The dark side of new babies.

Woke up this morning at around six by the loudest, most apocalyptic thunderstorm, I jumped out of my skin, thinking my brother’s apartment block was being demolished or something. Lay in the heat and semi-dark, breathing quietly and feeling my baby moving inside me. Rain started to hammer on the window and I had a sudden flashback to lying naked and post-coital with Spider in the heat and dark, listening to torrential rain one morning, feeling blissed out and happy. And then I cried. Agonised, wracking, self-pitying, unhealthy sobs. Often in the grey period between sleep and wakefulness all I want to do is immerse myself in the memory of the brief time that we were together. But it’s always a bitterly brief fulfillment usually superceded by fits of uncontrollable crying. I must not allow myself to go there, into that dark place. I can’t think about him. Once I lay in the dark and heat with him, and now I lie in the heat and dark with his child inside me.

Sorry, scratch the ‘his’. My child. He is no longer part of this story, he removed himself from it of his own free will.

Saturday was dad’s wedding. Finally he has married the woman he left mum for, twenty years ago. After twenty years, he’s suddenly had the urge to tie the knot. Why? I think it’s because of what he went through with the cancer and the operation and post-operative complications and everything. And she was there for him, through all that. She was the voice in his head. I can understand that they’ve built a very special bond through that experience, and that they will be together for life now. I can’t feel particularly happy about it, and I guess he probably knows that – he knows she and I have always had a difficult, if not impossible, relationship. But he seems happy, and that’s all that matters to me. After that terrible time through the cancer and the operation, I’m just glad he’s still here, and able to enjoy life again.

It was really nice to see all the rest of the family, and my cousin’s new baby, who spent most of the afternoon happily bouncing and dribbling on my lap, and I was completely infatuated! He also vomited down my new silk dress. I guess he just wanted to show me the light side and the dark side of new babies! Everyone seems very excited about my pregnancy, and any raised eyebrows are being well hidden. Of course, this is the first grandchild for my dad and mum, and my brother’s first nephew/niece, so it’s big news!

Mum is in ultra-protective mode right now. As each day passes the baby becomes ‘more of a reality’ as she said. I think it’s just starting to sink in (for her AND for me) that there’s a strong chance I might actually carry this baby to term and have a living, breathing, bouncing child at the end of it! But I’m not counting my chickens, I’m only halfway so there’s still time for things to go wrong. I just have to take every day as it comes. Every kick and twitch is a little miracle to me. And tomorrow I will find out (hopefully!) if I have a girl-baby or a boy-baby! I so so so hope that baby get’s him/herself into a good position with his/her bits on view!!! I’m going to make a bet with myself that he’s a boy… well, we’ll see, watch this space…

Pour olive oil in them…

I feel like a big bag of shit today, and it’s not just ill feeling it’s a really strange feeling. I think it’s something to do with my ears. My ears are all weird, and I feel sick and dizzy.

I was fine this morning, felt on top of the world. Up and in work by 8.15am and planned to finish earlyish and go swimming. Felt okay all morning and then went to meet ex-boyfriend (previous, not babyfather) for a coffee at lunchtime. And then my body just decided to go all weird on me. The first thing was that my ears popped and I couldn’t hear very much, and speaking made them pop worse. I’ve had this several times actually since I’ve been pregnant. It seemed to get a bit better, and we were just sitting and chatting, and then I really suddenly felt really faint and dizzy. I sort of hid it, didn’t want to make a fuss and carried on as if nothing had happened, but it felt as if the world had receded and it was all kind of muted and fuzzy, even my voice. My mouth had gone cracker-dry, too. All I wanted to do was lie down.

