Today I went to the doctor and put away dishes and picked up the living room and bedroom and went to Ikea and bought a bed frame, called my mother and father, read 25 pages of a book while laying on my left side like the doctor said, watched no TV, vacuumed the living room, ironed shirts and did a load of laundry, emptied the bathroom trash, cleaned up the baby's room, made a list of baby supplies needed, registered at Babies R Us like I have been telling people I would for a month now, ate lean protein every three hours, swam fifty laps in the pool, showered and blow dried my hair and put on makeup, went to the grocery store, cooked for four, picked up Mr. Aran from work looking like someone he might want to date, ate dinner, washed dishes, played some WoW, gave Mr. Aran a nice BJ, went to bed early.
For a Type A person, the list is necessary. For the ADD sufferer, the list is a godsend. To the Type A, ADD person, the list is your life. You may deviate from the list, but if you ignore the list, you will feel like shit at the end of the day and you will have some splaining to do, even if no one asks. Even if no one notices that nothing got done. You'll still explain why; you'll still apologize.
***
Fuck a duck, I'm tired.
***
My bathing suit fits fine and moves alright in the water. How I look in it is not an issue. It was the easiest bathing suit shopping I've ever done. I went into the badly lit dressing room knowing the results wouldn't be pretty and having a good excuse for that. I'm still self-conscious in it. If someone is also at the pool, I just float on my back. I don't want them to think I'm doing real laps, because I don't swim right. I could swim before I walked, but I don't like my face in the water. I don't like the burning up my nose or in my eyes, so I keep my head out. I don't know why I give a shit about other people's opinions of my swimming skill.
When I hang my suit to dry in the shower, it looks bigger than God. I panic in the back of my throat because it reminds me of my enormous grandmother's suits hanging in the bathrooms of my youth. She weighs many pounds, more than three hundred, but her suits have these little frilly skirt things that, I suppose, are supposed to trick the eye into believing she is a svelte one hundred. But if you stuck a pole under the middle of one of her suits, children could camp in it.
My suit isn't that big, but I only just got used to bikinis.
Floating on my back is nice, though. It's good to feel like you don't have to hold everything up.
***
Here's the fun stuff. I am about thirty-two weeks along. The kid, however, is not on the same schedule. His head and femurs are more than thirty-four weeks along. His belly is about thirty-one weeks. So he's this tall, skinny guy with a big head which likes to knock against my very sensitive cervix and cause me pain. He's upside down, ready to exit when all systems are go. He still has a penis. I have a picture of it. I don't see anything in the picture but the doctor sounded pretty damn sure of himself.
***
My ma ditched me this weekend. I'm not surprised. She makes bad choices as a general rule. She arrived in Vegas on Saturday for her friend's birthday with a bad chest cold, and immediately ordered drinks. When I called, I mentioned that she sounded like she'd been drinking. She took a drag on her cigarette and said, "I have NOT been drinking. I've only had three beers."
Ma is one of those alcoholics who make up these rules that justify their problem, who goes to the AA meetings and figures it isn't for her because she's nowhere near as bad as THOSE people. Beers don't start to count until the twelfth, and if you can kareoke, you can drive. You only really get drunk on shots and wine drinkers are pussies. If the mixed drink is sweet, it doesn't count.
Her plan, at first, was for me to meet her in Vegas. I hate Vegas when I'm not eight months pregnant. Ixnay on that idea from minute one.
Plan B was to attend the wedding and then drive to visit me. Ixnay on that idea, as she does not want to drive that far. She wanted me to meet her somewhere. I suggested Ontario, where my inlaws live. There's also a Babies R Us there and an outlet mall and a bunch of restaurants and it's a bit closer to Vegas than I am. The wedding is Sunday, so I assume she'll drive out after the wedding, hook up with a place to stay the night, meet me on Monday...
...insert the sound of a screeching halt here. She's supposed to be going home on Monday. Did I mention that she fucking DROVE from Colorado?
It didn't occur to her that this would not work out, timewise. This is how my mother thinks, or does not think. It's impossible to plan around her. With her measley three beers in her, she begins to weep when I say, "Ma, I don't think this is going to work out the way you think it will."
