Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 14, 1994 TAG: 9404120082
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Beth Macy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
I was appalled by such unnatural desires.
Four months pregnant myself, I relished every fetal movement, every maternal twinge. I obsessed over the nursery details, sponge-painting the ceiling with clouds and getting my astronomy-buff cousin to correctly arrange glow-in-the-dark constellations.
And perhaps most significantly, I could still fit into my jeans.
Five months and 40 pounds later, I looked in the mirror and realized I was a dead ringer for Bill Clinton.
The seams on my faithful black stretch pants left such deep rivets on my thighs that my husband forbade me from wearing them. "I think they're pushing all the blood up to your face and making it swell," he said.
The ultrashort haircut that looked so hip yet refined on the Eddie Bauer catalog model could only be described as looking "middle-aged butch" on me, eliciting such comments from co-workers as "Look! She's already got a Mommy haircut!" and "Grab your cameras, the president just walked into the newsroom!"
By the end of my term, I was advised to lie on my left side - so my blood pressure wouldn't rise any higher - and confined to bed, where I prayed my blood pressure would do just that:
Dear Lord, get this thing outta me.
I remember how tired I got of hearing women say in those nervous waning weeks of pregnancy, "Labor's not so bad - really, you forget the pain."
Which is little consolation to someone about to go through it. I've forgotten a lot of my adolescence, too, but you couldn't pay me to relive it.
And yet they were right. Seven weeks later, those 10 hours of labor are mostly a blur.
I do remember thinking if my husband told me to relax one more time I would take a deep, Zen-like breath and hurl him through the window.
After four months of doctor-ordered sugar deprivation, I remember thinking I would die if I couldn't get a milk-chocolate Dove bar soon.
I remember too well that last 90 minutes of labor, which was so miserable that, in retrospect, it seems like an out-of-body experience - which is surely mother nature's way of tricking women into having subsequent children, a nasty ploy I refuse to fall for any time soon.
And I remember the strangely powerful attachment I formed to my nurse, Mollie - who was the perfect combination of mother, therapist and drill sergeant. I remember feeling guilty when I complied with Mollie's orders to relax but growled at my husband's.
And then my son, Max, was born, and I was so consumed with fawning over how cute he was and kissing his head and figuring out how to feed him that it was a good 45 minutes before I realized: To hell with the ice chips; bring me some chocolate.
It's been seven weeks now, and the elation of childbirth has been replaced by the constant demands of my new and awesome responsibility.
I have become totally versed - and totally immersed - in the field of bodily fluids management. Poop is my life.
I've also noticed the "Congratulations - It's a Boy!" greeting cards have started being replaced by daily hospital and doctor bills, along with unintelligible insurance-company notices, most of which start with: "Your policy does not cover . . . "
I had to laugh a few weeks ago when I heard my husband ask a Blue Cross worker about a notice they sent for a Chesapeake Counseling Center bill in our son's name. Coverage, of course, was flatly denied.
"But we haven't driven our son to Chesapeake for counseling," he explained.
I've come to realize that delivering this child was just a speck in the horizon, compared to life with an infant and the prospect of life with a toddler, a boy, an adolescent (yikes) and so on till I die.
One of my friends says a sex change couldn't change his life as much as having children did. Although I can't fathom a sex change - except inasmuch as it would prevent me from going through childbirth again - I have to agree.
I'm fighting 15 pounds of Dunlap's.
I slept a total of four hours last night.
I've eaten so much chocolate, I'm almost sick of it.
And it's all I can do not to pick up the telephone and call my son's part-time babysitter on this, his first morning away from me, his first morning with a stranger. I miss his gummy smile like crazy (his latest trick), but I feel relieved, too.
The first half-hour was so strangely quiet I couldn't think, couldn't even look at my list of things to do.
I just sat there in his room, looking up at Orion on the ceiling.
Beth Macy, a part-time features writer, was thrilled to learn last week that the new Virginia driver's licenses no longer list weight (so she didn't have to lie). Her column runs every other Thursday.
by CNB