Walked slowly back to work and felt better when I was walking, but all afternoon felt waves of nausea and faintness. Couldn’t focus or concentrate, and kept sigh-breathing – the breathing I do when I’m not getting enough oxygen, take deep breath in, then… aaaaahhhh as I exhale. Tooth grinding got worse, and butterfly feeling in tummy made me want the loo a lot. The more I thought about it, the worse I felt. It felt a little like a panic attack, only the ears thing was strange. I was hearing things somehow muted but louder… more like loud vibrations that rattled my eardrums. A car revving up was like a roll of thunder in my brain. Horrible. I had to phone the midwife anyway, so I asked her if this feeling was normal. She said it was normal at nineteen weeks to feel faint, that it’s to do with low blood pressure and I should just rest and drink lots of water, and keep my blood sugar steady by eating regular, little meals (which I do anyway.) ‘But what about the ear thing?’ I asked. ‘Probably you have wax’, she responded. I guess midwives have minimal experience of ear complaints. And then: ’Pour olive oil in them.’

10pm. In bed, still feeling pretty awful. Have not poured olive oil in my ears yet. I think I may save this as a last resort. And in such unlikely event, must remember not to use chilli oil by accident. Anyway, my small inhabitant has been dancing around like a maniac today, so at least I know however ill I’m feeling he certainly isn’t!

Preemptive schadenfreude.

August bank holiday weekend IS dragging. I should have gone to Malvern. Instead I’m stuck here, while Dan, Jo and her parents manically try to rid the garden of all unruly vegetation. I feel somehow like I ought to be doing more to help, but a) I really have no interest in chopping stuff in the garden, b) four people seems to me to be overkill and c) I am pregnant. Is that a avalid excuse, nowadays?

I was reading some posts on a pregnancy forum and one of them was moaning about people around her suddenly wanting to do everything for her now she is pregnant. I sort of sympathise – I think I’d just get irritated too – but I haven’t noticed anyone particularly making any concessions to me now I’m pregnant! I just kind of presume that one just gets on with things and it’s not really till the last trimester that you start to be a bit incapacitated. It would be really fantastic to come home every evening to a loving, tender partner who would make me a wonderful dinner, massage my back, read a bedtime story to my belly and then take me upstairs and shag me senseless… but that’s not my how life has worked out. I have to pamper myself, make concessions for myself, treat myself to dinners and read bedtime stories to my bump. I am in this on my own, by my own choice. And it’s fine, most of the time. I feel very calm and centred (most of the time). I feel positive and happy (most of the time). Sometimes there’s a crack, and I stumble along the thin edge of madness but I always seem to pull back before I’m engulfed.

I know I’ve got a way to go. I think about Spider more than I want to. I still think about him every day, and the thought still has the power to jerk me into a state of sadness and inertia. But it happens less and less, with each passing day. If I focus, I can picture him coldly and rationally, and see only the negative things. Balding. Slightly overweight, with a paunch and really bad man breasts (I can’t think too badly of his looks, however, for my baby’s sake! But you get the picture. Not Mister Universe). Total computer geek. He is a computer geek by day and then in the evenings his alter ego is a computer geek. His world revolves around computers, eating and sleeping. And the occasional band practice, where he no doubt struts about with his ‘rock face’ on. He is thoroughly selfish, seeing everything in terms of how it benefits him. He wants to have two or three cakes and eat them too. He lied to me about his girlfriend and he lied to her about me and, knowing him, he will continue to lie. She will continue in the relationship, presumably completely unaware that her boyfriend had an affair, got someone pregnant, walked away from it without a second thought and will, in January, have a child alive in the world whom he has refused all contact with. She will find out one day what he is like, I guess. It’s fairly inevitable that he won’t change his ways and that one day he’ll trip up. I’m feeling preemptive schadenfreude right now… (or is it just wishful thinking?)

Thinly stretched at nineteen weeks

19 week bump

Is it normal to feel this thinly stretched at nineteen weeks? All my stomach muscles feel like they’re pulling in different directions, and the skin on my belly is tight as a drum. Still no stretch marks though (or do they appear after the birth??) I’m out of breath a lot because my lungs feel squished and also to breathe in deeply seems to stretch already taut muscles even more. Linda doesn’t seem to be in so much discomfort, but I can’t remember now how much, if any, discomfort I felt at seventeen weeks. I’m all bunged up, too. And my teeth ache from grinding them at night.

