Fear, Loss, and Resentment

35 weeks, 1 day

So I had a little bit of a breakdown today.  I lifted my shirt in the bathroom mirror today, and almost couldn’t handle it.  My stomach looks like a crime scene.  It’s almost gory, it makes me so sick.

I didn’t have a single stretch mark for the majority of my pregnancy.  It wasn’t until five months came around when the first couple reared their ugly heads.  I didn’t mind so much, because they were small, just three tiny red lines coming out the top of my belly button.  Otherwise, my belly stayed smooth and flawless for a good amount of time.  I developed a few more as time went on, but not enough to really bother me.

And then one day, it seemed my skin couldn’t take the strain anymore, and I woke up the next morning hardly able to recognize the once-smooth surface of my belly.  The marks had exploded across the bottom half of my belly.  I don’t care who you are, stretch marks are ugly because they look painful.  The skin is RIPPED apart.  Since that first initial explosion of stripes, the marks have only gotten worse.

This hurts me worse than anything else I have gone through with this pregnancy.  My VANITY suffers.  I suddenly have this great, glaring physical flaw, and I don’t know how to deal with it.  I am reduced to tears consistently, facing this horrible change.  I know it sounds vain and selfish, and maybe it is, and I DON’T CARE.  It hurts so badly to suddenly have something about myself that I HATE.

What will happen to me when I go back to work?  I will never again be one of the flawless girls, “one of the hot ones.”  I will never again be able to work in a high class club.  Forever, for the rest of my career, I will be one of the mediocre ones, one of the ones that is lucky to make even half of what could be pulled out of a club.  I was only able to enjoy my work for a little over a year before this pregnancy took over me.  Dancing is my PASSION, my LOVE in life, and it has been taken away from me.  Now, instead of a beautiful dancer, I feel like I will be a desperate mom stripper. 

I don’t know how to even articulate the level of hurt that this causes me.  I expected to be able to spend many years as a beautiful dancer, choosing to work in whatever club I liked, making as much money as I chose to ask for.  Now what?  My future is nothing like I wanted it to be.

…

Even writing this is making me cry.

I cannot wait to get back to work.  I want to feel the pain in my muscles again, and I want to feel the power of strength that that grants me.  I want to lose myself into the music, and I want to fly.  But it will NEVER be the same.  It will never be the way it was again.  I feel like somebody let my take one bite of the most delicious cheesecake ever made, and then threw the rest of it down on the ground before me.  I didn’t have enough time to really enjoy and experience this work as I wanted to.

The universe has taken everything from me.  Every material belonging to my name, I have lost.  I have lost the time that I wanted, and I have lost my VANITY.  Everything I ever cared for has been taken from me, and I know it is meant to be replaced by this little boy.  I am afraid I will still be unhappy.

I am afraid of resentment.

34 weeks, 1 day

I feel like I’m in purgatory right now.  I’m far enough along that I’m anxious to see the end, and starting to feel uncomfortable, but not far enough to feel the looming possibility of imminent delivery.  In fact, I am quite confident that this baby is very happy in his little home, and I doubt I will deliver before the final due-date.

…

Being pregnant makes writing frustratingly difficult.  I can make any simple statement, make it true and thoughtful, but I can’t seem to string them together with any sort of linearity.  (Is that even a word?  It ought to be…) my thought processes are jumbled and disconnected, pushing too many things around at once.  Maybe writing these things will help me to organize…

…

I’ve been meaning to write for a long time.  I’ve spent more than three months procrastinating this very moment, and now I find myself just as unprepared as I expected I’d be.  I’ve never been terribly good at keeping record, but at this time I feel as though there is a wall blocking the passage of emotion and thought into my hands.  Maybe I should start by telling a story…

I had a doctor’s appointment today.  It was short, efficient, and boring.  I’m not terribly fond of my obgyn, but because of the late nature of my prenatal care, I didn’t have much choice.  I just needed health care, the face didn’t particularly matter.  My Medicaid didn’t kick in until nearly thirty weeks of gestation, and at that point I was so desperate to see a doctor that I chose the closest available.  Now I’m stuck with it.

