Someday...

Someday, I will go to bed and fall asleep. Someday, I won't have a pit of anxiety in my solar plexus. Someday, my head hitting the pillow will NOT be a signal to my brain to start scrolling uncontrollably through all the horrible scenarios that could befall my family. Someday, I will feel peace. I will feel, in the night, the faith that carries me through the day. I will feel happy and the happy images in my mind will float me into a sleep that will last until morning. And I will enjoy the hell out of that day.

Ups and Downs

Up: My "cousin" J finally had her baby yesterday (more than a week overdue, God love her), which is such a joyful thing. I'm so excited for her to experience motherhood and to see her flourish at it.

Down: If the pregnancy I lost had made it, based on when I gave birth to B, I probably would've had the baby sometime around today, give or take. And even though I'm pregnant again now, I can't help but reflect on that baby, and what he or she would've been like, and why he or she couldn't stay.

Up: As if sensing this, the baby I'm carrying now (a girl, btw), has really picked it up in the movement department this week. She's kind of a maniac in there, frankly. I'm actually able to feel her if I put my hand on my belly. Awesome AND reassuring.

Down: Feeling pretty stressed out this week. Not sleeping well AT ALL, for some reason. BLAH.

I would say the ups outweigh the downs pretty handily, so that's something.

Paucity of Civility

I was just speaking with my brother, who is very conservative, about a conversation he had with someone who works in politics, and it got me thinking.

The areas where we agree are things like this. George HW Bush was an underrated and unfairly maligned president. Bill Clinton was exceedingly popular and good at uniting the two sides of the aisle (even if what he was uniting them in was sometimes embarrassment at his excessive libido...but I digress). We need leaders with the ability to be centrists.

My biggest disappointment with the Obama administration, for whom I voted with the utmost hope and excitement, based on the "Change" mantra, is that...not much has changed. And President Obama seems largely unable and unwilling to strike a centrist note. He's intent on blaming Wall Street (which includes two of my brothers and one of my sisters in law) for the vast majority of the country's ills, which is...misguided at best. Meanwhile, we have the GOP and the Tea Partiers, launching more and more frequent attacks on things like Women's Health.

What happened to presidents like Reagan and Bush I, who went their entire presidencies without feeling the need to re-address Roe v. Wade, since, you know, the Supreme Court ruled on that one in 1972? What happened to presidents like Clinton, who found a way to work WITH Wall Street, to, what I think we can all agree, were favorable results (You guys, remember the late 90's? Yea, those were awesome.).

The two major parties keep diverging further and further from the center. And because things have been crappy for three plus years now, people cling to that passion in hopes of achieving some cataclysmic change. And in the course of this panic, we've all forgotten that things were better when people could and did work together. Is it too much to ask for a candidate who has charisma AND moderate views? These days, it seems so.

Sequel

When I was pregnant with B, I, like many first time preggies, constantly got the question, "Is this your first?" and when I answered yes, SO many people said things along the lines of, "Enjoy it, because it will never be this enjoyable again." And that kind of drove me nuts. I mean, I GET that the first time is sort of magical and mysterious, and I GET that if you don't have a child to run around after, you have more time to pamper your pregnant self (not that I had TONS of time to do that, with my insane job and even more insane commute, but I had SOME, at least), etc, etc. But it still sort of drove me nuts.

And now I think I probably have more perspective on it, since I am, in fact, pregnant with one of those subsequent children I didn't want to get the short end of the stick. And in some ways, all those people were right. Pregnancy isn't quite as mysterious as it was last time, although this pregnancy has found its own ways to surprise and mystify me in good ways and not so good ways. And I am flat out exhausted, even more than I was last time. Last time, even though I was working and unbelievably stressed out as a result of the dysfunction that surrounded me, I DID nap a lot - often to AND from work (E drove), in the evenings, and most definitely on weekends. And not that I don't nap now - I do, sometimes unintentionally (like today, when I sat down on the sofa and promptly PASSED OUT for half an hour), but it's harder to come by.

But at the same time, there are ways in which I'm...I don't want to say "more excited," because that seems like it would be mean to B, but I do think anyone reading this knows how unprepared I was for that pregnancy, so as a result, it's a nice feeling to have gotten pregnant truly on purpose. I'm not quite as terrified as I was last time, which is nice.

Additionally, it's unbelievably nice not to be working in a job where, spoken or unspoken, my pregnancy was a liability. It's nice not to have that external stress adding to my already often stressy and anxious nature. It's nice that, on days when I feel sick or especially tired, I can make adjustments for that (notwithstanding earlier today, when I was absolutely exhausted, but B was SO fired up to get outside and play street hockey that I couldn't deny him).

So, I don't know that I could say absolutely that this time is less "special" or whatever than last time was. Sure, it's not my first pregnancy, but it's my first time being pregnant with THIS baby, so that's special, right?

Lucky

Sunday is E's birthday, so this seemed as good a time as any to sing his praises a little bit.