I walked into town yesterday and whilst aimlessly wandering, managed to buy a stack of random foetus-friendly stuff. A Sheila Kitzinger book about pregnancy and birth, a stack of vitamins with omega 3, walnuts, flaxseed, bio oil (against my better judgement!). Two more classical CDs (Tchaikovsky and Mozart) for baby. He-she SHALL be a musical genius… Omega 3 + musical stimulation MUST count for something!!

Purse considerably lighter, I went swimming on the way back from town, which was good because it took pressure off tummy, and in the evening went out with Shaun and Linda. For the second night in a row I found myself in the pub, was very restrained and drank bitter lemon all night. I don’t know what they put in bitter lemon but it put me in a very silly mood and I laughed hysterically at everything to the point at which I even irritated myself.  And hurt my stomach. It’s nice that Linda is pregnant too, we can laugh about things that maybe we would have worried over if we didn’t have someone to talk to about them. She’s very easy to talk to, and we’re quite similar in many ways, I think. We’re both arty- she’s an art teacher and I’m an ex-art teacher. We’ve both gone through fertility problems. We laugh at similar smutty things.  And now we’re both pregnant, within 2 weeks of each other, and live 2 doors away from each other. How weird is all that?!

A lady-baby or a gentleman-baby?

I have been eating pretty much constantly all day today, and now I feel uncomfortably bloated. My lunches are becoming legendary, and seem to be getting bigger every day, causing my work colleagues much amusement. I take a lunchbox of chopped fruit to snack out on, sandwich or roll, crisps, cake, biscuits, yoghurt. And mixed seeds to finish off with. And sometimes I take my muesli in so I can eat breakfast at work. I am weighing in at around 10st at the moment, which means I’ve gained over a stone in weight since pre-pregnancy. I have not weighed that much since I lived in Greece – and that was because I had some kind of compulsive eating disorder!

This evening I found myself having a baby conversation with three male ex-work colleagues who were more than happy to talk about pregnancy pillows, breast pumps, perineal massage and baby names. Two with partners in the final few weeks of pregnancy, and one with two young children already. They were very sweet to talk to actually, and no one made any reference to the big absence that must have crossed their minds at some point. But actually he barely crossed my mind when I was talking about it, maybe for the first time. I thought afterwards, well that’s a good sign. Perhaps I am getting over him now, at last. Properly. Maybe baby and I can move on into a new phase of happiness without the spectre of the absent father hanging over us.

Only twelve days now until I can (hopefully!) find out if baby has the bits for a lady-baby or a gentleman-baby! I don’t know why, but I think he’s a he. Just a gut feeling. Funny isn’t it, how even at this stage everyone is very focussed on gender issues. Even those people who don’t want to know the sex prior to the birth are still very much excited by wondering whether they will have a boy or a girl. And everything for newborn babies is colour co-ordinated pink or blue. Absolutely EVERYTHING. You cannot buy neutral coloured baby stuff for love nor money. I suppose it makes it easier for strangers, and prevents any awkward gender recognition faux pas. The thing is, gender stereotyping notwithstanding, I’m really not into pink. I’d prefer any colour but pink – orange, maybe. Or even peach would be okay. Anyway, I’m going to sign off now and spend some time with baby before we go to sleep…

Tick the box ‘Must try harder’.

A first! Baby decided to whup me quite vigorously this morning at work. So much so that I yelped out loud ‘Whoa there, kiddo!’ (or something along those lines, maybe not quite so country and western) to a virtually silent office. Then the little darling proceeded to squirm around merrily for the rest of the day. I am never happier than when I can feel these reassuring, gentle little foetal movements. I glaze over and just sit and enjoy the feeling. My baby, inside me. I don’t want to ever forget this feeling as long as I live.

