more about the blob

According to all the books, the blob is now about 12cm long and covered in hair. I am obviously incubating a small guinea-pig and all this nonsense about an impending man-child is clearly a load of tosh.

What is also a load of tosh is the 'second trimester glow'. So far, while it's a definite improvement over the first, I'm still absolutely laid-out exhausted all the time and am beginning to be out of balance and unwieldy. Also moody, touchy and argumentative. And unwilling to cook, clean or pluck my eyebrows, all of which I have forced myself to do this weekend.

Some days I spend the whole day and don't even think about being pregnant. Most days it's just a fact of life, like having a backache... which I do... all the time...

What would really work for me would be a gallon of coffee or a strong martini. Without the fun bits removed...

Time going down

I don’t know about time. At the moment it’s doing it’s thing very quickly, you know, the thing where it passes in a fog leaving footprints on your skin. And in my head, at the moment, time is teeming; one day comes into the next without asking and again until all the days of the week are knocking around in the confines of my skull, each like the other, messing up the carpets, kicking things out of place and I can’t remember what belongs where anymore.

It’s like the end of the world, nothing matters, anything could happen, nothing is real, meaning is shifted, glass turns to butter.

And things, events and things, they find their way into this bog of time and stick there, clustering together in my weeks, cluttering up my evenings, covering my days until there’s no space left. They force time into order, the clickety clock of things lining up to be done, alarms, deadlines, telephones, friends, traffic, meetings, dinners, lists of lists and there’s time treading all over me again.

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Notes from Inside My Head

I've had my first belly pat today.

Highly unrecommended.

I'd write more but I'm singularly un-inspired. I seem to be surrounded by other pregnant women and I'd like to have a conversation that doesn't circle around the contents of my womb or the size of my new comedy boobs.

blah

The boy pod

I am a boy pod. We have seen a penis on the scanner. Or rather, the doctor circled a tiny blob on the screen which may or may not have been a penis. Both the doctors nodded wisely. I thought I saw it. D didn't see a thing but then he pays as much attention with his eyes as he does with his ears - a great amount and in huge detail if his brain processes something as 'useful', none if it doesn't.

I imagine the inside of D's head as one big organised filing cabinet full of important stuff and one equally big shredder full of all the rest. He accesses the shredder as if it were a secondary filing system and comes up with random, unrelated items when searching in there for something he was told several times a few days ago.

I am incubating his son. I cannot begin to imagine the rest of my life.

Note 3 - to the blob again

More diary excerpts:

Week 11: This has been another interim week – I still can’t tell people and am desperate to tell my parents. January is over and my excuse of having a month of de-tox has worn out – now my friends will view my continued abstinence and healthy life-style as distinct symptoms of pregnancy, it will be hard to disguise it.

Week 12: this is the last week of the secret phase of the pregnancy – nearly, at any rate. Within 2 weeks we will know if this is going to work and will be able to tell everyone, or we will know that things have gone wrong and we are back to the start. I can see it would get progressively harder and harder to keep losing pregnancies. You spend all this time with big changes in the body, encouraging scan photographs and hopes, you get a deadline and you begin, even if subconsciously, to plan your life around this date. When things go wrong, all sorts of dates become anniversaries – the midwives appointment, the 20 week scan, the telling people – all those things become ghosts, they leap out of the calendar and go ‘boo’ and things become a little more grey. We had the scan and told my family this week before the results came through because the doctors were so positive.

Week 14: It's a boy.

Note 2 - to the blob

I wrote this when I was 6 week pregnant. I'll put in a few more of these randomly.

All the time now I catch myself imagining what you will think about us as we are now – about the apartment which you probably won’t remember, about our car, the cat, our clothes, the furniture. Thinking back to my own childhood, it all seems so remote, so dated and I know that’s what this will all seem like to you – another time, the time before you were born.

When the dinosaurs roamed free.

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Note 1

This is a series of relatively random blurts from the inside of my head. The inside of my head is rather like the inside of my bag... full of completely unrelated things, likely to spill anything out into the public domain at a moment's notice, mostly dark with obscure corners harbouring forgotten remnants and organised only by force.

It doesn't help that at the moment I am pregnant and therefore the jungle in my head is particularly dense and eliptical. I am too old to be pregnant. My body is protesting. My mind would protest if only it could organise itself to print up the signs and set picket lines. My eyes are beginning to see things that are not there and the things that are there sometimes shift as though reality was printed on silk and someone is breathing behind it.

This is a test.

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