My mother and cousin are here, and my inlaws live here now. My mother-in-law has backed up a bit, stopped hovering so much, and that makes me mad at myself for being such a bitch, but truly, a woman nine months pregnant should not be trifled with. If she tells you she's okay, accept that. Don't ask again. And never, ever, under any circumstances, ask when the baby is coming, unless you know there's a scheduled C-section or induction. I mean, never, never. Fucking never. What you don't know is, every goddamn person she's encountered has asked that question, with that same I'm-so-cute concern, and you just might be the one who gets his head bitten off for asking.
If you can't help yourself, call up and ask how she is, ask if there's something you can help with, something you can clean, a freezable dinner you can make, somewhere you can drive her. If she says no, then tell her to call if she needs something. Then hang up, because what she wants is to be left alone, but with the reassurance that there is a safety net of loving people in case she needs them.
So I have a houseful of people now, people sleeping in every room except the baby's. He's doing his best to come out, I think. Rubbing his head against the opening, making it wider, thinning it out, trying to kick his way out. It just isn't time yet. I'm a week away from due but my ma and cousin can't stay that long. He has to come sooner. So the doctor gets all up inside me today, does some scary painful shit they call "stripping membranes" that I can barely breathe through.
***
My feelings about Ma are strange. I'm deeply in love with her and deeply ashamed of her at the same time. From abusive boyfriends to booze, cigarettes to food, inactivity to sunbathing, this woman is on a death trip. She's living like she's twenty, but it's going to come crashing down on her, hard, very soon. She surrounds herself only with enablers, but she loves me so she comes around anyway, then I break her heart by snapping at her for being so fucking irresponsible with her life. I need to chill out on her, I have every intention of chilling out on her, swear. This time, I say, I'm going to greet her with a massive hug, but then I look inside her car and it's overflowing with junk food, all kinds. It's like a cheap, ugly version of Willy Wonka's big main room. Everything is edible. There are candy-covered nuts stuck to the dash, Reese's Pieces, Whoppers, Cheetos, and Diet Pepsis. I should be grateful there is no beer. Maybe she drank it all on the way.
At the movie theater she buys Snickers Poppables and peanut butter M&M's. We can't pass a drug store without her stopping in for Diet Pepsi, orange soda, some new kind of chocolate thing that looks like a potato chip. She does not eat breakfast, but from about 10:00 AM on, the eating is endless. She loses her deoderant, and immediately grabs a handful of nuts before she goes to look. The bread she buys to go along with her heart-attack lasagne tastes like butter with a little bread and garlic in it. The smoke breaks, the cute comments when Mister Aran and I go to work out. It grates and grates on me until she demands a suntan lotion with a smaller SPF because she wants to get a tan - and that's when I snap, "What do you need a tan for? Really?"
She doesn't answer. It isn't until later that I realize the answer in her head, that she never considers, is that it's slimming. It's one step closer to the supermodels. Like her fake-nail manicures and box-dyed roots, it's an easy, temporary beauty step that accomplishes exactly nothing in making her look and feel like she wants. That would take - I almost wrote work, but that isn't right - looking inside. It would take answering those questions, like "What do you need a tan for?" The answer being, I don't need a tan, I need vegetables and water and lean meats and exercise and to quit smoking and dump my loser boyfriend.
She isn't ready to answer. So she just weeps, silently except for the aggravating sniffling, all the way to the beach, with an SPF 6 in her bag.
***
It's just so fucking hard for me to be kind. Patience is another thing I do only with great effort.
***
I think, in order to change, you have to want to change. I don't want to change those things. They keep me from getting hurt. They keep me tough and independent. They keep me,
me.
***
Mister Aran will be in a wedding next month. The bachelor party is on the 30th: a morning of paintball followed by a night of strippers. This is a hurdle I haven't jumped yet. I have eleven days to get over myself in a big way.
Yeah, I make myself sound so cool, usually, but that's only in theory. I'm an in-theory cool chick.
And because he reads this, I'll stop there.
Because I want to be a cool chick, and not only in theory.
***
And I'm done.
posted by Samus @ 10:19 PM
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