Awkwardly Social

I don’t know.  30 weeks.  What can I say? I’m gaining weight.  I’m peeing a lot when I remember to drink fluids. My ankles swell when I work a 12 hour day.  My fuse is short.  My husband is in Canada for 2 more weeks.  My dog seems depressed.  We still don’t have any place for the baby to sleep and no way for the baby to get home from the hospital mostly because I can’t decide on a crib I like.  And uh… I am feeling pretty good physically now that I’m taking Tagamet and Magnesium.

Besides the weird cervix pain that has me in bed now because walking around seems too dangerous, I’ve been feeling fantastic.  The cervix pain was horribly reminiscent of the pain of passing giant blood clots after my D&C, so I’m a little rattled, but after a cursory search of the internet, the illiterates out there have me assured that it’s just the baby moving to the pelvic floor.  I love a good panicky forum!

Yesterday, in the spirit of getting out of the house, we took the dog up the coast to Santa Barbara for the day.  I really love it up there and on a foggy day in April the tourists seemed to stay away from the beach.

I have a hankering for beach front property! I wish there was a booming reality television business in Arch Cape, Oregon, or at least 6 months of the year I could afford to be unemployed and beach bound.  I have nothing much against the Los Angeles beaches except almost every single person who lives on that side of town seems completely insufferable (except for the people I know and love who live out there. I do have real life friends who are beach people.  I don’t know how they do it.).  I’m sure they feel the same about those of us in the land locked ‘hoods.

I’m gaining weight like a champ! I am choosing to think of this as a positive thing because if I let myself go down the wallowing well and compare myself to the ladies who struggled to gain more than 20 pounds during their pregnancy, I will quite possibly eat all of the cookies.  And I’m at the point now where if I eat all of the cookies I will be in a lot of pain.  Let it be forever known that I am a champion weight gainer!  Ring it from the mountain tops!  If you need a person to gain weight for a role, call me!  I will coach them in the cookie eating!

Well… that was enthusiastic.

Seth leaves in a couple of days.  But don’t worry he has arranged for every possible person we know in Los Angeles to be able to jump at a moment’s notice if something emergent occurs.  I hope his Hancock Park friend knows how to make a cheese omelet, because that’s the only emergency I can reasonably assume is going to happen.  Cheese omelet emergency!

I am technically 28 weeks and three days today.  I have excuses for not writing this on Sunday, but they are boring and you deserve better than that.

I seriously can’t remember what happened last week outside of work hours except for an excessive amount of baseball watching and dog snuggling.  I feel like I’m totally over-compensating with Lula.  She’s a dog.  It’s not like having a new baby in the house is going to ruin her life, right? (POOR LULA!)

Oh! Now, I remember something we did, we reached our goal for production for my movie!  That is huge news and I’m very proud of us.  So proud that we promptly found out one of the director’s must have locations is going to cost us TWICE as much.  So, we’re still accepting donations over there. (Mentioning that feels so tacky to me, I know you guys have all been super generous and I love you. We’ll find the money somehow!)  We had a very important production meeting where things like “snake season” were discussed.  I am not afraid of snakes, however, I do not think it would be wise to be the named producer on a film where someone dies from a snake bite, so we implemented a “Boots on set” rule, which I’m sure one person won’t follow and I’ll have to be the mean producer and tell them to get their act together.  Which, don’t worry, is right in my wheel house.  I don’t mind being the mean producer.  Don’t get me wrong, I prefer everyone to like me, but I know what my personality is like (abrasive at times? is bracing the right word?) so I’m fine filling the role where required.

To top off interesting things happening in my life, we found out Seth will be in Winnipeg for at least 3 weeks for work.  Which, yay! WORK!  But boo, Seth will be missing the birth class.  The birth class I pretty much signed up for because I thought he might need a little refresher given his huge gaps in knowledge about how babies get here.  (And yes, he DOES have two children.)

The belly photo will follow tonight.  Never fear.  Here is a photo of me at 15 and 27 weeks to get you through the afternoon.

Here is the 28 weeker!

A year ago we went to our second ultrasound hoping to see a heartbeat, instead we had an empty yolk sac and a month of barely holding it together.

Today, I’m feeling big as a house and pretty glad I can complain about Elvis* using my ribs as some sort of climbing device.  He may be climbing with his toes, he may be climbing with his hands, but whatever he is doing is fucking weird.

So, as they say, life goes on.  But what they don’t say is it only goes on if you’re alive.

*Not remotely in the list of names we’ll use but every day it’s something different from Seth. In the current rotation are Elroy and Elvis.

So, clear skies the past few days.  I think a big familial blow up where I act like kind of an asshole and Seth gets mad at me and I drive around my old neighborhood for an hour is nice and cleansing.  It’s not actually nice and cleansing, but relationships are work and being pregnant is hard and having a husband with another family is complicated.

I’ve reached the stage in pregnancy where I feel super shitty when I overeat.  So, guess what I’ve been doing! Eating my feelings.  My big feely feelings.  I haven’t been able to get out at lunch to walk around and it’s to be expected at this stage, but it’s frustrating and I’m tired and my job might be extended and I’m making a movie and it’s all kind of crazy.   But good crazy.  Well, good and bad crazy.

I’ve officially become a victim of pregnancy brain.  I’ll go in to talk to someone and by the time I get to their room I’ll have completely jumbled what I’m going to say and have to sit down and figure out what I really mean.  It’s fun! Thankfully my people are good people and we all laugh about it.

I guess all of this is to say what everyone says about pregnancy, it’s a kind of fucked up ride but I am lucky to be on it.

