped into a conversation my husband was having with Norah’s drummer and guitarist, two very lovely, sickeningly talented people who were way too sober to be on tour. So lovely and talented were they, in fact, that when the guitarist reached out and touched my belly, WITHOUT MY PERMISSION, twice within the span of five minutes, neither Jon nor I bit his hand off or broke his arm.
After about an hour of milling about the after party and talking with the band, wherein Norah appeared and disappeared three or four times, everyone headed outside to wait for the VIP golf cart to show up and take everyone back to the tour bus. The drummer suggested that we wait with the band instead of walking all the way back to the parking lot, but Jon, not wanting to appear a mooch, refused the offer, saying that we’d be fine walking back by ourselves. I, however, considered mooching to be an art form and instantly mentioned to the drummer that I was pregnant and probably shouldn’t walk back in the dark because that would be bad for the baby. I figured, I’m only going to be pregnant two or three or seven times, and if my baby is going to use me for nutrients for the next five months, why not use it to score a golf-cart ride with Norah Jones? I can guarantee you that any child of mine would see the logic in this reasoning.
So the golf cart showed up, and everyone in the band piled on, except for the drummer who gave up his seat so that I didn’t have to walk. And it turned out there wasn’t enough room for Jon anyway, so he got to walk back in the dark, content in not having had to mooch, manhood still intact. But I climbed up on that golf cart and sat directly behind Norah, who looked back at me and smiled like, “I’m smiling because I’m friendly, not because I have any idea who you are.”
She then asked, “Are you the one who’s pregnant?”
And I knew that she could see straight through me, could see that I was a mooch and that I was so much of a mooch that I would use my unborn baby to score a ride on a golf cart with her, and I nodded, afraid that if I opened my mouth to say anything, the blood I’d been sucking from her band members all night might drip from my vampire fangs.
So she turned back around, and the golf cart started motoring down the mountain, as fast as its little golf cart motor could go. And the moon was bright, and the breeze was perfect as it moved down the canyon, and I was sitting behind Norah Jones on a golf cart. All I could think about was how, maybe twenty years from that moment, I would have at least one story to tell my child that would make me, if only for a very brief moment, the cool one.
Thirty seconds into the ride as we rounded a tree-covered corner, about seven members of the tour group—roadies and managers and sound technicians—all came screaming out of the bushes like crazed, ferocious werewolves in an attempt to scare the life out of Norah. Consequently, the golf cart almost careened off into a ravine, and that bowel movement I hadn’t had in two years seemed like it might enter stage left.
After everyone on the golf cart regained composure, Norah turned around, eyes on FIRE, the hair on the back of her neck standing straight on end, and she reached back to cover my stomach and screamed, “THIS WOMAN IS PREGNANT, YOU IDIOTS!” Like she was my protector, my angel sent from heaven.
I felt so accepted in that moment, so understood. She was the rock star, and I was the lowly mooch who had pilfered a bottle of wine from her stash. Yet, she overlooked all of that because of my pregnancy, because of my tiny round belly. And when I met back up with Jon at the bottom of the hill I told him everything, including the part about how I had gone flying through the air, and how Norah had caught me in her arms before I landed in a giant pit of alligators.
CHAPTER THREE
A Twenty-pound Basketball With Legs and Arms
When I was four months pregnant I walked up to a mirror, turned to the side, and stared intently at my belly to inspect the growth. Maybe it’s because I’m five feet eleven inches tall, and every feature of my body is elongated, but instead of looking pregnant, I only looked painfully bloated.
But my boobs? Wow. My boobs were the most glaring side effect of second trimester pregnancy. I thought maybe I was the only one who noticed until we had dinner with my sister one night, and the first thing she said to me, very loudly, in front of all of her children and six of my visiting aunts and uncles, was, “My little sister grew boobs!” As surprised as if the same change had happened to our brother.
She had every right to be alarmed by the new set of appendages sitting on my chest. My small-chestedness had been a stabilizing constant in our family’s lives, not unlike their belief that the Mormon Church was true and that God lived. They had always been able to testify with very much faith and confirmation from the Spirit that Heather had no boobs, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
I marveled at my new boobs daily, primarily because I’d always wanted boobs, more than I ever wanted Malibu Barbie or front row tickets to a Debbie Gibson concert. If the eleven-year-old Heather had known that the much older, pregnant Heather was going to have such cleavage, she never would have worn that poorly designed padded bra for so many months, and the endless teasing and torment, which included being pelted with tissue paper every time I got on or off the bus to middle school, never would have happened. If I had only known that my profile in my second trimester of pregnancy would include bumps other than my nose and chin, I could have saved thousands on psychotherapy.
Another less satisfying side effect of having made it through those first three months of nausea was that I was able to eat properly for two, and once I was done with two I fed the other fifteen appetites that had seemingly taken over my personality. There are no words to describe the hunger I experienced at any given moment, and not even white bread could satiate the urge to eat my own fingers. Not that I didn’t try to curb the demons with white bread—croissants, crumbly buttermilk biscuits, hot buttered rolls, English muffins, an entire loaf of Wonder Bread. I felt only a little guilty for clogging my arteries with enough carbohydrate voltage to power the western United States, and I became convinced that if the battery on our car were to die we could have jump-started it by hooking a set of cables up to my chest.
