Fear.

Turns out, I really was in early labor. I didn't mean to leave anyone hanging, it's just that I've been kind of occupied with this little ball of baby boy, and that doesn't leave a whole lot of time for writing.

More than the physical and mental occupation with our son, I'll be honest and just put it out there that I'm terrified. I can't say it anywhere else without people looking at me like I might be too overwhelmed and at risk of throwing the baby out on trash day. (Which, let me be clear, is not what's happening here.) I'm just... it's just a lot. It's more than I thought it would be, and it's harder than I imagined, and I'm scared. When I say I'm scared, people look at me like I need medication. Maybe I do, I don't know, but the details are as follows:

My son was born a month early, at 5lbs 3oz... (I did it on my own, by the way. No medication, 12 hours of contractions 1 minute long/2 minutes apart, 2 hours of active pushing. I'm kind of proud of that.) He dropped to 5lbs 4oz, and was hardly maintaining there for a week... He had one bowel movement in the first two weeks, which is highly unusual, and we had to start supplementing with formula because I was starving my son by breastfeeding exclusively. And holy shit, can I just say that hurts so incredibly bad to even TYPE, no wonder people don't want to hear me SAY it...

Now at a month old, he's up to 6lbs 6oz, which is almost the size of a 'normal' newborn. I thank God every twenty seconds that he's growing... But his stomach is a mystery that the doctors can't crack. He screams for hours in obvious pain, and is constipated terribly. We've tried every stupid thing they can throw at us, even giving him diluted juice and Karo syrup in an attempt to give him diarrhea. So yeah, we're trying to make him sick to make him better... Again, I can hardly even type those words... Now the doctors are throwing around words like "barium" and "extensive tests" and "possible intestinal abnormalities" and I want to throw myself into fucking traffic because this can't be happening. It has to be a dream, and everyone knows that if you die in a dream you wake up. Or is it that you die in your sleep? Either way... Anything would be better than this not knowing, this inability to help my son.

He's just so little, yaknow..? He's so small, and he's in so much pain, and they aren't helping him, and I just want to scream ALL THE TIME. Babies aren't supposed to know pain. We're supposed to be able to protect them - I'm supposed to be able to protect him - and I can't. And I'm afraid this is what insanity feels like. A month is hardly any length of time in the big scheme of things, but it's an eternity when there's no sleep for you (literally three hours a night, that's how much sleep I'm getting) and no relief for your child. A month is forever.

So if there's no improvement by tomorrow I have to take him to the hospital, and I can't even think about what that means right now. I just keep staring at him, thinking stupidly that if I stare hard enough I'll be able to figure out what's the matter and fix it. I stare and hope and pray, and I hold my fucking breath until I think I'm going to die because its all I can do. And it's not enough.

That's what I've been up to... What about everyone else? What's been going on outside this tiny universe of mine?

I blew my cork. Except less 'blew' and more 'slipped away like Wilson from the raft.'

So remember when I said I'd shortly be writing about a reoccurring dream I've had my whole life? Yeah, that was a lie. I didn't know it was when I told it, but woops! Pesky ol' LIFE got in the way and what do you know, I'm in the early stages of labor. Or, uh, the stages of Early Labor? Or whatever. I don't know. It depends on which book you read, but apparently the only thing keeping me from firing an infant out of my patunia like a cannon ball is that my water hasn't broken yet.

That seems like a flimsy barrier, yaknow? A bag of fluid is all that's standing between me and having a person coming out of my pelvis. I keep kind of looking down and going, "Really?" because, REALLY? There's a person that's going to come out of there? Whatever. That's got to be a joke or a dirty rumor that someone started when they were high on glue.

Without getting too personal and queasy, let me tell you what's already happening with my vagina. (How contradictory am I? Shut up, it's cute.)

