People like to say, “I bet your mom is so excited to be a grandmother. What did she do when she found out you were having a baby?”
“Oh. She immediately put her house on the market.”
And they laugh. They laugh and laugh. “That would be so funny,” they chuckle.
I don’t say anything. I don’t have to. You can see it in my face, my tired eyes, my worried hair.
Their laughter fades away. They whisper, “Oh, you weren’t kidding.” Continue reading
“WHERE IS BABY?”
This is the text I get, several times a day now, from all over the country. Sometimes it pops up on a Facebook window. Sometimes it’s just a subject line of an empty email.
“WHERE IS BABY?”
As if I’ve hidden the child somewhere, confused Christmas for Easter and hidden this ripened egg under a rock in a field. Like I’m lying to them all and I’m waiting until Baby’s First Tooth before I spill any details.
My own mother asked today with sadness, “Will you tell me when you’re going to the hospital? … or do I just find out after the baby’s here?”
I know they are all asking out of love and excitement. It just cracks me up that it has been reduced to–
“WHERE IS BABY?”
Baby is still incubating, heavy enough now that my stomach rests on my legs when I’m sitting, making me feel like an exhausted bus driver.
Did you know you can have contractions for days and days and days that mimic labor but don’t turn into labor? Not these cute Braxton-Hicks things you hear about sometime, little “practice contractions” that can pop up at any point during your pregnancy. These are minute-long, full-on cramping, every ten minutes contractions that just stick around for ten or twelve hours until you finally fall asleep? Then they wake you up every few hours when a particularly strong one happens, and then the next day you just have them all day again? All the while your friends are texting–
“WHERE IS BABY?”
And you know exactly where Baby is, because your body has been trying to push the baby out since Thanksgiving.
This is just one of the things on my very long list titled: Things People Don’t Tell You About Being Pregnant Until You’re Pregnant, Which Is Just Way Too Fucking Late, If You Ask Me. Continue reading
How’s everybody enjoying their holiday season? Already had a few teary fights and regrets? Having a lot of life-altering meditations and heart-to-hearts? Thinking about your life and what has happened to it? Determined to be able to see your feet again by this time next year? I hear ya, friend. I lift my non-alcoholic beer to you in solidarity.
I’m entering the final stretch of a very long period of time that has been my Visibly Pregnant season. It is exhausting — not just because of how pregnant I am — but because it has brought out in full force the You Should Be’s. Continue reading
I’m going to tell you about the time a lightbulb almost destroyed my relationship, but I can’t do it without a little backstory.
For better or worse, one thing that Jason and I have in common is that we both really like to be right. We can get kind of jerky about it, which means we’re the kind of people who are prone to issue an apology that sounds like, “I can see why you thought I might have meant that.” We don’t mean to be jerks; we just both grew up having to defend ourselves a lot, and I think it makes both of us headstrong in our opinions. It also makes arguments in this house become events better described as Word Offs. We will just beat each other down with constant discussion. Eventually someone will throw up his or her hands and say, “Fine! Whatever you said! That’s what we’ll go with!”
That is the sound of victory around here. Not someone saying, “I’m wrong. I’m sorry.” But someone saying, “You can take this one. I’m so tired.”
It’s still a win, people. Continue reading
Jason and I have been in talks to start a family for some time now. I say “in talks” because I find it to be along the lines of countries negotiating, as one nation will have to take on a serious — albeit short-term — obligation that could potentially affect that country’s GNP for some time. We went back and forth on when and how, birth vs adoption vs fostering, back to budgeting to financial obligations to legal obligations to when and how we would fit it in with our work schedules and my deep-rooted fear that if I had a child I’d never get hired for anything ever again.
We discussed starting a family at such a conceptual level we were practically wearing elbow patches, continually adjusting our reading glasses in order to make another articulate point about feminism and the human procreational instinct. (TL;DR: We nerded out about it.) Continue reading
I’ve mentioned before how my dreams are annoyingly literal. I rarely have to spend any time pondering, “I wonder what that meant.” Yes, even REMpam is a Wonder Killer.
How literal? Well, to be extremely graphic, I once had a dream in college where a notoriously tough professor was butt-raping me in front of the entire class to prove a point about the importance of authenticity in acting technique.
LITERAL.
IT IS NOT FUN TO BE DREAM ME. Continue reading
Song: “Veronica”
The first time I heard this song, I told myself I’d one day name my daughter Veronica.
There’s a King Cake in the breakroom because one of the pretty girls who works here is from New Orleans. She sent a message warning people about the plastic baby inside the food, and suddenly I remembered the song we used to sing in high school theatre about King Cake: Continue reading
pamie.com is thrilled to be a part of Virtual Book Tour once again. This time it’s Jennifer Traig’s hilarious Devil in the Details : Scenes From an Obsessive Girlhood. She promises me that the copy of the book I received had a binding issue, and wasn’t intentionally off-center by one centimeter. The three borderline obsessive-compulsives who tried to fix the book before a recent Writers Guild screening of Closer do not believe her. In fact, our discussion of how her publishing company was genius to make a book about obsessive-compulsive disorder have a small, irritating, disorderly flaw garnered the attention of more than one audience member sitting near us. In fact-in fact, the book held the attention of more than one Guild member much longer than Julia Roberts could. Apparently writers like things to be orderly, and Jennifer’s book was calling to us, asking to be fixed, begging to be righted, to be held and taken care of. Continue reading
