funny ha ha or funny peculiar

You might be surprised by this, but I'm going to a comedy show this evening.  Yes, even though I normally detest staged comedy (exception might be made for Billy Connolly), am terrified of the potential for P to heckle (he thinks he's so clever, sigh) and have not, well, been in the mood for funny business of late,* I saw a sign for a show that P would like and purchased tickets out of the blue.  I wanted to do something nice for him.  He's been lovely despite the wasting away of our mutual social life -- do you know, I think he might actually like my company and is missing nights out together? Strange as it may seem -- that I thought he would both greatly enjoy a show and recognise it for the clear sacrifice it'll be on my part.  Nothing like enjoying a side of martyrdom with your gesture of goodwill.

On Thursday I have a function for work.  On Saturday a high tea for a hen, which I think will only last a couple of hours.  I think those events will probably drain me of all the social camaraderie I can muster this week, aside from the usual pleasantries in the office.  I'm such a drag at the moment. 

Over the weekend, you could generally find me pottering around the house, providing pleasant company for the cats but very few others.  Being bigger than normal in hot weather is no joke.  I was completely cranky by the end of Friday and Saturday evenings, as the evening humidity rose.  Oh, and I am never going to the hairdresser pregnant in hot weather ever again.  It was some twisted torture sitting under a cape with a hairdryer being pointed at my scalp and having to make pleasant conversation. 

I suspect it's at least half unwillingness to unleash my beastly self on others that is causing my social reluctance at the moment.  Poor old P, wish him luck this evening...

*This goes exactly as far as you think it does.  Well, I have been feeling better pregnancy-wise and I think under different circumstances this might actually be an, ahem, amorous period of my existence, the circumstances remain and make spontaneous one-on-one time somewhat more difficult than usual.

23 weeks

Things I have noted about my pregnancy, recently:

• I never felt 'flutterings'.  I went straight from believing I had those weird intestinal gas pops (you know, where there's trapped gas and you get a wee explosion in your intestines, cf fizzing) to thinking a week or so later, hey, that must be a baby.
• The movement still isn't particularly regular.  At least, I don't register it as particularly regular.  The pops are still there, as is pushing and what must be kicking.  Very occasionally I feel something that may be wriggling.   
• Pregnancy yoga is the business, still.  Even though I burst into tears during quiet time once.  I cannot believe I am voluntarily going to a class twice a week where I 'breathe my baby' and have to think about my terrible posture.  I love it. 
• I had to wear one of P's t-shirts to yoga this week.  My gym pants keep rolling over at the top because they don't fit under the bump. 
• Knocker growth is out of control. I am seriously concerned that Lefty is going to far, far outstrip Righty, which, given Righty's still the size of a football (or so it seems), is a Very Bad Thing.
• I'm a bit slower than I was previously.  I get a bit huffy heading up the first hill in the morning. 
• Everything is stretchy.  My tummy, the ligaments in my pelvis - they're stretching all the time. 
• At night, it's now really uncomfortable if I end up lying partly on my stomach or back.  I wake up quite a bit, but am peeing slightly less frequently than previously.
• I need to pare back the meal size and eat earlier because heartburn blows. 
• I really need to get organised on the paperwork for parental leave.
• I really need to get organised to think about daycare (can you fucking believe it, over a year out from when I'll need it.  Calm down Auckland parents!) 
• I really, really want to know who is in there.  I don't usually let people I don't know inside me.  But it's not creeping me out - rather, I'm curious and feel a kind of wee secret smile come across my face when I think about it. 
• Tailbone is still giving me grief, but then, I've not done anything to fix it recently either.
• Wore a horrible, sacklike dress to the wedding last weekend having paid more than I should for it.  Have another wedding in two or three weeks and really want a new one...but cheap heart tells me to recycle the first to make it remotely worth the price.  Will wear my stacked heels come hell or high water.
• P thinks he felt the baby from the outside, when we were away on holiday.  I'm not sure he did because when he thought he felt it, I didn't notice anything.  I'm giving it to him though. 
• I still have an innie tummy button. 
• I really like Fresh'n'Fruity custard and rhubarb yoghurt. 
• Good apples are very satisfying.
• I am ordering a fresh Tank C (orange, pineapple and ginger) juice almost every morning, asking them to put apple in it.  I can tell when they get the proportions wrong.  I am going to bankrupt myself over juice on the way to work.   
• I find myself holding the bump all.the.time. 

a trip booked before all of this

I spent four days in Golden Bay this weekend.  Think of a map of the world.  Then think of the small collection of islands in the bottom right hand corner of the globe, to the bottom right of Australia.  That's NZ.  Of the two largest islands in the cluster, think of the southernmost one.  See how at the top it curves away in an odd spit of land known as Farewell Spit?  Golden Bay is beneath the Spit, sandwiched between two national parks, and is pretty remote, as far as places on earth go.  It is inhabited by dairy farmers, hippies and transient German tourists, so far as I can tell.  It's pretty much my favourite.

