Only moments ago, I stumbled into a pocket of self discovery. It happened while chopping kumara and stuffing buckwheat pancakes slathered with yogurt into my mouth. I stood outside my thoughts for a moment and became aware of the fact that I am the voice-over to my own life. Some people whistle to themselves or talk out loud, some people go over taxes, worry about the homeless, count calories consumed and expended, or fine-tune their plans of world domination.

Me? I narrate. Like the voice-over present in television dramas such as Grey’s Anatomy, I summarize the small and large acts that make up the moments of my days into metaphors and storyline. I only realized this tonight because in the middle of editing my own unfolding narrative about how my hormones were forcing me to do strange things like bake kumara muffins at an hour that is way past my bedtime, I realized that I was telling the wrong story.

The real story is this: I am worried about my mother. Beneath the surface stories that I have been telling myself, I have been thinking about my mother. Each moment floats like a water lily, a beautiful and distracting thing, beneath which a part of me swims through shadows and filtered light. My mother is with me everywhere in this place. I realize that I have no way of imagining the world without her presence moving like a current beneath me.

Yesterday, when my father told me that they are waiting on tests to find out if the cancer has spread, I responded with, “Okay, I won’t worry until I know we have a reason to worry.” We joked a little. We said, “I love you and no, let’s not think about this until we get the results.” And then I began narrating about the things that will keep me busy until Friday, when we will have an answer. I thought about the thesis, the house chores, the ultrasound on Wednesday morning, my sister and her husband freshly arrived in New Zealand, crammed into a camper van somewhere on the north island.

All day my surface has become crowded with water lilies vying for my attention, choking one another out until they are a sea of white and pink. Without acknowledging it, I have been descending into the quiet over and over again.  Beneath the surface I swim carefully between the flowers’ tangled roots and I find my mother. I gather her to me in memories. Together we wait. We dream. I tell us stories.

In the last two weeks I have become the leader of a massacre. It is possible that when the afterlife comes, a giant ant is going to greet me and say in a Spanish accent, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my brothers/sisters/uncles/aunties/grandparents/co-workers now prepare to die!”

(big kudos to anyone who got the Princess Bride reference)

If this moment comes, I have been rehearsing my reply. I have been rehearsing it while crushing small bodies with my thumb. While watching small bodies suffocating in bleach. While wiping out what appears to be several generations of swarm into my kitchen day after day.

I will say, “Being ants you should get the whole ‘queen’ concept. I am the queen of this house and I gave you fair warning. That first blast of Raid was not a misguided welcome, it was a ‘you have one chance to back your nasty little selves out of my kitchen before I declare war.’ Did I mention I am a pregnant queen with a thesis due in five months and that I have been waking up at 5 a.m. every morning to find one my most important pleasures, my cup of coffee, destroyed by you deciding that invading my cupboards is not enough, you have to fall into my kettle as well?”

At this point, I am convinced that Mr. Vendetta ant-with-attitude will back away and declare me absolved of my sins. By that time it won’t matter because I will be in the afterlife with a half-written novel and an unfinished thesis haunting me into eternity.

Before you accuse me of over-reacting (and perhaps needing to keep a tidier kitchen to avoid attracting ants in the first place) let me point out this is no ordinary ant invasion. Oh no. We have been rebuilding the deck and in the process managed to disturb several massive ant colonies which promptly found entry into our home. We are talking millions. Every morning I wake up and have to vacuum dead ants off the kitchen floor. We have had to empty three cupboards to devote them to ant poison and the necessary swarming process that will continue until they have carried enough of the poison back into their nests.

That sounds horrible, it does, but all I have to do to harden my heart is look over my shoulder into the kitchen and my wrath will return. My war lust catch flame.

I blame my lack of blogging on the ants. Right now, the ants are my general ‘get-out- of – jail – free’ card for all of my transgressions. A few examples:

The printer acts up and doesn’t allow me to print out the journal articles I need. A clear case of ant sabotage!

My children destroy the house in five seconds flat and refuse to sit still. They have ants in their pants!

I think my reasoning is pretty difficult to argue with.

In my mind there is a constant loop of Milli Vanilli’s “Blame it on the rain” only now they are singing “Blame it on the ants.”

I will not stop my campaign of slander until every single ant is dead.

