theology&geometry

We finally, finally, finally, have a pronoun to use for the Heirloom Tomato Formerly Known as Sweet Potato — he’s a he! That’s correct, ladies and germs. There will be a penis inside of me for the next five months. Jealous? Yuk yuk. Can you believe I am going to be someone’s mother?

Now the hunt for a name begins in earnest. Before, there was a fifty percent chance I wasn’t going to have to worry about a boy name; we had pretty much settled on a girl name. But now there is no avoiding that I am going to have to hunker down and wade through the awful, awful Braedyns and Jaykobs and find our diamond in the rough. I have a handful of names I love dearly but that Ray doesn’t care for and, in fact, insists will get our sweet baby boy beaten up on the playground. And Ray has a handful of names he fancies but that I might name a goldfish before I’d christen a child with them. We will find our middle ground but it might not happen until my water breaks.

During the ultrasound last week, Heirloom Tomato was very modest, and quite lethargic. (I am hoping he was just asleep and not a true couch potato, like his mommy.) He kept his legs together the whole time, so that the tech had to go around and up under him to get a glimpse of the, uh, turtle. Oh, my sweet son, you have no idea the ways in which we are going to creatively invade your privacy throughout your precious life.

There was this one point early on (you can see it in the video I posted) where he sort of threw his arms up like he was doing the wave. That cracks me up every time I think about it, but then again, maybe the ultrasound pulses scared him. Or it was just a random, uncontrollable muscle twitch. I don’t know. Amber told me that, facing forward, he looks like a fortune cookie and a Jason mask. No, Cox, that does not mean I am going to name him Jason.

On Monday we went to Saltillo — final batch of sex-reveal cupcakes stacked in the back seat — to let my family in on the secret. Originally I wanted to get Muddy’s to make a cake for us, but when I realized I’d be doing the reveal on a Monday, plus my dad wouldn’t be able to be there, it became clear that making my own cupcakes had to be the way to go. (Muddy’s is closed on Sundays and Mondays.) That way Dad was able to take a cupcake to work with him, and we all bit in at the same time. He texted me, “Told ya so. Never doubt me!” because he thought it was a boy all along (as did I; I am fascinated by how I just knew that was the case, and it gives me hopes for my maternal instincts). My sister was rooting for a girl, but I’m not sure anyone else cared one way or the other. We ate cupcakes and grilled things and then sat around while I got to explain my somewhat unconventional labor/delivery plans. Everyone demanded I would want drugs, of course. I just had to laugh it off and say that I may want them, but I’m determined to go without them. My grandmother thought my homebirth plan meant I would be giving birth unassisted, which explains the pained look on her face as we discussed it, but I explained that no, I’d have a qualified midwife there to guide me and make sure things were going smoothly. “No offense, but I think you’re crazy!” said my aunt. You just have to laugh all that stuff off and not let it get to you. It’s difficult enough rising above my own fears and insecurities. I can’t start letting others’ seep in.

Mom and Dad gave us a sweet glider — wooden with cushions — and a pretty green and toile travel bed. Plus a smattering of stuffed animals. They are so giddy about the new grandbaby. Dad said he was excited to see me become a mom, since there for a while he didn’t think I was going to make that leap. It floors me that anyone could objectively look at me and think I would be a good parent, as I am a whirling dervish of crazy, but I suppose my dad isn’t looking at me objectively. Still, it’s sweet.

This week I have given up on all my pants entirely. It’s time to cry uncle and get some panel pants, if only because I get sick of looking at my busted, pale legs every day when I wear a skirt and I cannot force myself into my jeans as though I am some sort sausage to be cased. Even with the Bella Band. Hell, I would wear a muumuu every day if polite society would allow it.

I’ve noticed my skin has made the change I was so excited about: The oil-factory has slowed production considerably. Used to be that I’d wake up every day with a fairly greasy head of hair. No more. Now I could probably go every other day without washing my hair, but old habits die hard.

Supposedly Heirloom Tomato should be starting to hear things soon. I am trying to watch my mouth. We’ll see how that goes.

The man was wearing a bright red shirt — was it red? Lord, my memory is bad — and he was smoking a cigarette outside the chain-link entrance to a parking lot Downtown, a grin creeping across his face as we walked closer.

“I don’t know if y’all are married or not,” he said, “and I didn’t want to say anything, but if you’re not, you better be soon!”

We looked at each other and then down at the ground, laughing and embarrassed. I glanced at my growing belly to see if perhaps it was peeking out more than usual, prompting strangers to contemplate its origin and future.