It’s not that he’s unfriendly or rude.  I just think he’s sort of… high traffic.  He is one of the few doctors in the city that accepts Medicaid, and so I’m sure his client list is quite extensive.  His mannerisms are very efficient and non-personal.  He divulges little information that isn’t imperative, and our appointments rarely last longer than fifteen minutes.  It seems his ideals have followed the same track of efficiency.  He keeps to the sort of ideas that follow the mainstream, and can get him through the many patients that he sees every day.  For example, when I asked him about the hospital’s policy on allowing me to leave with the placenta, he made a comment about people doing “weird stuff” with it.  For those of you out of the loop, it is quite common for us crunchy, naturalistic mommies to ingest the placenta after birth, either by powdering and encapsulating it, or by preparing it as a meat.  I know that this is what he was referring to, and so I kept my mouth shut about my own decision to ingest the organ.  I don’t think it would have gone over well.

Luckily, he was very supportive of my decision to breastfeed.  (I think that most physicians are, however.)  I have not spoken to him about my decision to go through with a natural unmedicated childbirth; I have no idea how he would react.

Not that it matters anyhow, he won’t be around for the delivery, and neither will any of the other doctors that I will be seeing up until then.  Apparently it is the new fashion for well established doctors to climb Mt. Everest in the summers.  That’s where my doctor will be, anyhow.

I’ve decided I don’t particularly care what doctor I see anymore, since the likelihood of my preferred ob being the one to catch the baby is about as slim as the little stick that told me I was in this mess.

Vincent didn’t want to come to the appointment today, and I can’t say I blame him.  The doctor told me nothing of interest and, as I stated before, the entire appointment didn’t even last as long as it took to make the baby in the first place.  (That’s saying something, if I know anything about our sexual habits at the time of conception… and I do.)

I feel quite a lot of affection for him lately.  He has made a complete turnaround from a couch-hopping bum to a hard working guy.  Currently, he spends twelve hours a day, seven days a week, caring for a quadriplegic friend of ours.  This work is intensive, demanding, and relentless.  Vince must be there EVERY morning to get P out of bed, shower him, change his catheter, dress him, and cook him breakfast.  In addition, every afternoon he has to administer P’s medications, and every night, he has to put him to bed.  The times in between, Vince can’t be far, in case P should need help with anything.  If Vince isn’t there, P gets stuck in bed, which is a terrible situation for him.  Vince doesn’t get weekends, or even reasonable working hours.  He is on call as P’s attendant for every hour that he is awake. 

If he were getting paid, I’m sure it wouldn’t seem so horrible.

You read that right, Vince is not getting paid for these services at this time.  Because of the irresponsibility of P’s former attendant, Vince was asked to fill the role without any notice, and because of the necessity of the situation, he did so.  Unfortunately, he had no way to know that it would take nearly two months for him to get on the payroll and start receiving checks for his work.  In addition, all of the work that he has done every day for the last month and a half was off paper, and so he will not see even a penny of the wages that he was promised for that time.

I know that he is feeling the strain of this.  Luckily, his employment approval should come in within the next day or two, and he will start getting checks then.  I try and make him feel a little better about it, telling him that his time will be returned to him.  He has been completely selfless in helping P go about his daily motions, with no compensation except his stress.  The karma will return to him, it must.  I don’t think it makes him feel any better.

It doesn’t help that we aren’t living together at the moment, and he doesn’t get to see me (and the attached baby) as often as he would like.

I feel so much gratitude for the work that he is doing (as well as a healthy dose of guilt for not being as supportive as I could), and I want to make him feel better.  Finally, I see some hope for our future.  It’s been a long time since I’ve looked around and seen anything but unhappiness coming towards me.

I think I shall write again soon.  Maybe by that time we might have decided on a name….

Haha, yeah right.