34 weeks

(God, I suck at titles. That was my feeble attempt to indicate a connection between this post and the last one.)

Do you think that anticipating (a.k.a. obsessing about) all of the possible bad things about pregnancy and parenthood might actually lead to an easier overall experience when it actually happens? Kind of like expecting the worst and being pleasantly surprised, I guess. Leave it to me to be an optimism about my own pessimism, but yesterday I was thinking about Ms. 33 Weeks' very likely total absence of panic and despair, and I wondered if perhaps she's in for a very rude awakening. I have a feeling that giving birth and having a newborn isn't much fun even in the best of circumstances, but if you're expecting it to be such a positive experience and then you have a 48-hour labor or the kid screams for a week straight, it seems like it'd almost be worse than if you were expecting things to suck. At least then you could say I told you so.

This is probably a really awful comparison, but I'm thinking of my wedding. I was not at all interested in the planning process, and I was completely convinced that I was not going to enjoy a bit of it. I don't dance, I hate having my picture taken, I prefer not to be the center of attention. And yet when it came right down to it, I had a pretty good time. But I have a feeling that if I was an eager bride, the litany of things that went wrong--from 9/11 to lighting the unity candle from the wrong taper to M. Defarge's friends vomiting off the terrace onto the golf course--would have undone me entirely.

So maybe my Bad Attitude will be my salvation rather than my downfall. If I expect hyperemesis gravidarum (damn medical textbook editing job and its accompanying useless knowledge!) maybe I won't even be nauseated. If I expect antenatal AND post-partum depression (and honestly, I don't think that's a completely unreasonable expectation), maybe I'll love being pregnant, the way my (albeit non-chemically imbalanced) mom professes to have. If I expect to not sleep, maybe I'll get one of those model children who pass out for several hours at a time. If I expect M. Defarge to abdicate all responsibility and play video games, maybe he'll turn into some sort of superspouse and wear the kid on his back while he cooks a three-course meal.

Or at least maybe thinking that will be enough to get me over this latest bout of crazy.

The funny thing is that for awhile I thought I'd made great strides in this area. I always said that I'd wait until my panic mellowed into a "oh, what the hell" attitude, and I had started to think I was there. M. Defarge and I agreed on a timeline of sorts and I felt relatively fine with it. Now I'd go so far as to say I've pretty much come to terms with the pregnancy part of the equation. It's everything after that that I'm still working on. (I have a huge mental block about breastfeeding. The whole idea completely repulses me.)

If nothing else, I guess I'll wait and see what happens with Baby X. (Not that his mom will probably send me updates.) Ah, schadenfreude.

33 weeks

The other day I finally responded to the "pregnancy picture" sitting in my email box. It had been there for more than a week, demanding some kind of acknowledgment. Every day I would open it, look at it for a while, and then close my email. I had no idea what to say. My eventual solution was to disregard the picture altogether and focus on the subject line; I ended up with something along the lines of "33 weeks--you must be in the home stretch [of course I have no idea how many weeks an average pregnancy is supposed to last--9 months would indicate 36, but I thought she wasn't due until the end of July]! Hope you aren't too uncomfortable." I know I should have said something more like, "You look great--I never would have guessed that you were pregnant!" But, frankly, she didn't; she looked doughy and crabby, not exactly glowing.

The photo had inspired me to write something pregnancy- or parenting-related, but I never sat down to do it, and then it seemed like I was suddenly bombarded with all sorts of related media. So then I intended to write some sort of cohesive meditation that would bring all of these things I'd been reading and viewing together. But then I didn't do that either. And now that I have a few minutes in front of the computer, the eloquent essay that I was composing in my head for a week has completely fallen apart and I think that this may end up just being a snarky bullet list.

But let's try to follow the breadcrumbs in my brain, shall we?

