It Sucked and Then I Cried Read online

  There was that one time when Jon spilled a bag of coffee beans and thought he had cleaned up the mess, but he hadn’t cleaned up the mess at all whatsoever, and Chuck hunted out and swallowed every last stray coffee bean, and the consequent twelve hours were The Worst Twelve Hours of My Life, ending only when his buzz ended.

  Or the time he became infected with the world’s worst case of fleas. I happen to know that it was the world’s worst case because any case of fleas involves actual fleas, and even if only one flea were involved it still would have been a flea, and therefore, the worst possible scenario in the universe. It was a few months before we left California, and had we been living in Utah this never would have happened as fleas cannot live at such an elevation. The only thing a dog can really catch outdoors in Utah is heartworm and a healthy testimony of Jesus Christ.

  One afternoon while the dog and I were playing tug of war on the living room floor, I noticed that his fur was moving. At first I thought that I had brushed his fur in the wrong direction, and there it was working its way back into place. But then it would move back into the wrong position, and the effect made his body look like it was trying to say something to me. Like, DEAR HUMAN, THIS IS NOT RIGHT.

  When I closely inspected the fur behind his ears I distinctly saw a flea staring me squarely in the eyes, and the first thing that came to my mind was:

  Let’s try to vacuum the fleas off of his body.

  Seemed reasonable. They’d pop off his fur. Just like that. Why had no one thought of this before me?

  It would be easy. One of us would hold Chuck down while the other took the vacuum hose and suctioned off the fleas. Since I was the one who was at home with the dog most of the day, I decided that I would be the one to hold him down, reasoning that my embrace would be comforting and familiar. But I forgot that I was hyperventilating and on the verge of a panic attack. There were fleas in my apartment near my underwear. I would have been more comfortable having my front teeth tied to the back of a moving pickup.

  Once I had Chuck in a cradled position, my arms trembling with the thought of what was crawling around so close by, Jon turned on the vacuum cleaner and slowly approached us. And to me it just sounded like a vacuum cleaner; to Chuck it sounded like, “Oh my God, it’s The End of the World and it is SCREAMING AT ME.” Jon was only able to suction a tiny square inch of fur on Chuck’s stomach before Chuck turned into an African cheetah and clawed out of my arms. He immediately ran yelping into the bathroom carrying his flea-infested ass to the place where my body got naked to take showers.

  Hours later, after the fleas had multiplied and established a thriving metropolis in Chuck’s nether regions, we stuck him in the bathtub and atom-bombed their command center. When the tub drained there were literally thousands and thousands of dead fleas clinging to the porcelain, and it was my job to clean up the mess. I did it dutifully like any parent would, and like my own parents used to torture me, I would occasionally taunt Chuck mercilessly by breaking out the vacuum cleaner and leaving it sitting upright next to his head while he slept.

  Having Chuck in our lives made us feel a little wiser, a little more understanding of what every other dog owner was living through. And in many ways I understood that having a child would increase our sympathy for other people in exactly the same way, and that in no time we’d be walking around comparing the war wounds on our shins and heels with everyone else who had made it out alive.

  CHAPTER TWO

  How to Exploit an Unborn Baby

  When Jon and I got back from my twelve-week checkup where we heard the baby’s heartbeat for the first time, it was hard to comprehend what I was feeling, a mixture of disbelief and fear, excitement, a little bit of heartburn, definitely some nausea, but I knew undoubtedly that those little thumping pulses would make it possible for me to go another day hunched over the toilet with half of my internal organs lodged in my esophagus.

  It had been four weeks since I’d first seen my doctor, and I’d gained back four of the ten pounds I lost in those first few weeks of pregnancy. My guess was that those four pounds were made up entirely of hot dogs, refried beans, sauerkraut, and Nacho Cheese Doritos. Sadly, everything you’ve ever heard about pregnant women and cravings and the complete erosion of decency is absolutely true, and one embarrassing Saturday night I found myself standing utterly defenseless in line at Kentucky Fried Chicken ordering Extra Crispy chicken wings and buttermilk biscuits. Honestly, that was the only thing I could have eaten at that moment, fried chicken made specifically by the Colonel, and I couldn’t remember a better tasting meal in the last ten years of my life.

