my bump's on walkabout

crazy: all of a sudden my bump has shifted from my lower abdomen up, up, UP to my upper abdomen. Apparently, I'm "carrying high." This means it's even more noticeable, which is aweseome of course, but so odd! when did it happen? I mean, I noticed it yesterday, and yesterday morning i was feeling some odd stuff -- you know when you are lying on your arm the wrong way, and you can feel your blood pulsing? It felt like that, but in my abdomen, and I rolled around a bit till things shifted and I took the pressure off it... but it was super-weird. For a while I lay there and pretended it was Sluggo kicking, which is just silly, but was really neat till I realized I was being more of a lunatic than normal.

I can't get over how much I love being pregnant. Someone joked that I'm crazy the rest of the time, and now I've got the right hormone level -- she might be onto something, but if that's the case, what do I do? Hire myself out as a surrogate? What my uterus loves, my vagina might resent! I do NOT want to give this up. 

I never thought I'd feel this way. I thought for sure I would have a dreadful time being pregnant. My entry into womanhood wasn't exactly auspicious. My first period arrived when I was 11 and away at camp; I was thrilled, but when I announced the exciting news via letter, I didn't hear back from my sisters or mom. When I got home, I found out why: mom had gone into emergency surgery -- ironically enough, on her reproductive system -- and everyone had been too worried and unsure to respond. My sisters felt awful, but didn't know what to say or do.

 

Over the next months, my uterus let me know with a vengeance that being a woman was NOT for the faint of heart. I began having the sort of vicious cramps that little girls whisper about at slumber parties: I barfed, I missed school, I developed a method of leaving my body while observing the searing pain from a distance. Over time, they happened less often, but were worse when they showed up, every six months or so. I just couldn't understand: what was the goddamn point of this regular, dependable, no-reason pain? I mean sure, if a tiger's biting my ass, I need to know about it so I can run away and nurse the ass-wound, but pain like that every month, signifying nothing? Whose grand idea for a cosmic joke was that? 

Despite the pain, and especially once I (finally) learned to manage it, I liked the whole communion-with-the-moon aspect of my period. No getting away from being an animal when you're constantly reminded that you're in a seemingly eternal loop of internal waxing and waning.  Nonetheless, it was hard for me to see it in connection to actual reproduction, which I relentlessly saw as: Not For Me.

You know, like the prom. Not for "girls like me. Marriage, a big wedding: not for "girls like me." Never mind that I made the prom happen -- I didn't go the right way, in a limo with beautiful people. Never mind that I had my princess wedding -- it felt like a bit of a sham, and I got divorced anyway. This isn't about reality, people; it's about perception, and my perception was that the great lives I saw my friends having -- stay-at-home moms with a passel o' kids each, with that cool kind of ease around things like boogery noses -- just wasn't for me. I wasn't breeder stock, I was pleasure stock. Or -- I don't know what my issue was, I was just convinced the stars would never align in the right way to anoint me someone's mom. I thought you had to be impressive, or at least "done." A "shipped game," as my babydaddy would say. 

Now I find myself constantly stroking my belly just to remind myself it's there. I honestly feel more myself, more at peace, than I've ever felt before. Things have locked into place physically, emotionally, hormonally, whateverly, and it's just very weird, because this was not what I thought it would be like. It never is. But really, it really really isn't. 

Anyway, stay tuned to see where my bump appears tomorrow!