Arm-y

Back in January I slipped on some ice and snapped my arm.  Well, snapped my arm, ripped all of my muscles and tendons, and basically made my arm useless.  Then I had surgery, and went through month sand months of really painful physical therapy.  In the end, it didn't do a whole lot for me.  My arm moves a little more than it did post-surgery but not anywhere near what one would consider "normal.  I also have almost no strength in it.  It's difficult to lift heavy things, and when we climbed the mountain I couldn't straighten or bend it or lift myself up onto the rock ledges very easily.  It's pretty inconvenient.

Lately it's been feeling more stiff.  A month or so ago, I was walking the dog in the yard and didn't notice that he had seen a bunny before he started to take off after it.  I tried to tighten up on the leash before he got up too much speed, but I wasn't fast enough so he ended up straightening out my arm more than usual and I felt some of the scar tissue snap.  It hurt, and ever since I have felt like the arm is stiffer than it was before that.  Plus, it's obviously weaker than it was before the injury.  I was helping my husband move boxes in the basement and it was an actual challenge to lift things that weren't really all that heavy.  I was struggling to do normal every day lifting and it sucked.  It's been wearing on me a lot lately to think about it.  On top of all of the regular stuff you're not allowed to do when you're pregnant, I have this.  I have this useless stupid arm that doesn't work properly and is a hindrance to my every day life.

Plus, every time I'd lift a box I'd think "How much does this weigh?  10 lbs?  15?  At what point am I going to be unable to lift my kid out of her crib, or carry her around, or pick her up when she's crying?  At what point do I have to say 'Mommy can't, I'm sorry' because my stupid fucking arm won't work?" and that weighs on me too.  It stresses me out.  It's just one of those additional things at the back of my mind to make me wonder at what point I'll start to fail because I'm physically incapable of something.  I want to be able to carry my kid around or pick her up.  I hate my stupid arm sometimes, and I hate myself for falling on that ice.

I had been coping with it.  I really had.  I had accepted it all.  I had a total meltdown the day the surgeon told me there was no hope of it getting better, but afterward I picked myself up and I moved on.  Now it's starting to become a weight that crushes me a little bit.  It makes me angry and afraid.  And there's nothing I can do about it.

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Made the bed you lie in

I brought up the issue of being frustrated about some of the stuff I wrote up yesterday to my husband and he was basically like "Well, you can't have it both ways.  You say you don't want to talk about it all the time, so don't be surprised when people don't talk about it".

So I guess this is all my fault.

He's right, I don't want to talk about it all the time.  I do sometimes want someone to give a fuck.  I also wouldn't mind if it felt safe to talk about anything with my social circle.  I honestly think the only reason any of them have been cool with this stuff is because I'm not talking about it.  Plus, I've made such a huge deal about how I would not become a mommy and talk about nothing more than my kid that I don't feel it's ok to bring up the subject at all.  I feel like, with most of my social circle, I'm half a step from an eye roll and the "Oh great, here it is, she's becoming a mommy" statement.  I don't think anyone gives a shit, so I don't bring it up to avoid being the person who has to bring up their baby and their pregnancy.  Despite the fact that it's not on Facebook, I don't talk about it on social media at all, so basically unless I personally told you, you have no idea.  I have done an excellent job at not making it a big deal, not just because I didn't want to be one of those people who makes the whole thing a big deal, but also because everyone around me seems to hate those people.  I've kept this as under the radar as possible because I sort of feel like I have to.  I don't want it to be a huge goddamn deal, but I guess the problem with being under the radar is that no one picks up on anything going on.  Not that I think they want to know, since everyone is wrapped up in their own bullshit all the time anyway.

I don't know where I'm going with this.

I'm just cranky.