We went for a wedding and it was lovely, despite torrential rain that ruined the marquee two nights before and saturated the grass and guests on the day of.  We crammed into the local hall and celebrated loudly the illegal marriage of two old and dear friends (illegal only in the sense that they're doing the licence thing later and had an unregistered celebrant, not illegal in terms of consanguinity or anything scandalous, should you be concerned).  While they don't live in Golden Bay, they are civil servants who would love to be hippies making goat cheese off the land.  We gifted them chooks and a coop for their backyard as their wedding present.  They're chuffed. 

We stayed in a bach beside the water with fourteen-ish old friends from scattered corners.  We laughed, we reminisced, we hugged, we swam, we ate together. 

The sun came out the day following the wedding.  We celebrated by a taking trips to the clearest, cleanest springs I have ever seen and to a remote, windswept beach on the Abel Tasman coast where seal pups were playing in a rockpool.  It was magical.  Te Waikoropupu Springs and Wharariki Beach, respectively, should you ever find yourselves in that neck of the woods.  The springs are wai tapu or sacred water, so you can't touch or drink the water, but nothing I have ever seen has made me so thirsty in my life.  And the seal pups! Well, I have no words for the seal pups except for horrific things like ADORABLE.

It was restorative.  I used to have family living in that neck of the woods, so I called Dad every day for recommendations and to discuss the lay of the land, the size of the ice-creams.  It was a lovely way of reminiscing about childhood trips spent swimming in the river, panning for gold and running over the dunes.  It was precious.

On the way home, we stopped in Nelson for lunch with Dad's two surviving sisters, his brother and their spouses.  Dad is the youngest by a reasonable stretch and it is tough to see them grapple with the mortality of their naughty, independent wee brother.  We focussed instead on my baby and the next generations of grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.  It was lovely to see them. 

We came home last night to a plastered master bedroom, two happy kitties and a boat load of washing, following an unfortunate incident in P's bag with a bottle of red wine.  I really, really needed that trip.  I needed the laughter and the happiness of a wonderful life event and the natural beauty and the escape from the everyday and the time with family and the sleep, oh god, did I need the sleep. 

I am really a lucky girl, I think. 

progress

The renovations are actually going quite well, in case you were wondering.  Gib went up in the master bedroom yesterday (hah, master bedroom - in a very wee house, it feels odd to describe anything that way!) and today I believe it'll get a new door and a frame for the wardrobe.  With any luck the gibstopper will have been in too, to get the walls plastered. 

The wardrobe interior and doors are planned and barring a few minor details, should be ordered shortly too.  Assuming all the framing and stopping happens this week, P and I (well, P, I am mostly useless) only need to sand and fill the roof, sand the window and then paint the bejesus out of everything and voila, we should be able to move back in. 

So yes, it's going well.  Mostly because we're paying a professional this time.  We've streamlined to our DIY strengths - we can demolish, insulate and paint.  With me mostly out of action between visits to family and pregnancy, this being P's busiest time of the year at work and the looming baby deadline, we've decided that it makes sense to pay to get the work done quickly.  This does fill my wee nesty heart with horror though, thinking about the unpaid months of parental leave looming on the horizon.  So much so that I'm squirrelling tiny amounts of cash away for a rainy day unbeknownst to P.  So far, I've saved the princely sum of $350 which isn't going to go far but honestly, just the act of dropping $20 in a savings account from time to time relieves the hormone-induced need to be financially savvy.  We're not going to be destitute by losing my income for a while by any means, but I don't know, I'm like a spare change hoarder. 

Bedroom 2 is next in line, but isn't getting a new wardrobe.  We're just going to insulate, re-line, decorate and replace the door on that bad boy, because we still aren't sure where the bathrooms will eventually end up.  The bathroom or rooms may be on the other side of the wall to bedroom 2 and if we decide to have a wee ensuite, the space where a wardrobe might go may need to be a doorway.  We thought about leaving the room entirely alone, but it's not properly insulated and eventually this baby will move in there.  I think it preferable that the baby have a warm dry space to sleep in, I guess. 