  Another change since that first visit to the doctor was all my clothes started to fit differently, even though I was still five pounds under my normal weight. I couldn’t wear any of my jeans anymore, and even the baggy pants in my wardrobe were too tight to zip up. I still refused to buy any maternity clothes, however, because I was morally opposed to wearing any sort of clothing that by design invited strangers to coo and put their hands on my belly. There would be no cooing in my presence, and for crying out loud, NO BELLY TOUCHING.

  I definitely thought that the nausea would have begun to subside by week twelve, but that week was by far the worst of the whole pregnancy up to that point. And there is no way to describe what that type of nausea felt like, just how tortured I was by that sickness. And whenever people would ask me, always expecting me to nod quickly in return, “Don’t you love being pregnant?” I felt like I needed to stand up for every woman who has thought to herself in dark moments that being pregnant is the worst lot in life and give them a lengthy, gory, detail-ridden treatise on why in reality the whole process mostly sucked, starting with what it tasted like to puke up banana pudding.

  The nausea had also caused me to loathe the smell of alcohol, and when Jon drank beer he was not allowed to sleep in the house. When Jon first moved in with me, about two and a half years before I got pregnant, we began consuming alcohol and coffee in very large quantities. I don’t think either of us had been very big alcohol or coffee drinkers up until that point, but there was something about the giddiness we felt when we were around each other that brought out the naughty juvenile in both of us. We had in common a rather stringent Mormon upbringing that forbade us the enjoyment of alcohol or any hot, caffeinated beverage, and I think we went about drinking both together like bandits, relishing with flagrant naïveté the sinful buzz brought on by liquids that will drown the soul to Hell.

  I’d be terrified to see an X-ray of my liver because when I say that we began drinking on a very daily basis, I mean very daily, more daily that just your normal, average daily. We drank alcohol every day, multiple times during the day, multiple drinks multiple times during the day. And we never consumed beer or cider or anything that would require more than one refill in order to get a stinking buzz. We drank bourbon on the rocks, or straight shots of tequila, or double vodka martinis. We drank on empty stomachs, before sundown, often after vigorous workouts, before rehydrating with water. I’m quite certain that during those workouts anyone standing next to us could smell the bourbon in our sweat.

  Drinking as much as we drank wasn’t necessarily the smartest or healthiest way of living, although it did make watching the first installment of American Idol a deeply spiritual, highly interactive experience. It also made for extraordinary hangovers—aching, screaming, gut-eating hangovers—that lasted weeks, even months at a time. All of that stopped when we found out I was pregnant, and Jon showed his solidarity by joining me in abstinence, or at least frequent abstinence punctuated by the occasional Bud Light. And on those occasions I could smell the beer in his pores, and then I’d have to dry heave for several hours. Alcohol was surprisingly one of the easiest habits I’d ever had to give up, much easier than kicking a nasty Diet Dr Pepper addiction I had my freshman year in college when I would refill a sixty-four-ounce mug three to four times a day just to stay awake through Calculus.

  In those two or three seconds where we
heard the trumpeting cadence of life growing in my abdomen, I completely believed all the hype, that the whole mess, the never-ending nausea, the tightening of my favorite jeans around my expanding hips, the craving of all things Kentucky Fried, the grinning and bearing it when Jon couldn’t resist happy hour, it was worth it. We were going to have a baby.

  Although I didn’t think I would ever feel better, I woke up at the beginning of my fourteenth week of pregnancy feeling remarkably fine. I really did believe that I was going to be sick the entire pregnancy, and then afterward for the rest of my life because I’m optimistic like that. I come from a long line of Southern women who were sick the entire nine months of their pregnancies, my mother and sister included, and although I was the first woman in my family stubborn enough to reject the whole notion of panty hose, I suspected that I would be forced through defective genes to suffer forty weeks of incessant gut-churning, face-contorting, Nacho Cheese Dorito-laden vomit.

