something dark and viscous—which I want to drink with a mustard-covered soft pretzel. This is bizarre because I’ve never even tasted Guinness, though I served it to many a table as a waitress. It must have been the mumbo jumbo I read online about Irish beer containing iron.
I don’t give in to the beer, but each time I walk by the Drawing Room, a dive bar down the block from my house, I pause and wonder why I didn’t take full advantage of drinking when I could, why I didn’t while away afternoons in that cool dark guzzling stout on a bar stool patched with duct tape. Anyway, who cares what the hell food and drink I want to ingest while pregnant? Just know I want a lot of it.
I’m going to complain a bit more for a second, before I apologize for complaining, so please humor me.
There is also a burning sensation in my heart, and I can’t figure out what it is, before I put together that a burning in my heart area could be a thing I’ve heard about called “heartburn.”
There is my first hemorrhoid, concurrent with and certainly related to niggling bouts of constipation. There are leg cramps, concurrent with and certainly related to nightly insomnia, both of which I treat by spending hours in the middle of the night sitting in the bathtub listening to podcasts of This American Life and staring at my belly poking up above the water. There is something my dermatologist calls “an estrogen surge,” which results in cystic acne on my chin and jaw-line and most frustratingly across my chest, because what good is having cleavage for the first time when you can’t showcase it because even when covered by concealer, it is lumpy and odd-looking?
“Overactive sebaceous glands on your neck,” whispers my hairdresser, as he shampoos my hair, and the accidental shaming takes me back to my teen years, during which I had terrible skin and sometimes took a “me” day off from school if there was an especially bad breakout I couldn’t hide.
While I wasn’t pregnant during those years, I certainly looked like it thanks to the chub I acquired when I quit ballet and started soft serve. In fact, the headmaster of my high school called me into his office my sophomore year to let me know he had heard I was pregnant, and to tell me with studied, “I’m-an-educator” compassion that he “was there for me” if I needed help. I assured him I was not pregnant, could not be, as I was a virgin, to which he replied with obvious disbelief, “Okay, but if you need to talk, I’m here.” I stared at his gray crew cut and squinted my eyes before repeating that I was not, in fact, with child. “Right, but if you need to talk, it would be totally between us.” At a highfalutin prep school, I guess a puffy, carb-eating Jew on scholarship was basically Claireece Precious Goddamn Jones. No baby would be born to me that year, but an eating disorder was already crawling by then. Thanks, Mr. Butler. Maybe you meant well, or maybe you were just a do-gooding jerk who couldn’t tell the difference between fat and pregnant.
So, anyway, it doesn’t feel good to have pimples on my neck so glaring as to trigger Butler flashbacks, but at least it gives me an excuse to say, “Oh, yeah. It’s an estrogen surge. I’m not supposed to say anything yet, but I’m pregnant ,” using a stage whisper and kind of hoping the whole salon overhears so they can make a fuss over me.
There are Sea-Bands on my wrists, stupid acupressure things you buy at the drugstore for motion sickness, and I’m always chewing on ginger candies from the health food store to tamp down the nausea. Though neither works at all, they make me feel closer to the pregnant side of limbo. After all, each day, each hour, I wonder if I’m still pregnant and I have only my burgeoning acne and gripping vertigo to tell me, yes, I am.
At Oscar time, I am hired to make jokes on the red carpet with my cohost on the deep cable talk show I’ve been doing for a couple years. The
I don’t give in to the beer, but each time I walk by the Drawing Room, a dive bar down the block from my house, I pause and wonder why I didn’t take full advantage of drinking when I could, why I didn’t while away afternoons in that cool dark guzzling stout on a bar stool patched with duct tape. Anyway, who cares what the hell food and drink I want to ingest while pregnant? Just know I want a lot of it.
I’m going to complain a bit more for a second, before I apologize for complaining, so please humor me.
There is also a burning sensation in my heart, and I can’t figure out what it is, before I put together that a burning in my heart area could be a thing I’ve heard about called “heartburn.”
There is my first hemorrhoid, concurrent with and certainly related to niggling bouts of constipation. There are leg cramps, concurrent with and certainly related to nightly insomnia, both of which I treat by spending hours in the middle of the night sitting in the bathtub listening to podcasts of This American Life and staring at my belly poking up above the water. There is something my dermatologist calls “an estrogen surge,” which results in cystic acne on my chin and jaw-line and most frustratingly across my chest, because what good is having cleavage for the first time when you can’t showcase it because even when covered by concealer, it is lumpy and odd-looking?
“Overactive sebaceous glands on your neck,” whispers my hairdresser, as he shampoos my hair, and the accidental shaming takes me back to my teen years, during which I had terrible skin and sometimes took a “me” day off from school if there was an especially bad breakout I couldn’t hide.
While I wasn’t pregnant during those years, I certainly looked like it thanks to the chub I acquired when I quit ballet and started soft serve. In fact, the headmaster of my high school called me into his office my sophomore year to let me know he had heard I was pregnant, and to tell me with studied, “I’m-an-educator” compassion that he “was there for me” if I needed help. I assured him I was not pregnant, could not be, as I was a virgin, to which he replied with obvious disbelief, “Okay, but if you need to talk, I’m here.” I stared at his gray crew cut and squinted my eyes before repeating that I was not, in fact, with child. “Right, but if you need to talk, it would be totally between us.” At a highfalutin prep school, I guess a puffy, carb-eating Jew on scholarship was basically Claireece Precious Goddamn Jones. No baby would be born to me that year, but an eating disorder was already crawling by then. Thanks, Mr. Butler. Maybe you meant well, or maybe you were just a do-gooding jerk who couldn’t tell the difference between fat and pregnant.
So, anyway, it doesn’t feel good to have pimples on my neck so glaring as to trigger Butler flashbacks, but at least it gives me an excuse to say, “Oh, yeah. It’s an estrogen surge. I’m not supposed to say anything yet, but I’m pregnant ,” using a stage whisper and kind of hoping the whole salon overhears so they can make a fuss over me.
There are Sea-Bands on my wrists, stupid acupressure things you buy at the drugstore for motion sickness, and I’m always chewing on ginger candies from the health food store to tamp down the nausea. Though neither works at all, they make me feel closer to the pregnant side of limbo. After all, each day, each hour, I wonder if I’m still pregnant and I have only my burgeoning acne and gripping vertigo to tell me, yes, I am.
At Oscar time, I am hired to make jokes on the red carpet with my cohost on the deep cable talk show I’ve been doing for a couple years. The
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