It Sucked and Then I Cried Read online

  The middle name represented the European flavor we wanted to inject into the name, and even though I took four years of French in high school and two in college, the only French word I could think of other than croissant was Le Bon Marché, so it stuck. And I know that there is a good chance that I assigned the wrong gender to that word, but it didn’t matter if it’s a “le” or “la” because we were in Utah and no one would know the difference.

  My family was horrified when I told them that I might actually do this to my child, and my sister, WHOSE NAME IS SEPTEMBER EVEN THOUGH SHE WAS BORN IN JANUARY, threatened to not talk to me again. This from a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman who named her two Aryan twins Noah and Joshua, after Jewish prophets. I am obviously the insane one in my family.

  I thought I had prepared myself for the onset of nausea and fatigue and bloating and complete emotional instability of pregnancy by going through the agony that I did when I stopped taking an antidepressant, but during the first few weeks of pregnancy I could barely sit up straight without feeling the thump thump thump of my heart in my ears as it signaled the march of acid through my digestive tract, and it could not have possibly sucked more. It wasn’t morning sickness, because the morning was over there in the front yard carrying on with its day while I was in the back of the house with my head in the toilet because some cosmetic company tried to jam every single smell of nature into one shampoo bottle, and then lie and call it an “essence.” Those delicate little jasmine berries they add to make my hair smell like a fresh-cut flower reached out of the bottle while I was washing my hair and cut off my face with an axe.

  Perhaps the worst smell I encountered during those first few weeks was the aroma of hand soap. I could not wash my hands without becoming hysterical, and the only reason we had any hand soap in the bathroom at all was because we needed to find a replacement soap, and that would involve walking into one of those bath and beauty stores, a veritable reservoir of insipid soap smells, a place where you can actually see the fragrance in the air, and for a pregnant woman that would be like walking into a gas chamber. Jon would often come back from the bathroom with hand soap stench on his hands, and it made me wonder whether or not he was intentionally trying to kill me. I know he was just practicing good personal hygiene, but it came down to a choice between his wife spontaneously gagging or having moderately dirty potty hands, and there I was, giving him permission to walk around with potty hands. Isn’t that at the top of the list of what every man wants from his wife?

  I blamed all those prehistoric women in caves who should have collectively decided that being nauseated like this and having to carry the baby at the same time is a raw deal. They should have put someone in charge of making some changes. And because they hadn’t I decided I wasn’t going to feel sorry for them anymore that sometimes they woke up in the middle of the night to find that a wild boar had eaten their cousin.

  I cannot possibly forget what it felt like to be nauseated in my fingers and toes. The dizziness worked its way from the middle of my head down through every part of my body, and instead of feeling pregnant I just felt angry. I was mad that Jon could drink a beer and I was still able to smell it in his hair two days later. I was mad that a list of basic things that were a part of my daily life were forever going to remind me of the sensation of dry-heaving, like the smell of fabric softener, or the texture of chocolate pudding, or the way certain notes played over each other on the soundtrack to some of my favorite shows. Certain characters on some of my favorite shows would forever make me sick whenever I heard their voices, in particular a certain designer on a DIY home improvement show who glued things to walls that ought not have been glued to walls. Anyone idiotic enough to sign up for a reality television show probably deserves every injustice of life, but there are few sins in this world so evil enough that they warrant the punishment of having two tons of goose feathers hot-glue-gunned to the bedroom walls. And then there’s that one episode where she wrapped a room in cardboard and made sure that even if the homeowners didn’t want the walls of their guestroom covered in CARDBOARD, that there was no possible way they would ever be able to remove it because of all the nails and glue and tape and concrete she used to seal it to the drywall. That woman’s face will from now on remind me of the inside of a toilet.

  One thing no one ever told me about was that once I became pregnant I would experience a constant urge to go pee. I had no idea that during the early stages of pregnancy my bladder would spontaneously sprout its own holding tank, a reservoir of urine, so that God forbid I ever ran out of pee at any given moment I’d have at least a spare gallon standing by. Was that supposed to come in handy?