What would my other babies have been like, I wonder? My three little might-have-beans. As far as the doctors were concerned they were ‘non-viable’. I used to hate that term. To have my babies labelled ‘non-viable’ sounded like a scene from some dystopian sci-fi. It also made me feel non-viable as a mother. Once you’ve made it past the twelve week mark, a vast baby-making conveyor belt kicks in, and once you’re part of it you become just another baby maker. You are on this production line for 40 weeks, upon which at certain points there will be things that you will do. You will have a scan at this point, then at this point blood tests, at this point you will meet your midwife who will talk to you about this, and that and then… and so on and so forth. It’s easy to forget sometimes that actually you are free to NOT do any of this stuff – it seems so expected that you will do everything by the book. When your baby is deemed ‘non-viable’, you drop off the production line into the rejects pile and no one is interested in you anymore. Tick the box ‘Must try harder.’

But this time I’m on the conveyor belt and rolling toward the next big moment… the 20 week scan, which is a nice thing. But the bit that I am currently dreading is the ‘and at this point you will go to Parentcraft classes…’. That is the point at which I feel like my pregnancy, my baby and me lose our privacy and independence and suddenly become public property. I dread these classes, I imagine them full of cooing, self-satisfied, slightly gormless couples, and at the head of it all the Amazonian figure of the expert, the Parentcraft Teacher, She who must be obeyed, with gimlet eyes and a tongue as sharp as a razor. I don’t suppose that these classes are anything like as terrible as I imagine them to be, but still my blood runs cold at the thought of them.

By the way, there is the hugest spider running manically around my room right now. I keep catching glimpses of it out of the corner of my eye, and at first I thought I was going mad, but then I caught it red-handed, running straight towards my bed. Now I am not scared of spiders, but I really don’t want this one deciding to run over my face in the night – aargh, what do I do? It’s bloody fast, too!

Sometimes retail surgery is called for

18 week bump

Yesterday was my and baby’s 18 week milestone, and I had a horrid self-pitying moment, which I hope baby did not share. Having spent all morning in bed reading and scouring the internet for 18 week 3d scan pictures, I eventually made it downstairs. My housemates were hungover, watching the Olympics amidst piles of weekend supplements and I became instantly morose and uncommunicative, and wanted to slam things around in the kitchen. I hated myself for behaving in that way too, which made it even worse. I could feel my chest getting tighter and tighter… Fiona eventually came in and braved speaking to me, upon which I burst into uncontrolled sobbing. I don’t know what came over me. Fiona just sort of stood there looking confused and helpless, and then suggested we take a walk into town. I didn’t want to go at first, then changed my mind. Glowering around the house all day was not going to help.

You cannot beat retail therapy for the blues. Sometimes retail surgery is called for, it depends on the seriousness of the complaint. Having sworn blind not to buy anything (especially clothes – what’s the point?!) Fiona broke my resolve by dragging me into Jigsaw and forcing me to try on dresses. ’You NEED a dress for your dad’s wedding’, she said, which suddenly made perfect sense. Next stop, Ghost, where I was seduced by some very lovely perfume on the counter. Final purchase was for baby – a CD of Strauss waltzes. Baby likes classical and Strauss is lovely, lilting, feel good music.

Armed with unfeasible amounts of posh packaging, we then headed for John Lewis and lurked around in the beauty section, hoping that none of the immaculately made-up Barbie doll shop assistants would notice we weren’t wearing any make-up. I am a hopeless impulse shopper, really. My resounding, repetetive cry is ‘HOW much?!’. It’s a miracle I ever buy anything. By this time it was getting late, and we had decided to go to the pictures. Fiona wanted to see Wall-e but we were too late so ended up seeing Mama Mia. I have now decided that baby and I will go live in sun-drenched bliss in a villa on a Greek island, and sing Abba songs all day long with our Greek servants forming a comedy chorus. And Spider will turn up one day and sing S.O.S even more cringeingly badly than Piers Brosnan, and then will suddenly propose after twenty years of not having been around for me – and unlike Meryl Streep I will tell him to get lost. It will be my finest hour.

A paragon of virtue!

