The Truth :-)

Rachel wins – 2 & 5 are the Truths!

1. My first pet was a boa constrictor.
Lie – I always wanted one, though. I think they are beautiful; they are not venomous, and you only have to feed them once a week.

2. As a young adult, I used to regularly drive a motorcycle (Honda XL 125) across a river (during dry season).
True! – One of my proudest accomplishments 🙂 This was actually in Bolivia during my volunteer days.

3. We briefly had a monkey as a pet, until it was killed by army ants.
Lie – or, rather, half-true: we did have a pet monkey, but it died of a cold/flu/respiratory illness. We used to feed it fruit, grasshoppers, and cockroaches. A family I babysat for had a monkey as a pet, too, and while I was babysitting army ants came through the yard and so we had to bring the monkey indoors so the ants wouldn’t kill it. They are pretty voracious.

4. One time my sister was swimming in the lake near our house and a piranha bit off part of her little toe. The next day, a boy we went to school with was fishing and caught a piranha. When he gutted it, he found the missing piece of her toe inside!
Lie – or, again, half-true: this happened not to my sister, but to a girl who went to our school some years before we did. And the boy who caught the fish was her brother.

5. As kids, we always went barefoot everywhere, including to school and to church. I even learned to drive a motorcycle barefoot.

100% true.

6. I learned to speak Quechua before either Spanish or English.

Lie – I learned Spanish and English simultaneously, although my first words were mostly in Spanish. I grew up hearing Quechua spoken all around me, but my playmates all spoke either Spanish or English, so I didn’t learn Quechua until I studied it as an adult. Then it came quite easily to me.

7. One time in the 1990s when shopping with a group of friends in town, gunfire opened up on the street (terrorist-related activity) and we had to hide in the back of a truck until it died down.

Lie – but it did happen to some of my friends.

8. For several years when I was in elementary school, my mom cooked all our meals over an open fire. Yep, just like you see on “Survivor.”

Lie – but our neighbors (in one place we lived) did. We had a two-burner camp stove.

6 lies and 2 truths

I grew up in the jungles of Peru, so have fun sorting out lies from truths!

1. My first pet was a boa constrictor.

2. As a young adult, I used to regularly drive a motorcycle (Honda XL 125) across a river (during dry season).

3. We briefly had a monkey as a pet, until it was killed by army ants.

4. One time my sister was swimming in the lake near our house and a piranha bit off part of her little toe. The next day, a boy we went to school with was fishing and caught a piranha. When he gutted it, he found the missing piece of her toe inside!

5. As kids, we always went barefoot everywhere, including to school and to church. I even learned to drive a motorcycle barefoot.

6. I learned to speak Quechua before either Spanish or English.

7. One time in the 1990s when shopping with a group of friends in town, gunfire opened up on the street (terrorist-related activity) and we had to hide in the back of a truck until it died down.

8. For several years when I was in elementary school, my mom cooked all our meals over an open fire. Yep, just like you see on “Survivor.”

He he he.

I did it!

To celebrate V-day (and V-week) I broke down and bought a sweet little onesie with the university logo on it. I’ve had my eye on it for nearly a year.

Stirrup Queens

She leaned over and said, “I hope this isn’t a terribly rude question, but are you pregnant?” I hadn’t brought it up earlier, because my “laydar” was ringing, and we’d only just met, but I guess I’m past the point where I can suck in my gut and hope I look like I just had a big meal. The next morning she said “we would love to have kids, it just hasn’t–.” I tried to say the right thing but there isn’t really a right thing to say. “I know, it’s hard… it took us three years to get this far.”

I wanted to say so much more. But that was it.

Don’t Scare Me Like That…

All is well. But I had a heck of a scare this morning. When I got to my office, I went to the bathroom, where I absent-mindedly checked the TP (as always) after wiping. And saw blood. I stared at it in terrified incomprehension. My first thought was, do I have a cut or lesion down there? Because it was a bright red smear. And then I remembered that I had used the same TP to blow my nose (BEFORE I peed!). It was just a winter-weather nasal-dryness little blot of nose-blood.

Damn, woman. Don’t do that to yourself.