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Back to the lonely island

At the risk of sounding like a total whiner, I didn't expect this process to feel so isolating.  Maybe part of that is my fault.  I'm not really embracing the whole "sisterhood" of having a baby.  I specifically avoid talking to people who want to talk about nothing but growing a fetus.  The thing is, the people who want to talk about those things are not people who are close to me.  They're people who want to find some sort of kinship with me through this subject, sometimes people I've drifted from and don't really feel the need to be pulled back to for any reason.  The people around me who do have kids are the sort of parents I want to be, the ones who don't constantly talk about their kids or the process of growing them.  The ones who don't have kids well....why bother them with details they don't care about?  So who does that really leave?  And the thing is, I don't want to talk about it all the time but sometimes I wish someone would ask me in genuine earnestness how I'm doing.  Not that "How are you feeling?" crap you get from co-workers where it's not really appropriate to say anything other than "Fine, thanks!" but a genuine "Hey, how are you?" where it's safe to say how you really are is sometimes welcome.  I don't even have anything to complain about.  This has been a piece of cake for me so far in the sense of physical change and all of that.  I'm not crazy hormonal and emotional.  But sometimes the fears creep in and it'd be nice if someone asked if I was ok.  Sometimes I just feel more tired than usual and it'd be really nice to have someone else offer to make dinner or at least help with it.  Some days I just wish that I wasn't sitting around feeling like it's just me, all alone, while the rest of the world goes about their business.

Sometimes it's hard because my husband is in the type who doesn't talk about anything.  Like.....anything.  I find out more from reading his blog than I do from him actually telling me anything about himself.  I struggle with that, but I'm trying to just accept it and find a way to make it fit with my own needs, though there are days when that's hard.  This whole process has been a non-thing for him.  He's actually said, several times, that he doesn't make a big deal about it because it's not a big deal.  I suppose for him, it's really not at this point.  Nothing changes for him until this kid shows up and starts needing things.  He can go days or weeks without ever thinking about it at all.  He doesn't have to.  It's not happening to him.  Me?  I can't go more than 4 hours because at some point something's going to happen and my bladder is going to get kicked, and there it is.  A reminder of everything that's going on and sometimes a reminder of how afraid I still am.  Not so much of being a total screw up anymore, but just afraid of how things are going to change, or afraid of what the end game for this looks like for me, in that whole "Sort of afraid of being ripped apart" way.  It's also a bit of a reminder that, although she's in there rolling around and doing her thing, I'm still sitting here feeling like that's somehow separate from me.  A friend of mine said something about how she was "already in love" by 20 weeks and I'm like "I'm not even sure if I'm in love now" because....there's still an element of it that doesn't seem entirely real.  I'm struggling with this lack of feeling "super connected" that all of these other women seem to have.  It's not that I'm unhappy or not excited, I just sometimes feel like all of this is happening to someone else.  Like, I still feel too much like me for it to be happening to me.  I half expected something to trigger in my brain and turn on and make me suddenly feel like a mom, but I just feel like myself, and the me I know is certainly not a mom.  The problem is that I don't know how to express that to people.  I also don't think it's actually ok to express that to people.  Especially when people don't ever ask how I'm doing in the first place.  Even my husband doesn't ask how I'm doing.  Probably because it doesn't cross his mind because again, he could go days without thinking about it.  I don't expect it to occur to him that, because I'm not walking around with a list of pregnancy related ailments and I was never puking every day, and I was never so exhausted I couldn't function, that it's exactly the same for me as it is for him.  But it's not.  It's different, and I don't know how to express that either.

I keep latching onto things that are easy to get excited about.  I'm actually excited to put together a nursery.  I like decorating.  I like picking paint and fabric and all of that stuff.  The problem is, that's on hold.  Just like everything is on hold.  So it's just me surfing the internet looking up ideas and doing nothing with them.  I like picking out tiny baby clothes and for some reason having those makes me feel like maybe this is happening to us.  Something, in the not-so-distant future, is going to fit into those clothes.  I think about names a lot, despite the fact that he refuses to talk about it.  I keep latching on to all of these things that do make me excited, but there's always resistance.  There's always a reluctance to move from one milestone to the next and to get things done that might help me feel like a mom.  Moms buy their kids clothes.  Moms decorate bedrooms.  Moms take care of necessities.  This probably doesn't make any sense to anyone.  I'm not sure I'm articulating it properly.  I don't know how to explain myself, and when I try, I feel like I just make everything more complicated.

Basically, I'm just lonely right now.

And I wish I wasn't.

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Running out the clock?

