And when I say “we” I am totally misleading you, because I really had nothing to do with the demolition. I may have plucked a few staples from the wood floors here and there, and you’d never in your life have seen a more enthusiastic, pregnant cheerleader, but 121 square feet of Smurf-blue kitchen was smitten and sent to Jesus through the hands of one very tired father-to-be.
While I had prepared myself for life without a kitchen sink or stove or oven, I had no idea the actual physical toll the project would take on my already ravaged and swollen body, or that I would become so desperate as to end up on my sliver-infested knees promising the Mormon God that if he would just make it end already I would stop telling my sister’s children that sacrament bread is laced with arsenic.
After we took apart the kitchen, we were faced with a decision between tiling the kitchen floor or prepping the wood for refinishing, and because choosing the easy way out would have been too logical or easy, we opted for the latter, a decision on par with deciding to remodel the kitchen when I was eight months pregnant:
Dumb.
Our floors were not just covered in a layer of dust and dirt, no. They were coated with a quarter-inch crust of an asphaltlike adhesive and three layers of cardboard. In order to remove that crust we had to spread a toxic chemical adhesive remover in small squares across the floor and then scrape, inch-by-inch, centimeter-by-centimeter, over and over again. The first night of The Armstrong Wood Floor Prepping Disaster yielded a whopping one-square-foot area of scraped wood flooring. By the end of that night—after almost five hours of continuous scraping, after my arms and fingers could scrape no more, after I had tried to will the scraper across the floor with the sheer power of my mind alone—I sat huddled in a lumpy, pregnant mass in the corner of the kitchen, lead-paint respirator pulled up around my forehead, tears pouring down my dusty cheeks.
Jon, bless his heart, not only had to deal with his own set of scraping, but also the inconsolable idiot in the corner wearing his carpenter pants, the waistline of which hit me in the armpits, because I wasn’t willing to sacrifice any of my pregnant pants to the toxic jaws of this project. Scraping and sobbing continued in this manner into the second night, after which a whole three feet of flooring was uncovered. It was on this second night that both of our hands started to bleed and the dog, high on chemical fumes, started barking in Russian. In a delirious moment before we fell into bed that second night I halfheartedly suggested that we leave a small square of solvent on the floor overnight, just to see what would happen, even though the directions on the side of the can say DO NOT LEAVE OVERNIGHT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. When we woke the next morning we found that the solvent had turned the asphalt adhesive crust into butter, and that instead of five more days of scraping we were going to be able to wipe everything off in a matter of hours. Because my hormones were so out of whack I cried for an hour over the fact that I hadn’t thought of trying this sooner.
This bipolar relationship with the wood floors continued the following day when I waited over eight hours for the refinisher to show up, a small Greek man who knew about three words of English: yes, no, and Tuesday, which he thought meant Thursday. And even though it took him two days more than he said it would take to complete his job, I was happy to be done with that portion of the project because it allowed me to spend a few days concentrating not on the kitchen, but on ways in which I could dislodge tiny little feet from my ribcage and drink a glass of water without getting heartburn.
When I finally did see the refinished floors I had to be physically restrained from dropping to my knees and licking their shiny goodness. It’s just that small victories like that one were what was going to get me through the next seven weeks of pregnancy. I was already so uncomfortable in my bigness that I constantly felt as if my diaphragm was sitting in my throat, and I couldn’t maneuver the baby’s feet out from under my lungs. No amount of coaxing or pushing or thumping could get her to extract her toes from my third rib. And with as many weeks as I had to go, the baby was going to double in size, which basically meant that by the end of it her feet would be sticking up my esophagus and poking out my mouth, and I’d look as if I’d just swallowed an 8-pound baby.