Thought-Provoking

Tonight a friend and I went to see “the Business of Being Born,” which was a lot of food for thought. I’m still digesting.

Anyway, I saw a number of women there from my prenatal yoga class, including the one who said she’s still TTC. Somehow the fact that she was there with her female partner put her participation in this yoga class in a different perspective. I hope I get a chance to talk with her soon.

Alone in a Crowd

At the prenatal yoga class I’m going to, we start out by saying our names and due dates (we always have the option to “pass”). Today, one woman said her name, and then added, “we’re still trying to get pregnant.”

I was floored by her courage in being there. I couldn’t have done it. I couldn’t have gone to a yoga class where part of the instructor’s mantra is “open your awareness to the baby within,” where everyone is surreptitiously sizing up one another’s bumps, or standing around after class comparing symptoms. No way.

I wanted to go talk to her but she vanished pretty quick. We did make eye contact while putting away our mats, and I smiled, but she slipped away. I just don’t want her to feel alone is all.

Infertile-PG musings

I was just starting to feel all comfortable, maybe even complacent, with my current condition. I’ve been feeling better than great – good energy, good appetite, hit my stride for the semester – I was even starting to get a little ho-hum about the regularity of Critter’s kicking.

And then Critter got kind of quiet. Last night at around 8, which is usually prime-time for movement, I noticed along period where I felt nothing at all. So I did a kick count, and got 10 kicks in 90 minutes. But… they felt kind of feeble. So all through the night, whenever I’d wake up to go to the bathroom or eat a bite of banana, I would wait for it… and wait for it… and sometimes I’d fall asleep before I felt it.

This morning was more of the same, and I started getting really anxious. So I downed a cup of hot chocolate and at a muffin; half an hour later, I called the nurse. Normally I hate to feel like I’m being a nuisance, but I talked with my office mate and she encouraged me to call.

The nurse said that at 23 weeks, Critter is still small enough that kick counts are really not very accurate. If Critter has turned facing backwards, then likely I won’t feel much of anything at all. She said not to worry, unless I felt nothing at all for 6-8 hours straight. Well, that hasn’t happened yet – so I felt a lot better. I did actually notice, last night, an oddly transversal sensation, that made me wonder whether baby was turning around or shifting position in a big way. So her explanation made sense.

And then the hot chocolate kicked in and someone started dancing on my bladder again…

So right now my head feels like it’s full of cotton, thanks to the subsequent crash post sugar buzz… but that’s ok. I’ll take it.

The Potluck

A week ago today I attended a department potluck, where I reflected on how differently I would have experienced the event if a) I had never experienced infertility, or b) I wasn’t currently knocked up.

One of my profs is expecting twins in May.

Someone asked me if I’d seen “The Waitress” and commented on a line from the movie, to the effect that “you can’t be ‘a little pregnant.'” (I would think that anthropologists, of all people, especially in the 21st century, would know better than to make propositional statements that reflect absolute dichotomies.)

There was a charming 2-year-old present who greeted the 13-year-old girls with a floppy-handed wave and the words, “Hi babies!”

I felt a now-familiar admixture of melancholy and contentment in response to all these things. I don’t envy my professor’s pregnancy, now, but I know how hard it would have been to be around her if things hadn’t turned out the way they did for me last fall. I know from being a part of this online community how false the statement from the movie is. And the toddler charmed me rather than broke my heart, although I couldn’t help but think that had I conceived when I wanted to, I’d have a child that age already.

Potluck. You never know what you’re going to end up with.

Dream Diary

This morning I woke up at 5:30 a.m. from a horrifying dream, perhaps because T. is away for a few nights and I felt unprotected. Maybe I won’t go into all the details (they are, well, nightmarish) … but it started out with Halle Berry’s pregnancy but ended up being about me. In the dream, I voluntarily submitted to an unanesthetized abortion, only it was performed on my heart.

Thankfully, when I woke up the baby was kicking up a storm. When I couldn’t get back to sleep, I finally said “ok baby, you’re awake, I’m awake, let’s have some music” and played my guitar for awhile. The dream faded, and eventually I fell asleep in the warm cocoon of my bed while the snow and freezing rain fell outside.