I don’t give in to the beer, but each time I walk by the Drawing Room, a dive bar down the block from my house, I pause and wonder why I didn’t take full advantage of drinking when I could, why I didn’t while away afternoons in that cool dark guzzling stout on a bar stool patched with duct tape. Anyway, who cares what the hell food and drink I want to ingest while pregnant? Just know I want a lot of it.
I’m going to complain a bit more for a second, before I apologize for complaining, so please humor me.
There is also a burning sensation in my heart, and I can’t figure out what it is, before I put together that a burning in my heart area could be a thing I’ve heard about called “heartburn.”
There is my first hemorrhoid, concurrent with and certainly related to niggling bouts of constipation. There are leg cramps, concurrent with and certainly related to nightly insomnia, both of which I treat by spending hours in the middle of the night sitting in the bathtub listening to podcasts of
This American Life
and staring at my belly poking up above the water. There is something my dermatologist calls “an estrogen surge,” which results in cystic acne on my chin and jaw-line and most frustratingly across my chest, because what good is having cleavage for the first time when you can’t showcase it because even when covered by concealer, it is lumpy and odd-looking?
“Overactive sebaceous glands on your neck,” whispers my hairdresser, as he shampoos my hair, and the accidental shaming takes me back to my teen years, during which I had terrible skin and sometimes took a “me” day off from school if there was an especially bad breakout I couldn’t hide.
While I wasn’t pregnant during those years, I certainly looked like it thanks to the chub I acquired when I quit ballet and started soft serve. In fact, the headmaster of my high school called me into his office my sophomore year to let me know he had heard I was pregnant, and to tell me with studied, “I’m-an-educator” compassion that he “was there for me” if I needed help. I assured him I was not pregnant, could not be, as I was a virgin, to which he replied with obvious disbelief, “Okay, but if you need to talk, I’m here.” I stared at his gray crew cut and squinted my eyes before repeating that I was not, in fact, with child. “Right, but if you need to talk, it would be totally between us.” At a highfalutin prep school, I guess a puffy, carb-eating Jew on scholarship was basically Claireece Precious Goddamn Jones. No baby would be born to me that year, but an eating disorder was already crawling by then. Thanks, Mr. Butler. Maybe you meant well, or maybe you were just a do-gooding jerk who couldn’t tell the difference between fat and pregnant.
So, anyway, it doesn’t feel good to have pimples on my neck so glaring as to trigger Butler flashbacks, but at least it gives me an excuse to say, “Oh, yeah. It’s an estrogen surge. I’m not supposed to say anything yet, but
I’m pregnant
,” using a stage whisper and kind of hoping the whole salon overhears so they can make a fuss over me.
There are Sea-Bands on my wrists, stupid acupressure things you buy at the drugstore for motion sickness, and I’m always chewing on ginger candies from the health food store to tamp down the nausea. Though neither works at all, they make me feel closer to the pregnant side of limbo. After all, each day, each hour, I wonder if I’m still pregnant and I have only my burgeoning acne and gripping vertigo to tell me, yes, I am.
At Oscar time, I am hired to make jokes on the red carpet with my cohost on the deep cable talk show I’ve been doing for a couple years. The makeup artists have to shade my face, even my nose, which is widening. Although the wardrobe lady begs me to get at least two Mystic Tans before the event, I can’t, because they might be toxic, so I show up so pale Nicole Kidman and Amy Adams make Casper jokes to my face (I didn’t actually interview either of them, but you get the idea—I was white). My feet get swollen and blistered on the red carpet, my skin is a mess with no faux tan to cover it, I’m sure everyone has noticed my puffy belly and beefy upper arms, and the mental energy I should be using to plan my “off the cuff” remarks I mostly spend finding ways to get back to the craft services table so I can pick the fried noodles off a giant pan of Chinese chicken salad.
Here’s the thing about pregnancy complaining: I feel terrible about it. It makes me uncomfortable to bitch about such high-quality, first-world problems, especially when conceiving at all is such a blessing.
Later, when I end up talking about the pregnancy publicly, and all the symptoms that go along with it, I get an angry e-mail: “I used to be a fan of yours, but my husband and I can’t conceive and I am sick of hearing you complain about being pregnant.”
