Liars

Montana Diana told me she knew she was pregnant because she was soooo happy and she also said she never felt more womanly beautiful than those nine months, but she's a Holy Joe so maybe she was religiously obligated to fake liking it. God rewarded her in the form of no weight gain so all that lying was probably worth it.

Idaho Lee said being pregnant is like having mono and a really bad hangover at the same time, which is more accurate. More women should just admit that being pregnant just sucks. Only a crazy person would enjoy barfing every day for nine months straight.

Two weeks old

Introduction to breastfeeding:

Step 1: Baby appears hungry

Step 2: Position the baby in the cross hold, football hold or lay facing the baby

Step 3: The baby opens her mouth in a wide and polite way, the tongue covering the lower gumline. She may look at you in an adoring way with those huge trusting beautiful blue eyes.

Step 4: Pinch the areola and gently guide it into the baby's mouth.

Step 5: The baby sucks. The baby sucks really freaking hard, as hard as one of those hot tub drains that can kill you it sucks so hard.

Step 6: Scream in pain

Step 7: The baby startles, simultaneously biting down and jerking her head back before letting go in order to scream like a caged bobcat and frantically stuff her hands in her mouth because you are such a nipple wuss she is starving to death.

Step 8: Repeat from Step 1.

From the archive: Koi

On the North side of town there's a duck pond for a yard. All kinds of exotic water birds live there that you could wish forever to see in the wild but never would even if you lived in Siberia and were specifically trying.

Jeff and I got in a fight about I don't even remember so I drove him all the way up to the north side to see the duck pond because I wanted to show him something really neat as a way of saying sorry without actually saying it.

When we got there, the harlequin ducks were chasing each other in a waddling funny way and the trumpeter swans came right up to the fence to inspect us. Jeff was smiling and about to forgive me when a fish flipped out of the water and landed on the bank right in front of us, flopping and gasping and all we could do was watch.

Baby math

Baby math I:

1) If each boob weighs at least two pounds and the baby drains them about every two hours, given then she gains 1/2 pound each week, how many pounds of poop do we clean up each month? (Factor in one boob's worth of barfing every four days or so)

2) REM sleep is required to feel rested and it takes about three hours of sleeping to enter deep REM sleep. If the baby wakes me up every two hours for two months straight, how many times will I politely listen to someone say "just sleep when the baby sleeps" before I kick their smug, well-rested ass?

See Baby Math II

One week old

Nothing personal, my little friend, but I can't believe I gave up my life for a little creature that will probably hate me when she's a teenager. When we found out I was pregnant and people gave us all those adorable pink clothes, it seemed so charming. Now the clothes are wadded up in the laundry covered with crap and barf and I lie here with you sleeping on my bizarre flesh-heap belly and I whisper to your sweet warm head: "what the hell were we thinking?"

41 weeks

Nine months pregnant and we're moving to a new city. I'm vacuuming behind the movers as they lug out furniture, vacuuming dust and strings and surprising number of spiders big as August blueberries. The spiders scramble to throw themselves over their silk-fleshy egg sacs before the vacuum hose finds them. This does no good. I can feel their bodies break against the inside of the hose as they pass under my palm. And I wonder two things: what forces could conspire against me which I would be so helpless to defend my own daughter? And why haven't I vacuumed more often?

I-90

Driving alone at winter midnight to Missoula, I stopped at a rest area and had to hover over the cold dirty toilet, hoping my knee didn't give out it was sore from driving so long.

The road conditions report is piped into rest area bathrooms so you can listen while you pee: "wind 30 knows from the east. 32 degrees."

The voice is always tinny and flat, menacing. It repeats in a loop forever: wind 30 knows from the east. 32 degrees. Gusting winds. Ice patches on the roadway. Severe storm advisory."

Cold in the bathroom only halfway to Lisa's house my knee started to shake and give and right exactly then I was overwhelmed by pure, pure happiness.

Cargo

The woman on the whale-watching boat said she worked on the docks. She was telling the family from Australia the best way to ship their furniture overseas is in one of those huge cargo containers.
"Just make sure it's packed real tight," she said. "If there's a storm at sea one big wave can turn the boat every which way. It can go almost on end. Most people don't know that."
"There was a storm last year so bad the captain jettisoned 36 containers of brand new BMWs to lighten the load. They can do that, you know, in a storm. You'll want insurance."

Shallow

Being pregnant on your wedding day sucks because you're pretty much fat and when you get the pictures back only then do you notice fat dimples on your elbows - your elbows, for God's sake. This, of course, is completely shallow, because people have way worse problems that your ridiculous body image issues and you're pregnant so of course you've gained weight, shut up already. And the pictures are gorgeous, brilliantly done; everyone else looks fabulous. Double shut up, then. Still, people will come over and see no wedding photo on your mantle and wonder if you hate your husband when the truth is marrying him was the best decision in your whole life but maybe, just maybe you should have laid off the kobe beef burgers in the first trimester or not chosen that sleeveless wedding gown.

Your butt looks like two squirrels wrestling in a pillowcase

One of the best things about approaching 40 is that I'm no longer under pressure to have a nice ass. As long as I  stay in a reasonable weight range and don't grow those side fat pockets my ranch-raised mom calls "saddlebags," then I can be relatively hot. Relatively. Also as I age I have ever-dwindling opportunities to go streaking, so it matters less if I look good naked.  The point is that I spent most of my twenties and thirties eating raw food and obsessing over triathlons and mountain biking and surfing and thinking always I needed to look better; but now I've had three kids in four years, my stomach looks a little like a ball sack when I bend over, and I worked out Tuesday but haven't had time since, yet I don't worry about my ass at all. It's awesome to be free.

Consequences!! (Pregnancy edition)

If you don't rush to the hospital to induce labor today!! your amniotic fluid will dry up and your Sahara-like womb will kill the baby!

If you don't get a Cesarean RIGHT NOW your baby will die and you'll need a hysterectomy!

If you don't tell you crappy doctor to F(%@*k OFF! you'll get a totally unnecessary Cesarean after two hours of labor!

If you don't start breastfeeding right away and continue until she is two, your baby will be a mentally handicapped, disease-ridden pariah until she dies miserable at an early age.

and so on.

Charity

Someone keeps putting breast cancer awareness magnets on my car, little flat pink ribbons in a tidy row under the back side window. I liked the first one. It looked good. I thought someone must have confused my car for theirs; wouldn't they be surprised! But the second magnet couldn't have also been a mistake. Then the third - kind of weird.

Then this morning there were ripped-up pieces of a huge one slapped on the back, not in line with the others at all, just big and broken and angry-looking. Is this some kind of hint? Was I supposed to donate something?