Pretentious rock stars: There is something about being pregnant that puts life into startling perspective, and in those first five and a half months I called my mother at least once a week to say I’m sorry, please forgive me for everything I’ve ever done. Never before had I had such a sense of what is and isn’t important, and people like the bassist of the band we saw just need to grow up. I’d never seen someone so upset to have to play a bass line. I’m willing to bet that his toes weren’t swollen to the size of a large grapefruit.
At 2:34 AM one morning I scurried blurry-eyed into the bathroom for my nightly pee break, the first in what was usually three to four stumbling trips past bulky furniture and menacing doorways that seemed to grab my pinky toes every time I walked by. I’d grown to appreciate those nocturnal pee runs as they were the only time the baby wasn’t sitting directly on top of my bladder, and I could pee more than a half-thimble at a time. Often during the day I would call out from the bathroom to Jon in the other room, “Do you hear this?” and he’d get quiet enough to witness the four-minute drip-drip drizzle as I performed somersaults and handstands on the toilet in an effort to maneuver my bladder into peeing position.
I’d been warned that this would happen, that there would come a time in my pregnancy when I wouldn’t be able to empty my bladder in one go. But no one ever told me it would happen so early, or that I wouldn’t be able to empty my bladder in fifteen goes. During that 2:34 A.M. morning pee run I was seized with an almost paralyzing panic, a sickening realization that I was at that point in my pregnancy, a week before my third trimester, the point when my body would start to become so unbearable that the lesser of two evils was going through labor.
I was so disappointed that The Belly did not feel like a natural extension of my body, and that was perhaps the biggest misconception I had about what it would be like to be pregnant. There was nothing natural about The Belly. It felt like an alien object had been implanted haphazardly into my abdomen, perhaps a basketball inflated with twenty pounds of loose gravel, and it was constantly shifting its weight from organ to organ.
Did I mention that this twenty-pound basketball had legs and arms and an annoying habit of trying to get my attention every night at 11:30 P.M. by poking her toes into my bladder? It was cute the first time it happened, for the first fifteen minutes. But two constant weeks of twinkle toes had me concerned that she suffered attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, or worse yet, that she took after her father and was up late typing angry letters to Mormon senators.
I knew that her raging activity would be gone eventually, that I’d miss the hourly thumping and nudging and bumping up against my spleen. But I was having a hard time concentrating on basic conversations, on simple activities like counting out change at the grocery store, on eking out the tiniest bit of pee after a full ten minutes of sitting on the toilet with my leg behind my head.
And that is where having a husband came in handy.
Although Jon and I hadn’t yet enrolled in birthing classes, which everyone said would empower us with pain management techniques and teach us how to work together to get the bulging baby here, we were already pretty good at being each other’s partner.
Anyone who is married or has ever been married knows that it takes both people to make a marriage work. For instance, one person has to drive the car while the other person hangs out the window with a bat to demolish the neighbors’ mailboxes. Jon is better at driving, and I have much more anger to work through than he does, so we’re comfortable with our respective roles.
Additionally, he’s very good at conversational distraction and can keep my mother occupied while I steal toilet paper out of her bathroom. We’re always looking for ways to work together to save money.
When it came to the pregnancy, however, we had to work extra hard to figure out ways to balance out the burden. Even though he couldn’t carry the baby or have his ankles swell on command, he somehow managed to will his body into experiencing some of the symptoms of pregnancy, like nausea, abdominal bloating, and frequent grumpiness. Every pregnant woman should have a partner who can moan in pain with her and mean it. Although he was still so skinny that I could use his hip bones to slice raw meat, there was nothing that said “I love you” more than Jon standing sideways in front of the bathroom mirror bemoaning the fact that this baby was making his ass look bigger.
We also figured out a technique to make it easier for me to empty my bladder, a position called The Ten and Two, where the left leg sticks out toward the ten on the clock, and the right leg sticks out toward the two. Once the legs were in place I leaned over forward as far as possible, and the bladder opened up and spilled pee like manna from heaven.
If there was ever any doubt as to whether Jon and I were meant to be partners, that doubt would be squashed entirely by our graceful mastery of The Ten and Two peeing procedure, which went something like this:
Jon, standing near the bathroom door, shouted, “Are you doing The Ten and Two?”
Me, strategically positioned on the toilet, left leg toward ten, right leg toward two, leaning so far forward I was nearly kissing the bathroom floor, “I’M DOING THE TEN AND TWO.”
Jon, in the middle of performing a toe-touch and handstand, continued shouting encouragement, “Ten! Two! Ten! Two!”
Me, holding my breath and pushing so hard that every vein in my forehead was about to explode, screamed through clenched teeth, “TEN…TWO…TEN…TWO.”
After hearing me pee for more than two seconds Jon finally cheered, “Gooooooooo Heather!”
And then we’d repeat the whole process every fifteen minutes for the next eight hours.
I was convinced that we didn’t even need to sign up for birthing classes because we could get that baby here through The Ten and Two alone.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dressing Like a Concubine in Humpty Dumpty’s Harem
It was only a matter of time before the little indentation in the middle of my belly erupted in a volcanic burst of nubbly flesh, and all at once I was sporting the dreaded pregnant belly button. I named him Fred.