In addition to my new boobs and the crippling hunger, the major second trimester side effects I experienced were the aches and pains and cramps associated with the expansion of my uterus. I slept on my left side the entire night and could physically feel my thighs stretching and cracking in opposite directions. My hips moved so significantly that the only thing I could wear was sweatpants, but because I refused to buy maternity sweatpants they were always slipping off my butt. I dealt with this by holding up my pants with one hand while using the other hand to pull my shirt down over my bare belly, and I’d walk around hunched over like a paranoid lunatic who had eaten too many cupcakes at lunch.
And it’s not that I was necessarily opposed to showing off my pregnant belly in public, but I learned quickly that the practice of belly exposure only enticed strange people to walk up and put their hands on my body. Unfortunately, strange people make up about 90 percent of the population in Utah, and they all stared at my bare belly like it was some sort of sacred Budha that would release the secrets of the world if they just walked up and rubbed it. The only thing going on behind the cherubic curve of my belly was the sound of a digestive tract processing four thousand Nacho Cheese Doritos that I’d eaten after lunch.
I kept hearing that the second trimester was the best trimester because, hey look! No more morning sickness! Also, you’re not yet as big as a Hummer! But did you know this? The second trimester is basically puberty ALL OVER AGAIN, as if the first time wasn’t painful enough. My body felt totally awkward, as if I’d just grown four inches in eighteen months again, except this time the four inches were at my waistline, and pants that fit fifteen minutes ago were suddenly cutting off oxygen to the baby.
I didn’t “get out of” bed anymore, either. Getting out of bed was more of an assisted roll and shove off the
mattress where Jon pushed my backside with his arms and legs using a strength he’d normally reserved for knocking over a brick wall. And the acne! Those were not your average, friendly variety of pimple. They were pregnant pimples, deposits of hormonal oil embedded so deep in the skin that I didn’t know whether I had a tick rooting through my forehead or an alien pod trying to free itself out the middle of my back.
I felt really sorry for Jon, because I knew he fully expected my head to start spinning all the way around and for his dead ancestors to start speaking through my mouth. All he could do was watch this terrifying metamorphosis take place from a safe distance, preferably behind a stain-resistant protective wall. The good news was that we were almost halfway through the whole mess, only twenty or so more weeks to go. The bad news was that he had to spend those twenty weeks married to me.
Five months into the pregnancy we found out whether we were having a boy or a girl, or God forbid one of each or two of one. I think my fears of giving birth to multiple babies may have been a little more profound than the average pregnant woman, as twins run rampant in both Jon’s family and in my own: my sister has twin boys, Jon’s sister has twin boys, two of my cousins have sets of twins, and one cousin has two sets of twins. My family thought it would be awfully cute if I, too, had twins, and I just thought it would be awfully awful.
During the first trimester I was convinced that I was having a boy, primarily because I only had dreams about boys and I also craved spicy food. Most of the men in my life love to torture themselves by dousing their dinners in hot sauce or by eating jalapeño peppers whole, without water or fire extinguisher. It could be one of the reasons I fell in love with my husband, that he is so much like my father when he looks for the one item on the menu that is most likely to burn a hole in the side of his mouth. They both get giddy with the possibility of a meal rendering them unconscious, as if the more sweat they bleed from their forehead during a meal, the more they can provide for their families.
I’d never understood this ritual, as I like to eat my meals in relative comfort, without fear of imminent death, until I got pregnant. Once I had a baby to think about it was as if I needed to prove to the baby, to myself, and certainly to the wait staff that I could withstand the burning flames of spicy food, if only to demonstrate that I was going be a good mother. The two have nothing to do with each other, I know this, but I guarantee that many men will totally understand this line of reasoning.
We did not care about the gender of the baby going into the ultrasound, and I know that everybody says that, or is at least supposed to say that. But since this was our first we had no practical experience to tell us what would make one preferable over the other. Although, I did contemplate what a delight it would be to horrify my feminist, graduate student friends by imposing my stringent, close-minded, puritanical, privileged white bourgeois notion of gender roles onto my innocent daughter by dressing her in pink.
Many of our friends had waited to find out the gender of their children until the actual delivery, but I didn’t understand the romance in that. Maybe because I was terrified of all that I was going to be worrying about during labor, and the gender of the child was only going to register a tiny blip on the graph of Major Things Going On, like, say, a human being coming out of my body and what that was going to do to my own anatomy. By finding out the gender several months before the delivery I felt that I could experience the excitement without simultaneously having to deal with the blinding pain of having the lower half of my body ripped in half.
In preparation for our ultrasound I drank almost a half gallon of water, like they told me to, and then tried not to think about the urge to go pee for two straight hours. No one will ever be able to explain to me why this is a good idea, because even on a normal day when I had not drunk enough water to drown a hippo, all I could think about was the next time I’d get to go to the bathroom. Almost like a fourteen-year-old boy thinks about sex.
