InnerTeub

When I first became a stepmother, my mom told me: “The two things a child needs is to feel safe, and to feel loved, in that order. Everything else is just bonus.” It was great advice, and in the time period before I really knew my stepdaughter (meaning – before I knew what the hell I was doing), it was a great default: make sure she knows shes safe, make sure she knows she’s loved. And, sure enough, as our relationship formed and got stronger, everything else – the bonus- came with it, but having those two cues to start with were enormously helpful to me.

Anyway, I was thinking about this on Saturday, when I heard a THUD behind me and looked over to see my five day old daughter lying face down on the ground between the ottoman in the chair, a position she apparently hurled herself to in a fit Wanting Food And Not Getting It Quick Enough.

Back to the basics, it appears. Sorry, little girl. We’ll try to keep ya safer than that.

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Here’s what’s crazy: I look back on pictures from her birthday (6 days ago), or even just yesterday, and I recognize her immediately. When she first landed on my chest, she felt like a stranger to me, but now I feel like I’ve known her forever.

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Reagan Mary Teubner, born December 3rd — her great-grandmother’s birthday. We’re so happy, you guys. Sleep deprived, a little shell shocked, but so happy.

I was reading some pregnancy book and found the following statistic:

“You are almost 100% likely to have your baby by the time you are 42 weeks pregnant”

Ok. You guys. Just. I mean. We live in a SOCIETY, right? With LOGIC and REASON, yes?

No doctor in North America is likely to let you go past 42 weeks pregnant. You will almost CERTAINLY be induced by 41w5d if you are receiving standard pre-natal care in North America. That is just is how THEY DO.

So NO KIDDING you’re 100% likely to have your baby by 42 weeks. THEY WON’T LET YOU NOT. This is not proper application of statistics, in fact, this is why people HATE statistics, because when you abuse LOGIC AND REASON like this, you end up with MEANINGLESS CONCLUSIONS. You can’t just mess with numbers like that and SAY stuff. God. Telling someone they will have their baby by 42 weeks is a completely and utterly meaningless data point, and does nothing to help someone understand, in an informed fashion, when her baby will actually arrive. So, in conclusion, shut up.

This post has been brought to you by week 38.

Mike and I were talking about back when we first met, and how that was kind of the beginning of our mutual triathlon careers (he’d been in it for awhile, but was training for his first Ironman when we started dating; I had heart surgery around the same time and picked up swimming and cycling as recovery stuff and well, if you run, swim, and bike, and date a triathlete, well…)

Anyway, in the middle of this reminiscing  (“God, we were in great shape back in the day”) (“Also, 7 years younger”), I commented (whined) something related to the concept of being pregnant forever, and how I know that’s not technically possible, but it just feels like every day now- literally, every single DAY – is harder than the last, and things are deteriorating quicker than they have been. I have been completely spared most pregnancy indignities, but within the last week they’re all rushing at me – swollen feet, hands. Inability to sleep. I’m in full on waddle mode, and while I’d been doing extremely well dressing professionally at work, I’m now in the “look, at least I’m wearing clothes, OK?” zone. (Come at me bro. Seriously.)

Mike mentioned it must feel like mile 22 of an Ironman race – you are really, really so close to done, except that last four miles seems almost insurmountable. And: YES. I’m so close to done, you guys. So close. But I cannot imagine actually making it one more day, let alone like TEN more days.

Pregnancy as an Ironman is actually a metaphor that works quite well:

The Swim Start: Right before the swim start is amazing. You’re there on the beach, with 2500 other fools, jittery with excitement, with all the possibilities of a good day in front of you. You can’t do too much to control how the day goes down, but you’ve done the prep, and you’re about to get your chance to try.  Getting to the swim start may have felt like it took forever, but you’re there now, and it’s your turn, and you can’t wait.

The Swim (2.4 miles/ 12 weeks):  The start is rough. The 2500 people who were your closest friends 30 seconds before the start are now your mortal enemies as you all jockey for position in the water. You hope you don’t take an elbow or a foot to the nose or head, you hope you aren’t one of those people that randomly comes down with water induced vertigo, effectively ending your race before it even starts. You have moments – many of them, probably – where you’re swimming along and everything feels awesome because swimming is awesome, and you start thinking “hell yeah, this is happening. I am doing a fucking Ironman, y’all”. And then you get to a turnaround and you crash into 2500 other people and the water swirls and things feel out of control and you feel terrible and you hate everything, but no worries: eventually you find clear water and starts to feel manageable again.

T1/ Bike Out (5minutes-ISH / 13 week ultrasound): You made it through the swim. Maybe it was awesome, maybe it was terrible, depends on who you are and a lot of things you can’t control, but either way you’re 1/3 done and it feels good. Sure, there were probably moments where the whole thing seemed like a terrible idea but they were next to moments when the whole thing seemed like an awesome idea, and either way it doesn’t matter, because you did it, and it’s time to hit the hills.

