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Every time I try to leave town there’s something at work that I simply cannot believe I’m leaving.  Right in the middle.  No one else to do the work.  This is one of those times.  I think I’ve kept the sky from falling, but only time will tell.  I’m glad I’ll have a laptop with me.

I’m away until July 13th.  First I’m visiting friends in Chicago.  I’ve never really seen Chicago, and I figure, here’s my chance.  From there we’re going to Montreal for sightseeing and French food.  Then off to New Jersey for my brother’s wedding.  My little brother’s wedding.  So excited for that.  Work will seem a relative calm when I return.

Last night I got the crap kicked out of me.  Josh hit me.  First with a pillow at about 2:30AM, and then with his arm at about 3:15AM.  He threw the pillow at me because it was in his back.  I can see where throwing the pillow I sleep with to support my pregnancy belly is much easier than shifting, or than saying to me “move your pillow”.  He was mostly asleep, which is something of an excuse.  At least the pillow was soft.  When it hit me it woke me up, but it didn’t do any physical damage.

The arm to my face is, of course, a totally different story.  Waking up at 3:15AM to the sensation that someone is trying to break your nose is never fun.  Realizing it’s your husband who’s swinging at you is even worse.  I never did get back to sleep.  I had all that time in front of infomercials and Law & Order re-runs to be pissy.  When Josh came downstairs at 6:30 he told me that he could explain why he hit me, and that it was actually quite funny.

 Josh went on to explain that he was dreaming about me.  In his dream I was initiating intimate time together, and climbed on top of him.  He reached out in his sleep to put his arms around me.  As I was not actually on top of him, but to the side of him, that’s when I got hit in the face.

When he finished this story I said “how long were you sitting there, awake in bed, before you came up with this explanation?”

He was asleep.  There is that to consider.  So, I let it go.  Still, when I think of my sweet mild-mannered husband punching me in the face it’s somewhere between annoying and funny.

I live in a third world country called Montgomery County, Maryland.  Although it has expensive real estate, exclusive shops, and close proximity to our nation’s capital, it does not have potable running water or consistent electric running to its homes.  Two weeks ago I thought I lived in one of the best places in the world.  Now, I’m just looking forward to drinking water without boiling it first.

Here’s something about pregnancy I didn’t expect.  Food has been flowing right through me.  I’m absorbing nothing.  Yet, I gain weight.  I’m huge.  My boobs, having always been sizable, now seem to have developed minds of their own.  People bump into them and get embarrassed.  They shouldn’t be - how can they help it!  The baby bump has crept up under my boobs so as to make my bras all tight around the back, giving me lovely back-fat bulges.  Nordstroms does NOT have a bra that fits me.  Okay, so all these things seem to be direct results of carrying around another person inside me…but I didn’t think it would be quite this dramatic.

Here are the things that I did not forsee as direct results of pregnancy.  My gums bleed.  Every night when I floss, and every morning when I brush, and when I bite into a crisp apple.  I can’t sleep through a night.  If I’m not getting up to pee, then I’m rolling around trying to figure out how to get comfortable.  My eyelids are swollen.  So are my ankles.  My hair, always thin, is falling out.  I’m starving.  I’ll crave pad thai, but then get sick to my stomach having eaten nothing stronger than a bagel.  Sometimes I just don’t want anyone to talk to me.  I’m freaked out by the idea of being someone’s mommy, but when Josh tells me he’s freaked out to be a dad I get mad at him.  When I think about turning my home office into a nursery I get annoyed, and jealous, of my own unborn child.  Then I panic when I see the gorgeous murals other people paint in their nurseries because I only have two choices 1) pay someone to paint a mural and 2) have no mural whatsoever.

I won’t even get into what daycare costs.  How I won’t have money to pay for daycare and…well…anything else.  And I’m not a poor person.  What do poor people do?  What, in fact, do middle class people do?

I’m in week 17.  Hopefully the hormones will calm down soon.

Another summer, another family wedding.  My brother is getting married in six weeks.  A few months ago I had dinner with my husband and my brother’s fiancee, Nicole.  We talked about marriage - what makes it hard and what makes it amazing.  Nicole’s parents divorced years ago, and mine have been together for 40 years this August.  Nicole has heard from my brother and me about the ups and downs that my parents had along the way.  There were fights and tensions, and some of those still exist.

