11 Weeks Pregnant
>> Monday, July 27, 2009
I have never been so tired. I am too tired to type, but I'm forcing myself, because I don't want to lose momentum on documenting this experience.
I woke up this morning after 10 hours of sleep and started to get ready to go have lunch with a friend. Twenty minutes later, I was on the couch, struggling to keep my eyes open. I canceled the lunch (the only chance I've had the past two weeks to do anything other than sleep and work and worry) and promptly fell asleep for the next two hours.
I woke up with a pounding headache. And, somehow, I'm even more tired than I was before.
So much for doing something, anything, on my day off. Back to the couch and my blanket and BabyCenter.com and Sex and the City re-runs for me.
I'm aching to see this baby again, for confirmation that all this shittiness and stress is worth it. I have to wait until next Monday for that reassurance, when I go for the nuchal translucency screening (which brings a whole new set of stresses along with it).
Since this post has been nothing but a bunch of whining--I'm not good for much else these past few weeks-- I'll add one more gripe.
I just finished Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace, and it left me with a new confidence that I just might be able to do this whole parenting thing after all. Why? Because Waldman, while a brilliant writer, drove me absolutely crazy in that book.
Not because of her controversial stance on loving her husband more than her kids, which is something I understand completely, but because the woman contradicts herself in nearly everything she says. She failed to transfer her sensual desires from her husband to her children (hence the loving him more thing), and yet she prays her son grows up gay so he will never replace her with another woman? What is that if not placing way too much of your sensual desires and expectations on your children?
About halfway through, I realized the book was driving me insane. But to Waldman's credit I kept reading because her prose is wonderful, and as an aspiring writer, I'll take any chance to read writing like that.
But if I'm a chronic worrier, then Waldman's worrying is borderline-psychotic. If I'm prone to worrying too much about what other people think, then Waldman has dedicated an ENTIRE NOVEL purely to defending her choices, rather than simply exploring them.
The whole experience of reading it just made me want to take a chill pill and stop thinking so much about every minute detail of my life.
So I guess it wasn't a total waste of time.
2 comments:
I haven't read Waldman's book, Sarah, but while not wanting your son to replace you with another woman is certainly sexual (what in life isn't?), it's also self-centered. It takes a desire to possess--which should remain w/in the erotic--to a whole, newly unattractive, level. I suspect that Waldman would (or will) be jealous of her gay son's male lovers, too.
If the prose is as wonderful as you say, then I must read it. Good writing justifies itself, though I do wonder how writing can be good while the thinking is weak. Oh, well, I'll open the book & see. It's not really a novel, though, is it? I thought that it was a memoir--the genre of our time.
Good luck with the nuchal translucency (whatever the hell that it--it upset my spellcheck, let me tell ya).
Matthew-- I wouldn't call the thinking "weak," really it's a product of Waldman's bipolar mood, which she spends a chapter detailing. It's just a little inconsistent at times, and she takes the whole worrying about your kids thing to the extreme.
But, yes, she is a wonderful writer. And it does make a lot of interesting points about marriage and family and motherhood.
Bounty-- I've been trying to take vitamins... I take so many I think my stomach is now suffering! And as far as a name, I haven't come up with anything yet. I doubt I will until I'm staring the kid in the face. I'm that indecisive.
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