So a few things have happened over the last couple of weeks.  One, our house project list has been getting some major items checked off of it.  This wasn't just a list of things that existed because we were like "OMG there's going to be a baby here" but a pre-existing list of crap that you always mean to get around to and just never manage to do.  Lost of maintenance stuff like touching up paint on baseboards, cleaning out the basement, finding better storage solutions for some stuff.  You get the general idea.  Then we added baby related things to the list, like finding a place to like....put the baby once she gets here.  As of right now the plan is to move my husband's office to the basement and use that room for a nursery.  Knowing the basement was going to become an office meant doing some additional prep work to the basement to make it office-ready as opposed to "crappy ugly carpeted room we don't do anything with".  That meant new flooring, a fresh coat of paint, touched up baseboards.  It's been a process.

During this process, the weather also changed.  We got what I thought was a cold snap, but it seems to be persisting, which makes me realize it's already fucking fall.  Where the hell did that come from?  Plus, colder weather has me going "Crap, we're almost to Halloween, which is almost Thanksgiving, which is almost Christmas and almost baby time.  I HAVE NO TIME FOR ANYTHING NOW!" which is, of course, totally irrational, but I'm a planner and now I feel like I've hit crunch time.  Now I've got this irrational stupid list of crap that I feel like has to get done ASAP to not leave me in panic mode.  At the moment I'm like:

• Pick a name (which my husband doesn't want to do in case we change our minds at the last minute)
• Prime nursery
• Paint nursery
• Paint dresser/changing table
• Poly dresser/changing table
• Buy a stupid crib
• Buy some clothes, since we have like 3 outfits right now
• Figure out a baby shower, which is more stressful than anticipated
• Set up nursery once it's primed/painted
• Figure out artwork for nursery
• Finish the two quilts I've been working on
• Move husband's office to basement so we can do things in nursery
• Pick curtains for nursery
• Clear out other parts of basement so that husband isn't working in a disaster zone and we can store more stupid theater stuff that we have no room for.
• Figure out how I'm going to get my car into garage since it's filled with theater stuff we have no room for.
• Do that whole hospital maternity ward touring thing
• Get essential baby gear (though, I guess some of that might be covered if we figure out the shower?)
• De-junk the guest room and other areas of the house so if there's baby item overflow it can go in the guest closet or something.
• Figure out Christmas shopping way in advance in case I can't actually go shopping closer to Christmas due to spitting out a baby.

See.......it's not a super short list.  And it's giving me anxiety.  I know I've got time still.  Intellectually, I know that, but time seems to be going fast lately and now I'm afraid I'm going to blink and it'll be November and I'll still have nothing done.

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Sometimes I feel like a bitch

Here's the thing about being a pregnant chick:  other pregnant chicks want to relate to and commiserate with you.  It's just a reality that most don't realize prior to being a pregnant chick.  And it knows no boundaries.  It's not limited to currently pregnant chicks.  It's literally everyone who has ever had a baby in the history of ever.  They all want to share their stories, which is fine, but they want you to share yours and when you don't really have any well....you become a tad boring.  At least for the people who have already had their kids.  For the currently pregnant chicks, I think you become Satan.

I'm in a situation where I have a family member who is about 14 weeks ahead of me in this human growing thing, and a family member who is about 12 weeks behind me.  The friend who is ahead of me has told me about being sick constantly at the beginning, ravenously hungry during the second trimester, and now that she's near her due date she's talking about being swollen, hot and hungry all the time.  She sort of gave me one of those "So....how are you feeling?" questions where I felt like being honest was going to be the worst thing I could do, but I also couldn't lie.  I said that at 22 weeks, I'm still wearing all of my old clothes, I'm no more hungry than normal, I have zero cravings, no issues sleeping, no problems with heartburn, never had nausea issues, no major dip in energy (with the exception of like 2 or 3 weeks at the end of the first trimester where I think I was just doing too much and not sleeping enough) and that's about it.  At work, the only people who know I'm pregnant are the ones I've told.  My clothes still sort of mask the whole baby thing.  I look sort of pudgy, but if I don't tell people, they don't seem to know.  I felt like saying all of this made me a HUGE bitch.  I couldn't fault anyone with a "normal" pregnancy for hating me because I'd friggin' hate me if I weren't me.  But what else are you supposed to say?  I can't make stuff up.  It'd be really obvious.

Even my family member who is 12 weeks behind me keeps saying "Oh, sometimes I just forget I'm pregnant, it's been that easy" but then other pieces of conversation come out that point to the contrary.  Like the fact that at 12 weeks she's had trouble sleeping and already has to sleep with a body pillow to support her frame due to nerve pain in her back and her butt.  Or the fact that at 12 weeks she's in maternity clothes.  That when she doesn't want people at work asking questions she has to "suck in her belly" when she walks past.  So, maybe she's not sick all the time, but there are things going on.  I can't even relate to that.  She started telling me about how I should get a body pillow for sleep problems and I had to say "I don't have sleeping problems.  I'm doing fine".

I feel like this is one of those situations where everyone wants to share the same misery and I can't, which I'm totally fine with and incredibly grateful for, but I think it might make other women hate me.  Possibly a lot.

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Thoughts on Things

Lots of thoughts swirling around about lots of things these days.  Mostly on how this whole process is a bit strange, and it makes someone like me feel more than a bit awkward sometimes.  Like, people ask to touch you when you're pregnant.  Why?  They want to feel your belly.  You didn't have permission to feel my belly when there wasn't a creature growing in it.  Why do you think I'm giving it to you now?  I suddenly feel like one of those chubby Buddha statues that people want to rub for luck.  It's so weird.  It's not even like I have much of a belly to rub anyway.  I'm still sitting over here, hanging out in my regular clothes.  I'm not sure why people want to man handle my not-that-large belly.  And it's not like there's a super polite way to say "Stop asking to touch me, it's not going to happen".  It just makes me feel awkward.

People also keep buying us stuff.  This is very sweet, don't misunderstand.  It's so nice that people want to buy us baby gifts, but I'm so awkward about accepting gifts, especially when it's not a specific gift-giving occasion.  Birthday and Christmas gifts are far less uncomfortable for me.  Just random, out of the blue, I got this for you gifts?  Those make me feel weird when accepting them because I always feel like I should be offering up a gift too or something.  So far most of our gifts have been clothing, which is always useful.  Cute things like PJs and socks.  One friend bought us an adorable sweater, which I love because it's the first non-pink article of clothing we've received and I have nightmares of my home turning into a giant Pepto-Bismol pink nightmare so it's nice to get something in another color.  Then there was the person who bought me a maternity shirt, and that made me uncomfortable.  To begin with, this is a family member I'm not exactly comfortable with receiving gifts from in the first place, because it's always awkwardly given and I have some personal hangups about somehow being seen as "owing" this person anything later for whatever I've received.  Beyond that, she bought me a maternity shirt.  I mean, really?  I get it, she's trying to be helpful, buy something for me that I might need, but clothing like that is a bit personal because it sends a couple of messages.  First is "You're looking pretty fat, better wear this", which I get is more about the baby getting bigger than it is about me being fat, but there is a certain degree of self-consciousness that comes along with hearing about having gained weight, and losing a bit of your waistline, and although I'm still able to wear all of my regular clothes even now at five and a half months into this process, I don't really love when people point out that I look "bigger".  So, maternity shirt sort of does that.  The second message it sends is that perhaps you don't realize you're kind of big now, and someone needs to buy you a shirt as a hint.  Again, I don't think this is the case with me, and I don't think that was this person's motivation, but your brain sort of goes there still and you find yourself standing there awkwardly accepting your fat-chick gift.

On the subject of gifts, and receiving several pink outfits (and being guilty of buying one ourselves), I sort of hate this whole "pink for girls" thing.  Not that I have a problem with pink.  I don't.  I just sort of hate the immediate assignment of a gender role that comes from it.  Do I sit around and look at adorable dresses online on occasion?  Yes.  Do I worry that I'm already assigning a gender role that my kid might not want or be able to accept?  Yes.  It's a slippery slope.  My husband takes a very "If you think something is cute, buy it" approach to baby clothes, because he feels like the kid is basically a ball of putty for the first couple of years and can't form opinions on what they like or don't like, so if I find a t-shirt with puppies on it in the boys section but I think it's cute, he figures we should just buy it and put it on her, because she won't care either way.  I like that approach, but it's hard to keep friends and relatives from turning your whole life pink.  We have, partially, decided to paint her room aqua.  Mostly because I can't stand the idea of a big pink room, and until she's old enough to tell me she wants it to be pink, I'm avoiding it.  I like the idea of just mixing a bunch of pastel colors together.  Aqua, lavenders, yellows, and perhaps a hint of pink here or there, but definitely not the focus color.  Of course, immediately when I said aqua, my mother replied with "You know it's a girl right?  Blue is for boys".  WHY DOES BLUE HAVE TO BE FOR BOYS?!  I just don't get it.  I'm sure she's not going to give a crap.  Gender roles get so weird.