On the official last day of The Armstrong Kitchen Remodeling Disaster we spent several hours patching a hole in the ceiling and filling in tiny divots in the walls left as presents from the three blond kids who installed the new cabinetry. I think they might have been distracted by my belly, because all three of them couldn’t stop staring at it. And I didn’t understand this, because Utah is the Pregnant Belly Capital of the World. There is no other city in the world that is home to more pregnant bellies. And then I realized that they were probably glaring at the nakedness of the belly and its distinct absence of Heavenly Underwear, and were probably secretly praying for the welfare of my unborn, innocent child about to be born to a non-Heavenly-Underwear-wearing mother. I could see their point.
Once the holes were spackled and sanded Jon and I made a celebratory trip to the grocery store to buy our first box of dishwashing detergent, and after paying cash for a giant box of Cascade I said to the cashier, “You’re witnessing my first adult purchase of Cascade.” Because she needed to know.
And she just looked at me blankly, unmoved, and mumbled, “I’m honored.” But I knew she was lying. She had no idea of the significance of the occasion, that starting that night I would be able to sterilize baby bottles, and all of the depraved sins I had committed in my life would be forgiven.
The morning after Christmas Jon and I woke to over a foot of snow on the ground and to a house with a temperature hovering at about fifty-two degrees. Salt Lake City was in the beginning stages of a snow dump that would last almost two straight days and leave nearly 90,000 people without power.
My belly was usually very good at generating its own heat, and had on several occasions nearly singed off Jon’s leg hair in the middle of the night. But that morning even my belly was cold, so we headed twenty minutes north of Salt Lake to take cover at my mother-in-law’s house. Halfway through the day, however, she lost power as well, and so we headed back home that evening to a freezing house, rooms full of Pier 1 scented candles, and several minutes of heated poker playing. Both Jon and I grew up in a religious culture that disdains “face cards” as tools of the devil, and the only thing we had to bet with were M&M’s candies that never made it from the bag to the poker table because my mouth got in the way.
We were among the very fortunate who had our power restored within twenty hours, but by the time the storm was over we had to deal with no Internet service and a driveway covered in over three feet of snow.
And then our twenty-seven-year-old hot-water heater kind of stopped working.
And then the guy from Sears who showed up to install the new hot-water heater that totally wasn’t in the budget said that he couldn’t install the new hot-water heater because of some code or permit relating to the furnace and how carbon monoxide was most likely leaking out of the chimney and slowly killing us in our sleep, and that to fix the whole death-in-our-sleep thing would cost us the college fund of our second child, the college fund for our first child having already been spent on plumbing the new kitchen.
And then Our New Dishwasher started making weird noises, noises that just aren’t supposed to be made by a new dishwasher, noises you’d likely hear coming from a rotting, diseased rhinoceros as it flails its gigantic limbs in a last gasping yelp for life.
And then the guys who were supposed to pick up the old refrigerator smoked too much pot and said they couldn’t pick up the old refrigerator, and I was forced to figure out a way to make a twenty-five-year-old refrigerator look a little more cozy as it had become a permanent fixture in the living room.
And while I was totally ready to scream and cry and wield my belly in wholly lethal and illegal ways, I was tremendously blessed to have a husband who could look at it all—after two straight days of shoveling snow, snow he’d only ever accuse of being glorious and
beautiful—and smile and hold my hand and tell me Heather, it’s going to be okay. And there was nothing in this world more magnificent than the way he said my name.
I thought that when I finally made it to the thirty-sixth week, the point after which they say the baby can make a safe appearance at any time, that I would feel calm and peaceful with what was about to happen to me, because many pregnant women in their ninth month seem to radiate an almost superhuman serenity, an impenetrable resolve and acceptance of their fate, like they are walking to the guillotine feeling nothing but happiness at the prospect of meeting their maker.
I did not feel an ounce of this calm. What had forever been an abstract concept, something that would happen later, was going to materialize and become a very real and realistic reality in less than four weeks. I was scared shitless, even more shitless than my usual shitlessness. And when you consider the standard I’d already set for shitlessness, this new level of shitlessness was perhaps a level of shitlessness the world had never before seen.