She has a point and now my worst fears about how I’m coming across are confirmed. That’s when I ask myself, who
can
complain? My girlfriend who is desperate to get married and pushing forty-five up a hill would probably be pissed off at this bitch for bemoaning the fact that she can’t conceive when at least she is lucky enough to have found a mate. Someone else would hate the forty-five-year-old for griping because at least she has a job, even if she hasn’t found a man. Take this thesis to its natural end and there is one guy living under a bridge with no arms, no job, no parents and maybe one kidney who has the right to complain. And only that guy. So the argument is spurious and I’ll continue to lament all I goddamn want.
Back to complaining, although I promise to try and keep it in perspective and tritely struggle to find the bright side, because that makes me feel better about complaining the way knocking wood makes me feel better about having hope.
My biggest complaint in these early days, and it’s one that will grow and fester, is anxiety, which is alleviated only by my doctor visits every couple of weeks. My doctor is one of these guys who gives you an ultrasound every time you go to the office, probably because he bought the expensive imaging machine and insurance covers the test so patients don’t sweat it and it doesn’t hurt and everyone loves to see their fetus on-screen and ascribe all kinds of bullshit characteristics to it, so why not blast sound waves at your fetus unnecessarily? Anyway, at my eight-week checkup, I sit on the butcher paper during my exam as he probes me with the transducer, my denim skirt in a pile with my panties in the corner, my husband in the other corner, and there it is: the heartbeat. He turns up the volume and we can hear it, fast and loud, calling us to the other side.
Now I think I can talk about the baby, but I’m not sure.
I take the small black-and-white photo from the ultrasound like I’m going to be all scrapbookish, but it ends up stuffed in my glove compartment.
In a way, this is sad. In another way, it’s reassuring. My therapist was right—maybe I’ll still just be me, but with a kid. I will not suddenly turn into, say, this woman whose pregnancy blog I found online complete with a photo of herself in jeans and an unbuttoned white shirt. In the picture, her husband stands behind her, also in jeans and a white shirt, and both of them make heart shapes with their hands surrounding her belly button. Even if you don’t have morning sickness, this will probably make you throw up in your mouth. At least I know I can find less syrupy ways of disgusting people with my solipsism. Or at least I fundamentally understand that despite the thrill of being “a little bit pregnant,” a sonogram image of my fetus at eight weeks is not compelling to anyone else. Like the dried-out ballpoint pen, melted ChapStick and expired insurance cards also rattling around in my glove box, its usefulness has passed.
The likelihood of miscarrying seems smaller now that I’ve seen the fetus, and I’m increasingly anxious to tell. Mostly, I want to tell the listeners of the radio show, who have been with me through Billy, the guy who met the love of his life when I declared us “on a three-month break”; Anton, the guy I met on MySpace and almost married in Vegas on our first date before I sobered up; and countless other dating misadventures, not to mention the blaring sound of a clock ticking that our sound effects guy, Bald Bryan, had been playing for years whenever I discussed my personal life. The morning show is going off the air, because the station is flipping from talk to Top 40. After almost three years, I just want this one moment with the anonymous masses who have traveled with me. I want it though it isn’t prudent; I want to tell though I know there is no way to un-tell a couple of million people, what with the show going off the air and all. I would wait the entire twelve weeks, but I can’t because the end is nigh and 97.1 FM will not be a place for anecdotes, but instead for a steady dose of Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.
Our last day is a Friday, a month before I’m officially out of pregatory. I still have no idea whether I’m going to say anything on the air. As always, Adam Carolla throws it to me to do the news. I hear my news music through my headphones (or “cans,” as I like to say to act like I know what I’m doing) and I have no idea what I’m going to do. There is a pause while I grip a stack of the day’s news in my sweaty hands.
“The lead story today ... I’m pregnant.”
Adam is so touched, he has his assistant Jay run into the studio and hug me.
I get my dramatic moment, lots of callers congratulating me, and coworkers running in to squeeze me and mistake my estrogen surge for a “glow.”
