Oct
31

A Very Good Year.

Well here I am, at work, just sitting here being twenty-eight. It is my birthday, you see. It hasn’t been particularly eventful thus far, which is probably just as well, as I am tired of eventful. Last night I was pulled over by a policeman for the first time, for speeding, in a sort of sting. He was just sitting by his car in the middle of the street when he waved me over. Luckily he was quite nice about the whole thing, and I don’t have to pay any money or have anything on my record as long as I update the address on my license toute de suite (Did you know that you have only 30 days after moving to update your driver’s license? Neither did I!) and take it to the courthouse, along with the proof of insurance I could not locate in my flurry of post-sting searching.
The officer seemed to feel sorry for me, to tell you the truth. I suppose this could be because he thought I was simple, because it took me quite a while to realize A) That he wanted me to pull over, not merely to go around him B) That he wasn’t stopping me to tell me to take an alternate route because a dangerous murderer was on the loose C) That I should probably just put the car in park, already. And roll down the window. D) And put away my checkbook, because he wasn’t going to actually give me a ticket, and even if he had, I wouldn’t have had to pay it right there, Jesus.
At some point while he was back looking things up in his police car, I realized I was going to cry, and though I tried my very best to keep it from progressing, I could not. When the policeman returned and saw me he went to great pains to reassure me that he was not giving me a ticket, and that everything was fine, and I tried to sort of push the tears back in my eyes with my fingers and laugh gaily to show him I was ok, which was markedly unsuccessful, and then I started apologizing for the messiness of my car, like I was about 30 seconds away from offering him a drink and asking whether I couldn’t take his coat. Obviously I will have to work on this before my next run in with The Law.
I drove home at approximately five miles an hour and called Scott to tell him I had been caught in a sting. And then I cried until I went to bed, for no reason at all that I could tell except that I was tired, and pregnant, and had already worked almost 30 hours by Tuesday, and I had been planning to have fishsticks for dinner only to find that there were only three left, and…well that was all, really. The logic, she has deserted me.

Much as I have deserted you, over these past few weeks—a situation I find a little baffling, honestly. I have posted less this month than in any month of the more than two years I have had this website. I always planned to write a lot throughout any pregnancy I managed to achieve, and yet I have found myself curiously silent, and not just virtually: I have not returned emails or phone calls, seen friends, gone to what were previously weekly acupuncture or therapy appointments, or done anything, really, except for work, eat, and sleep. And much of that is due to legitimate busyness, but I cannot help but suspect that there is more to it. That if my work hadn’t obligingly exploded with deadlines at this particular juncture, I would have gone into this suspended animation anyway. And after thinking about it rather excessively over the last few days, I think I have a vague idea why.

I am almost twelve weeks pregnant with twins, and by all indications, things are going swimmingly. And yet I have a slightly shameful feeling that this pregnancy is something I have made up. If you have spent any time at all trying and failing to conceive, you have undoubtedly fantasized about being pregnant. I myself have spent hours imagining it, and somehow it feels like this is what I am doing, now. Scott and I ventured into a baby store in our neighborhood last week, and I lasted maybe ten minutes before feeling I absolutely had to get out of there IMMEDIATELY. Those ten minutes were spent in a sort of herky-jerky browsing—not looking at anything too closely, just wandering around in a carefully aimless fashion. At some point I saw a very pregnant woman looking at strollers, and my reaction was to blush, feel embarrassed, and think “Oh, there’s a real pregnant woman.” Like I was a sort of infertile Miss Havisham-y character, trolling baby stores to fondle onesies I had no need for, rather than, well, a “real pregnant woman” in my own right. Mixed in with all this is my knowledge of all that can still go wrong, and a dawning awareness that I am never going to feel safe in this pregnancy, at least not much before 30 weeks, if then.
My solution, apparently, to this overwhelming cocktail of emotion, has been to shut down all nonessential functions. Work and my crippling fatigue provide convenient and absorbing distractions, and I focus on those, giving in to the fantasy that I can put the rest of my life on hold until I feel better equipped to deal with it.

But I don’t like living this way, and I am ending it now. This is likely to be my last pregnancy, especially if it works out and results in actual, live babies. That means that today is likely my one shot at being eleven weeks, four days pregnant, and I’ll be damned if I am going to let it pass unenjoyed and undocumented. Remember, I am a girl who saved every note she was passed in junior high, cataloguing them in large manila envelopes according to year. These envelopes are still in my closet, which means I have purposely packed and moved them at least eight times in the past decade. I take documentation seriously, friends, and if things continue the way they have been, I am going to have little record at all of this pregnancy. Of course I could lose the Science Babies at any time. And if I do, I will lose my mind, regardless of whether I spent the months they were alive with my head safely in the sand or out in the open, where it could be whacked off at any moment, but where the air is undeniably fresher. At this point, I have a greater chance of bringing home at least one baby next spring than I do of losing them, and if things do work out, I want to be able to remember this time, when I was newly twenty-eight years old, finally, finally pregnant, and roughly the size of your average houseboat.

So, I have gone ahead and signed myself up for NaBloPoMo. Again. I will be posting every day for the next month, so prepare your RSS feeds for a groaning weight of solipsistic hijinks! And when I can’t think of anything to write, god only knows what you’ll get instead. (Ahem. “A Girl and Her Chicken,” anyone?)

And now, prepare yourself for the staggering cuteness of Science:
I did get that pity ultrasound last week, and it started out like every ultrasound we have ever had. Well, there was a fan in the ultrasound room positioned in such a way that it blew straight up the paper sheet covering my lower half, and while we waited for the NP I amused Scott by pushing the sheet down in front while the fan blew up the sides and pretending to be the Marilyn Monroe of Exam Room 12, but except for that moment of COMEDY GOLD, it was routine. Until—The Science Babies started moving. Baby A was wriggling around and waving its arms, getting its wee heartrate up to 178, like Spinning for fetii. Baby B continued its Garbo streak, moving mainly when we tried to get a picture, and then pushing itself out of view.
I had grounded the Science Babies after the previously mentioned macaroni-out-the-nose episode (for one week following birth, which seemed reasonable), but I confess I promptly ungrounded them after they were good enough to be not just alive but moving on ultrasound. I am just a softie, I guess.

But really, who can blame me?
Babies!
(A on the right, B on the left. Please ignore the mysteriously glowing midsection and the fact that they look like they have pincers. My god, please don’t let my babies be born with pincers—maybe there was an accident with a spider in the embryology lab?)

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |