The Bewildered Housewife

Am finally getting on the task of record-keeping for the baby-to-be.  Here is the beginning!

July 7, 2008

Dear Xxxxxx,

I think that’s what we’ll name you.  I’ve meant for a long time to sit down and keep track of my pregnancy with you, but for one reason or another time has gotten the better of me.

I’m sorry to have let it slide for so long, but I’ll try to catch you up.  The previous months were relatively uneventful – if you call endless excitement and anticipation for you “uneventful”.  Nausea was okay, not fun but okay, and there was a slight bleeding episode at 9 weeks which landed your Dad and me in the emergency room with a very annoying doctor attending.  But you’ve stuck around!

So we’ll begin the diary at xx weeks.  It’s better late than never.  I’ve really wanted to put things down for you.  I want you to be able to read this and have an awareness that the world, and time, and people move along a continuum on which you are about to appear for a while.  As I write this, you are gestating sweetly in my womb, while billions of people are breathing, eating, sleeping, rejoicing, crying, laughing, singing, working, resting and probably more than a few are making the babies you’ll grow up to love, hate, read about and hang out with.  Someone right now is digging a hole, riding a donkey, planting a field, needing a meal, losing a loved one or birthing a life.  So much is happening as you sleep inside… much has come before and much will go after.

(I remember being a tiny child without the ability to grasp the concept of the world existing without me.  My sisters and I crowded my father’s knees one afternoon and asked where he had just come home from.  “Golf,” he said.  “I used to play a lot of golf before you were born.”

Before I was born was a concept entirely foreign to me.  I could not wrap my mind around it and was as utterly confounded as any three-year-old could be.  What the hell was he talking about?  “I’ve always been here!” I protested.) 

It is my hope that you will grow up to recognize this continuum and to effortlessly, without force or strain, find your place within it and effect its flow in a positive way.  It is my hope that the person you are emerges with all her beauty and passion and courage to leave the world and those you love better for having known you.  This is my wish for you.  May you be fully realized and driven by your own true joy – whatever that may be.

We can’t wait to see you!

Love,

Mom and Dad

I am normally a foodie.  I appreciate the art of cookery and have rarely, if ever, asked a chef to change my meal or told them how to do their job.  At home, cooking dinner was a sort of yoga that served as both art form and meditation.  Until now.

The task of eating has become entirely too confusing in pregnancy.  While there are odd things I can tolerate, and even crave, there is a lot of my normal fare that I now insist on keeping, at minimum, outside an arm’s length. 

Take today, for instance.  My husband had the dubious honor of accepting my invitation to “grab some lunch” with me.  I had every intention of both “grabbing” and “lunching”, but the simple act of ordering an acceptable sandwich turned into a thirty minute ordeal that nearly left me in tears.  I had to reorder my lunch three times - THREE TIMES.  The first sandwich was tossed in the trash the second I opened the wrapper and smelled teriyaki.  Intolerable.  The second sandwich was literally covered in mayonnaise, such that when I stormed back to the counter with the disgusting specimen and tried to peel back the soggy bread as evidence, it kept slipping from my hands.  The third sandwich was finally made to my liking, despite the eye-rolling and looks of amazement passed between the employees: a plain piece of chicken with a pile of lettuce on half of a wheat bun.  By the time I finally bit in, my husband was already picking his teeth, and the rest of the joint thought I was crazy.

Here is a small sampling of my favorite wacky, generic guidelines that pregnant women should follow:

Eat sensibly.

Okay!  But before we commence, let’s try an experiment.  First, your job is to swallow an eleven-inch-long melon that possesses the spectacular ability to both a) navigate small crevices, especially while kicking/punching, and b) expand daily.  Observe the slowing of your intestines, your heightened sense of smell and the zest with which you recoil from broccoli.  Next, throw in a few gluten allergies and, oh heck, a little lactose intolerance for good measure.  Then, sob in fits and starts at most commercials.  Finally, YOU FIGURE OUT HOW TO EAT SENSIBLY.

A pregnant women needs only two hundred extra calories per day in her second and third trimesters.  Two hundred calories is equivalent to two rotis without ghee, a medium katori (bowl) of chole or rajma, a couple of idlis, or a couple of aloo tikkis.

Well.  Glad that’s cleared up.

Eat five or six small meals per day, instead of three large meals.

I’m confused.  Does frozen yogurt with bananas count as a “small meal?”  (Don’t answer that.)

Be sure to get 6 six servings of whole grains per day.

This is not hard to do when most of what I can picture eating is associated somehow or another with an english muffin.  It is, however, entirely counter-productive to my effort to stick to my Blood Type O diet and healing my allergy to gluten. 

Make sure to meet your expanded vitamin requirements.

Gosh, now there’s somethin that never occurred to me.  I suffer from paranoia daily that I am not getting enough calcium, folic acid, vitamin C, B-12… and then I lay awake at night wondering if I’ve gotten too much.

Goddammit.  Where’s my yogurt?

Although I’ve been broadcasting the news for months, it seems to be dawning on us just now that I am, indeed, pregnant.  Gone are the days of sucking in my stomach.  Expelled from my closet are the the skinny jeans.  Evicted from the mirror is the smooth, lithe torso, and in its place a lumbering 30-something has moved in with her dizzying array of leg cramps, stretch marks and very round luggage.

Until these oddly-shaped harbingers arrived, my pregnancy was more about pseudo-interesting commentary, such as would be tossed out over tea with the girls, like “Robert and I are vacationing out by the pool in July,”  or “we’ve just remodeled the kitchen,” or “wasn’t that pie fantastic.”  Then the table is cleared and we all go on with our respective lives.  Not so now - this IS my life.

In an effort to accentuate the positive as much as possible, I’ve decided to compile an ongoing list of the benefits of pregnancy:

Husband smashes all the spiders.

Husband takes out trash.

Husband deals with litter box.

Ice Cream.

A free ticket out of dinners with people I don’t want to have dinner with.

Cupcakes! But not those.

Everyone asks how I feel all the time, and I get to tell the truth. 

Pregnancy glow and fingernails strong enough to slice a rare steak.

People are generally nicer, which I’ll take any day.

C L E A V A G E!

A (legitimate, finally) excuse to act crazy and clean out all of the closets in the house.

What are/have been YOUR favorite parts of being pregnant?  Stay tuned as the list grows…

As is customary among most American adults, I am often asked what I do for a living.  Whereas I used to dazzle my audience with my resume from the past ten years, I now give a different answer.  Depending on my syllabic mood, I say that I am either a homemaker or a housewife.  In a few short months from now, I’ll have my job title distilled down to one succinct word: MOM.

And then I wait for the inevitable reaction:  First, eyebrows raise in surprise.  Close on those heels comes the usual, slightly passive-aggressive platitude, “Well, THAT must be nice.”  I tell them that no, sitting around eating bon-bons all day must be nice.  What I do actually keeps me busy and on my toes. 

“So, what DO you do all day?” they ask.  What, you mean besides being secretary, accountant, nurse, therapist, housekeeper, laundress, nutritionist, personal shopper, event planner, decorator, executive chef, and, oh yeah, pregnant?  Why, I just sit around eating bon-bons all day.

What is odd is that it never occurs to me to ask what other professionals do all day long.  It’s a question that makes its way specifically toward housewives and other similar women.  Its asking is intended to marginilize us, as if no task we carry out could possibly be as important or necessary as the things that other working people do.  For reasons I have yet to understand, divulging this information makes us a fair target for others’ judgements, as if as stay-home women we become property, kept or child-like, and need to justify our actions and motives even to strangers.

Important to note is that not everyone holds judgment or demands explanation.  I do encounter people - granted, not often - who don’t bat an eyelash, but rather greet my response with a satisfied nod.  It’s no strange coincidence that these are all people who have set their own lives up in such a way as to be doing the things that they love.  Some of it might pass as “official business”, but all of it qualifies as passion.  I have come to imagine that the people who have conciously created their realities don’t find the concept offensive.  It takes a fulfilled person to understand fulfillment.  This is because a satisfied person has had to first embrace the possibility of an authentic existence in order to create it.  A happy person has the capacity to be happy for others.  On the contrary, a dissatisfied person has a compromised ability to imagine satisaction, let alone to be pleased with someone else’s version of it.  To them, satisfaction is always somehow partnered with guilt (guilt for seeking satisfaction, guilt for not seeking it), and it’s a happy housewife’s funny fate to often be an object of that projection.  In reality, my being a housewife (and soon to be stay at home mom) is not a problem - it’s actually YOUR problem.

Is this all to say that I have no desire or drive to do or be anything else?  Of course not.  Am I able to hold a provocative, informed conversation on a myriad of current, cultural and/or academic topics?  Sure am.  Will I continue my education once the babies are a few years old?  You bet I will.  Will I fufill my other dreams of teaching college, writing books, and contributing positively to my larger environment?  There is not a doubt in my mind.

But will I allow my desires for the future to undermine the importance or joy of the commitment I have made to my home and family in the present time?  Absofreakinglutely not.  And I won’t let you do that, either.

In short, I don’t cluck my tongue at you for chopping your hair off and schlepping for a boss so that you can share bitter cocktails at 5pm and order a pizza for your child after daycare.  You’ve made your choice.

This one’s mine.

There is a baby boom happening here on the West Coast of the United States.  The wealthy Jewish daughters of my mother-in-law’s friends in particular are popping out children at breakneck speeds, destined to be weaned from supple breasts straight into Juicy Couture.

My mother-in-law delights in these children (which on most days, I find odd, given that I am halfway through my pregnancy and she still hasn’t told a single soul).  She takes every occasion we see each other as an opportunity to describe each of their births in detail.  Fortunately, these stories are never very long; most last about two sentences and invariably include the words “scheduled”, “induced” and/or “voluntary c-section”.  But there is an art to my mother-in-law’s storytelling.  Her labor tales are always related with a soft tilt of the head, the last syllable drawn out long, and the whole thing colored by a tone of voice usually reserved for explaining something incredibly complex to a five-year-old, such as “That big bad tiger wouldn’t be nice to people, so that’s why we keep him in a zooooooo,” or “People are putting money in that man’s cup because he has no place to liiiiiiiive“.

Once my mother-in-law burps up the initial news and the method of birth, she narrows her eyes and pauses to look me over for a moment.  Now comes the head-tilt.  I watch in slow motion as she opens her mouth.  Here is where she inserts her expert medical opinions, apparently earned during her lengthy residencies at Saks and Nordstrom. 

She opted for surgery because:
(choose all that apply)

She’s just such a tiny girl.

Her hips were far too narrow for a natural birth (for the eightieth time).

She was just so exhausted, she couldn’t bear to be pregnant anymore.

and my favorite, which rolls the soothing voice, the narrowed eyes, and a slow head nod all into one bundle of condescending bliss:

It’s just what people today dooooooooo.

I follow along with all the rapt attention of a giraffe on qualudes.  Who knew that a woman oblivious to the dangers of injecting botulism into her face could be so knowledgeable about labor and delivery?  And here I was making monthly appointments with amateurs.  Boy, am I naive!  Hopefully she will break through the line of security officers instructed specifically to keep her out of my delivery room, and show us all how it’s really done.  But that will only be if I am very, very lucky… but then, I AM her daughter-in-law. 

If that doesn’t make me lucky, I don’t know what does.

The word prego is often used as a cute little reference to pregnancy.  It is also a marginal pasta sauce.  Prego, in my case, as a woman both pregnant and eating a lot, can be used interchangeably. 

This morning I am in pain.  Everything hurts.  I began my nifty new pregnancy workout video yesterday, armed with only a sports bra and the naive expectation that after three nauseous months of relative inactivity, my muscles would still be raring to go.  Talk about a miscalculation.  It was the equivalent of thinking that because I can tilt my head to look at the sky, I am qualified for space travel.

The woman in charge took me through 45 minutes of yoga, calisthenics and breathwork.  She looks to be about 6 months pregnant, speaks with a French accent, and is adorable.  I may develop a crush on her before this pregnancy comes to term.  Also, she is a Cirque d’Soleil acrobat, a smug fact in which she rubbed my nose every time she effortlessly cast her leg above her head.  And flex.  And down.  And breathe.  I lay there cursing her ligaments as my own hips underperformed.  Surely, I am more flexible than this!  Aren’t I?

Dammit, no.  This pregnancy is already wreaking havoc with my body.  Let’s start with the tummy.  If I didn’t know me, I’d be one of the women about whom I’d say either, “She really should not be wearing low riders,” or more likely, “Lay off the beer, lady.”  This is that in between stage when my whole middle is getting thicker by the second, but it really just makes me look like I am coupling too much wheat with too few sit-ups. 

This pregnancy thing is also getting expensive.  Not only will I have to buy new clothes in about a week, but I believe that I may be contributing to the deforestation of the Amazon with the amount of toilet paper I am using.  Pregnant women get very thirsty, and so we pee A LOT.  I could probably power a small third-world country with the force of my urine stream alone.

And the breasts.  Ohhhh the breasts.  I won’t complain too much that I am about to need a bigger bra, because that secretly delights me and openly delights my husband, but the pain certainly is odd.  The worst time of day is when I am in bed at night and have to get up to tinkle (see above).  It has something to do with gravity, with moving from a prone position to leaning over to lift the toilet lid, and there are no words to describe how achy and uncomfortable this can be.  Actually, the words “bricks”, “weights” and “gallons” come close, but not quite.  It is an utterly new sensation - everything about them is novel.  I actually raced home from one of my walks last week to phone my best friend and announce breathlessly that my boobs are now casting shadows.  I am mortified, but thrilled.

On the subject of walking, I have no idea what the hell is going on with my hips.  I used to be very graceful, and even received frequent compliments on the way that I walked.  Now it’s as if my legs are tied into splints; I am beginning to plod.  My lumbering through the neighborhood sends small animals scurrying and local geologists running to their desks.

I don’t know what this body is doing, but it’s certainly up to something…

Today I am baking banana cookies, replete with walnuts and chocolate chips.  I hope my husband doesn’t read this at work, because I’d like for them to be a warm surprise when he gets home.  I feel myself about to enter into another cycle of recipe exploration, because I have adopted the following tried and true methodology to life:  When all else fails, cook.

If you’re anything at all like me, you occasionally feel guilty for crimes you have not committed.  With such venom being spewed from the doors of my in-laws’ mansion lately, I have naturally spent some time pondering the possibility that there could be some truth to their accusations.  I try to be fair, just in case I need to learn something.

For instance, is it true that all of my husband’s actions are designed to mortally wound his mother’s feelings?  Did he really marry me with the sole intent of abandoning her ? 

Curious!  I ponder on…

Might it be true that I, in marrying my husband, was not expected to merely be an excellent wife?  Did I also sign up for the required task of frequently lunching, shopping and closely bonding with my mother-in-law, at which I am failing miserably?  Is it possible that my independence is indeed a cruel, purposeful display of defiance?

After much consideration, I have reached my conclusion.  It goes a little like Kiss My Ass.  It ain’t all about you.  Put on your big boy shorts and take some responsibility for your own unhappiness.

Mother-in-law has been in New York, purchasing yet another Park Ave. apartment to become bored with and sell again 12 months from now.  In her absence, she left a string of nasty emails, and a Father-in-law to scold the two of us for being so terrible.  He called us over to his study last week, and proceeded to spend the next three hours counting off each of their resentments. 

In no particular order:  My husband hadn’t sought their approval for his car.  I hadn’t sought their approval to leave my job.  We hadn’t sought their approval before conceiving a child.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  And the best part is that we’ll either shape up and obey, or ‘not be part of the family’. 

“What brought this all on?’”  I wonder for the next week.  “They’ve never hidden their disapproval, but why are their resentments suddenly surfacing with a vengeance?”   And then it dawns on me.  I look at my watch and glance up at the fan that has been visibly covered in shit since the day we informed them we are pregnant.  Coincidence? 

My willingness to tolerate other people’s crap is shrinking in direct proportion to my expanding belly.  Really, the more room my womb takes up, the less room there is for bullshit.  So, in the interest of not committing homicide, I decided to enlist some help.  But how?  I’ve never been huge on self-help books.  All the ones I’ve ever read usually have me doing primal screams at the moon or sucking my thumb in the fetal position and I, as a rule, prefer to do neither.  But I’ve been diligent lately about making sense of the situation, and this is a task too large for one person. 

And so, against my normally stellar judgment, I surfed around Amazon until I landed on this book by Susan Forward, mostly because I love her name.  She’s eloquent in a Take No Prisoners kind of way, and I do love a woman who tells it like it is.  In it, she outlines his parents’ behavior with such ease that I seriously wonder if she’s teamed up with my astrologer and camped out in our bushes.

“…the crime is that he had become independent.  In response, his parents had become desperate, and lashed out with the tactics they knew best: withdrawing love and predicting catastrophe.  Like most controlling parents, his were incredibly self-centered.  They felt threatened by his happiness, instead of seeing it as a validation of their parenting skills.  They see the new spouse as a competitor for their child’s devotion. They make every choice an all-or-nothing decision.  With directly controlling parents, there is no middle ground.  If the adult child tries to gain some control over his own life, he pays the price in guilt, frustrated rage and a deep sense of disloyalty.”**

Wonder how they’ll take the news that we’re selling the house and moving 900 miles away.  Get out your crash helmets, kids.

** Toxic Parents, Susan Forward, Ph.D.

Another failed attempt at clothes shopping has me in a tizzy.  It is difficult to navigate authentic individual style when surrounded by nubile 18-year-olds gracefully sliding into their size 1 duds.

I, on the other hand, go home and squeeze myself into my size 4 jeans that are becoming a bit too snug for comfort.  At 3 months pregnant, I am desperately trying to get every ounce of wear out of my girl clothes before having to eventually purchase a throng of tent-like contraptions to fit my expanding physique.  This is foreign territory.  All my life, I’ve been the one with no butt, narrow hips and a small chest - but no more!  Soon my husband will be able to hang a jacket on my rear, while I keep miscalculating doorways to wind up with bruised hipbones.  I am not exactly sure what a huge ass has to do with gestating a fetus, but whatever.  These are sacrifices a woman makes to become a mother, at least until she gives birth and hits the gym obsessively.

There is a whole breed of Moms who never seem to outwardly struggle with these things.  Everything about the process of becoming a mother is TABOO, especially the issue of pregnancy weight.  You can recognize these ladies by the way they are picked up and blown away every time a breeze kicks up, all due to trading prenatal vitamins for celery sticks and wheatgrass once the little one has been lifted out of their womb.  They step out of their Porche Cayenne, unsnap the infant car seat and walk away on their cell phone as the Guatemalan nanny takes over - who, by the way, hasn’t seen her own children in 10 months, but sends them every meager cent she is bestowed by the Anorexic Miss.  Think I’m exaggerating?  Last week, parking lot, Trader Joe’s.

There are other favorite taboos among this calculated breed of Breeders, such as ‘birth’ and ‘nursing’.  Nursing doesn’t usually happen with this crowd, because nursing mothers will normally hold onto those last 5-10 pounds as energy reserves.  And these mothers know it.  Bring on the formula, ladies!  Besides, nursing huuuuuuurts the poor dears, and they have done quite enough bringing their child into the difficult world without, god forbid, having to FEED it, too. 

These ladies like to get it in, get it cooked, and get it out - preferably during a c-section scheduled two weeks early, so as to avoid gaining those last couple of pesky pounds.  Don’t get me wrong; I am not against C-sections if they are necessary.  But not wanting to get sweaty, not wanting to retain a little more fluid, and, my favorite, just growing impatient while that selfish little fetus decides when it’s ready to come out - the nerve of that child! - don’t constitute “necessity” to me.  If it seems judgemental, it is.  That’s why it’s my blog, not yours.

My mother-in-law, before I recently tossed her to her own wolves, was trying to convince me that I simply MUST have a c-section.  Because that is what you do.  You whip out your calendar and decide when it’s convenient to thrust this child into the world, and dammit it’s going to obey you from the get-go.  When I scoffed at the idea, she amended her argument, saying that my “narrow hips” would necessitate a c-section then.  I explained to her that nature takes care of that, and was met with the best version of a raised eyebrow she can muster with all that Botox.  Nature is so barbaric!

Clearly, I need a nap.