“I didn’t pay him to say that, I swear,” I said to my companion, loud enough for the stranger to hear.

We passed the man, all three of us chuckling.

“You need to put a ring on her finger,” the man said to our backs. “Don’t let her get away!”

My companion was smiling as we got out of the man’s earshot. “I think people need to mind their own business,” he said, half kidding.

“I dunno. I thought he was nice.”

I’ll be honest — I’ve had a couple of days now of nagging worry. Tuesday I slipped on a pair of pants that I was unable to button just last week and the dang things fit. I thought maybe it was a fluke so I tried on another pair and sure enough, it fit too. I mean, they fit OK but not awfully comfortably. The same thing happened Wednesday, I don’t know. I find it unsettling. And I know that weight fluctuation is normal, and that my belly was mostly water and gas throughout the first trimester, and that that has a tendency to settle or even out or change as the weeks pass. But I still do not like the feeling of steady growth suddenly shrinking.

I am trying not to worry but the brain goes to dark places when in doubt. As soon as I find “yes, this is normal” reassurances on mommy message boards, I click on something that turns out to be tragic. What good is worrying? I ask myself. You can’t do anything about it. What’s happening is what’s happening. Let it happen and just have faith that things will work out as they need to work out. But, well, faith alone doesn’t grow healthy babies.

Of course on the most basic level I have faith and hope that things are fine. I feel fine. Things surely are fine.

And yet, when the night grows quiet and it’s just me awake, lying there with my hands on my stomach, trying to divine some sense of the life that’s inside me, I whisper my pleas: “Please, baby. Don’t leave.” And the morbid part of me strains in the acute hope that I am not already talking to a ghost.

I mean, how do you really know, during these long pauses between midwife or doctor visits?

I don’t necessarily want to rush through what has been an admittedly laid-back pregnancy so far, but I do long to be at a point where I can feel the baby moving. Just so I can know what’s going on. That something IS going on. I suppose, if you take this to its logical end, it means I am going to be a bit of a meddler in my child’s life. I’ve had plenty of practice as a hovering art director; I see no reason to relinquish my nosiness now when it will surely be of more use to the world.

In less morbid news, my former tadpole should now be the size of a navel orange. Which is what I just ate, so ew, she says, pushing the peels out of her line of sight. In a wonderfully science fictiony twist, the baby’s skin is nearly translucent. It’s possible — well, probable, given my DNA, that the baby is starting to suck its teeny little thumb. (Which reminds me of an adorable story about my dad, who — like me — was a dedicated thumb sucker as a child. He was riding his horse as a boy of 10 or so out in the pasture, and got bucked off. The horse then stepped on his thumb — his preferred sucking thumb! — and my dad interpreted that as a sign from God to stop with the thumb sucking already. Also I think the nail fell off and who would want to suck that? Don’t answer that, Internet.)

After reading several birth books (with another in my mental queue), I decided to graduate to a Ina May’s breastfeeding book. In what will surely be used as evidence of my lack of parental fitness some day, I am enjoying flashing Ray with the included pictures of undoctored boobs in funny positions. Today’s flash was an inverted nipple being squeezed to all hell so it would pop out. Ray was confused but probably aroused.

What else?

Oh, I had some pretty dull but annoying lower-back pain for several days. My friend Stephanie lent me a foot stool at work to help with my bad sitting posture. Plus I did some deep stretching, and the pain seems to have gone away.

I see Amy, my midwife, on Tuesday for our first official checkup. My every minute between now and then will be spent simply trying to pass the time until I can hear that heartbeat again.

The bulge continues to embiggen and I find myself unable to stop touching it and feeling its contours when my mind wanders or I am walking somewhere. What, exactly, is in there? Better yet, who? These questions are as big as the universe right now.

This weekend Ray’s mom and my mom and sister came to town to celebrate his graduation. The conversation, naturally, turned to babythings. My sister demanded that I would want an epidural during labor (a fair point and surely technically true, but what I’d really prefer is some “you can do it” support). Ray’s mom joked about all those years that women birthed babies without pain relief, and here I was volunteering for the agony. And my mom, when I mentioned that my most recent symptom seemed to be insatiable (at times) hunger, got wide eyed and gapey mouthed. “Ohhhhhhhh,” she gasped as the elevator in the Cannon Center acended toward the balcony. “Beeeee caaaareful. You’ll gain so much you’ll never be able to get it all off!”

