J. Crier

The first time I was pregnant, I was tired all the time. It got better after the first trimester was over, and got worse again as the due date got nearer. This time around, I didn't have that first trimester wipe-out, and have been feeling fairly normal even up to now (week 20!). But there are other things about this pregnancy that are different too, and one of the most notable is the fact that I cry at the slightest provocation. I have always been an easy crier, but since this fetus came along, it has become an absolute pathology. So if the first time around was the sleepy pregnancy, this one, it seems, is the weepy pregnancy.

What makes me cry, you ask? First, just about any item on the news. Soldiers who thought they were coming home this month are redeployed until July. Wah! And again, any time they give the slightest personal detail about a soldier killed in Iraq. Wah! He had a mother and two sisters! He had a ten year old son! But of course it is not just bad news. When the two guys in New Jersey or whatever caught the toddler that fell out of of his fourth story window? Wah! Last week DURING THE TRAFFIC REPORT, they guy explained that the slow-down on I-5 was because someone had to pull over and give birth to a baby. Nice! I cried the rest of the way to work. Just now I was watching some of the video contest entries on the intranet here at work (don't ask), and one of the videos from some guy in India showed a young techie go-getter mountain biking through a rural village, where a mother was holding a very sick child. WAH! Of course the techie uses his technology to get help, and at the end of the video, the kid is frolicking. More tears from me!

There is a song on the mix CD I got from a way-too-nice classmate once (she gave one to everyone in the seminar!) called "Last Fare of the Day," and I can't remember the name of the artist, though if you're reading this, CW, feel free to remind me with a comment. The song is about a cab driver who picks up this couple who are in a really bad place (you know, emotionally, or whatever, not a bad neighborhood), and then later in the song he picks up the same couple (at least in my mind, it's the same couple), and they are just leaving the hospital with a new baby, and flowers and balloons. And things are a lot better with them, as you may imagine. (Here's the line, so corny, which sends me over the edge: "I asked about her name, and we all laughed when he said 'Hope' and she said 'Grace.'") Even when I wasn't pregnant, I teared up for this song, but now that I am? Forget it. I think it actually frightened Jim once, how hard I cried when this song came on. He claims he can't understand the words, so obviously he is somewhat less affected by it. One morning when it came up in rotation on the drive to work, I thought, oh, I can handle it. Then I heard the first few strums of the guitar and had to immediately turn it off. That's how bad it is with me and this song. And these hormones.

I am reminded of my hyperextended lachrymosity today because of a little breakfast tableaux that has had me dabbing at my eyes two or three times now, at random points during the day. Naomi has been talking now and then about babies being born, how they are in their mommies' tummies, then they come out and that means they are born! And they're on the outside! My friend's baby is due any day, which we talk about a lot, and Naomi is also starting to get it that I have a baby in my tummy, too, so it's all good with me if she wants to talk about the miracle of birth. This morning while she was eating her mini-bagel, she said, I was born! I was in your tummy, then I came out! And I was born! We talked about what it was like when she came out, how it was light and Daddy was there and I held her on my chest and we named her.
Then I told her that I was born too- that I used to be inside of Gramma's tummy (which I'm sure was a stretch for her, but she seemed to go along with it), and then I came out and was a little baby. I said, you know, because Gramma is MY mommy. She thought for a second, then she said, where is Gramma's mommy? Oh, man...really? I said, right, Gramma had a mommy too. Gramma was a little baby once too. And she said again, where is Gramma's mommy? What I did not say is that Gramma's mommy was a beautiful person and an excellent Gramma herself, with a cute Swedish accent, who passed away in 1997 at the age of 92. And what I did not do was try to figure out whether Naomi had any sense of what she was actually asking me about. I just said, Gramma's mommy is not here anymore. At which point, naturally, I had a huge surge of crydrenaline and had to whisk my cereal bowl off to the sink to avoid weeping all over my unsuspecting kid (who of course has seen me cry before, an embarrassing number of times- no strong as steel mommy in this family).

Fortunately, she moved right on to something else. Like gleefully pointing out for the fifteenth time that she had both a milk cup and a water cup. Luxury! I went through a hundred quick thoughts at once, that I missed my Gramma, and that I wish Naomi could have known her, and that she could have known Naomi, and that yeah, my mom was once a little baby, just as I was, and that was almost as hard for me to imagine as it probably was for Naomi to imagine her big, giant mommy in Gramma's tummy. None of these instantaneous musings were much good for stopping the crying. I got my act together, we finished up breakfast and got on with our day. When I think of the things I get to enjoy when this pregnancy is done, I hope a slight cessation in the weeping is one of them. Otherwise you will find me, greedily eating cold cuts and soft cheeses and sushi with a glass of beer, crying over whoever got eliminated from American Idol.

The Khoolest

A post about our trip to AZ is forthcoming. In the meantime, is there a cooler baby than this one? Hard to imagine.