- I'm dilated to 2 cm, and have been for about a week. My doc put me on 'modified bed rest' - which means that I can come to my sitting-on-my-ass-type job and SIT, and I can go home and lie down, but that's it. No walking around, no doing anything. No lifting anything heavier than a gallon of milk, wtf.
- The baby has most definitely moved down. I can breathe now, but the trade off is that I can hardly walk, because there's like this SKULL inside my PELVIS and holy shit OW. Well, not really ow. But more... owwww. Not really painful, but decidedly uncomfortable.
- I started losing my mucus plug yesterday. (I have to whisper 'mucus plug,' when I say it out loud, by the way, and follow it up with an ambivalent 'whatever,' as in, "I'm losing my mucus plug or whatever." Because there's something weird about saying 'mucus' when you're talking about your downstairs. So in an effort to make talking about it less awkward, I've taken to calling it my Cooter Cork, and that makes me laugh so hard I almost pee every time I say it. In addition to the peeing, it feels like my abdomen is going to rip open ala some terrible horror movie every time I laugh, because it's SO TIGHT and FULL OF BEBEH OMGZ.)
- I've started cramping low in my back and belly. It's a vague, menstrual period kind of cramping.
- I'm 36 weeks pregnant.


Now, all of these really vague, contradictory and mysterious books and Internet sites I've been scouring tell me that early labor can last like, twenty seconds, or it can go on for fucking WEEKS. Because who knows! The female body is a strange and mystical thing that no one could ever possibly understand!

So... Any advice? I have my hospital bag packed. I've got everything all ready to go. It's just... uh... Hm. I'm kind of worried that I'm going to be doing this crampy, achy, vaguely labory thing for A LONG TIME, and that makes me want to go up to the Walmarts and start doing bicep curls in the diary section to get things kicked off.

Monkey hijack.

I know no one is interested in hearing about what another person dreams. Dreams never make any sense, and they're always kind of anticlimactic and weird. You never ask to hear about them, but instead it comes on in a sort of bum rush hijack. Like a mugging. You see someone at the grocery store and they're like, "Oh my gosh, so, speaking of bananas. The other night I had this dream where a monkey broke into my car through the bumper, and I went outside to see what the ruckus was, and I could see this bigass monkey in the passenger seat of my car. He was like... looking at me. So I went back inside to get Mr. Husband, and when we came back out, the monkey had ripped the entire car apart! And I said, "Fucking monkey!" and then I woke up and I'd peed the bed. What do you think that means?"

I think it means you need to not drink so much coffee before bed. Strike that. I think you need to not drink coffee EVER, especially when you know you're going to the grocery store and might run into an unassuming acquaintance that didn't ever want to know you have bladder issues and a strange monkey fixation.

That being said! I had a dream last night. It's a reoccurring dream, and I've had it since I was very little, always the same down to the most minuscule details. I'm going to post about it here shortly, and I'd like some feedback. I've always wondered what it might mean, what the symbolism is, why I have it at all. So, fair warning, I'm going to bore everyone with my own little monkey dream. I'd love to hear about yours, too, if anyone wants to share. Dreams are fascinating things. (Except when they're not. Which is usually. But I'm sure yours are AWESOME.)

Spoiler: There are no monkeys in the dream I had. Damnit.

I said the F word in a funeral home. A LOT.

Last Sunday I found out my dad died. I found this out the same way I always find out things of this nature - my older sister told me. People tell her and have her tell me, because... I don't know why. But they always tell her first, and leave my finding out up to her.



I was at work when The Older emailed me and asked me to take a break so she could call my cell. I said hey, no problem, and ran down the hall to the locker room. As I was sitting down to pee, I called my sister. She answered the phone crying, and I told her to take a deep breath and not say a word, because whatever this news was, I wasn't going to get it on the toilet.



After I was situated on a bench I told her it was okay, whatever it was, and that I wanted to hear her breathe for me. Big, deep breaths. After she did this for a few minutes, I told her to go ahead, but take it easy. (I can't stand to hear her upset. It murders my soul.) She told me between sobs that our dad was dead. I knew the news was coming, because there was nothing else that could have upset her this way unless it was news about our other sister or her children, which I would have gotten first because I'm closer to The Oldest than she is. I stupidly asked if she was serious, which appears to be my stock asshole response when I'm getting "So-and-so Is Dead" news, and told her it was okay. I told her to breathe. I stared at the tiled floor while the news tried to beat its way into my brain, while it tried to wring some sort of reaction from me. The Older noticed my lack of appropriately upset reaction and commented on it, making me feel about thisbig as I told her, "I'm at work."



It was all I could think to say.