  Going to the bathroom allowed me about thirty seconds of relief, a short half-minute of feeling like I didn’t have to pee, and then once that minute ticked over into its second half my bladder would start billowing with the urge to go again. Given the era of technological innovation we live in, it wasn’t terribly inconvenient for me to sit on the toilet all day long, as I had a laptop, a wireless Internet connection, and not one shred of dignity. However, venturing outside of the house was entirely problematic, as being any farther than an arm’s length away from a bathroom triggered a battle of wills: my will vs. my bladder’s will, and anyone who has ever challenged the will of an internal organ just trying to do its job knows that the internal organ always wins.

  When I was at home I was peeing, and when I was away from home I was thinking about trying not to think about peeing. I dreamt about peeing. I even started asking pregnant strangers if they knew what I was talking about, which was dangerous for a couple of reasons. One: the only way I knew these women were pregnant was because they looked pregnant, and I was taking a huge risk in assuming that their giant bellies were filled with humans and not just a whole bunch of Oreos. Two: at some point my luck was bound to run out, and someone was going to knock me in the jaw when I walked up to them and asked them how often they used the toilet.

  I picked up a few books and pamphlets here and there on the topic of pregnancy to see if I could find insight into this pee thing, because when coupled with the nausea, the inability to go more than ten minutes without a bathroom break was starting to give me second thoughts, like, this is not at all what I signed up for! and what the hell have I done? In my darkest moments, like the night I sprayed the backyard with staccato chunks of orange shrimp tikka masala, I wondered why women aren’t equipped with tidy ctrl-z options, like, undo eating that Indian food or undo biological urge to procreate. There were countless mornings when I wished that I could have ctrl-z’ed the gel I put into my hair.

  Nothing I had read up to that point in my pregnancy had done anything to make me feel better about the fact that I was facing months and months of ongoing discomfort. In fact, everything I’d read had the following wholly infuriating thesis statement:

  Be careful and don’t gain too much weight!

  I am here to tell you that the last thing a pregnant woman in her first trimester wants to think about is how much weight she is gaining. Do you have any idea what else she has to worry about? According to the four books I had sitting on my nightstand, the list of things I had to worry about ran the gamut from not mixing certain household cleansers to not touching lunch meat with my bare hands else risking the possibility that the baby would be born with three ears. And if I touched a piece of sushi each of those three ears would be covered in scales.

  What’s even more annoying is that all those books began with a foreword in which the expert talked endlessly about how they planned to calm all the worries of an expectant mother, and then they spent the entire book detailing everything, real or imaginary, an expectant mother should be wary of. And every other sentence said something like, “Be careful and don’t gain too much weight!” Always with the exclamation mark even though the word “weight” is already its own exclamation mark.

  I will give them that it was hard not to think about the weight gain when I could feel my thighs separating at the joints.
It was hard not to think about it when I could look at an entire chocolate cake and project manage in my head how I would get the entire thing down my throat in less than four minutes.

  But on a good day I couldn’t keep down a single meal without delivering it straight to the toilet wrapped in digestive acid, and I didn’t understand why weight gain should be at the top of the list of things I was losing sleep over. AND I WAS TIRED OF READING ABOUT IT.

  However.

  My sister often brought over a pan of Rice Krispies Treats during those first few weeks, and although she told me she did this because she felt sorry for how sick I was, I know she did it to hurry along my massive weight gain. Because that’s what siblings are for, to bring out the best in each other.

  She knew that Rice Krispies Treats held the keys to my stomach. They are the world’s perfect food: a mixture of cold cereal and butter, a transcendental blend of chewiness and crunchiness. In high school I used to make a whole pan of Rice Krispies Treats and then eat the entire thing by myself in less than a half hour. Of course, this was a time in my life when I was able to metabolize a cow by looking at it over a fence, and a 4,000-calorie pan of sticky breakfast cereal was just an appetizer before dinner.