Though I’ve now spilled the beans to a couple million listeners, I don’t call my mom. I sometimes think she will call me, when she hears it through the grapevine or reads it online, but I know that comes from the fantasy place of the little girl who thinks her mom will do lots of things she won’t—pick her up from school when it’s raining, smile at her when she enters a room, tape her lousy drawings to the refrigerator, be able to name her elementary school teacher.
Now, if my uterus plays its cards right, I’m going to be someone’s mom, and the only good thing about this rising level of concern for my baby is that it proves I’m already attached. My constant worry is like a friend whispering in my ear, or perhaps posting a note on my esophagus written in stomach acid and bile, saying, “You will not be your mother.” You will fuck it up in your own way, but not in hers.
five
I’ll Miss You, Toxins
E
ven someone like me who isn’t particularly good with babies, who looks at them and says things like, “Hey, buddy. Look at your little face,” before resorting to a flaccid round of peek-a-boo and then running out of material, even I endeavor to err on the side of caution when it comes to chemicals. After years of wondering if I’m cut out to be a mother, I’m relieved to find that the instinct to protect this fetus is so strong, or at least the image of me smoking a Camel while balancing a tumbler of Jameson on my bulging stomach is so distasteful, that I figure all of my favorite chemicals can wait.
And I really love chemicals.
Being pregnant makes me feel toward booze and Xanax and Retin-A the way Emily from
Our Town
felt about food, hot baths and milk delivered to your door. She didn’t appreciate the simple things in life until she returned as a ghost to Grover’s Corners, relived one day as her twelve-year-old self, and asked the question all preteen girls agonize over while performing Emily’s big monologue at theater camp: “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it?”
What I mean is, I never appreciated guilt-free drug use until it was gone. Did I just compare not using Klonopin to dying? Is that overblown? Someone get me to Samuel French because I’m feeling dramatic.
I had no idea how much I took the privilege of occasionally poisoning myself for granted until now. I’ve always been moderate about my use of prescription drugs and alcohol, yet my pregnant longing for a lightly altered state makes me feel (and come across) like a flat-out junkie. No matter. The fact is this: I’m pregnant, which means I’ve got way more worries than ever before, and way fewer chemicals to make them go away.
Chemicals, I can’t wait to return to you. Until then, here is a list of the substances I miss the most.
VICODIN
—Narcotics are bad. Except for the fact they produce a little something called euphoria. Listen, this drug is a highly addictive opioid that should be used only to manage moderate to severe pain. However, my definition of “pain” is a loose one. Is it painful to sit around pondering labor, the mysterious process of somehow squeezing a human head out of your va-jay-jay? Does it smart to look down the pike at childbirth, something most of us have only seen in movies (during which the woman sweats profusely, swears, wails, curses her husband and, let’s face it, dies half the time)? Speaking of death, does it hurt emotionally to ponder the absolute
end
of one’s identity? Is it a bit of an
ouchy
to imagine never going to the gym, the nail salon, or the therapist, without first scheduling a sitter? Does it ache to even hear yourself say the word “sitter”? If a future of pureeing yams to make your own baby food causes a throbbing in your very terrified soul, well, you are in moderate to severe pain. When pain-killers are prescribed “as needed,” I always feel “as needed” is a very fluid concept. Medicines are categorized in various ways as it pertains to their use during pregnancy. The FDA says Vicodin is a category C drug, meaning it is unknown whether it would be harmful to an unborn baby. Since there haven’t been adequate or well-controlled studies, since vitamin V is habit-forming and may depress the baby’s breathing if taken late in the third trimester, most doctors won’t sign off on this and neither will your conscience.
Incidentally, any drug worth your time will probably be a category C, which should stand for “Could be fine but you’ll feel like a selfish baby maimer if it’s not.” Category B drugs are considered “probably safe,” and include such party favorites as Tylenol and Pepcid. We’ve all heard about those underground Pep/Ty raves. All the kids are rolling on P and T, saying
Screw E, we’re up in here with mild relief of muscle aches and almost no heartburn. Join us in this unfettered pleasure-fest. It’s a pharmaceutical bacchanal.
Even though Vicodin means I’m twenty minutes from the sense that all is right with the world, I’m off the junk.