I thought I was over the moody hormonal phase, but tonight I am raging against everyone and everything. I need to calm down, for baby’s sake. Pregnancy is a vicious circle in this respect, you are expected to quit everything, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol… all the little crutches that help you get through stress, basically. But you’re not supposed to get stressed, either. Baby might spontaneously combust. Everything you do, you catch yourself thinking, ‘can I do this?’ ‘can I eat this?’ ’should I be lying this way?’ It’s like having your mum inside your head all the time, nag-nag-nagging away till your blood pressure goes through the roof and you find yourself a twitching bag of frayed nerves…

Actually, although I’m a tad grumpy tonight, most of the time I’m really enjoying being pregnant. I love the way my body looks now. I love being extra-curvy and round. I’m usually stick-thin and all bones, and find it really hard to put weight on, but I’ve put on a stone since I’ve been pregnant, bringing me up to 9st 10. At eighteen weeks my tummy is as tight and round as a beachball and I love it, although it’s a little uncomfortable sometimes. My boobs aren’t so firm, though – they’re more slightly deflated zeppelin-like, and without support they are definately feeling gravity’s pull!! But generally I feel kind of glamorous and sexy, and proud of my ever-expanding bump. I love looking after myself too, feeling virtuous because I’ve stopped smoking, quit drinking and I’m eating as healthily as I can, and lots of it, and I’m going to the gym as often as I can, too. I am a paragon of matronly virtue. I would never have believed it myself.

The only thing that I don’t like about being a paragon of virtue is that I’m not having sex, since Spider has disappeared off the face of the earth. I still think about him a lot. I know I shouldn’t, but it’s kind of hard when I’m carrying his child. To know that he doesn’t care, isn’t interested, doesn’t want to know and hasn’t offered any sort of help or support does sometimes make me feel lonely and sad.  I know this is my decision and I’ll stick to it, I don’t want anything from someone that they don’t give willingly, but it does really hurt me when I remember how we were together, how we just seemed to click and be comfortable and good together. But he was deceiving me from the start – I have to keep remembering that. He isn’t the person I thought he was. And me and the baby are better off without him in our lives.

I’m going to sign out now and read some more of The Golden Notebook, which I’m just getting into. And baby’s just started making a few little twitching movements, so hopefully he-she will get a little lively now for a while before bedtime!

It was the hands that did it.

17.5 week bump

I’ll have travelled eighteen weeks down the baby-making trail on Saturday. Blimey. I’m almost halfway there already! I can’t believe how quickly it’s gone – well, actually I can, since I didn’t even know I was pregnant until I was 12 weeks. That might sound daft, but not as daft as my mum. She didn’t know I was on the way till she was five months gone. ‘I was just having too good a time,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even think about it. And I wasn’t fat at all…’

I found myself pregnant in entirely different circumstances. Let’s call the male half of this equation.. oh, I don’t know. How about Spider? Appropriate, in a way. I met Spider and thought he was nice, got on well, but not much more. He seemed very keen on me, and kept contacting me. In my stupid girl brain, this set off some kind of faulty chain reaction. The false logic goes something like this: ‘He is pursuing me. Ergo, he must like me. Ergo, I am flattered and feel wanted and special. Ergo, OMG this could be THE ONE!!!!!’ Needless to say, within two weeks of me succumbing to his charms (if you asked me what they were I couldn’t tell you) he had cooled off considerably and finally declared that he had got back together with his ex. Not the one, then. Not even close.

It wasn’t for another miserable and confusing eight weeks that I found out I was pregnant.

I have no doubt in my mind that I’ve made the right decision. I’m carrying a child. A beautiful, living being. I saw my child move, I saw the tiny moving hands, the perfect, even tinier fingers. I heard the astonishingly loud, vital, energized heartbeat of my baby and I knew then that there was never any other choice. I think it was the hands that did it, in the end. I asked Spider what he wanted, and he said he never wanted children. Ever. Never-never. I heard him, I heard the words… ‘but I DO,’ I said, and I looked at him, and I could see in his eyes that he knew it made no difference what he said. He took himself out of the equation, so I made the decision myself, to keep the baby.