I know I've addressed here previously that I feel blessed to have found him, and how he taught me what love should really be between a husband and wife. And that is all still true. I am a bit of a handful - I'm neurotic and dramatic and sometimes overly sensitive and fragile. And he somehow navigates all of this with skill and grace and professes to love me unconditionally even through my most epic of meltdowns. He makes me feel loved, cherished, safe, beautiful, sexy, brilliant and hilarious - all things I often doubt about myself until he reassures me that at least one person thinks they are all true.

The other night, he came home and I wasn't feeling well, so he made dinner for Benj and for us, and then folded the laundry I'd done that day but hadn't had the energy to fold. All of this after a long and stressful day at work. It's small gestures like that that make me feel unbelievably lucky. He doesn't come home and say, "Where's my dinner?" Or, "Why is the house such a mess?"(Which, sometimes, it is, especially lately when my energy level has not quite been sufficient to keep up with B's mess-making abilities.) He knows instinctively when I need a break, and takes charge with B.

Sunday will be seven years since the luckiest day of my life - the day I met my E.

Trying to Be Coherent

http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2011/02/georgia-wingnut-gop-rep-wants-police-to.html

I saw this via twitter a little while ago, and I've been feeling sick and fighting off tears ever since. I realize this guy is a wing nut and I probably shouldn't even take him seriously, but I just can't ignore the horribly misogynistic overtones of this bill.

I understand that a lot of people are anti-choice. I even understand why. I do. Like I said yesterday, I think it's important for abortion to be legal, but I hardly expect other people to agree with that stance on an issue that is so fraught with emotions. And I understand that this type of wing nut views Roe v. Wade as too difficult to try to overturn, and so the alternative is to create bills like this one.

What makes me want to cry about this bill is the thought of someone having come to me after my miscarriage, an event you all know devastated me emotionally, to "investigate" it, to ensure it was "spontaneous." The bit about asking family members what caused the miscarriage especially sickens me. I can imagine someone going to E and asking him, "What did your wife do to cause this?" I mean...he would've landed himself in jail for punching a cop if he'd been asked that. And furthermore, as I've documented here, no one knows what caused my miscarriage. So, does that mean that this guy thinks I would be under suspicion of murdering my embryo? Chilling, isn't it?

Disgust

For those of you who don't want to read another of my politically-adjacent rants, well, stop reading now. For those who'd be shocked or offended to learn that I'm pro-choice, do the same.

So, yea, I'm pro-choice. That's right. I'm a pregnant mother who's had a miscarriage that devastated me, and I'm still pro-choice. Would I ever have an abortion? I honestly cannot imagine the scenario in which I would. But I think it's important for it to be legal, for so many varied reasons that I probably wouldn't have time to touch on all of them in this space. I am lucky enough never to have had to face the decision of whether to have one. I've had friends and loved ones who have, and that implication that pro-lifers often make that women make that decision blithely offends me, because I do not know one person who ever made that decision lightly. I know people who still mourn the decision, years later. I know people who know it was the right decision for them at the time, but who still wistfully wonder about the road not taken. But I don't know anyone who ever said, "Eh...easier to just end it." Maybe some MEN think that way, but...they're not the ones with the embryo growing inside them, now are they?

I also have some pretty strong feelings about rape. Shocking, I'm sure. As a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother of a son, I feel very, very, very strongly that a woman should NEVER falsely accuse a man of rape. There is absolutely no justification for that. It's disgusting and it sets back the cause of rape prevention every single time someone does it. That said, I, and all the women I know, and God willing the men too, know what rape is. And what it's not. Date rape? Is rape. No means no, like we've all been taught. There is no need to redefine the word rape, thank you very much Congressional Republicans. And to you men in Congress who are interested in redefining rape, consider this. If someone sodomized you against your will, would you want to quibble over wording? Or would you just want that person to be punished? Yea. I thought so.

When I lived in Georgia, my insurance company, in their infinite wisdom, decided they were more capable of making decisions about my sex life than I was. As a result, the birth control pills I had been on for four years (to treat severe menstrual cramps, not actually to prevent pregnancy since I was notoriously chaste at the time), became unavailable to me. If I wanted them, I had to go to Planned Parenthood to get them. Which begs the question - aren't birth control pills cheaper, and don't they require fewer taxpayer dollars, than the CHILDREN who would need support from the government if women can't get birth control? I realize I'm not addressing the moral argument here. And that's because I believe birth control is responsible, not sinful.

The reason I've found myself straying from the Democratic party of late is that I don't think government is responsible for everything. As much as I hate to agree with Sarah Palin, I don't think it's any of Michelle Obama's business whether I breastfeed my baby or not (I will, because I want to, but it's still none of anyone else's business). But by the same token, my reproductive health is also none of your business. Taking federal funding away from Planned Parenthood because abortion offends you is ignorant and short-sighted. There are plenty of organizations out there that get federal funding, and PP is one that actually saves this country money in the long run.