So the question is “what’s the difference?”  What’s the stuff that differentiates a marriage that works from a marriage that doesn’t.  ALL marriages are difficult, at least at some point.  So, she asked, from an affianced woman to a newlywed, “what makes it work?”

I told her that the difference is the willingness to stand there and MAKE IT WORK.  No matter what.  That knowing you’re independent, and capable of taking care of yourself, you choose not to.  You choose to continue the marriage and to figure out how to live together.  Even be happy together.  It’s easy to walk away, and hard to stand there and work it out.  Leaving just takes the problems to the next relationship, and working it out fixes the issues for life.

I told Nicole this was the most important lesson my parents taught me.  She told me that when she asked my brother the same question, he had the exact same answer.  I don’t think that’s just because we grew up in the same house.  I think it’s because knowing when and how to work it out is truly the “secret” to staying together.

When a child, grown or not, has a weight management problem it makes sense to me that the parents are concerned.  They’re concerned for the child’s health, and also for her appearance.  I get that.  With a child on the way, I get it even more.  I don’t just want the best for my child.  I want so much more than that.  Any problem, any struggle that my child could have I would go to any lengths to help.  I don’t fault my parents for wanting to help.  I got that, even then.  I do sometimes have an issue with their methods.

Both of my parents have this penetrating glare.  My father’s is especially developed.  If rage only had an expression, and not a sound, this would be it.  The rage was often disproportionate to the problem, and/or ineptly applied.  One french fry should not be enough.  One french fry does NOT make a person fat.  Showing rage at the consumption of a french fry could not, therefore, achieve the goal of helping me with my weight management.  In fact, I don’t think my father has ever seen me eat the foods that make me fat.  I’m an artist with smoke and mirrors.  That fry, or even a handful of them, couldn’t possibly explain my overweight.  I was a teenager at the time, and maybe he thought that the only food I consumed was food they fed me.  Wrong.

I was given lunch money most days.  I believe that my parents knew how much a sandwich/drink/chips combo cost and gave me that amount each day - something like that.  I didn’t use it on food quite the way they expected.  I’m sure they envisioned a turkey sandwich, milk and a snack.  Instead one of my favorite meals was three chocolate chip cookies.  Not the one inch diameter kind like Entemann’s sells.  These were great big ones.  As big as your hand.  They were baked fresh every day and I used to ask for the ones that were slightly under-cooked.  I usually had them with milk, but I don’t think that helped the nutritional content of my lunch.  And let’s face it, that’s not enough fuel to get through the day.  Calories maybe, but not sustenance.  I was always chasing after snacks, and I came home starving.

Did the glaring help?  Would it help you?  Or would it make you eat more cookies?  Would knowing that the food you were eating during the glare wasn’t the problem change anything?

I could not explain the worst pain inside of me to the person who would have done anything to take that pain away.  I could not tell my father, or my mother, that the help they offered was at best useless and misguided and at worst the problem itself.  I could not hurt the people who wanted so badly to help, and on some level also believed that they wouldn’t believe me if I told them the truth.  I gave them the best love I could by holding everything in, and in doing so ate away at my strength.  Without my strength, I had nothing to protect me, and the fat consumed what was left.

Sometimes the best part of having a secret is finally getting to tell everyone what it is.  That’s why I’m truly enjoying telling everyone that I’m pregnant.  Yes, pregnant.  It’s the best news I’ve ever had.  When I say it casually as part of a conversation (”well, now that I’m pregnant the pollen is only bothering me more” for example), everything else stops because the listener wants to go back a step.  Everyone smiles.  There have even been hugs at work.  And, when I am not completely exhausted or nauseated, I’m excited and happy all the time.

 I keep debating the merits of tacky/fun t-shirts.  Ones that say “Needs Coffee” or “I’m not fat, I’m pregnant (and fat)”.  If I saw them on someone else, would I think they were cute?  Can you wear the shirt in front of the same people more than once?  I mean, it kinda loses it oompf, right.  And in my opinion, all maternity clothes must be able to be worn at least once a week for the next few months as they have a very short shelf-life.

I’m due November 25th, so I’ve still got a long way to go.  This is the most important thing I’ve ever done.  But in the middle of it, I just feel like it’s a means to an end.  I can’t wait to find out who’s in there.

Everyone in Kindergarten thought I was odd.  I accepted this a long time ago, and when I talk about Kindergarten this is what most comes to mind.  My oddness.  But I guess that isn’t the entire picture.  There was another part of my personality that had already started to emerge, only at the time I didn’t know what it was.  Fortunately, neither did the other kids.