It is my job to keep people calm in crisis. In order to do what I do, you fabricate around yourself a shell that is nigh on impenetrable. You do this to preserve yourself against the absolute horror that can come with what I do. That shell is most of the reason I did not react, I think. I hope. I hope the reason for my lack of reaction didn't have something to do with the shitty state of my relationship with my father, although if I'm being honest, I know that it did, at least a little. I know there was some shock there, although his health was TERRIBLE and certainly this did not come as a true surprise... Death is always a shock. It's so sudden, so permanent. And so, I focused on talking my sister through her grief and panic, because for whatever reason, it's what I could do at the time.



I went back into my office, asked my boss very calmly if he could get someone to cover the rest of my shift because my father was dead. He didn't seem to hear me, then turned and looked at my face, as if to see if I was serious. My phone was still to my ear as I looked at him, my skull filled with the sound of my sister crying on the other end of the line. I said, "I'm sorry," but to whom, I don't know. It was all I could think to say...



The Boy showed up then- turns out The Older had called him before she called me, out of concern for my reaction to the news and the affect it might have on the pregnancy. He found me kneeling in the dark in another office, staring at the carpet and trying stupidly to comfort my sister over the phone. He pulled a chair over, sat down with his legs on either side of me, and there in the shelter of him the tears finally came.



The next couple of days are a blur. We wound up in our home town, where we picked The Older up at the airport. The morning after that there was the funeral home to visit, details to tack down that could not be finalized long-distance via phone or fax. I learned, not unexpectedly, that my father had not had one cent of life insurance, nor had he made any sort of realistic arrangements for his death at all. (My uncle's ex wife had gone and gotten all kinds of papers for him, filled them out, and taken them to his apartment. She'd explained that all he had to do was sign those papers, and the government would give him life insurance. They would pay for his many, many medications. He would have nurses that would come to the apartment and check on him, they would make sure he was okay. The drawback would be that my dad would receive a few dollars less a month in Social Security, which would be more than made up for in the deferred cost of his meds. The papers were never seen again. He made no effort to even sign his name.)



My dad had been in congestive heart failure for over ten years. He'd been told by every specialist, general practitioner, nurse, whomever that he'd ever seen, "You're not going to live much longer." How could he? He was poisoning himself with everything he ate or drank. It was some strange miracle of luck that he'd managed to live as long as he had. He knew he was going to die, and soon. He could not have thought otherwise, and did not think otherwise, as evidenced by a comment from his own lips not so very long ago in response to the question, "Who do you think it will fall on when you die? Who do you think will be responsible for handling that?"



His answer? "What do I care? I'll be dead."



With no wife to shoulder the burden, he knew it would fall on The Older and myself. With The Older not having had a paying job in quite some time (She is the primary caretaker for her fiance's very ill mother, and cannot be away from the house for stretches of time, so this is more than understandable,) he knew it would fall on me, the daughter that was not his daughter, more by his own doing than genetics ever could have accomplished alone.



So there I sat, at this table, across from a mortician that seemed to have a Jones for very large numbers. I stared at him quietly as he explained that the stiff cardboard box they used to transport my dad's corpse to the crematorium cost more than 200 dollars. (A box. A cardboard box. Worth 200 dollars.) The transportation fee itself was enough to boggle the mind, not to mention the cost of the urn or the memorial pamphlets that had been printed up, apparently using pure gold leaf as paper, and the blood of infant angels as ink. I sat very, very quietly, staring at the ever growing numbers. I did not make a sound.



And I got angry. I got angry because, as terrible as it is to admit, I resented that as the daughter with the shitty relationship with this man, who was not my biological father and had never treated me as an equal child to begin with, I was staring down the barrel of a six thousand-dollar gun while trying to save for the birth and future of my unborn child. I got angry because not once in his life had he ever done anything responsible, and it never kept him up for one second at night how his childish ways hurt the people that had to make up for them. I got angry because he was a PARENT and should have done MORE, because we were good, dutiful children and deserved more. I got angry because The Older started crying again, as I (the youngest) signed papers and prepared to shoulder a very heavy financial burden that she could not help with, and so she was being crushed by a guilt I could not sooth with words or actions, and the inability to save her from that feeling ENRAGED ME. I got angry because ANGER is not the response a person should have when sitting in a funeral home trying to iron out the details of a parent's final arrangements. I got angry because what I wanted more than anything in the world right then was to punch the funeral director in the throat and chuck that fucking over priced urn through a window, and I am not proud of that.



The Boy tapped my shoulder, asked me to step out of the room with him. I snarked, "I don't want to step out of the room. I want to fucking leave." He asked me again, very softly, to step into the hall. So I did. Of course I did.



