Dramamine Queen

I spent the weekend in my home town visiting my best friend. Her son has sideburns now which made me giggle. I had these grand plans to tell her all about my new baby friend which involved finding a photo booth and telling her between photos. Except the mall we were at only had those awful digital ones that does all sorts of fancy things but doesn’t take a strip of photos. So instead I told her while we were walking through the food court so I could recycle. It worked out pretty well because we walked by this little baby who smiles at us and she said something she always says when we see a cute baby “Ohhhh can you have a baby please?” so I responded with “Sure! How about October?”  I guess it’s on par with her telling me on my front stoop all those years ago. We went and told my sister at her work. I asked if she could keep a secret from our parents and she said “ARE YOU FUCKING PREGNANT?!?!”  and then she burst into tears. So there we all are standing in the middle of the Canadian version of Hot Topic crying. Yeah, were hardcore. 

Some things I’ve noticed:

Boobs now rock hard. Like I’ve been given implants in my sleep. Which since I’m suddenly sleeping like a log(why do we say that? Logs don’t sleep!) is actually possibility.

CRAZY DREAMS.  Like one where I’m an awesome tap dancer and I’m tap dancing EVERYWHERE I go, in the mall, down the escalator and I’m so happy that I’m such an awesome tap dancer. Because, who knew? Or the weird sex ones. I’ll leave it at that.

If there’s one grain of salt in something I can taste it. Things that normally don’t taste salty now suddenly as of this past weekend taste like they are covered in it. Like cheese and bread. Oh and oil. I can taste the oil in things. I guess that’s sort of good because now I’m actually forced to eat the good things I want to eat. Because everything else is covered in salt.

The pain in my right shoulder, the one that usually feels like it’s on fire, is gone. POOF!  Just like that. That’s a pleasant surprise. 

(I promise I won’t spend the next 9 months going on and on. )

My boobs don’t lie.

I got up at like 6:40am and peed on a stick. Counting for 5 seconds is a hard task that early. I was counting in my head and then thinking “Did I skip the number 4?” 

I placed the test on the counter and kept peeing for like the next 2 minutes. I glanced over at the test and there was a + bright as the sun telling me what I already knew.

I’m pregnant!

If everything goes smoothly I’ll be giving birth early October. Wow.

Tomorrow I will get up bright and early and pee on a stick to see if the first month of baby making fun has been fruitful. We had sex a lot this last month.

My sister has predicted that it will take us at 5-6 months. I am not sure why she thinks this. She got pregnant the one time they were lazy about birth control. History shows that the women on both sides of my family tend to get pregnant just thinking about it. I did a little more than just think.

I think I am though. My boobs are currently creating their own gravitationalpull. They are super sore. Im a bit frightened to think about what sort of size they are going to become. I am already a 36D.

My cousin told me that after her first child was born she was a J.

A FREAKING J CUP.

She said it was like having a watercooler strapped to her chest, except full of milk. She was a big double D to start with.

I admit I am a bit freaked out by that.

There are things I know about my mother that explain her. Explain my upbringing. Things that make it easier for me to understand why she might be the way she is. Things she should have gotten help with things she should have been medicated for.

The details of her own upbringing are at best hazy. She is one of 12, the 3rd or 4th born. Her mother gave her to her grandparents who raised her. I’m unsure why, I have a theory it was for post partum depression, since it runs in the family but, it could have been anything. My mother was raised until she was 5 by her grandparents who lived next door. Then her mother wanted her back. So she went back to a mother she didn’t know. A bond had never formed and never would.

She lived on a farm. She did chores. She took care of smaller children. She went to Catholic church and was schooled by nuns. She helped make moonshine and homemade wine.

She became an alcoholic by the time she was 15. She told me this once while she was lying on the sofa wasted. 

She doesn’t remember her life from the ages of 10 to 15. She has blacked it out from her memory. She says she can only remember a few things. Making moonshine with her brothers. Swiming in the ocean. Some bits from school.  Her cousins were all sexually abused by her Uncle, a man that was always around. Her sisters believe that my mom was too.