And it’s not that I hadn’t read about labor or didn’t know what was going to happen to me—I was very aware of how labor works and what would happen after labor and how my nipples would feel like they were going to harden into steel bolts and fall off my chest. I’d witnessed two live births and watched in slow motion, Technicolor, wide-angle focus, the slicing inhumanity of an episiotomy. I’d asked strangers at the grocery store how they handled their first labors and endured endless half hours of baby stories on TLC involving perky women in plaid who saw no problem with having their wheelchair-bound grandmother rolled into the delivery room at the exact moment their vagina exploded with new, screaming life.
If there were two things I’d learned through my extensive study they were 1) labor is by nature a total unknown, and there was no possible way to determine what my personal experience would be like, and 2) if anyone decided to roll in my wheelchair-bound granny while my naked, sprawling vagina was pushing out a hairy, flat skull, I would personally hunt them down and tear their face off. My husband had been instructed that no grannies in wheelchairs were allowed anywhere near my delivery room. He had also been instructed that the use of sports-related metaphors to get me through contractions, such as “We’re rounding third base!” or “It’s the bottom of the ninth and all bases are loaded!” were grounds for immediate divorce if not death.
I think the reason I was so scared was because the whole thing seemed so unpredictable, and I have a very hard time being put in situations in which I am not in absolute control. Labor would involve the will of a wholly separate human being inside my body, a human being with the DNA of her mother and father, which basically meant I’d be dealing with the most stubborn personality that ever walked the Earth. She’d also have to make it through the birth canal with her shoulders and feet, a combination of my shoulders and her father’s feet, which basically meant the average of wide and wider, and huge and huger. The only comforting, predictable factor of this labor was the idea that if she did get stuck, someone could just reach up in there, grab hold of her fully grown unibrow, and yank her into the light.
When Jon and I went to the doctor during the thirty-seventh week we learned that my belly had grown over three inches in less than fourteen days. It was encouraging news, as my belly had surprisingly measured below average for most of my pregnancy, and it seemed that this child had decided to save all her weight gain and growth for the last few weeks. I’m not sure there are words to describe just how uncomfortable it was to suddenly be three inches wider at the waist, and my doctor, sensing my noticeable discomfort, kind of rolled his eyes and said, “You haven’t seen anything yet. The next few weeks will be the worst part of your pregnancy.” I had never wanted to take up violence against a human being so fiercely in my entire life. No man, not even Doctor Jesus Christ, should ever try to convince a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy that he knows anything at all about what it’s like to be pregnant. Just go ahead and shut up, you uterus-less clod.
Although the last couple of months had been extraordinarily uncomfortable, I would take the third trimester any day over the first thirteen weeks of pregnancy. But this didn’t mean I wasn’t going to go ahead and complain. In fact, the number of things to complain about in the third trimester overwhelmingly swamped the number of things about the first trimester, even though I could smell shampoo without taking a shower in my own vomit, and that alone made the last few months infinitely more bearable.
The worst part about the third trimester was my inability to sleep. I’ve always been an expert sleeper, almost Olympian in my skill to ease into unconsciousness within moments of hitting a horizontal surface, and have been known to sleep in bursts longer than the average life span of a large canine. But during the last few months of pregnancy I averaged about twenty minutes of solid sleep at a time, and this was due entirely to that horribly unnecessary force of nature known as gravity. Whenever I fell asleep on my left side, the weight of my body would crush my shoulder and thigh, forcing me to roll over to my right side. But where I’d once been able to roll over while still unconscious, I was suddenly forced awake involuntarily and had to physically maneuver my body into another position, usually through means of a crowbar, forklift, or a team of three to four muscular contractors trained in heavy lifting. This left-to-right-side maneuvering continued throughout the night so that by the time the alarm sounded in the morning, I’d have changed positions no less than four hundred times, leaving Jon bruised, without covers, and reminiscing about how much less energy it took to demolish three layers of linoleum than to push his wife over in the middle of the night.
