Pregnancy

Time for my list of things to never ever say to a pregnant woman unless you want her to rip your eyebrows out and feed them to you hair by hair...

1.) "You're glowing"
No, fuckhead, that is called sweat. It is merely reflecting the light off of your shiny bald head.

2.) "Wow, you've really popped"
Wow, you've really gotten fat and ugly and wrinkly. Oh, wait, I can't comment on you but you can feel free to comment on a pregnant woman? So sorry...

3.) "You sure you're not having twins?"
You sure YOU'RE not having twins?

4.) "So, you decided to try for that boy, huh?"
(This one really gets to me, especially given my history.) No, we were actually hoping for a hermaphrodite with a puppy's head.

5.) "I only gained three pounds when I was pregnant!"
Bugger for you. My goal here is to have a LIVING child, so really, my weight gain is the last thing that I will obsess over because I kinda have bigger fish to fry, mkay?

Miscellaneous

Right before Elizabeth left, Charles asked her, "I know you feed your fish when you go to stay the night at someone's house, right? But I am assuming that you want us to feed them while you are gone in AZ?" Elizabeth, without missing a beat, turned to him and said, "Yeah. I don't want to get a phone call about them having run away or anything like that..."


I regularly watch the Secret Life of the American Teenager, and I am not ashamed to admit it. I freely acknowledge that it is really bad TV (though Stiffler's mom from American Pie as a reformed hooker is pretty funny) but it is a train wreck that I simply can't turn away from. However, the whole Adrian being pregnant thing is pissing me off. Of course, the "good" girl Amy keeps her baby and is doing a fine job of raising him, not on any kind of public assistance, of course....while "bad" girl Adrian, who (GASP!) has sex frequently and (GASP!) enjoys it with (GASP!) numerous partners is contemplating an abortion. I applaud Adrian's assertion that it is her body and the knowledge that she is not ready for a baby, but really? WTF?


Elizabeth has been given a trac phone by her dad to use during the day while she is in AZ because they don't have a home phone over there. Fine, and I applaud them for ensuring her safety...but I hope she does not think that she can get one when she gets home. She will not be getting a cell phone until she is playing sports and needs one to call me (this is only if I can verify that there are no pay phones at the school...and it will be a prepaid one at that). If there are pay phones there, then it will be when she can pay for one herself. I may be old-fashioned, but she DOES NOT need a phone during the day at school...she is there to LEARN, and the odds of me needing to get a hold of her in such a way that I could not go through the office is slim to none. Plus, if something catastrophic were to happen (again, very unlikely) I would be hauling ass to the school, not calling her! I am not worried about keeping up with the consumption-driven mania that seems to have possessed our society WRT stuff like this. Finally, I need to have some more conversations with her about proper usage of them...I saw on one of her friend's Facebook page some borderline inappropriate pictures of this friend and another girl in their robes, with bras clearly visible....posted from Facebook Mobile.


I am not too thrilled with where we are living either at this exact moment. I wanted to get Alexis into a dance class for the summer. No place around here offers anything appropriate. If we were to live out by where I grew up, this would not be a problem. I guess that is a price to pay for knowing that you are far enough away from your family that they can't unexpectedly drop in and butt their way into your life, but is the price worth it?

Leaving

It is that time of year again. Elizabeth leaves to go visit her father this Saturday. Every summer, a part of my heart is ripped out and flies across the country. It never gets easier to give her a hug and a kiss with a false smile planted on my face and to let her get on that plane all by herself. It never gets easier to deal with the every other day phone call that I am allowed (to not make things difficult for her there). It just fucking sucks.

I deal with the fear that something will happen to her down there and I won't be there or that her father won't call me. I somehow, some way, seem to feel that because she is here with me that somehow I am able to shield her from the evil that is so rampant in this world. I am able to keep her blossoming figure from becoming the object of men's lust and that I can protect her from what our society allows men to do with that lust. I am able to protect her from the heartbreak that comes with the struggle of finding out exactly who you are throughout your teen years. I for some reason believe that simply being in my vicinity I can prevent her from ever being hurt.

All of which is hogwash, I know. I can't protect her from any of those things any more with her here than I can with her there. She has to grow up and learn and get hurt and make her own choices. It is a struggle for me to allow this to happen because it goes against every single instinct that I have as a mother. I can no longer pick her up and cuddle her on my lap and kiss the boo-boos away. I can't keep her a baby forever...but how much do I allow her to grow up and how quickly?

I have no choice in letting her go. I had to let her go before I wanted to, before I thought that she was ready to fly by herself. I tried to comfort myself by saying, "She will have experiences there that I can't give her. She deserves to see her father and his family." It does not comfort me. I want my daughter here. I want her to spend the summer with me and her sister and her step-father.

I wish that for about a half and hour I could be a toddler again so I could throw the huge fit that I have brewing inside of me. That I could just kick and scream and cry and carry on and someone would come to comfort me. I suppose I could and blame it on pregnancy hormones...but really, what would that do for me other than temporarily make me feel better? I was trained to think systemically...to change the rules that govern the system, not just treat the symptoms. I have to treat their underlying causes.