less offensive, you can read this

So I'm quite sure I didn't win any new fans with that last post, and maybe a few readers dropped my feed, but I'm glad I got it out there. That was my first trimester. It was pretty rough going for a couple months on the inside of my head.

I want to thank you for the amazing emails that some of you sent. I was surprised that I would get any nice comments at the bottom of the post but I was doubly surprised with the support I found in my inbox. There is a reason people send emails instead of comment and I will respect that level of confidentiality but I'll say here that I was surprised how normal my feelings were and I'm strangely glad that I'm not the only one in the world to feel that way. (Hooray! You suck too! See you in hell, bitch!) I shared with a few emailers that writing this post made me realize that no matter what I do and when I do it I'll go to bed at the end of the day feeling like a miserable failure. I slept well last night despite that fact.

I got to feeling better about things.
About 12 weeks along Dave and I were, um, playing checkers, and I started to bleed. Really really bad. Giant chunks of chunky stuff was everywhere. In the bedroom. Down the hall. In the bathroom. We didn't know what to do, where to go, the emergency line at the hospital just advised me to lie down and wait until the ultrasound department could get me in. The nurse said to get to an ER if I lose so much blood I get dizzy but unfortunately nothing much could be done. I understood this, and I wanted as little intervention as possible so I went to bed. I didn't sleep. I wanted that baby more than anything in the world. I bargained with my God, your God, his God, her God, the two-armed God, the multi-armed God, a God, any God, sun Gods, cow Gods, the Gods, all of whom were kinda at the top of my shitlist for letting me get this way in the first place. I didn't believe they were listening, but I tried. This is what I deserved, I thought, for being such a jerk about everything. A dead baby, spread out all over the upstairs of my house. That would teach me, said the universe.

The ultrasound showed a perfectly happy swimmy creature bouncing around in my belly. The u/s tech laughed, and said she had never seen such an active little thing, and called one of the other techs over to see it pushing off the wall and flipping backwards a couple times around to the other side over and over and over again. My mom flew in to be there, and told me that the same exact thing happened to her with my brother, without the luxury of an ultrasound to confirm life. I would lose my mind. Three cheers for science.

The second trimester was a lot different than the first. Although not belly-baring proud, I began to tell people. I accepted congratulations as exactly that, and not as patronizing attempts to make me feel better about things. I decided to stop trying to be the best worker from 9-5 and the best coolkid from 5-9 and focused on being the best mom I could be. Because I'm highly ridiculous, I was already on a high protein no junk no caffeine vitamin and mineral rich diet and had a solid exercise plan in place so I made sure to continue that. If something was going to go wrong, it certainly wasn't going to be my fault. I set out to meet other pregnant girls so I could build a nice healthy support system. I needed peers, a cohort, and little baby buddies for the boy when he was born. I built a new little network of colleagues for myself. Ones dedicated to being good moms and good friends. I found a good set of girls just like me, and a good set of girls totally different from me and we all got through together because we had a pretty solid and well thought out mission statement.

And anyone in public or social service knows the importance of a solid and well thought out mission statement.