  My nausea only lasted thirteen weeks, exactly as long as my doctor said it would. But I hadn’t been able to take my doctor seriously, primarily because he introduced himself to Jon by saying, “Last time she was in here she didn’t know who the father was. Have you guys figured that out yet?”

  That type of bedside manner may be funny on a sitcom where a famous actress is pregnant with a pillow stuck up her shirt, but in real life, the kind of real life that involves me and my superparanoid husband of fiery Scottish descent who is about to hear his child’s heartbeat for the very first time, this type of bedside manner CAN CAUSE A HEART ATTACK.

  This is the same doctor who told me that the only thing he could prescribe for nausea was an anal suppository—you know, the type of suppository that has to be inserted anally, that type of anal suppository. Maybe I should take a sentence or two here to summarize why I am not fond of anything that might exacerbate my lifelong battle with constipation and how, from time to time, more often than not, especially during the first months of pregnancy as the entire chemistry of my body morphed spasmodically into a host organism, I lost all ability to poop.

  Sometimes I just misplace the ability like I misplace car keys, under the bed or in between the cushions in the sofa, and after a few hours of looking I’m back to normal and can start the car again. But usually my ability to poop goes missing entirely, not unlike Jimmy Hoffa, disappearing without a trace, perhaps to pursue a life in hiding, more likely than not abducted and killed by the Mafia.

  I am the only one of my mother’s three children who was breastfed, and she says it’s because I was born at a time when it was in vogue for women to formula feed their children. Since I am the youngest and last child, she decided that she wanted to try breastfeeding with me. Almost two years after I was born she still couldn’t decide if she would ever stop, and the result? Her only breastfed child grew up to be a wayward Democrat, whereas the other two are God-fearing, law-abiding Republicans. I can see the correlation clearly.

  I’m also the only one who has suffered chronic constipation her entire life, and although I’m no doctor and rarely have any idea what I’m talking about, I like to think that it goes all the way back to the first couple weeks of my life. I didn’t have a normal bowel movement for fourteen days after I was born, and even though my mother called the pediatrician several times, concerned that something was wrong with my inner workings, he assured her that this was normal and that I would grow up a healthy, intact kid with normal plumbing, albeit one who would eventually grow up and vote for Ralph Nader.

  As it turns out, I’m a pretty healthy kid, moderately intact and surprisingly good with multiplication tables. But there is nothing normal about my plumbing. Those first fourteen poopless days did something awful to my body, and I have suffered constipation nearly constantly since then. I remember my fifth birthday party when I swallowed over two hundred gumballs in less than a half hour, a strategy I employed to keep my older brother from stealing any of them. Seven days later my mother sat on the edge of the bathtub holding both of my hands, coaching me through pain management techniques as each gumball tried to find an exit out of my body. I think I pushed so hard that they eventually came out of my foot.

  During the first year that I lived in Los Angeles I reintroduced meat into my diet after eight years of being a strict vegetarian while I had guests staying with me for the weekend. Which I guess is like saying, sure, come stay with me, but I won’t be able to hear a word you’re saying over the sound of my body yelling at me.

  After a particularly filling meal of steak and potatoes on the third evening of their stay, I spent over two hours in the bathroom praying that God might spare my life and let me return to the guests waiting in the living room. I finally had to call my boyfriend, have him drive across town to my apartment, and then barricade him in the bathroom where I whispered, “You’re going to have to get me an enema because otherwise I won’t come out alive.” Is it really possible to whisper enema? Doesn’t that word demand to be cried maniacally through gnashing teeth?