(PS Tuesday was a good day, Dad was well enough to go back on chemo.  Wednesday, unfortunately, not so hot, Dad feeling terrible.  Rollercoaster is the cliche, I believe.)

rumination

I spend the day following my return from a visit melancholy and processing, churning over the events of the previous few days.  I lay in Mum and Dad's guest bed last night, stoutly chasing away all thoughts of how bad it must have been for this weekend to count as 'good', but following three hours' transit back to Auckland this morning there's no avoiding it.  The processing is grim.  I'll adjust by tomorrow and be back into summoning optimism and dealing with normality.

I also spend the day before a visit in a similar reflective and concerned mode.  On Friday, not long after posting that last angry/sad missive, I burst into tears during quiet reflection time at the end of my yoga class.  The others were very, very kind, but I was mortified.  I couldn't stop -- the dam had opened and there wasn't a single thing I could do.  I leaked the whole way home behind large sunglasses, sniffling and trying to unobtrusively wipe my face, as much as that's possible as a pedestrian beside a four lane road. 

This was bothersome also because yoga has been the one proactive thing that makes me feel as if I'm doing something to help my baby, myself and my stress levels.  So if it's not achieving that result, what on earth are the alternatives?  P's step-mother was so kind, a week or two ago.  She told me that there was evidence that a pregnant woman's stress levels only affect the unborn baby to the degree that she feels unsafe in her own home or relationship - other things, like grief, don't necessarily trigger concern for the child.  I want to believe that, whether or not it's true, because the belief in turn reduces my stress.  It seems that the inhabitant of my uterus is currently flopping around quietly post-lunch, apparently unperturbed by what's going on upstairs.  God, I hope that's the case.  He or she seems to get a little kicky/punchy at 4am-ish when I've rolled over onto my stomach, but otherwise has seemed very low key, up to now. 

(I've just googled pre-natal maternal stress and come across this doozy.  Oh not to worry, the effects may not last into adulthood, we're not sure yet.)

So I breathe, I focus, I work on my posture.  We will get through this, that's all I know. 

the end of another month of this

I'm going to visit Mum and Dad this weekend and I'm a bit nervous.  Fragile as he was two weeks ago when I saw him last, he's now lost his hair, is battling a burned/cracked/chapped face and is using a walking cane.  If I've said it once, I've said it far too many times: this, from a man who three months ago was digging holes and fixing fences and lugging rocks for landscaping purposes.  It's fucking brutal, is what it is.

My nerves arise out of the unknowns - I don't give a shit what his hair looks like, but I just want him to still be my dad underneath it all, you know? 

These things (hah, cancer, a 'thing' - it's like I can't name it for fear of the consequences) come in batches.  A colleague's father has just had surgery for prostate cancer.  Another's ex-boyfriend has been paralysed from the chest down in a workplace accident this week.  I find myself understanding and empathising properly to some degree for the first time (maybe that's why they're telling me?)

To top it off, I started fucking bleeding again last night.

It wasn't a major - no cramps, finished quickly, I can still feel the baby move (I think - I play a constant game of 'firstborn or gas?').  Still scary to turn around to flush and find your toilet looks like a murder scene at twenty to one in the morning.  Afterwards, I lay still in bed for twenty or so minutes, burning with concentration at my stomach, hands wrapped around it.  I got up again to check progress and things appeared to have eased.  I slept, uneasily. 

The good news, I suppose, is that the suspected UTI wasn't in fact an infection - just a raised bacteria level.  I haven't really reported much good news this pregnancy - here we are: I feel mostly like a human being (albeit a human being with a sore tailbone) and I'm starting to relish having a belly.  I want to feel this baby more often so I can enjoy the feeling of not being alone.  I do enjoy being by myself, but it's nice to know someone is just quietly there with me. 

motivational quotes have never been my thing

Dad's not back on chemo yet; his liver enzymes are now causing concern.  They've knocked back the steroid dose and told him to take care, he's fragile right now. 

Two times I felt rage, warranted or unwarranted, in the last few days:

• Reading an article in the Herald about a patient with the same tumour as Dad, who has survived 20 years and claims it was his unorthodox self-prescribed medication routine that 'cured' his cancer.  I wanted to scream; whether or not it was the acne medication that helped that guy and whether or not Dad starts insomnia pills as a supplement, we still have no fucking idea whether it will work.  It doesn't give me hope, not at all. 
• Quotes pasted by relations on Facebook from a recently deceased public figure implying that if she'd better taken care of herself, rather than looking out for others all the time, she would not have been diagnosed with cancer or may have picked it up earlier.  Hey, it's always possible that her diagnosis was late because of her schedule assisting others.  But if you'd like to make yourself feel better about being a little selfish from time to time, you do not need the words of a dead woman lashing herself for missing her disease while helping others to make you feel better.  And do you genuinely believe that cancer differentiates on some kind of moral basis?  You might, but I certainly don't.

Anger is part of the process, I expect.