  I tried hiding them in dark corners of the basement, but I kept forgetting that I knew where I was hiding them, and I found them as soon as I hid them. I tried rationing them in little packages, but then I’d rationalize that each ration was lonely and needed friends, and so I’d eat four and five rations at a time. One time I gave up and just stood in the middle of the kitchen in my pajamas at four o’clock in the afternoon screaming at the pan, “STOP LOOKING AT ME!” Because their eyes were following me around the room.

  The only other food I could even think about eating was a hot dog. In the seventh week of my pregnancy I ate more hot dogs than I had eaten in the collective whole of the rest of my life. I’m not talking about three or four hot dogs; I’m talking about the whole package of hot dogs. Hot dogs for snacks, hot dogs for lunch and dinner, hot dogs on the way back from each of the four pee breaks in the middle of the night.

  Also, sauerkraut. For breakfast. Because the box of salt I ate beforehand wasn’t salty enough.

  At the beginning of my eighth week of pregnancy I experienced a rare morning when I was able to walk around and perform normal tasks without wanting to puke my spleen through my nose. I was smiling, and there was a noticeable lilt in my step, and it all felt completely unnatural. I’d forgotten what it was like to be okay, and I was so happy to feel okay that I even thought about washing my hair. I was almost out of control.

  I felt so good that I thought I’d spend some time with our dog, Chuck, a one-year-old brown mutt that we had adopted from a shelter in Los Angeles. He resembled almost every dog imaginable, and you could see Jack Russell terrier in his face, pit bull in the shape of his body, yellow Labrador in his ears, and greyhound in the speed with which he could outrun other dogs. His favorite activity was meeting other dogs, so I put him in the car and drove to the dog park, which totally astounded him because he’d become used to seeing me lying under a bundle of covers in the dark bedroom, twitching and moaning and mumbling some nonsense about how much it sucked to be a woman. Chuck often looked at me, in between bites of a stuffed toy, like he understood, like he was sorry I had to suffer painful bloating and sore boobs—so sore that the resulting breeze from shutting the refrigerator door made me feel like a baby seal being clubbed by poachers.

  Chuck chased a chocolate Labrador from one end of the park to the other, and after we walked back to the car I coaxed him into drinking a small handful of water to cool off from all the activity. Once we climbed back into the car we both hung our heads out of the window to feel the wind in our faces, and you couldn’t have found two happier companions, happy to be alive and feeling okay. I was feeling so okay that I ignored the splash of water I suddenly felt scatter across my face and upper body, blaming it on a sprinkler we might have passed or maybe a small rain shower. And I was still feeling happy and okay when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the dog was chewing on something, and I thought, isn’t that nice? The dog is so cute when he chews on something.

  I finally turned my head to notice that the dog was chewing malformed bits of apples and peanut butter THAT I HAD FED HIM THAT MORNING, and my brain was so rattled from the pregnancy that it took several seconds for me to put together what had happened, that while his head was hanging out the window, the small handful of water got together with the apples and peanut butter and planned an explosive revolt out his snout. And the water and the apples and the peanut butter hit the air whooshing past the window and splattered all over the inside of the car, all over the outside of the car, all over his face and all over my right arm. And he was just sitting there chewing regurgitated bits of apple and peanut butter as they dripped off his ears and chin. As if that’s what you’re supposed to do when you throw up your breakfast into your own lap.

  Owning a dog is nothing like raising a child, but I can confidently say that I felt exactly like a parent when I pulled the car over in the middle of downtown Salt Lake City and picked someone else’s puke out of every crack and crevice of that car. And yet, that type of chaotic situation was not an anomaly with Chuck, and since the day that we adopted him from the SPCA in Pasadena, California, I had rarely not felt like a parent.