I was also under the impression that everyone else in the world was pregnant, men and children included, and when I saw anyone bump their stomach into a solid surface I wanted to make sure that their baby was okay. I couldn’t watch more than thirty seconds of a football game, because there were over twenty babies on that field at any given time, all in danger of being tackled and stomped. By the fourth play of the game I’d be in tears, having just seen six or seven babies smooshed into the Astroturf, appalled that these men could just run around bumping into each other without one concern for the babies in their bellies. While watching a commercial where a gigantic man belly flops into a pool, my whole body seized and I immediately called Jon at work to ask WHY DOES NO ONE LOVE THE BABIES?! And for the remainder of the day I walked around feeling like I had done the actual belly flopping, my whole chest stinging from the impact.
Another inconvenient side effect of having a six-pound critter fighting for space in my belly was being constantly reunited with the taste and texture of things I’d just eaten. Everything caused heartburn, including water, ice cubes, and air. If I ate a handful of Tums, I’d burp Tums for the next three hours. There were nights when I’d lie awake for hours at a time, left-to-right-side maneuvering, stifling monster burps of food I’d eaten over the span of three days. A horizontal esophagus seemed to exacerbate the heartburn, so while I was trying to relax and sleep, a chunk of the bagel I’d eaten that morning was dancing on the back of my tongue with the red onion from lunch. Chuck was constantly smelling my breath and licking my face, searching for bits of the burrito I’d eaten last week.
I never could have comprehended how magical it was to be a ripe pregnant woman, belly widening inches per day, grumpy and irritable from sleep deprivation, burping acidic salsa into my dog’s face. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that this isn’t an exquisitely beautiful experience.
CHAPTER FIVE
Labor to the Tune of Janet Jackson’s Nipple
On one of my final visits to the doctor we found out that I was dilated to a “one plus some” (the actual medical term he used) and 70 percent effaced. I had no idea what that meant, so he explained it like this: let’s just say that there’s this thing that has to open up to the size of a large bagel before the baby can move down the birth canal. We’re talking about a steroid-injected bagel full of carbohydrates, the ones that count for t
wo full meals’ worth of calories. A big, big bagel. And when that thing gets to be the size of a bagel, that is when the baby comes out. That morning, though, it was only the size of a small Cheerio, which meant that I probably wouldn’t go into labor for two more years.
For a few days I’d been experiencing false labor. I knew it was false because every seven or eight minutes I would turn to Jon and say excitedly, “My lower back hurts!” And he would in turn say, “That’s awesome!” Come on. I wouldn’t be uttering any decipherable words or giving Jon any impression that what I was feeling was in any way awesome if it had been real labor. I hadn’t given Jon too much in the way of instructions or rules as to how to coach me through labor, except that he not get within a foot of my face with his own face. I imagined that my sense of personal space would become especially pronounced during contractions, and I didn’t want to be held responsible if I bit off his nose.
I mentioned the false labor to his mother one night as we were driving her to a small town in northern Utah, and she immediately perked up. “Don’t you DARE have that baby in this car!” she demanded. “I don’t have my good scissors!” Even if she had only had her bad scissors I’m pretty sure she could have delivered the baby. Jon’s mother is an incredibly talented woman, and she’s constantly blurting out little insane snippets of wisdom that would sound rude or invasive if they came out of anyone else’s mouth. But because she’s the one who’s saying it, I never take it personally or seriously.
“Cover up that belly!” she warned me toward the end of my second trimester just as my stomach had grown too big for my wardrobe. “That baby is going to catch a cold and come out diseased!” She has six children of her own. This probably happened to at least one of them.
Another time she told me, “You know, the reason you’re so uncomfortable is because of all that working out you’re doing! Those stomach muscles are restricting that baby!” These observations were followed by a sigh and an almost inaudible mumble about “you crazy kids,” and then she sent us home with a quilt she’d made in less than two days and leftover potato casserole. I’m constantly thanking Jon for being born to her because I saw the first few seasons of The Sopranos and I know the risks involved with inheriting mothers-in-law.
It Sucked and Then I Cried Page 6