She left home when she turned 15. Hitch hiking across the country. She met her best friend who is a few years older than her. 

She travelled with bikers. She worked odd jobs.  She did drugs. She shacked up with a man. Who she caught in bed with another girl and beat him with a baseball bat.

Eventually she met my father. Two months later she was pregnant with me. Three months after I was born they got married.

She got pregnant again sometime later. That sister died inside her just before her due date. Once when she was high she told me that after that she lost her mind. I don’t blame her.

When I was 5 my sister was born. My mother always had her in lots of layers. She was sweaty all the time. Then she got pneumonia when she was 2 months old. She almost died.

My sister turned into a monster of a toddler. My mother cannot recall this either. My dad and I used to joke that if anyone ever kidnapped my sister they would pay us to take her back.  It was awful. My mother retreated to the sofa and slept. Which is how my sister remembers her youth.

Now she starves herself. Her never ending quest to stay young or perhaps to control something. She eats a tiny amount for show or mashes her food around on her plate. She smokes a lot of pot every day. Self medication.

These are all the things I know. She has had a rough life. A life that she has never properly dealt with. Which makes me sad. She could have at least tried. Instead she spends her life constantly lying to herself and everyone around her.

All these things make me understand.

One of the things Ive been trying to process over the last year is the fact that my mother wanted to adopt my best friends baby when we were 17. My mother had been babysitting him while we went to school.  It was a great set up. My mom the hero babysitting her teenage daughters bestfriend infant son while we attended school across the street. Except my mom was caught calling herself Mom, something my best friend thought was odd but chalked it up to just a slip of the tongue.

I try to imagine what my mother was thinking. I try to imagine my best friends  son as my brother. How different he would be. Would she still be my best friend? Probably not, the pain of seeing her son so often surely would haved torn us apart.

The whole thing angers me. My mother barely raised my sister and I. My sister credits me for raising her. Im only 5 years older than her. Once we were old enough to fend for ourselves we did. Every once and a while she would crow about how independent we were to her friends, like we had a choice. My sister mainly remembers my mom sleeping all day on the sofa. When I finally moved out at the age of 18 my mother started abusing my sister, something I also only found out in the last year. The sad thing is she sees herself as the cool mom, she let us have boys sleep over, she let us drink in the house, she let us go out all night. When my friends were too drunk to go home from a party we all crashed at my house. She loved partying with young folk, she still does.

Why my mother thought that adopting my best friends son was something she wanted to do is beyond me. Another crack at the parenting thing? Another kid to let run wild and play “cool mom” with?

On top of everything though is the fact that she didn’t think of me at all. Her motives were purely selfish. No thought as to how her actions could change my life. By 17 we had already been best friends for 4 years. I’m lucky enough as it is that just my mother proposing such a thing didn’t make my best friend run for the hills from my family.  She did distance herself from me for a bit and I didn’t think anything too strange about it, she had a baby and there was a natural rotation between the 4 girls in my circle that happened from time to time. I only learned last year that it was due to my mother, my best friend had thought I knew about the adoption suggestion and which is what she thought up until last year when she brought it up.

A part of me wants to confront my mother with it. Ask her what the hell is wrong with her. Drag out all the things that she did and didnt do and point them out and make her answer for once. But I wont. I know I wont. Im afraid if I do she will pile on more lies, tell me my best friend made it up or was remembering it wrong. That is her M.O and if she did that I would just call it a day because I would know then that nothing she ever said would be the truth and she ends every conversation with I love you.

Jonathan thinks that art work should match the decor.  Every time I think about that I cringe.

What can I say he knows more about music, I know more about art.

I have suffered from chronic pain of some sort for most of my life. I have managed it with various methods, chiropractors, rmt, acupuncture, physio, reiki. But for the past year or so I haven’t gone to anything…actually it’s probably been longer than that. 