I’m having trouble breathing today.  Not physical trouble, just that anxiety elephant on my chest filling my eyes with tears and making it hard to breath.  Waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares about my mom which then send me into a spiral imagining her last few hours have been unpleasant side effects to working 70 hours this week. Then after a half day at the office today an out of nowhere fight with Seth sent me driving around Los Angeles with no place to go but home.  I sat in my car on the street waiting, wishing I didn’t have to pee, wishing I wasn’t so upset, wishing I hadn’t fallen into the trap of commenting on something that always ends in tears no matter how many times I’ve told myself STAY OUT OF IT.  Another Monday morning of puffy eyes and dark circles awaits.  Welcome to your third trimester, kid.

I finished reading The Happiness Project last night.  The book isn’t what I expected.  I had only heard it mentioned in sort of the twee “life list” type circles so I expected it to be a super motivational twee book.  It is not.  Rubin writes from a very analytical place with a lot of research to back up what she’s saying.  The style is slightly off putting but once I got used to it I found it kind of refreshing.

One of my biggest takeaways that I’ve been trying to practice is being less reactive and less judgemental.  For some reason, when I’m at the doctor’s office I don’t like Seth to talk to me.  I just feel like the doctor’s office is the perfect place for people to sit and listen to your conversations and judge you.  I feel this way because that’s what I do.  And I don’t particularly like that about myself.  Today when we walked into my OBs office there was this ancient woman sitting in a Rally scooter with her ancient husband sitting next to her holding up a phone that was BLASTING on speaker a conversation that seemed to be about finances.  It was so insanely ridiculous.  And such an opportunity for me to just laugh.  Normally, I would get annoyed that this old lady had the gall to act like she was the only person in the world and that our precious silence was being treaded upon.  But honestly, LIGHTEN THE FUCK UP, Tamara.  So I looked at Seth and laughed.  And he laughed and the woman sitting across from us harumphed and looked annoyed but honestly it opened up the door for Seth and I to have a normal conversation.  We had to sit in the waiting room for about 15 minutes before we were called back and then about an hour during the glucose tolerance test, so I had a lot of time that normally would have been spent with my fur up trying to get Seth to talk more quietly or to not talk at all.  But only once did I put my hand on Seth’s wrist in a quiet effort to get him to stop talking about something that made me uncomfortable and he did.  It was so damned pleasant.

Rubin talks about her own twelve commandments and her own secrets of adulthood.  Her number one commandment is “Be Gretchen” and one of her secrets of adulthood is “It’s important to be nice to everyone.” I’ve often thought that being me was being sort of a sarcastic, caustic, to put it bluntly, bitch, but in reality that’s just the easy way to be me.  I like doing nice things for people.  I like being kind and generous, I just usually shove down the Pollyanna and let the Anna Wintour rule. I think my number one commandment, if I were to do such a thing, would be “Be the better Tamara.”  Of course, I’ll never not be able to cut through bullshit with a sarcastic comment to lighten the mood, but there’s no reason to use it on every occasion.  Sometimes it’s nice to be pleasant and not argue the point just because you’ve got a captive audience.

Sitting in traffic, waiting in lines, listening to old ladies very loud speaker phone conversations, are all things that, if I let them, drive me to instant anger.  But sitting in traffic, waiting in line, and listening to old ladies speaker phone conversations are also opportunities.  They’re a great place for a writer to be.  How many times have you looked out at the construction workers holding up your progress to whatever incredibly important (it’s never that important) thing you’re going to and seen a glimpse into a little world you never really get to inhabit. Those kinds of things feed a writer’s arsenal and if you’re only ever looking for content in the tiny part of the world that doesn’t annoy you, you’re only going to be writing about the writer’s room, and even there, Jesus, we can be an annoying bunch.  No one likes waiting in lines, but guess what, no one likes the bitchy girl sighing and saying FUCK in the line either.  We’re all in this together, people.  Let’s cut that pharmacy tech a little slack, even if she’s on the phone taking a personal call.  Maybe ESPECIALLY if she’s on the phone taking a personal call.

The time spent reading this book has found me progressively happier and I’ve only just started trying to figure out what the things are that make me happy.  I’m looking forward to doing some more personal research and getting to the core of my own happiness.

Well, in addition to producing an indie feature and working 12 hour days, I am indeed still gestating a fetus! I had people over Saturday night for a screening of 42nd Street, and wow, it is not quite the masterpiece I expected.  I guess plots could be loose back then, maybe the Depression made it so that people would watch anything as long as there was the promise of panty peepage? I also baked a vegan cake and made vegan frosting this weekend, and I can almost PROMISE you that I will never do those two things again. Long story, but if I ever write my reality TV memoirs this memory will be included, I assure you.  But for now, I remain coy and offer up to you that baking a vegan cake is hard and Butter Cream frosting that has neither butter, nor cream, should be abolished.

Thank you for those who clicked through and checked out the Indiegogo campaign.  I promise not to be a weirdo and write about it every time I stop by here, but I wanted to say again, THANK YOU. And also, once more, THANK YOU.

Here is my morning after a party belly bump.

He seems very large.  And I still sort of forget that I’m not just being lazy and getting fat, that indeed there is a purpose for this porpoise.  I tried parking in a compact parking spot (with my compact car) but the people on either side of me were assholes and parked over the lines and their cars were decidedly NOT compact and because I now have a belly and a very low car to get out of, I had to move my car.  It was not my finest moment, in fact, I can straight up say, I was graceless.  And grunted. And I may have purposely bumped the car next to me with my door extra hard.  ALLEGEDLY.

I gained only about a pound this week, and my doctor’s office weigh in is on Tuesday.  I keep waiting for the visit where I get scolded about putting on too much weight, but it hasn’t come yet!  Fingers crossed it never will. I always cry when I get scolded.