And then I lost my ever-loving mind. He hugged me while I scream-whispered about how my dad was a selfish, heartless fuck who never thought of anyone but himself for one second of his life, and how were we going to do this with a baby? He held my hand while I asked over and over and over, "Who DOES this to their kids? Who fucking DOES this to people they're supposed to love?" He told me it would be okay, that he would write a check right then to pay for half, when I started hyperventilating again about how we're having a baby, I can't afford this with a baby, oh my god, THE BABY. He soothed me when I demanded if he'd seen the look on The Older's face, the one that suggested she was either going to throw up or kill herself right there, and how could someone do that to her?



I said 'fuck' more times than I can remember.



My sister and uncle came out of the office eventually with the funeral director in sheepish tow, and explained to me that since our dad had been a resident of the same county for the last 40 years, that county might be willing to help defer some of the funeral costs if we could find certain information. They needed his social security card, a copy of his lease, any titles he might possess, bank statements, etc. I growled that we would never find those things, as the man had never kept any sort of responsible record. They insisted we try, and so we went to his apartment.



Walking into the room where my dad died had absolutely no affect on me. I looked at the chair his body was found in, and wondered if he had been comfortable. I hoped that he had. The Boy and The Older went to search our dad's vehicle while The Uncle and myself poked around the apartment. Long story short: We found what we needed. The county deferred close to four thousand dollars of the funeral cost, and I was absolutely floored.



I cannot describe how grateful I was and am that a system exists to assist people with this burden. While The Boy and I could have paid the full cost, it would have put us in a precarious position, one where ANY unexpected cost would have put us very, very close to being shit out of luck monetarily. The fact that we were not put in that position but instead are still able to pay our medical bills and our house payment without having to beg, borrow and steal, is something I will never stop being thankful for.



Things I will never, ever forget or find my way around to accepting:

-The fact that my father was selfish down to his last atom, and his self absorption was entirely complete and unrelenting. This was evidenced not only by the total lack of insurance, etc, but more so by the *very large* quantity of something he should not have had that was found in his apartment. He had it and knew that if anything happened to him we would find it, and didn't care what that would do to my sister, how it would hurt her to know that he had been such a different person than she thought he was.


-The way a business or industry can capitalize on the misfortune of those that have lost a family member or loved one, going so far as to QUADRUPLE their cost and absolutely ROB people blind.

-Finding the papers my aunt had gathered for him, the papers that simply required a signature to insure his life, shoved in the back of a drawer in the kitchen and forgotten.

-My surprisingly violent reaction to the above three points.

-The fact that my sister will form this experience into a club and use it to bludgeon herself for the rest of her life, feeling guilty for not being able to help do what needed to be done, because he couldn't be responsible for himself and keep that burden from her shoulders.

-Going into false labor as soon as we got home. Having contractions and mind bending nausea for hour after hour because my body was coming down from the stress of the last week. Being so thankful that it stopped because, although my baby could be born now and survive, he needs more time. Don't we all need more time?

-That the predominant emotion associated with this whole shebang, for me, was anger and frustration. Anger that my father, who I loved deeply despite how I know it seems, could not care enough for his daughter - The Older - to take care of himself, or at least be marginally responsible for her sake. Anger that I'm angry, because it's easier than being sad for him and my sister and myself. Frustration that everything he ever said or did seems like lie after lie, in the current light, and he said he'd never lie to us.

Hmph.

I'm feeling kind of 'eh' these days. I want to post, I just don't know what about. I feel like I've forgotten this place, and that makes me sad on my insides. It's just, I don't know what to say about anything right now. Nothing is bad, everything is great, I just... don't know what to say.

Trying to get it figured out. Will update as soon as I do. Cross your fingers for me - figuring shit out has never been my strong suit.

Done sulking.

A guy I work with knew I was working on a pretty good sulk today, so he told me this joke. It only works if you say it out loud.

Him: Knock, knock.

Me: Who's there?

Him: Smell mop.

Me: Smell mop, who?

And I don't remember what he said after that, because I was laughing so hard I was literally in tears. Because I'm an 8 year-old boy, that's why.

Poo and fart jokes never stop being funny. Or if they do, I don't ever want to be that mature. Lucky for me, I'm not yet, and when he told me that joke today, it really did snap me out of my funk. As soon as I was done laughing (seriously, 5 minutes later) I called The Boy and the conversation is as follows:

Me: Have a joke for you, wanna hear it?