I couldn’t have been more horrified at the thought of a small plug jutting out of my flesh like a gigantic third nipple, even though the top of my belly button had already formed a frowny awning in the months leading up to this dreaded development, perfect for protecting the bottom half of my belly from inclement weather and sunburn.
As I watched it inch outward, suddenly parallel with and then breaking free of the curve of my growing abdomen, I couldn’t help but feel completely powerless. Having already given up control of my bladder, appetite, and complexion, I thought that my belly button was mine, something from my old body that I could hold on to. I considered it deep enough that I wouldn’t have to worry about what would happen during pregnancy, but I had a little less than three months to go and if it continued protruding at that rate, it was going to look like I’d had a third breast surgically implanted at the waistline by the time I went into labor.
The belly button revolt was just one of the things I thought wouldn’t happen to me. In fact, the list of things I thought I would never have to endure is so embarrassingly long that I ought to be publicly mauled by all the women who had been warning me the whole time that the worst was yet to come. At the top of that list was “I will never waddle,” because I thought that I would have way too much dignity to be caught walking like a drunk monkey in public. But first I started teetering and then that teetering turned into a full-on waddle that became so exaggerated that I was constantly losing my balance and ramming my massive weight into cars as I walked through parking lots. Once I even left a dent, but I didn’t leave my name or number because what would I have said? “Tell your insurance you got sideswiped by an ENORMOUS PREGNANT LADY.”
I also thought that I couldn’t possibly become a more clumsy numbskull. But there I was in the third trimester wholly incapable of uttering a complete, coherent sentence, one that didn’t cause Jon to look over at me in total co
nfusion, like, who are you? I couldn’t think of the right words to use for anything, and one night after dinner, even though I knew that I wanted to store the leftovers in a Tupperware container, I repeatedly told Jon to put the lasagna in the tussle-wob-naters.
“The what?” he kept asking.
“THE TUSSLE-WOB-NATERS!” And the more I repeated it, the more it sounded right.
And then there was that one time I accidentally threw my sunglasses into a seven-foot-high Dumpster, because they were in the same hand I was using to toss away a bag of dog poop. I actually thought I might try to climb inside to retrieve them, but I knew that if Jon found out that I was rapelling down the inside of a garbage receptacle in my six-months-pregnant state, he’d kill me before the bacteria would. And then that afternoon I fell down the basement stairs as he listened helplessly three rooms away, and the pain in his worried face when he came to pick me up off the floor was worse than the bruise on my left thigh and the near fracture in my left foot.
So I tried to take the stairs a little more slowly, tried to cut my waddle from a five-foot to a three-foot radius of destruction, started thinking through words and syllables before my vocabulary turned into a string of cindenipherable won cents. And when it came to that traitorous belly button, well, let’s just say we had a bulk-sized container of duct tape in the basement.
I had read about all these symptoms, that they might crop up, but it seemed like I was inviting the woes of pregnancy onto my body just by reading about them beforehand. It was as if reading about a symptom made it manifest. For instance, it wasn’t until after I had read about “pink toothbrush” that my gums started to bleed when I brushed my teeth before going to bed, and I’d always been a pretty vigorous tooth brusher. Give me a new toothbrush and I can whittle the thing down to nothing but a shabby nubbin of its former self within three days, using nothing but my teeth and gums. But the moment I read about the sensitivity of a pregnant woman’s gums my mouth swelled with so much blood I looked like the Vampire Lestat after a hard night of hard partying in the Castro.
So imagine my dread when I read about hemorrhoids.
Almost all of the literature I’d been reading, books and essays that listed symptoms month by month, had saved mention of hemorrhoids until the sixth and seventh months. They do this probably because it’s not until this time in the pregnancy that the body becomes so unwieldy that it actually becomes necessary to push or physically urge things along when using the bathroom. I think these books are doing a huge disservice to the unsuspecting pregnant woman, someone like me, who might think that hemorrhoids, much like cancer and twins, happen to other people. I think they should warn women much earlier, like when we’re in kindergarten, because I could have used that kind of time to gear up for this.
Having battled constipation my entire life, I fancy myself a veritable expert in the avoidance of hemorrhoids as I have fine-tuned the ability to push just enough and never too much. But I should have realized that the rules for hemorrhoids, just like the rules for everything else, dramatically changed for my pregnant body wherein the mere act of thinking about not pushing could produce an anal irritation the size of a small watermelon. So when the thinking about not pushing turned into trying not to push turned into IF I DON’T PUSH I’LL NEVER PEE AGAIN, the resulting weapon of mass destruction that sprouted on my ass could have taken out most of northern Utah if it had landed in the wrong hands.
Again, I’m not talking about a normal hemorrhoid; I’m talking about a pregnant hemorrhoid, and it was exactly like the pregnant pimple and pregnant stretch mark in that it was not a mere manifestation of pregnancy. It was an actual alien life form exploiting the gestational nature of my body to try and grow a body of its own. The pregnant hemorrhoid wanted to take over the world and was physically capable of growing fingers and toes. If left unchecked it would have mapped out a Middle East peace plan and given control of the West Bank to itself.