But a full bladder aids in getting an accurate scan, so I did what I could, and by the time we drove to the clinic and signed in, I could feel my bladder touching my back teeth. I had to close my eyes and breathe rhythmically, my legs crossed firmly to dam the flood, and when I finally reclined on the table and the doctor touched my swollen abdomen with that cold piece of machinery I almost started crying in pain. That is, until I saw my baby’s feet.
Both Jon and I had been silently worried in the weeks headed up to the ultrasound because I hadn’t felt any movement in my abdomen, except for gas, indigestion, and occasional conversations with the Holy Ghost. Most of the pregnant women I had talked to said they had felt movement as early as the fifteenth week. But here I was in my fifth month not feeling anything, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the ultrasound technician scanned my belly only to find a gigantic lump of fatty deposits, or maybe a few lost tennis balls.
But immediately we saw the baby moving almost violently in the womb, and I realized that every movement the baby had been making was being absorbed entirely by the placenta. The baby did several flips while the technician tried to take measurements and then every few minutes would flash a foot at the screen, almost as if to say, Have you seen my feet yet? I’m not sure you’ve seen my feet. So here’s this one! And look! I have another one, too!
And then, in what was one of the most memorable moments of the pregnancy, the ultrasound technician pointed to an unrecognizable shadow on the monitor and said, “See that cheeseburger? That means it’s a girl.”
And then he circled her cheeseburger for emphasis.
Jon had been holding my hand to give me strength to hold my pee, but right then he let go and cupped his tear-stained face. “You have a very important job,” he said, looking at me with the eyes I had fallen in love with. “You’re going to have to teach our daughter about her cheeseburger.”
I’m pretty sure the technician permanently altered the position of the placenta because later that day I could feel the baby’s every movement for hours. And the sensation didn’t feel all “fluttery,” a word every piece of literature I’d read had used to describe what it would feel like when the baby kicked around. When my baby girl moved it was more of a bump and a thud, almost as if she were head-butting me in anger.
It took over an hour of her kicking for me to recognize that she was moving, and that it wasn’t just another bout of uncomfortable gas maneuvering its way through my lower abdomen again. Everything in that part of my body was constantly changing shape, and so basic functions like digestion had to rewire their usual transit maps on an hourly basis. This meant that I had gas every single second of every single day. I remember one episode of a popular sitcom where four women are sitting around a table at lunch, and the character who is eight months pregnant farts out loud in the middle of the conversation. All three other women are appalled and disgusted—how dare someone fart in public, let alone within twenty feet of their Manolo Blahniks—but the pregnant one just shrugs and says that she’s pregnant and can’t help it. I know someone else watching that show was probably thinking that the fart was just another one of those things exaggerated for comedic effect, that a pregnant woman could hold her wind if she really wanted to. I am here to tell you that that scene was perhaps the most realistic scene in the history of television.
A week after the ultrasound Jon and I attended a live show at a bar in downtown Salt Lake City. It was only the second concert we’d been to since I’d been pregnant, a significant decrease in the usual number of live shows we like to see. And after this particular experience, I couldn’t see myself attending another live show while my body was being ransacked for nutrients by the human being growing inside. I very much wanted to be the punk rock pregnant woman who wasn’t going to let the changes in her body dictate what activities she could and could not participate in, but I was done pretending to be hardcore. I had way too much sleeping I needed to get done. For future reference, I put together a small list of reasons why I will never again go to a concert while pregnant:
Alcohol: While it’s never necessary to consume alcohol to enjoy a live show, alcohol consumption can always help a live show, if only by making you unaware of the humanity around you. By nature of being pregnant, a pregnant woman should not participate in alcohol consumption, and is usually the only person in the room who is neither drunk nor stoned. This makes the pregnant woman feel like she is the only one not in on the joke, or at least that every other person in the room is excruciatingly annoying. Plus, the smell of alcohol on everyone else’s breath is almost as sexy as a poopy diaper.
Standing for extended periods of time: By the time we walked out of the show, Jon and I figured we’d been standing for over four hours straight. I couldn’t feel six of my toes, and every ounce of blood in my body was stuck in my ankles. At one point while waiting for the band to take the stage, I could no longer endure the feeling of blood pooling in my calves, so I sat down on the sticky concrete floor. Two separate people spilled beer on my head as they tried to maneuver around me, cursing me in the process for ruining a perfectly good pint.
Cigarette smoke: This is such a divisive issue, but nothing is more infuriating than coming home from a live show smelling like someone else’s carcinogenic, respiratory crud. Although it is illegal to smoke in public places in Utah, it is still legal to smoke in bars and venues, and everyone does it with a religious fervor usually reserved for sacred temple ceremonies. I hate breathing secondhand smoke, and I’m guessing my baby doesn’t like breathing it, either. Smokers will tell me to avoid bars and shows if I don’t like it, and that is what I plan to do. However, I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to have to give up seeing the show of a band I like (whether or not I’m pregnant) because someone else cannot go an hour without a hit. And now I will go back and hide under my rock.
It Sucked and Then I Cried Page 4