Sigh. At least my sister jumped in and said, “No. Eat. Feed that baby.” Which … yes, exactly. The misery of sitting through a nausea-inducing hunger pang for the off chance that it might save me a week or so in the gym? Really, really not worth it.

Later in the car when I was explaining why I want to go with a midwife and stay out of the hospital if possible, I was citing statistics and studies and anecdotes that I’ve read/seen/heard from friends with children. Mom actually said, “You know, you can read TOO much.” My mom, the nurse! (I love her and value her input, of course, I just have a much tougher road ahead of me on this issue than I thought I would.)

Pregnancy [preg-nuhn-see] noun: The state of being constantly concern trolled.

This week my little passenger is roughly the size of a lemon. This milestone seems to have come with a brand new lower back ache that I cannot seem to shake. No doubt it’s exacerbated by my terrible sitting posture at work. I’ve got to bring in some kind of foot stool so I can elevate my feet and sit with my back straight. Usually, I throw a foot up underneath my opposite-side haunch and slump down. Terrible. This is what happens when you never select a posture pal. Your spine turns on itself!

I am officially in my second trimester now. That’s fairly surreal. If what they say about the energy boost is true, I welcome it. Man, I cannot stay awake for anything, especially not a movie. Of course, any movies I do try and stay awake for seem to do nothing but annoy me lately. I have officially turned into my parents.

Ha, speaking of that. Ray said something awesome to me the other day. It’s possibly the most romantic thing I’ve ever been told.

“If you get old and crazy like your mom, I won’t mind. She’s funny.”

Awwww.

The dog, not the kid.

[Project 365

Lately we’ve been watching episodes of American Pickers on Netflix streaming, and even though I enjoy the show (okay, I mostly enjoy pretending that the hosts are secretly in love with each other and that every pick each dude makes is secretly an attempt to find the perfect gift for the other dude), there’s something I find unsettling about it.

I know the whole purpose of the show is finding treasure among junk and giving things new life. It’s the same thing with the house-flipping shows. I get that. And I appreciate that. Like any red-blooded consumer of stuff, I love browsing overcrowded thrift stores and antique malls and tourist traps that are teeming with crap. And I enjoy the personalities of many of the (usually) old people the guys encounter and try to haggle with.

But the whole thing just makes me sort of sad. Every time their weird little van pulls off on yet another country road and into yet another country driveway, I see sadness and decay. I see my home and my family history. As the pickers rifle through dusty junk in dilapidated barns with corrugated metal roofs, looking for knick-knacks with old advertising logos on them, I see an entire way of life that has all but evaporated. I don’t know. It feels like watching vultures feed on the carcass of agricultural America.

I know that sounds hyperbolic (it is!). I know I am feh-ing all over good, clean, enterprising American fun, but I get so profoundly sad sometimes watching these old people be nickel and dimed out of ancient relics that they have for whatever reason hung onto throughout their entire lives. These pickers go from rusty graveyard to rusty graveyard, prying gems out of headstones and leaving a few dollar bills under a rock. Granted, a lot of these sellers are making decent money from the pickers on the show, and in turn getting good exposure to other collectors who might be watching and researching. That’s nice.

It’s a business, I get it. But it’s a macabre one.

My family lives on one of these rural American graveyards. It might be a picker’s paradise for all I know. I just know this: It wasn’t always a graveyard. Once upon a time, those rusting heaps that are scattered throughout our sheds and barns and pastures were shiny and new (but not for long), and hauled hay, cattle, pigs, chickens, horses, corn, and soybeans all over the Mid-South.

The farm has gone from functional to almost completely symbolic in my lifetime. When I was born, my dad was a farmer. That was his job. As it has been his dad’s job. I remember when Dad wore big trucker hats to keep the sun out of his eyes as he maneuvered his tractor around the hundreds of acres he was responsible for tending. He sported the finest farmer’s tan known to man. (Seriously, you need to click that link. I’ll wait.) (Glad you clicked, aren’t you?) Even my sister was expected to help out with farm duties; some of my earliest memories are of going with her to slop hogs before school. I remember seeing pigs being born and playing in the grain bins.

When I was itty bitty, Dad got a job at the local paper mill, and his time spent doing farm stuff started to fall off. Eventually almost all of the livestock was sold off and Triple T Farms wasn’t farming nearly as many acres as it had been in the past. Equipment broke down and became too costly to fix and too expensive to replace and one day suddenly everyone in the family was punching the clock away from the farm, and we were surrounded by scrap metal being overtaken by vines and dust.