One morning in the middle of my third trimester I woke up only to find that I had outgrown yet another piece of clothing, a pair of pants I’d bought three months earlier that was four sizes bigger than the pants in my nonpregnant wardrobe. That left me with exactly four items of clothing that I could actually wear, including a pair of my husband’s plaid pajama bottoms which I am embarrassed to report were frequently worn in public during daylight hours.
I knew it was time to invest in maternity wear. I couldn’t continue to deny the fact that my belly had transformed into such an awkward shape that the only thing that was going to fit any longer was an industrial-sized canvas drop cloth. But I hadn’t ever been a big clothes shopper and found it hard to justify buying a pair of pants that I would only be able to wear for two months when the average life span of a pair of pants in my wardrobe was longer than the series run of Law and Order. I would have rather spent fifty dollars on a really good dinner at a Thai restaurant than on a sturdy, name-brand pair of pants, even though I knew the pair of pants would last 700,000 times longer than a serving of massaman curry. I knew it made no sense, but food tasted better than clothing, and that’s where my priorities were.
Because I had yet to purchase any maternity clothes, I was still wearing T-shirts and sweaters from The Old Life, and this annoyed the more conservative members of my family to no end. I think they saw my exposed pregnant belly as some sort of scarlet letter, that I was announcing to the world in a broad stroke of flesh that I had had sex. Sadly, the only thing I was announcing to the world by wearing a T-shirt that barely covered the top of my belly was that I had gained two pounds yesterday.
I was also supposed to be setting some sort of an example to my nieces and nephews about modesty and whatnot, and baring my midsection in public was, I suppose, evidence that I was a coke-snorting whore for hire whose evil flesh would burn at the second coming of Jesus Christ. The last thing my family should have been worried about was what my clothes were saying to their children, which was, if they listened really closely, “Dressing in clothes that are too small for your body like Aunt Heather does makes you look COMPLETELY FUCKING RIDICULOUS.” They should have been much more concerned with how I planned to dispose of the bodies of their children after I sacrificed them at the altar of Satan, which had been my master plan ever since I’d left the church and started listening to KISS.
I eventually gave in and started wearing those atrocious pup tents that they try to pass off as clothing, the shirts that flare with a full fifteen-foot circumference at the waist. And I even surrendered and bought a pair of elastic-bellied denim trousers that did nothing but make me look like a cheap concubine in Humpty Dumpty’s harem. But I didn’t wear the maternity clothes in front of my family, if only to force them to get over my bare belly and all the sinful sex that got it there in the first place. I should point out that since Jon and I were married, our sinful sex was state sanctioned, which in Utah means approved by God. So my bare belly was, for all intents and purposes, a righteous, God-fearing belly with a place reserved in heaven for itself and all its polygamist wives.
Throughout my pregnancy I’d been asked two questions consistently more than any other, the first one being: now that you’re no longer Mormon, how are you going to teach your child the difference between right and wrong? My response to this one, if I didn’t first start speaking in tongues or crying blood, was, I don’t know, I think a few billion people in this world have done it before, it’s not like I’ll be breaking new ground.
And the second question was: you have a dishwasher to sterilize bottles, don’t you? Which I took not as a question but more of a serious warning, that if I didn’t have a dishwasher I might kill my baby with an unsterilized bottle and spend the rest of eternity in a fiery Hell with other evil mothers who never owned dishwashers.
When we bought our house at the beginning of my pregnancy, we knew that we would one day have to remodel the kitchen. All of the appliances were twenty years old, and the room wasn’t even wired for a dishwasher or disposal. When a large enough number of
other parents convinced us that the eternal and spiritual consequences of not owning a dishwasher far outweighed the fact that our 32-inch tall countertops prohibited us from owning one, we threw up our hands and bought one anyway, thinking that we would just cut a hole in the countertop and shove the dishwasher up against the wall.
That plan proved impossible, and we were faced with a decision between taking back the dishwasher, the key to the survival of our baby, or taking apart the whole kitchen. Let’s just forget for a moment that I couldn’t bend over at the waist, and that the biggest home improvement project Jon and I had ever participated in involved $29.99 IKEA lighting, and that during that project I came within a millimeter of accidentally drilling a hole in his butt. If we forget those two crucial FACTS OF LIFE and just concentrate on the idea that we started a kitchen remodel in the middle of winter in Utah when the average temperature hovers just below freezing, all without the aid of an experienced contractor, then you’ll see how reasonable I am when I say that our firstborn child will drink from sterilized bottles for the rest of her life and, by God, she will be thankful for it.
The remodel involved the complete destruction of the existing kitchen, which included the removal of three layers of flooring, demolition of a wall of built-in cabinetry, and hacking into over twelve feet of eighty-year-old lathe and plaster. While it would have been totally possible to demolish the whole room by letting me waddle around the kitchen for a few hours, taking out chunks of wall with my mammoth thighs, we opted instead for crowbars and sledgehammers which weren’t in danger of going into early labor.
It Sucked and Then I Cried Page 5