  My boyfriend then walked several blocks down to a drugstore in the most homosexual neighborhood in Southern California and bought two Fleet Enemas “for my girlfriend back home.” I only like telling this story because the cashier at the drugstore gave him a subtle indication that he did not believe him, and this rankled my boyfriend so badly that he remained there at the checkout arguing with the cashier so long—“No, really, she’s my girlfriend!”—that by the time he got back to my apartment, my guests had gone to bed. AND I WAS STILL IN THE BATHROOM.

  My system is so sensitive that if my daily routine varies even slightly my body forgets how to poop. I have to drink two cups of coffee at the same time every morning, have to consume at least a half gallon of water and eat at least one bowl of bran-infused cereal a day. At four o’clock every afternoon I stand in the middle of the backyard, hold my arms out perpendicular to my body, turn three circles to the left, then one to the right, touch my toes and clap my hands twice. If I forget and only clap my hands once I don’t poop. If the wind changes direction I don’t poop.

  And when I was pregnant, none of those rituals mattered. In fact, I would not have been surprised if the pregnancy had made it so that I wouldn’t ever poop again, and if that was the case, what do you know! Something else no one was willing to warn me about.

  Once I started to feel better Jon and I made a point of leaving the house more often. One night very early in my second trimester we attended a concert by musician Norah Jones at a venue in an open field on the side of a mountain overlooking the Salt Lake Valley. Seating at this venue was general admission, meaning normally we would sit wherever we could find a patch of grass, but that night we got to sit in the VIP section, a small rectangular area directly in front of the stage with upright white folding chairs, because our friend knew the drummer in Norah’s band. That did not stop me from telling everyone around us that it was because I was pregnant, and I was horrified when those words came out of my mouth. I couldn’t stop them, it was an urge I could not stifle, something inside that made me want those people to understand that being pregnant made me special. And after I said it I remembered why I find pregnant women so annoying.

  It was the first real outing we’d taken since the beginning of the pregnancy, and for two exquisite hours we sat facing the middle of the stage while sucking watermelon Jolly Ranchers, a suitable alternative to white wine, and listened to Norah’s voice drip like honey onto sandpaper. It was one of those sublime Utah summer nights where it’s almost chilly enough for a sweater, but warm enough that you can smell the neck of the lover sitting beside you, and the sun fell behind the mountains to the west in electric bands of neon color.

  The venue was packed with earthy non-Mormon Utah types, people who live here despite, not because of, the religion. Everyone had some sort of alcoholic beverage in their hand, something they’d brought from home or bummed off the person sitting next to them, mostly white or red wine, a pint of lager here and there. And that was precisely why
it had been so hard for us to go out those first few months of my pregnancy, because the smell of people partying was right up there with sewage.

  The VIP section of the crowd was a virtual who’s who of Utah celebrity. Although I was disappointed that there was no Osmond sighting, we sat directly behind a local news anchor who had one of the most beguiling mustaches on the planet, and in a state where facial hair was considered an outward signifier of “evildoing,” those of us who did evil on a regular basis appreciated his high-profile representation. Plus, he wasn’t wearing socks, so we could see his ankles. And because he was showing so much skin I could totally imagine what he would look like naked.

  The concert itself was phenomenal, full of every hit song she’d ever written plus a few covers of some country classics, and Norah’s voice was a thousand times more remarkable than any live recording could ever capture. After she played her final song we followed our friend to the after-show party at a large greenhouse up the hill from the venue. The room was littered with half-eaten food, and within seconds of stepping foot in the building the pregnant demon inside of me couldn’t keep its face out of the cheesecake. There I stood surrounded by members of Norah’s band, civilized people who use words like “amenable” and talk about NPR, and instead of making small talk or doing my best impression of an evolved person, I stuffed my face with stale cheesecake, skipping utensils and napkins altogether. I also stole a forty-dollar bottle of chardonnay out of their cooler, something I planned to drink a year and a half later when I’d weaned the baby off breastfeeding, or perhaps sooner if I mastered the whole horrific pumping mechanism. All I knew is that I would one day be able to drink alcoholic beverages again, and when that day came, what better way to celebrate than with an illicit bottle of wine I’d poached from a rock star with great tits?