The Bike (112 miles/ 2nd trimester): Oh, things are great. Really totally awesome. You love your bike. You love riding on pretty roads. You get into a groove and it’s like “Oh yeah, I know how to do this, let’s ride”. There are moments of discomfort, but that’s how it goes with cycling and you hopefully have decent enough gear to mitigate it. Modesty starts to go out the window but you’re still pretty sure you can make it through without publicly peeing yourself. Nutrition can make or break how you feel, but again, hopefully you’re doing it right. Things can still go wrong here to derail your day – you can blow a tire, a spoke, crash – some things will just set you back and make it harder day, some things will end the day altogether – but you can’t do too much about it, so you just keep cruising, hoping that your training and planning will you get you through. Near the end, you’re feeling it – 90 miles is a long way to ride and at that point you still have over an hour of cycling left – but you’re ok. You’re doing this.

T2/Run Out (5 minutes-ISH/ Start of the third tri): You made it. You’re off your bike, you’re throwing your running shoes on. At this point, there is very little that will stop you from finishing this race. So many things outside your control on the swim and the bike, but when it’s just you and your feet, there’s not a ton that can stop you. Sure, it can be hard – you could get cramps or blisters or whatever and have to walk the whole thing – but even if it’s not ideal, the odds of you finishing the day as an Ironman are higher than they’ve been at any other point. You can think to yourself “Oh, thank God, all I have to do is run a marathon”, which under normal circumstances is a complete preposterous thought, but after the morning you’ve just had, it makes total sense. All you have to do is keep moving, and the odds of success are really high.

The Run (26.2 miles/ third trimester): This is not the most comfortable you’ve ever been in your life. If this were a training run, you’d bail and go grab a sandwich, but as it is, at this stage, the only way out is through, so you keep moving forward. Food is kind of a crapshoot at this point, so you just eat whatever you think will make you feel the least bad. You might get into a zone, but your body feels heavy and while this type of movement isn’t new to you, you find yourself having to adapt your gait and your attitude to account for the new aches and pains you’re carrying. Parts of this run will feel great, parts will be all about “ok, just get to that next tree (tonight’s Unisom), and then reassess.  Your race could still end at this point, but it’s highly unlikely, would be quite tragic, and you know if you just keep your wits about your, you’re almost done.

Mile 23 – 26.2 (Full term, still pregnant): You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me with this. You’ve come this far and you’re still not done. Everything is terrible. Your feet hurt your hips hurt you’ve never felt less like yourself and you have no idea why or how you’re going to find the motivation to keep moving, except for the knowledge that even if you quit the race you still need to somehow make your way back to the finish line, so you might as well run there. It’s only 3ish miles, 30 minutes, maybe less, out of an amazingly long day, but those three miles may actually be too much. You’re getting stupider and the littlest aches and pains that you never would have noticed before are now the only thing you can think about. Everyone is telling you that you look great and while you know they’re lying, you’ll take it anyway.

The finish line (Labor and Delivery): It’s there. You just have to keep moving. The final sprint hurts like hell but you’re excited and in the moment you can almost confuse pain with euphoria. And then you’re done. All that work, all that uncertainty, and you fucking did it. You’re an Ironman.  You look like hell, your body is destroyed in ways you’re a little frightened to think too closely about, but it doesn’t really seem to matter, does it?

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. 

(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.

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.

The Friday before last year’s Labor Day weekend, I had an ultrasound to check on the heartbeat of my slightly lagging behind baby. The heartbeat was still slow. I was told to come back on Tuesday, after the holiday.

Tuesday came and told me what I already knew, that the baby wasn’t going to make it, and we scheduled an in-office d&c for the next day, Wednesday. And Friday morning I got up and hopped in a van with 5 other friends and ran the Colorado RAGNAR relay, a 200 mile relay race from Breckenridge to Aspen.

At the time, I remember thinking “When I look back on the decision with the benefit of perspective, I’m going to realize it was really dumb.” But now, a year later I sit here, 28 weeks pregnant, dropping my husband off at the same van to run the same race, this time without me, I have zero regrets about how the week after Labor Day went down last year. My options, as I saw them, were to sit at home and drink my weight in red wine while listening to Counting Crows, or to go running through the mountains with friends on a fall weekend. And, you know, there is always time to drink red wine and listen to Counting Crows and feel sorry for oneself – in fact, in case you were worried, I managed to do that anyway, a few weekends later – but even with the slow running pace and the discomfort of running so soon after delicate lady surgery, I’d still do it again.