Him: Sure. Shoot. *Obviously does not want to hear it. Is afraid to have conversation with The Girl, as she is hormonal and emotional and the joke is probably a trap that will leave him crippled in some way.*

Me: *Doesn't care. Soldiers on in an attempt to bridge that awkward post-argument gap.* Knock, knock.

Him: Who's there?

Me: *Insane giggling for long enough that it gets awkward, which makes for more hysterical laughing*

Him: *uncertain silence*

Me: *gasp, gasp* Smell mop. *more cackling*

Him: What? Smell mop? Smell mop, who?

Me: *COMPLETELY LOSING MIND. He just said poo, ohmagah, DYING*

Him: Glad to see you're feeling better.

...It's the little things. And I should mention, for posterity: As much griping as I do about The Boy's mom, she is a wonderful woman. She's come through some serious shit in her life, and deserves a lot of respect. We just... we're going to butt heads. I'm up for that, and I'm sure she is, too. So here's to a future full of biting my tongue and sucking it up. Hopefully, it's also a future full of poo jokes. That would be fun, too.

Miniscule. Tiny. Obsolete. Subatomic.

My sister is throwing me a baby shower. She's making the invitations individually, by hand, and doing everything from half way across the country. She contacted The Boy's mother to get addresses for close family, letting her know that there was a limited amount of space at whatever venue she's found for the day, and that since the invitations are hand made, there is a limit on how many can be done by the time she wants to send them out... The Boy's mother came back with a huge list of people. She was told again to pare it down, and answered with, "Well, maybe I'll just invite A FEW of my friends." ... Her friends? People I've never met? To my shower? Is this what people do..? Especially when told "List needs to remain small and intimate." Uh... Okay. But... Um. No.

So. The Boy called his mother to tell her to keep it simple. Close family, that's it. She said she doesn't want any one's feelings to get hurt, she wants to invite her friends, and he told her that no one wants anyone to be left out, but there's a limit. She then told him that she didn't see why she couldn't invite two of his ex girlfriends mothers.

Wait. What?

This is where I kind of tuned out. I mean, not intentionally. It felt like someone stuffed cotton in my ears. She wants to invite the Ghosts of Relationship Past to the baby shower that's being thrown for his current girlfriend..? In celebration of the baby they're having together? What. The. FUCK. I seriously felt like I was going into shock. He must've keyed in on the expression on my face, because he said, "Well, I told her no." I said, "Really? She really wants to invite your exes' mothers?" And he said, "Well, but, I told her no."

...somehow, that isn't getting through the haze right now. Somehow, all I can think is, "Really? His ex girlfriends mothers?" SOMEHOW, the fact that she was told NO isn't the FUCKING POINT.

I know that I'm not part of this equation to her. I know I'm just the weird, artsy girl that thinks she's too good for disposable diapers and formula, that's going to turn her first grandchild into a bookish softy; the girl that her perfect son accidentally knocked up, the poor boy. I know that. But really..? The fact that him saying no wasn't enough, that he had to explain to her why it wasn't a good idea for his ex girlfriends MOTHERS (who she doesn't even talk to. They aren't besties or anything, she doesn't even have regular contact with these people,) to come to MY SHOWER, and that she sort of fucking fought with him (!) about it? That... I just... I... REALLY?

Maybe I'm just hormonal. I don't know. Maybe I really have been an orphan for long enough that I've forgotten how families work, how they step over lines and boundaries and whatever. But I'm pretty sure this wouldn't sting half so bad if I had a mother, too... But I don't, and it does, and I hate it. I don't want the mothers of random strangers invited to my baby shower. I especially don't want the mothers of my boyfriend's ex girlfriends, who are also strangers, invited to my baby shower.

And you know the kicker? Apparently, that makes me silly. It's just silly of me. I'm being silly, she says. Silly to only want friends and family there. Silly to not let this be about her and what she wants. I'm not the only one having a baby. (WHAT?! I mean, I know it takes a village but WHAT!?)

Well fuck that. I want to go to bed. I want to go to sleep. There's a difference between someone knowing they don't matter, knowing they're just hardly being tolerated, and having it throw in in their face that you don't give a shit about them or their feelings.

I'm not sure I've ever felt so very small.