She calls back a few hours later and tells me I am the main reason for her trip. She just has to see me pregnant, it has to happen, so she will not be leaving early Monday morning, she will leave Monday afternoon. Good to go. That way she can drive out on Sunday night, get a place to stay, have...
...more screeching halt.
Oh no, no. Staying a little longer means she'll be able to attend the reception and post-reception party, come out early early Monday morning and meet me for lunch.
I say fine. I will be in Ontario on Monday. Call when you're close, Ma, and I'll give you directions. I do not hold my breath.
Monday, I wake at 5:40 a.m. for my fourth bathroom trip of the night and figure it's useless to go back to sleep. I shower, dress, and send an email to my Marine brother thanking him for his service to our country on this Memorial Day. When my husband wakes, we get bagels and take a beautiful, traffic-free drive to Ontario, where I take a walk with my dad-in-law and his dog and I tell him that my mother makes me crazy. Then I rest until the stores open and on our way out, my phone rings.
Holy macaroni, did my mother really party all day Sunday, drink smoke drink drink smoke smoke kareoke drink smoke gamble drink drink, then truly get up and out by 6:00 a.m. to drive to California to meet up with me, her self-proclaimed priority on this trip? I'm ready to take back all the mean things I said about her, to congratulate her on her renewed sense of responsibility, but then I hear her voice. She's obviously just awakened. Her mouth sounds stuffed with cotton. This is the sound of a very, very bad hangover.
"I have a fever," she tells me, "and my glands are so swollen and I can't move..."
The way nobody tells my enormous grandmother that her knees are bad because of her weight and not because once in 1983 she got on a treadmill that ruined them, that's the same way I don't tell my mother that alcohol, along with the mid-summer Vegas tendency to go from blistering heat to freezing air conditioner, along with a long road trip and lack of sleep, is the best way for a little chest cold to turn into something much worse really really fast.
The way I ignored the oxygen tanks and guttural hacking coughs belonging to various grandfathers and granduncles over the years of my life, I do not mention that smoking menthol while sick does not really help.
It used to make me mad. I used to scream in her face. God, I want my mom back, the maybe-fake mom I had when I was a kid. She wasn't ever perfect, but she was my mom. I didn't have to give her advice, I didn't have to worry about her. And now that I'm having this kid, I feel like I'm overboard in a very still, calm but dark ocean. There is no number for me to call and whine that I am tired and lazy and overwhelmed and I don't know what to do, because my mother is inevitably worse off than I am and my mom-in-law is so dignified, so stoic, she's more like the sweet-faced statue of a mother than a real, snuggly mother to whom I can cry.
I don't scream at my mom anymore. It never has worked and it won't work today.
***
You ever read Flowers for Algernon? It makes me want to just crawl under the tile and die.
***
I've been thinking of this Ondaatje poem since hitting month eight.
DATES
It becomes apparent that I miss great occasions.
My birth was heralded by nothing
but the anniversary of Winston Churchill's marriage.
No monuments bled, no instruments
agreed on a specific weather.
It was a seasonal insignificance.
I console myself with my mother's eighth month.
While she sweated out her pregnancy in Ceylon
a servant ambling over the lawn
with a tray of iced drinks,
a few friends visiting her
to placate her shape, and I
drinking the life lines,
Wallace Stevens sat down in Connecticut
a glass of orange juice at his table
so hot he wore only shorts
and on the back of a letter
began to write 'The Well Dressed Man with a Beard.'
That night while my mother slept
her significant belly cooled
by the bedroom fan
Stevens put words together
that grew to sentences
and shaved them clean and
shaped them, the page suddenly
becoming thought where nothing had been,
his head making his hand
move where he wanted
and he saw his hand was saying
the mind is never finished, no, never
and I in my mother's stomach was growing
as were the flowers outside the Connecticut windows.
***
If you are not that in awe of the writing process, you aren't a writer.
***
I'm sorry this was so long.
posted by Samus @ 1:19 PM
2 Comments:
I loved this update.
i always read your blog. i never comment because sometimes it's like whatever i have to say is just to trite in comparison.
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