Also, she moves around now.  Like, she moved around before, but now I can feel it sometimes.  I guess I have a situation where the placenta is in an anterior position, so it's sandwiched between my abdominal wall and the baby, which means that whole early movement thing didn't happen for me.  I kept reading about how you're supposed to feel it move as early as 16 weeks and I just sat there feeling nothing.  Given my constant concern that something was going to go wrong, that was frustrating.  When we went in for our ultrasound, they said the placenta was in the way and that was part of the problem.  Basically, even now, I can only feel her when she's got some serious kicking around going on.  Sometimes you can feel it on the outside, but it's very light.  My husband tried and kept saying "Ok was that my pulse in my hand or movement?" and I had to point it out to him when she'd move so he could tell the difference.  I'm not sure if feeling movement is more or less nerve wracking.  It's good to know she's in there doing her thing.  It's also a little stressful when one week, it seems like you feel it quite a lot, and then the next you are pretty sure she's hardly doing anything and you start to wonder if something is wrong.  So far I've convinced myself that it all depends on where she's positioned when she's flailing.  I figure if I feel her doing something at least a couple of times a day, it's probably fine.  But this whole process is full of so many unknowns that it's sometimes hard to not be a paranoid freak.  At least she doesn't keep me awake at night with kicking around.  I'll take that for as long as I can get it.

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Thinking Pink

Yesterday we went in for our 20 week appointment where they took measurements of pretty much every body part and organ the kid has.  This time was less difficult, since it's large enough to find pretty quickly.  It's no less wiggly or uncooperative than it was last time, but finding all of the parts seemed to be a lot easier.  Getting a good view of all of the parts, less than simple since again, we're dealing with wiggly and uncooperative.  There was a lot of belly tapping to try to get it to move to the right place.  There wasn't a lot of discussion during all of the scanning, just lots of measurements and an odd question about whether I'd had any bleeding during this pregnancy, because of course nothing can be simple for us when we go in for appointments and scans.  Apparently there was some "brightness" in the bowel and that can be a soft marker for Down Syndrome, so that was a nice scare to get around 7:30 in the morning.  We were pretty sure we'd already gotten past that hurdle.  We had a scan at 12 weeks to look for genetic markers in my blood as well as fetal abnormalities in an ultrasound.  Our risk was rated 1 in 9,000, so we thought we were out of the woods.  This added a small layer of stress.  The tech told us afterward that he was going to take all of the ultrasound pictures and all of my other records over to a specialist to have them reviewed and that the specialist may be in to talk to us.  A few minutes the later the tech came back and told us that the specialist was "unimpressed" by what was found and said to send us on our way.  I am still a little freaked out, but I assume that a specialist would know what should be impressive and would have talked to us if there was anything to worry about.

Beyond all of the freaking us out parts of our visit, we also got to find out the sex of the baby.  The whole time, I sat there looking at various things on the screen prepping to hear that it was a boy.  We had been hoping for a girl, but since nothing in our world ever seems to go the way we want, I was fully prepped to hear it was a boy.  There were even a couple of moments where I was like "Oh, that might be a penis right there.  I'll bet it's a boy".  Then, casually near the end of the many measurements the tech said "So, are you ready to find out what you're having?" and we said sure, but I was anticipating that it would be more prodding for him to get a look at the right parts, but then he just casually said "It is a...girl" like he'd known for a while.  I was surprised.  I was happy, possibly for the first time in this whole process I was honestly truly happy about something.  Not nervous.  Just happy.  I said "Wait, how good are you at this?  Am I going to get a surprise penis at delivery?" and he sort of laughed and said no, so I'm coming back for him if he's wrong.  So, there it is.  A girl.  Something we wanted worked out, and it felt nice.  It makes me cautiously optimistic that maybe things will go smoothly for us from here.

Plus, now I can stop saying "It" when I make baby references and instead I can say "her".  That's sort of nice.

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