One day during the school year some emergency or other took the teacher out of the room.  In 1979 apparently you could do things like leave a room full of 5 year olds to fend for themselves.  Or maybe you weren’t supposed to, but on this occassion that’s what happened.  It was only a few minutes.  At first we sat there, mostly just confused about what to do.  Here was an opportunity for freedom.  We had to do something, but what?  What were we going to do, pull cigarettes out of our Sesame Street lunch boxes?  Being 5 is so limiting.  Eventually someone spoke.  Then someone else…somehow Underoos came up in conversation.  Really being 5 isn’t all that different from being 25 sometimes.

One of the ways I explain my current personality to people is that I have absolutely no inhibitions, but I do have a well developed sense of propriety.  That propriety stops me from, most of the time anyway, straying too far outside the bounds of society.  I developed that propriety late in life.  Because I didn’t interact with my peers that often in childhood I never got a great sense of what they considered normal, and never used that to guide my behavior.  So, now you’ve got a kid, with no adult supervision, in a conversation about Underoos, with no sense of societal mores, and no inhibitions.  Need I detail what followed?

I remember taking off my shirt.  I was wearing the Wonderwoman Underoos, which were my favorite ones.  Most underoos had a shirt that resembled an undershirt, but the Wonderwoman top resembled a bra.  It was really just the top half of an undershirt, but to me that was a bra, which made me all grown up.  Someone dared me to show what was underneath the bra, and I did.  Mosquito bites were flashed to the amazed room of toddlers.  Too amazed to assign a look out.  The door swung open, and I quickly lowered my “bra”.  There was still the matter of the removed shirt, but my normally non-existent reflexes got that in place with cat-like speed.

The most incredible part wasn’t that I flashed the class.  That was simply a preview of things to come.  What still boggles the mind is that every single kid in that room kept his mouth shut.  The teacher didn’t have enough evidence with which to prosecute, and so I never saw any consequences.  What she did see - my shirtless little body - contradicted everything she knew about the wallflower I appeared to be.  My reputation was saved by a tight-lipped Kindergarten class and assumptions about my purity.  Bring on 1st Grade.

I went to NJ this weekend to visit my family.  Aside from Mother’s Day, which was reason enough, my parents made an engagement party for my brother.  The whole thing was great.  Everyone was really happy.  My mom had turned 60 the week before, and my parents are having their 40th anniversary this year, so I felt like they needed gifts, and lots of them.

One of the gifts I brought with me was the Calphalon One Frittata Pan.  My parents make frittatas at least once a week.  With Egg-Beaters instead of eggs.  They’d never compromise on fat and heart health.  But anyway, this is one of their favorite foods, and flipping it is always a nightmare.  I thought I could help.

The pan is essentially two pans in one.  One says “top” and the other says “bottom”, so there’s no confusion.  You are supposed to cook the frittata fully on one side, and then flip it to let it brown on the other.  This should not be hard.  This should, in fact, not require instructions of any kind.  The two-sided pan kinda speaks for itself.  After we left on Sunday, my parents used it to make dinner.  I’m supposing the mistake was that the egg beaters had not cooked through enough when my father flipped the pan.  That’s all I can think of as an explanation for why the majority of the yellow not-quite-egg substance wound up coating every surface in the kitchen.  When the egginess hit the hot stove it cooked to a thin yellow layer impenetrable to most household cleaners.  Fortunately by the time my parents called me they were already laughing.

Next year I’m getting them a toaster.  I wonder what they’ll do with that.

Last Friday at a company picnic one of my co-workers expressed concern for today’s high school youth.  Not the usual babble about growing up too fast or dressing like Britney Spears, his concern was that they are all guzzling Red Bull, and other similar beverages, that taste like juice but are actually - well - kind of drugs.  Sure, most of the “drugs” are natural, but as I always point out, so is arsenic.  That doesn’t mean you drink it.

I immediately said what I should probably have kept to myself.  Most of my energy in high school came from my “diet” of black coffee and Marlboro “reds”.  At age 14 I was so proud that I drank and smoked the high octane stuff.  That I never used the word “light” when asking for coffee or cigarettes.  I wanted the real thing.  The one time that one of my friends got a pack of Marlboro Lights, we cut the filters down to half the length so we’d get more of the nicotine.

I think such idiocy made me feel tough and mature.  Now I just feel silly.  I wish I had been hooked on Red Bull instead.