Possibly even before the photo, I finally watched Juno, which I'd wanted to see since even before the Oscar buzz. It did not disappoint, although I could see where some of the critics were coming from, because her whole experience was pretty easy and sunny, and don't even get me started on his--very nice that his mom got to look down on her as a slut the whole time without realizing that her own offspring was the impregnator. But I have to admit that the whole time I was watching Juno's interactions with the prospective adoptive parents, I was secretly identifying with Jason Bateman's character, while simultaneously horrified with myself for relating to someone who turned out to be an irresponsible borderline pedophile. But to an extent I could see myself going along with the whole "yeah, of course we'll have a baby" thing and then being completely horrified when it actually happens. And of course, since M. Defarge has basically vetoed the adoption thing, my "oh, shit" moment would have to come when I was already pregnant.

So that was a little unsettling. Then I was monumentally bored one day at work and reading the New York Times online when I came across this article in their Sunday magazine about this phenomenon called "equally shared parenting." Which is basically exactly what it sounds like--that both parents split the whole shebang right down the middle--childcare, housework, career work, etc. The couples profiled in the article generally accomplished this by creating these flexible work schedules where they each worked 4 days a week or whatever. The article was accompanied by a week of a related blog where people responded to the article and the concept in a variety of ways, from "that sounds too much like keeping score" to "children need to be tethered to their mothers at all times" to "I like this concept and want to try it myself." All of which got me wondering (meaning, obsessing) about how it would work if we had a kid--eg, would I get stuck doing everything? Would M. Defarge do certain things and then be lauded for being such a great "helper"? Would he try to do his share and then get turned off when I went into type A mode because he wasn't doing it right?

The article referenced a book called Halving It All by a psychologist named Francine Deutsch, who had researched the issue (apparently 10 years ago, but whatever). So because I am a glutton for punishment, I requested it from the library--and then proceeded to read it in secret, because I didn't want to get into it with M. Defarge before I had done all my research, and because I had already aroused suspicion among my Goodreads friends when I put Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions on my to-read list, despite the fact that I love her writing (I also just finished reading a book about consumptives in a pre-WWI sanatorium, but no one posted any comments suspecting me of having TB). Anyway, I read the book furtively on the train and in the park at lunchtime and developed a gnawing stomachache reading about the disparity between the "equal sharers" and the "unequal couples" as I envisioned myself being stuck home with a screaming baby, scrubbing the floor, while M. Defarge achieved fame and fortune in his career and checked in occasionally to change a diaper and be heralded as a model father.

Then, once my brain was complete mush, I turned in that book for Lamott's, which is a chronicle of her first year as a single mother raising a son who, apparently, cried a hell of a lot. But in some ways the book was the perfect antidote for the whole NY Times thing, because for one thing reading about someone who raised a kid completely on her own (or at least without a live-in companion) put a few things in perspective and also because she is so damn funny and witty. The book begins with this paragraph:

I woke up with a start at 4:00 one morning and realized that I was very, very pregnant. Since I had conceived six months earlier, one might have thought that the news would have sunk in before then, and in many ways it had, but it was on that early morning in May that I first realized how severely pregnant I was. What tipped me off was that, lying on my side and needing to turn over, I found myself unable to move. My first thought was that I had had a stroke.

and just gets better from there.

So then I read some more of the comments from the blog that went with the NY Times article, the majority of which were written by seemingly sane and well-adjusted people who said, you know, we don't divided every single task right down the middle; we make an effort to do our share and pick up slack for each other and call out the other person when he or she is slacking.

And that calmed me down a little. Because even though I feel like I do the lion's share of the housework, it is also true that I work shorter hours and am not in school. And it is also true that there are certain things that M. Defarge does offer to do, but that I am too psychotic to let him (eg, laundry). And that we have always divided up the morning dog-walking based on whoever goes to work later. And that we don't even have a kid at this point.

So then I regained at least some of my equilibrium.

And then I read about this debacle (although now the story is being disputed by the local community). And now I have a whole new set of reasons for wondering if any of us should be adding to the population anyway.