  During the first six weeks of Chuck’s life we were unsure whether or not we’d actually adopted a dog and not some sort of abandoned scientific experiment, perhaps a hyena crossed with a mountain lion crossed with a mythical Latin goat sucker. He was four weeks old when we brought him home, and so all those little life lessons he should have learned from his brothers and sisters during the first eight weeks of his life, like not biting, and understanding that when someone else yelps they’re saying, stop it, you’re hurting me, all those little nasty feral dog habits were left up to us to cure. And because the experience of bringing him home was such a shock, one that I never wanted to live through again, a certain part of me feared that when we brought home our baby it would immediately start to crawl around and bite our ankles.

  I had never had a dog before Chuck, wasn’t allowed to own anything other than a fish—which I boiled accidentally, have I mentioned that?—because, according to my father, animals do not poop little poop, and as far as my father is concerned there is no such thing as a bodily function. “Because they don’t poop little poop” would become the answer to every request I made for most of my childhood. I couldn’t stay out past midnight because my boyfriend didn’t poop little poop. Couldn’t go to Florida on spring break because people in Florida didn’t poop little poop. The plot of that rated R movie I wasn’t allowed to see? It was all about big poop.

  And since Chuck was the first animal I had ever owned, I had no idea what to do with him, starting with how to get him to stop biting me, something that was happening almost every second he was awake, on the fingers, on the ankles, on the elbows. He even managed to bite me on the forehead once, as I was leaning down to tell him to stop chewing on my underwear.

  I read tons of books and websites, some of them written by pacifist monks, some of them written by sergeants in the U.S. military, to try to learn how to be a good dog owner. All of them claimed that their method was the best method, and that if I didn’t follow their method then I might as well just give up now because my dog would inevitably bite the fingers off starving, innocent children. I find that instructional literature about parenthood is almost exactly the same in that every expert thinks all the other experts are out of their minds. How could they possibly come to that conclusion when the book you have in your hands is based on an entirely different and contradictory conclusion? No one agrees on anything except that everyone else is deranged, and I get the feeling that not one of these experts has been laid since graduate school.

  The general consensus among dog-training experts, however, is that no matter what method dog owners choose, they have to prove to the d
og that they are the alpha dog in the pack, the leader, the one who calls all the shots. And in those very early months I tried telling that to Chuck. I tried to alert him in an authoritative voice that I was the big dog in this relationship. And you could tell, if not from the bearing of his fangs then from the gaping scar he left on my shin, that he took me very seriously.

  So we tried more physical methods of demonstrating our alpha-ness, like flipping him over on his back and gripping his jowls like his mother might do. We tried barking and baring our teeth. I even tried biting him back. But nothing worked until we spent a large sum of money on a trainer who came into our house and used a few small gestures, including a convincing impression of Darth Vader, to let Chuck know that he was the dog and that everyone else was human. That trainer taught me how to walk the dog, how to get him to sit, to stay, to come, and I remember the first time Chuck ever took a long nap, about a month into his training regimen. It was during the late-morning hours when he was usually sprinting laps around the kitchen or swiping the remote control to gnaw on it underneath the bed. Finding him prostrate, I thought something was wrong with him, thought maybe he was sick or dying, because he had never before sat still, had never willingly remained in a horizontal position. I called the trainer crying, like, oh my God, I should never have adopted this dog because I have no idea what I’m doing and now he’s dead and I killed him. And the trainer, who I now realize was my life coach, just laughed and said, “Dogs sleep. That is what they do.” And I was all, if this is what dogs do, then I’ll take ten, please.

  That first morning nap that the dog took was a turning point in my relationship with Jon, because I felt like I finally had a grip on taking care of another creature, that I could finally let myself feel the fullness of wanting children. I really believed I could do it, because the joy of having the dog around had become bigger than the pain of it, and there was a lot of pain. There were two months of housebreaking, of running fifty feet along a hallway, down a flight of stairs, and then across a parking lot to a tiny patch of grass EVERY HOUR FOR SIXTY STRAIGHT DAYS. I remember thinking that there was no way potty-training a toddler could be worse than that, and that I’d personally invest money in the company that invented diapers for dogs, just so that I could sleep through the night.