Category: cats

Fatty Post #1

If you’ve heard the rumors and wondered whether they were true, the answer is yes. I’m going to have a baby at the end of next February or the beginning of March. That leaves a lot of people finger-counting, so I’ll go ahead and give you this: I’m eight weeks and change today, which means my baby is the size of a kidney bean. Gross.

I’ve been told I ought to keep a pregnancy diary so I don’t forget the little things about this miracle. (I don’t deserve to be as sarcastic as I am when I say miracle because of how long Josh and I have been trying to get pregnant. And maybe I’m not as sarcastic as I think.)

Here, in order, are the things I don’t want to forget:

1. More than a week before I took the pregnancy test, I got incredibly dizzy and short of breath while reading a friend’s story. I went to lie down and after a few minutes, and my kitten Gypsy jumped onto the bed to see what was up. She climbed onto my stomach, stopped and smelled the place just below my belly button, then left seeming to have satisfied her curiosity. About 30 minutes later, Abraham, Josh’s kitten and Gypsy’s brother, did the exact same thing.

2. My boobs are huge and, for a little while, my waist was small. That was fun, and you can bet I wasn’t the only one to appreciate that change.

3. I owe dropping about 10 lbs to morning sickness so far. Nature takes over where willpower fails. Lucky for me (or unlucky?), I’m still barfing, though it seems to take a day or a few hours off now and then. The weird thing is that I didn’t start getting sick until about 3 days after I found out I was pregnant.

4. There’s this spot where my stomach has started to stay poking out even when I suck it in. It’s right under my belly button. This, I assume, is where I’m growing my kidney bean. Josh sometimes pushes down on the bottom of my navel and says that it’s solid.

5. We’re calling the baby Enis right now, since that was the name we had picked out a long time ago for our mutant child.

6. Sheila, Josh’s sister, has announced that our baby is a girl. I’m hoping for a boy, but I guess I’ll be happy either way.

And that’s it for now. Maybe in 50 years, when this blog is cross-referenced with my old facebook account and all the fake names I’ve used, and Enis is googling himself, he’ll read why I didn’t really enjoy the first few weeks of knowing I was pregnant. Other than the knowing part that is. I do enjoy that.

A Short Story I Wrote Instead of Cooking Anything

The Woman Alone

I’m a pretty boring person when I’m alone. I do a little karate around the apartment, sing, talk to my cats, and read. If there’s a TV, I watch TV. When my husband dies—whether I’m old or young—I’ll just go on being boring and alone. I imagine that, if I’m still here, I’ll learn to use his saws and drills. I’ll learn to make furniture and continue his business and become self-sufficient. I’ll learn to drive in this city without getting distracted. Or maybe I’ll take a job at my school, work forty-hour weeks, and pray to God that I can pay the rent. I don’t think I would pick his dirty clothes up off the floor or delete his woodworking stuff from the computer.

How would time pass when it was just me? Slowly, probably, like a fingernail dragged across a bloody scrape. Boring and painful. Someone waiting at a stoplight that won’t turn green. I’ll have to turn the television on for noise.

Of course, if I was alone here and died the kittens would probably start eating me before anyone wondered what the smell was.

Maybe then they’d fly me home and bury me in the graveyard behind my parents’ house. Or maybe in the cemetery where Granny’s buried. But if my husband is already dead, he will have been buried in a graveyard back home, too. Most likely, they’ll bury me with him. And that’s what I would prefer. Not because I believe that means we’ll be together in the afterlife, but for the symbolism. There in the mud our bodies decompose while our souls sing “Glory to God” in Heaven.

It’s not such a bad way to spend eternity.