BIG

“Wow!  Big!”

           

The first time the lady behind the snack bar counter said this to me, as she eyed my pregnant belly with wide eyes, I was both shocked and appalled.  I mean, yes, I’m pregnant, but for heaven’s sake, I’m not exactly planetary.  Yesterday, she seemed to up her game.

“Are you sure you’re not carrying twins?” she asked, after giving me the usual “big!” intro.  I ignored her, just trying to let it pass.  She waited until I made eye contact and asked again: “Are you sure it’s not twins?”

In short: yes, I’m fucking sure it’s not twins.

Another one for the books was when a colleague saw me coming down the hallway, limping because my feet hurt all the time, and performed an exaggerated waddle as though in imitation.  I think my mouth was actually hanging open in horror when she proceeded to ask me about how my bladder was doing.

I know I’m not the first person by a long shot to identify or complain about this phenomenon, but seriously: what is it about pregnancy that removes people’s filters?  Why are my body, my life choices, and my sex life suddenly open for public comment just because I happen to be growing a human?  My therapist’s comment on this is that the only thing that literally everyone on the planet has done is to be born, therefore they all have an opinion.  Unwelcome, in most cases, but an opinion nonetheless.

The internet provides a lot of helpful retorts for the body comments, among which I particularly favor “I’m not pregnant, this is just gas” and “Yeah, but at least I’m pregnant—what’s your excuse?”  Obviously, the former is snide, and the latter is just plain mean.  And this is the conundrum with which I find myself:

On the one hand, if I live my life according to the rules of engagement I was taught, there’s never an excuse to be rude or unkind.  Period.  When I find myself seething and leaning towards a snide remark, my beloved and departed grandparents—specifically my father’s father and my mother’s mother—come to my mind.  Mary Louise didn’t have a single mean molecule (much less bone) in her body; I don’t even know if she could’ve been unkind if she tried. Jack lived by a specific code of conduct, which depended not on external factors but internal integrity: ugly circumstances or other people’s bad behavior didn’t excuse anything nasty on your part.

On the other hand…

Particularly as a woman, I often feel as though culturally I’m trained to bend over backwards to make allowances for or excuse other people’s rudeness or bad behavior. The knee jerk reaction is often not to make the other person uncomfortable, even as their behavior has left you miserable and squirming.  Which, quite frankly, is bullshit, and brings to mind the theory about intent vs. impact: just because someone didn’t mean to offend you, or hurt you, or make you screamingly uncomfortable, doesn’t mean that they didn’t.  Once more for the folks in the back:

Even if they didn’t mean to doesn’t (!!) mean (!!) that (!!) they didn’t. 

I wonder why I spend so much energy trying to find a nice way to tell someone that their feedback is unwelcome, when they didn’t bother to actually think about the shit that came out of their mouth in the first place.  (Seriously, who the fuck waddles at another person?)  I wonder this especially when I barely have the energy to remain upright during the day.  It is unnerving, even and especially as I am growing an infant in my own body, to feel like a toddler when I run out of steam full stop and then, more often than not, come very close to collapsing in hysterical tears.  Why am I wasting energy on making sure I don’t hurt their feelings or make them uncomfortable, when they have invested zero energy in doing the same?

Again I think of Jack and his integrity, and how the key to integrity is that it’s true most especially when things are hard—fair weather integrity isn’t integrity at all.  When I think that, my first instinctive response is wildly childish: I want to throw it back at the universe—at the age and cancer that took my grandfather from me—and say that I can’t do it without him.  It isn’t fair to have to live in his image if he himself isn’t here.  It isn’t fair that my daughter will never know him, never be coached by him in the fine art of sarcasm, never get to feel what it’s like to love him and be exasperated with him and to want to do him proud every day of her life. 

And then, in one of those moments of insane, perfect irony and symmetry, I remember a story my sister told me:

Towards the end of Jack’s life, my sister was pregnant with his namesake, and we were all praying he would make it to meet his great grandson.  (They missed each other by about three months.)  As she came in to visit him one day, Jack looked up at her dryly and said, “Hey, chubby.”

I sit at my desk in this moment, wanting to lay my head down and laugh and weep, and the only thing that comes to mind is, “Well, fuck.”

He wasn’t perfect.  No one is.  Maybe in some ways that’s the point. 

As I shared this conundrum with my therapist, she commented that it seems like I’m spending most of my energy these days picking my battles (well, that and gestating).  The issue is that the stakes these days are so much higher: I hadn’t even realized I’d been doing this, but whenever I pick a battle now, I wonder what it says about me—as a person, and very soon, as a parent.  What would my daughter glean if she saw me making that decision?  That I had turned the other cheek, or that I hadn’t stood up for myself?  That I didn’t let someone make me feel bad or lesser, or that I said something unkind?  It’s not that I fear her hypothetical future judgment; it’s that I want to set a good example, which is really hard when I myself don’t always know what the right thing is.

I already know (believe me, I know) that I won’t have all the answers as a parent.  I never expected to.  What I hope to have is empathy and an open mind: that my daughter will know she can come to me with things that are hard, things that are hurtful, things that are uncomfortable, and that she can trust me to treat those feelings as valid and real.  As she gets older, I will try to help her think critically about how to engage successfully with the world and reflect honestly on and at times question her own beliefs, but to me, it is vitally important that she grows up trusting herself: not to write off hurt as her being too sensitive, not to assume as a knee jerk reaction that she is in the wrong.  And I want her to know that we make the best decisions we can with the information we have: that we get it wrong sometimes; that if we hurt the ones we love, we apologize and mean it; and that things can not necessarily make sense and still be true. 

It’s so hard.  But I love her so much already and want to give her the best tools that I possibly can, along with the knowledge that I—like her—am very human, and we’re all bound to screw up.

And I haven’t even squeezed her out yet.  Heaven help us.