This is, I think, a runner thing, but also, a time in life thing; for runners, running is what makes things better. If we can run, we’re still ok. And at that time in life – the “trying and failing to start a family” time in life, which I do understand is a Very Specific Interval, one that feels like, if you’ll pardon the phrase, a pregnant pause; a waiting and hesitating and putting things on hold-ing – the idea of giving up one more thing that I wanted to do in the name of something I couldn’t have, well. No.

I thought about running the relay again this year, even though I’d be all pregnant and slow. What a great bookend to the story, right? But Mike rightfully pointing out some flaws with that plan, and I dropped him off this morning with zero regrets, except perhaps annoyance that my friends are in the mountains while I’m at work. After drop-off I ran through the neighborhood trails before work, a slow slog, a lumber, really, feeling all 15 of the extra pounds I’ve got, and thinking “This is exactly where I’m supposed to be.” I walked the uphills. I talked to my dog, I talked to my baby, we enjoyed the morning.

Last year at this time, I wanted to be running hard; I carried my sadness (and my percoset) over the mountains and I wanted it to hurt, to feel taxing. I was hurting, I was taxed. But today, I feel content. The gift of being ok not running, well. That’s a nice thing to have.

Couple of quick updates, all food related:

1. I bought Gwyneth Paltrow’s book “It’s All Good” Look, Ok, I KNOW. I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW. But it’s GOOD. Um, All Good, if you will. (I hate myself.) If you find yourself at a bookstore, it’s worth flipping through and reading a few of the recipes to see if they work for you. I was sold pretty quickly – the soups, the salad dressings, the veggies – there’s some really great healthy stuff in there that falls in line with how I like to cook ANYWAY, and the kids section is actually kind of awesome. And because this baby has made me a borderline vegetarian (Mary Mooooooon) (sorry) (have we talked about this? What’s a paleo girl to do when her our baby turns it’s almost formed nose at red meat? Well, eat a lot of other stuff. Basically, if I could eat roasted veggies for every meal, I would  – and, uh, occasionally, do – and this cookbook has some really great non-meat dependent meals that are also not grain dependent, so, you know…wooo.)

Anyhoo, it’s one of those cookbooks that makes me want cook all the time, and, while YES, Goop can be a bit…much, luckily I’ve been conditioned on years of Barefoot Contessa and her “2 tablespoons really GOOD olive oil” and like, look, Ina, I’m doing the best I can, right? So yeah, I can roll with the “just hop out to your garden and grab some fresh herbs that were grown with love and unicorns!” and reach instead for my dried herbs and spices and the food turns out juuuuust fine.

Anyway. I hear your objections and I say to you: check it out anyway. Especially with fall coming and the need to get all nesty with good soups and yummy stuff in the kitchen.

2. Not from the cookbook, but I we made this grilled eggplant last night and it was fantastic and super easy and you should make it too, if grilling and eggplant are your things. I used my big jar of refrigerated minced garlic, dried herbs, threw everything in a shallow bowl, dipped the eggplant slices in it, threw it on a grill. No marinating for days, no chopping stuff – super, super easy, really really good. I want it again, right now, in fact. Nom.

Ingredients:

• 1 large eggplant
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
• 2 cloves garlic, very finely minced
• 1 pinch each thyme, basil, dill, and oregano
• salt and freshly grated black pepper

Preparation:

1. I am feeling more energetic. Apparently, as Susie mentioned in the comments, recovery time is now a Thing I need to pay attention to. And while climbing the Incline was fun and rewarding it also knocked me out for about a week. Ok! Noted! 

2. Erin commented on the last post that she is – from the vantage point of the first trimester – amazed at my activity level. HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA ERIN, you’re great, but no. The first trimester is a time for sleeping and feeling terrible and letting days and weeks go by with no activity if you need to. Second trimester is where it is AT for pregnant working out. I do remember working out in the first tri but it was always unscheduled, at the whim of how I was feeling (early AM workouts were seemed non existent for a few weeks because of the unisom), and just… I just did what I could, when I could. It was far from impressive, but I felt so terrible I don’t remember caring much. (“Much” is a really key phrase, there.) Somewhere around week 12 or 13 I started to really feel more like myself and get back into it, which was a much needed boost to my mood and took me from “How on earth do people stay pregnant for almost an entire YEAR feeling like this and OMG this will be an only child, FOR REAL” to “Oh! This isn’t that bad! Actually it’s kind of even ok! Neat! Babies for everyone!”

You’ll be fine, is what I’m saying. Go take a nap and wake up when you’ve hit your second trimester. It will be better. And, for what it’s worth, I had been worried that my relative inactivity in the first trimester would mean it would be harder to get back into in the second trimester; I didn’t notice this to be the case, happily. You’ll be ok. Sleep. It’s fine. This feeling is temporary.