InnerTeub

For reasons I’m sure I’ll discover in therapy someday should I ever remember to schedule an appointment, I was a huge asshole about having a baby shower. 

Lots of things were tied up in this general anti baby shower sentiment. The guest list forced me to confront for real the fact that I had willingly chosen to move very far away from my stable network of very very good friends, the kind of friends who you don’t have to apologize for inviting to a baby shower, because you know they love you and that they want to actually no-shit celebrate with you. Then there was the fact that I felt like I had to apologize for inviting people to a baby shower at all (like, I literally did say “So I invited you to my baby shower but I’m really sorry”) which I think is tied up in the idea that at this point in the game, I kind of missed the boat. We, as a circle of peers, have done the baby shower thing, that was very fun like five years ago, but I’m late here, and it’s not really that big a deal anymore, etc etc. Also with the fact that I’m inheriting a good deal of gear from my brother and sister in law who thoughtfully had a child a whole year ago that has now outgrown most of the infant-containment items, and that there is a Carter’s outlet down the street, so like, what do I need, really?

Pause for a side note: I came home from that Carter’s with a handful of newborn clothes, including a five pack of onesies. Mike looked at the five-pack and goes “Oh, good, we’re set for onesies” Heeeeeeeeeee. That’s my favorite moment of this pregnancy, so far, I think. Heee. 

ANYWAY. My point is, I was very uncomfortable with a baby shower being hosted for me. For reasons. Not good reasons, but reasons. 

This is why we all need a friend like Jess. In addition to being an intelligent and delightful person, she has a very low threshold for my brand of bullshit.  “Oh, that’s interesting that you have issues with a party being thrown in your honor. Anyway, what date would work best for you?”

And that’s how my good friend, along with my sister in law, threw me the cutest damn baby shower. I could not have conceived how cute something like that could, because I am not good at this kind of thing, but also because… well. I don’t know. It’s been two weeks and I’m still rather speechless about the whole thing.

(those Moose sugar cookies? She made those. From scratch. Did I mention this all went down two weeks before her due date? I mean.)

(It’s a good friend who really gets the place your dog has in your heart. Ha. She also made sure to include a gift for Moose “from the new baby” which still tickles me.) (it was a big hit: 

(Also: I cannot believe I do not have a single picture of the two of us from that party. Eh?)

In addition to the Moose-themed awesomeness, it was just so lovely to spend a morning with friends and family, laughing and talking about what’s to come, to hear from friends from afar and learn how much they had been working behind the scenes to make their love felt and known regardless of their geographic proximity. The idea of the baby shower had gotten stuck in my head as a glaring reminder of all I had left behind, so you can imagine how touching it was for me to realize that in fact, it was actually demonstrative of all that I have gained.  I could not feel more lucky, or more loved, than I do at this point in my life. 

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(I’ve now had that damn Foo Fighters song stuck in my head all morning)

This morning, as I was getting ready for work at the far far far too early time of 5:45am, I heard my dog in the bedroom start to throw up.

I walked from bathroom to bedroom, where I looked at my husband, who was sitting up in bed, looking at the dog. The three of us looked at each other in silence, kind of… waiting for the adult to show up and deal with the dog-throw up situation.

The adult never showed up, and Mike and I agreed: there was a strong possibility that if we did absolutely nothing, the dog would probably eat his own throw up, lessening the clean up considerably.

Last night was a tough one for me. Not for any particular reason, just, you know… late pregnancy. I’m tired and by the end of the day it hurts my ribs to sit for long periods of time, it’s hard to eat food even though I need it, it’s hard to do anything, really, and there’s so much that needs to get done. We had errands to run related to the construction project and while I had fun picking out this and that at Lowes with Mike, we stopped to get dinner before and see above re sitting and eating and ugh, all I wanted was to be asleep.

I had a little pity party for myself in the shower today. It was early – I needed to be in the office by 6:30am for reasons that are too stupid to go into – and I was thinking: “This is hard. Keeping it together at work is hard right now. And I have no energy to contribute at the end of the day at home, I’m using all my reserves to make sure work is not falling apart. And then the baby will come, and that will be hard, too, and then just 6 weeks later I’ll go back to work and that will be hard in the same way it’s hard now, but also even harder at home. I don’t see this getting any easier. This is just hard. Maybe this is too hard.”

(I get a little melodramatic when left to my own internal thoughts.)

The meeting I had this morning – the reason I had to be in so early – went well. Awesome, even. I feel great. I am good at this. Things don’t seem too hard, right now. I’m actually, even, having fun. But here’s the thing: I’m not sure this is what I’m supposed to be good at. Work is getting all my energy and I get home and I feel like I have nothing left. Some of this is, of course, late stage pregnancy conditional, I know that, I do know that. But I miss that other side of my life, and feeling good there, too. I don’t want the best parts of me to only be available during work hours.

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Snerk, a photo by LizScott on Flickr.

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The wheels have come off the pregnancy wagon, y’all. Things were going SO GREAT and then I started four weeks of work travel right at the beginning of the third trimester, and lo, it was stupid. I find work travel to be exhausting generally, but we’re now in a whole new stage of “Ok, but for real, this is really hard.” I’ve nursed a secret smug theory that a lot pregnancy aches and pains can be attributed to a lack of general activity – I mean, when not pregnant and I go from active to not active, I get back pain and hip and whatnot, so it made sense to me that if my activity level decreased because of pregnancy than I would have the same experience, therefore if I could stay active, then I would escape all the general complaints.

And you know, while I concede this is kind of smug first time pregnancy “Oh Just You Wait” theory, I’m still not convinced I’m wrong. I felt great up until a few weeks ago. In fact, if I found myself with a sore back or hips or whatever, I learned that a good swim workout would actually correct all those problems. It was all working out.

And then. THEN. Sigh. Then I just ran out of time to exercise, and found myself sitting on a lot of planes. (22 individual plane rides in four weeks, to be annoyingly precise.) And while I did what I could to hit the hotel treadmill or the pool when I was home, it just … starting…falling apart. I have knots in both shoulders that have pinched nerves and the act of sitting – be in a plane, a car or an office chair – aggravates them. I was apparently shifting and twitching so much on one plane ride that a flight attendant came up to me midflight and literally said “Can I do…anything? At all?” and I was all “What ever do you mean?” and then realized I was shifted almost horizontally in my seat with one armed raised over my head to try to reshift the knot in that one shoulder so it would Stop Fucking With Me Goddammit. At one point last night I looked at Mike with tears in my eyes because I could not comfortably position myself on the couch and therefore didn’t even WANT to watch TV and what kind of WORLD is this when I can’t even RELAX ON THE COUCH as God INTENDED for the LOVE.

I don’t have a point to this except to kind of generically complain. I am happily done with work travel – actually, all travel – and am trying to literally right myself as I get back into the swing of being home. I’m ready to nest and cook and snuggle into fall weather, and, as long as we’re complaining, I am taking it HIGHLY PERSONALLY that we’re not deep into fall weather consistently yet. It’s October, universe. I should be full time in scarves and boots, let’s get ON this, already.

And with that, I leave you with the opening paragraph of that age old classic from McSweeney’s, “It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers”:

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is — fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

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