I’m not trying to over-romanticize farm work. It’s hard and it’s thankless and it’s constant. It’s tied to the fickle whims of nature. But it is honest work, valuable work. Necessary work. Work that is so organic that it puts you in touch with the very nature of life itself. These days, it is rare work.

I don’t know. It’s hard to think about how a place can become a picker’s paradise without having to confront the loss and pain that got it there.

But then again, that’s anything, I suppose.

Mom and Dad set me up with some “chrome” hubcabs for Christmas. (They are shiny plastic; I’m not insane.) I’ve been riding with two hubcaps for at least half a year now. Longer than that. I’ve lost three hubcaps over the years, replaced one. They are not cheap. But these beauties? Boy, don’t they shine.

[Project 365]

I duped Ray into traveling across the state with me for my annual trek to the family timeshare in Gatlinburg. The first day was a complete tear-filled wash (seriously, I thought we were going to die) but when we finally made it to East Tennessee, things got better and more vacation-y. The fella had never been to that neck of the woods before, and while I declined to immerse him in the Black Bear Jamboree school of Southern culture, I hope his time spent in the mismatched blinking lights of Pigeon Forge helped educate him on the idiosyncrasies of the modern South.

Actually, I’m fairly sure that he got the biggest possible dose of edumacation about the South when he and my dad got into a heated two-hour political/social/historical argument in the middle of Golden Corral buffet, during which my dad only ate one plate of ham and taters. One plate. The rest of his time and mouth action was spent imparting conspiracy theories about 9/11, the end of the world, our Muslim president, the awfulness of Abraham Lincoln, and much much more. I have, for several years now, maintained that I will not engage my father in political discussions, even when provoked unfairly, because said discussions are less discussions per se and more me crying and him yelling and everyone around us looking on in horror. And yet, there sat my lawyer-in-training boyfriend — who has never met an argument he can’t chime in on with confidence — across from my dad — AKA He Who Loves to Turn Any Discussion Into a Political Argument — and the tense words just began to flow like so much blood from the neck of a slaughterhouse cow.

Figure one: Dad mid-argument.

I felt emboldened by having someone on my ideological team, so I chimed in plenty. More than I should have, given how upset I was getting. I eventually checked out and started Tweeting about the goings-on, listening and shushing them when I felt like our table was getting dirty looks from fellow patrons (none of whom were sitting very near us anymore) but Ray and Dad just kept on keeping on. Until, that is, Ray said something that sounded a lot like, “I dunno, I think Lincoln was an all right dude,” which caused my dad to snatch up his coat and spit, “LET’S GO!!!” and storm outside. My dad never leaves an argument first. Ever. He was pisssssssssed.

We got outside and he was already in the truck, yelling at us to hurry up and get in so we could get the hell out of there, but I refused to get in until they would at least call a truce and agree to disagree. The whole way back to the room, we were lectured on how we had a lot to learn about Real History, and did we know Lincoln was most likely a homosexual?

I think Ray sees now why I don’t engage.

Anyway, that was but one amusing blip on the Gatlinburg radar. The rest of the time was spent hootin’ and hollerin’ at the stuff in the Ripley’s museum, walking through the snowy streets of Gatlinburg, feeding coins into arcade games, buying sweets at a candy shop, kicking ass at Guitar Hero (on easy!), and turning up the fireplace in our very own private suite — a major development, considering we were told while planning the trip that we would be expected to sleep in separate suites.

Turned out to be not so shabby after all. But I foresee some refereeing in my future.

More than three decades and my dad still calls my mom his “green-eyed beauty.”

Cheers, you crazy kids.

The responses I’ve gotten to what I wrote about Charlie Brown’s Sad Thanksgiving for Fatties have been really interesting. Whole lotta solidarity coming from the ladies re: the weight crazies. I’m so thankful that there are people who will reach out to connect about such a very personal issue. BUT. I hate that the need is even there. I hate that there are other people fighting this same fight, routinely winding themselves into knots of shame over how much space they are taking up in the world. I want to make it go away for you, and you, and you, and you. All of you.

I talked to my dad last night, and he told me he hadn’t meant to upset me so much by his comment. Which, yeah, I know, which is why I had initiated the apology sequence by leaving him a note last Friday morning saying as much. And then he went on to ask me if it had been “that time of the month” and when I said “it’s always ‘that time of the month’” meaning I am fucking crazy ALL THE TIME HAVE YOU NOT NOTICED THE GENES YOU ALL GAVE ME, he told me not to wear my feelings on my sleeves. Which is an interesting thing to tell a person who comes from a family of passive-aggressive people who often feel slighted at the least little thing.