Tom Cruise can't fly

At least according to a sticker I passed today on the way to work, plastered to the side of a mailbox. Apparently some sort of anti-Scientology stickering campaign took place last night near Jackson and State. I saw another one on a trash can that said "Is Scientology an evil cult?" and had check boxes underneath. The printer had taken the liberty of selecting Yes.

Reading assignment

The library where I work has a weird collection, probably owing to the fact that it's entirely made up of donated books. We have random things like a paralegal licensing guide for the state of California from 1988 and a hefty collection of bad pop fiction that the accounting assistant keeps donating because they're too heavy to take on the train. We also have quite a few advance reading copies (which I feel guilty about, but not enough to pull them).

A couple of weeks ago I grabbed one of them, a book by Jo Ann Beard called The Boys of My Youth. I was between books and nothing else caught my eye, so I took it home on train. The first few essays mainly involved memories of her 1960s childhood or stories about her disintegrating relationship with her husband. Then I got to one called "The Fourth State of Matter."

It starts with a description of her nighttime routine with her ailing collie. Then she goes to work. I dimly recall that she's mentioned Iowa City in a previous essay. She mentions scientists. Then, by name, a grad student who walks into the room. I put down the book and say to M. Defarge, "I'm not completely sure if this is fiction or nonfiction, but the narrator is in the physics department at Iowa, and Gang Lu just walked into the room."

Before Northern Illinois, before Virginia Tech, the University of Iowa had Gang Lu. I was still in high school when he entered the physics and astronomy department and shot and killed four people, and then headed across the quad and killed an administrator and paralyzed her student assistant. I don't even remember it being in the news. But I took classes in Van Allen Hall, and every morning when I lived in the dorms I'd trek across the T. Anne Cleary Walkway and past the administration building where its namesake was killed. Beard, an editor of a physics journal and a friend and coworker of one of the victims, left early that day, in part to tend to her dying dog.

Maybe it was because I had at least a tenuous personal connection with the material, but the essay stunned me. Beard's grief about her dog's illness, her separation from her husband, and then the loss of her coworker and close friend, is palpable. The writing is amazing. I can't do it justice by describing it, but I can't recommend it highly enough.

Bridesmaid fatigue

In early October I will be making my sixth appearance in bridesmaid regalia. After that, I think I'm going to declare a moratorium. I can't imagine anyone else would ask me, but I thought that after wedding no. 4 as well, and look how that worked out.

Wedding no. 6 is well into the planning stages, and I'm having trouble working up much enthusiasm. I'm trying to be generous, but things just seem to me to be getting a little out of hand. The bride is a dear, old friend of mine, but she's also a bit on the type-A side, and she has very definite ideas about how she wants things to be. This has now extended to the shower and bachelorette party.

If the operative word used to describe a certain wedding in the recent past was "unique," the word for this wedding is apparently "interactive." Not so much for the wedding itself, but definitely for the peripheral events. Perhaps having attended too many cookie-cutter bridal showers and bachelorette parties herself, the bride wants more than just cake and gifts on the one hand and bar-hopping on the other. Which I suppose I can understand. Her solution is to involve the guests in some sort of activity.

Last Monday morning I attended a meeting of the shower planning committee, which I discovered consisted of the maid of honor, me, the bride's mother, the bride, and the groom. They had already done some pre-meeting planning, including choosing a date. After a false start involving having a chef from a local cooking school come to the maid of honor's house to facilitate gourmet cupcake baking for 30-some people, we settled on a do-it-yourself wine tasting.

This morning I received an email from the bride, who has moved on to planning the bachelorette party. She wants us to rate a list of potential activities, including a sailing lesson, a cooking class, and a polo match (viewing one, that is; thankfully this is one of the less interactive options!).

Am I just being petty and resentful because I had one of the cake-and-gifts showers and was fine with it, or does this seem a little extreme? We've had our first string of three warm, sunny days in a row, leading me to be cautiously optimistic that summer may come after all, and suddenly I'm feeling like this summer is going to be so much work.

I must be getting too old for this. I think it's time to retire my satin pumps and strapless bra and stick to being just another guest. I've had my fill of this honor.