It’s something I just deal with because something hurts almost all the time. So when we started this baby making talk I thought to myself “I better get my body working a bit better” I have heard that pregnancy tends to do your back in. I have a high pain tolerance as it is. The one time I broke something I wasn’t convinced it was broke because well,  it only hurt for a second and then it was just a bit uncomfortable, wasn’t I suppose to be screaming bloody murder? When I got 4 impacted wisdom teeth removed everyone told me that it was going to suck hard but that night I wanted to go out dancing because I felt fine, except for all that blood I kept spitting out. 

Mostly my pain is uncomfortable, at around a 6 on a 1-10 scale, but sometimes it ramps it up to burning, throbbing, screaming full tilt 11 mode and I think about pain killers in a lustful manner.  This is when I remember how I could just go see one of the many specialists that fixes these things and get it sorted out. Because DUH why wouldn’t I? It’s covered by my insurance, which I pay for!!! Oh yeah.  So my plan is to find a place to go and just go. It really is that simple.

Last night Jonathan and I were watching some stand up comedy and the comedian was talking about most embarrassing moments. So I asked him what his was. He told me and I couldn’t help but think that if the same thing had happened to me it wouldn’t have even made my top ten most embarrassing moments. Not that his wasn’t embarrassing, just that I guess he hasn’t had as many red faced moments.

One moment popped into my head right away. Although there were so many and all of them from my teenage years. I guess teenage girls get embarrassed easier than most people. I bet there is some science to back that up.

The time I had to poop really, really badly at my boyfriends house and clogged the toilet which then overflowed. I start screaming and freaking out and of course his mom comes in and I’m so mortified because now my poop is on the floor  and this is something that is worth taking my life over. I run into my boyfriends room and hide and start crying like a crazy person. How his mom could still look me in the eye let alone let me continue to come into their home after that I will never know. She even took me aside and told me not to worry and that things happen and no one was hurt so it was all good. Funnily enough I am still really good friends with my ex-boyfriend(he’s the only one who I am.) I don’t think I pooped at their house ever again though.

I am about to go shovel the walk. It is about minus 2000 outside and right now inside my house wearing two pairs of socks(one of them wool.) my feet are numb with cold. I was looking at a pair of boots that were good to -32C and Jonathan said something about how we dont live up in the Artic and I was like DUDE I WANT TO WEAR THESE IN THE HOUSE!

If I was dressed head to toe in several layers of fleece and wool and wrapped in an electric blanket lying in front of some sort of fire or heat sorce I might be able to deal with the cold. MIGHT. I probably still wouldnt be warm enough. In fact when I was little (ie: before 20.) I would often lay out my moms wool blanket on the lawn, lay down on the edge of it and roll myself into a little blanket burrito, in July.

Ok going out to shovel.

My 16 month old niece likes to be scared. Not just in a peek-a-boo way either, no she likes the terror of being dropped or thrown. Obviously we don’t really throw her or drop her but nothing makes her laugh like a maniac like the feeling of free falling.
So on Christmas Eve when I picked her up airplane style and did a quick squat(over a giant lady bug pillow, just in case.) she lost her mind. I did about 4 of them and then swung her around the room and to a safe landing. Except it was so mind blowing awesome that the second I put her down she reached her arms up to me still laughing and it was so cute that I did it again and again. And again. In fact about 30 minutes later I was sweating and starting to feel the burn in my muscles.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when I woke up Christmas morning feeling a bit stiff. That stiffness got worse over the day until the only way I could get up the stairs at my in laws was to crawl up them. I could barely sit down, couldn’t lean forward and by boxing day could barely walk. Jonathan rubbed some sort of muscle cream on my back, I took one of my mother in laws Tylenol 3, got into my pajamas and cranked a heating pad up high and laid in bed watching tv. It didn’t help that I also had horrible cramps and all the fun symptoms I get on the first day of my period.
I stretched every hour even though it hurt and I was convinced my back muscles would snap they were so tight. Today though I seem to be alright. Still a little sore but nothing like I was.

Guess I should start doing some more strength training.