“Today,” I declare, “is a good day for ants to die!“

So, I do apologize for my absence. I have been a wee bit occupied. I think I might need a vacation.

How have you been?

waiting on God

Yesterday night I turned off the television and ordered both of my children to the dinner table.

“Right!” I said, putting both hands on my hips and wilting inside, “If you are going to keep up all this noisy complaining and arguing about movies, we are turning off the movie!”

Sol and Zaviera sat in their chairs and started kicking one another beneath the table as I went about banging pots, sighing, muttering, and somewhere in my mind, paddling on my surfboard towards a sunset horizon.  This other self sat up on her surfboard and felt the ocean rock gently beneath her as I went about portioning noodles and peas.

I looked up when Zaviera screeched, my mouth open, ready to bark, “Stop fighting!”

But instead of sibling bloodthirst, Sol was squirming in his chair, giggling.  Sol declares, “Mommy! I just felt something. I felt it before, before when I was complaining about the movie.”

“What did you feel?” Inside my mind, I begin to paddle for a wave. Long strokes, my arms sore from the effort, my eyes fixed on the shore.

“I felt an angel.”

Thinking I had misheard, I ask again, “You felt a-what?”

“An angel. I felt it again. And when I was complaining, I felt it.”

“An angel?”

“Yes, that is why I was complaining!”

“You were complaining about the movie because you felt an angel?”

The wave lifts and I jump to my feet, feeling the wind rush up the face of the water.

“Yes Mommy, because it was a complaining-angel.”

And suddenly, my house full of domestic chaos, dirty dishes and piles of laundry, invading ants and the constant tide of toys, becomes an open ocean.

“A complaining-angel?”

“Yes,” Sol nods, confident in his truth.

I am flying, dancing along this wave, and I grab my child and whisper, “Sol, I love you.”

Personally, I think all mothers should be upgraded to Superwoman status.

I have hit my personal kryptonite wall with this pregnancy. This last week has left me sitting on the ground, cartoon character birds spinning around my head, and me looking around, stunned to realize that all of these years I have not actually been flying, I’ve been running towards this wall. Yes, running with my feet on the ground, lungs burning, gravity bearing down.

I’ve been operating under the assumption that if I run fast enough, flap my arms and refuse to look at the ground, I’m actually flying. While I may be equipped with a spirit and mind that wants to leap buildings in a single bound, I have been born with a body that would better suit the rhythms of a koala bear. Or a sloth.

A short summary is that I have some form of dysautonomia – my nervous system does not regulate my body the way it should. The result is my adrenaline shoots off, I have tachycardia, my digestive system is over-sensitive to food, and my immune system goes on the blink. You could say I am a woman gone haywire. I have been lucky enough to discover that a small dose of betablocker goes a long way to help regulate my nervous system.

We only discovered this back in November, when my entire family was preparing for the possibility that my symptoms might be the result of a leaking heart that would require open-heart surgery. And, we were all ready for it if it meant a change in my quality of existence after a lifetime of struggle. The betablocker, diagnosis and the instructions to “accept it and learn to live within the restrictions, this is just you” was a nice alternative to having my chest sawed into.

So after beginning the betablocker I had about 4 months of experiencing what will most likely be as ‘normal’ as I ever get. When I got pregnant, I switched betablockers but the nausea overwhelmed anything else going on in my body, so it was not until a week ago that I realized the new medication was not working. I felt like I had been dropped into the spiritual bog of eternal stench (Labyrinth reference anyone?). It is amazing how quickly I had begun to take my new state of being for granted. The realization jolted me.

I immediately switched back to my old betablocker and while it did not take away as much of the fatigue as I wanted (I would be a maniac if given the amount of energy I want), it alleviated things enough to allow me to function again. This whole “respecting limitations” thing is new to me. I don’t  think Spaniards in general are very good at this concept. We like to shout Ole’! and go conquer things.

It isn’t easy to make peace with the view of myself I have been secretly clinging to, one that involves me outrunning this thing in my body. But, I have realized that this is precisely how I will finally learn to fly. It is not by trying to escape the weight of what I am, it is by accepting it.

I said to my friend this morning, “It all sounds very Zen of me doesn’t it?” And then I gave him my Groucho Marx eyebrow waggle because I am the least Zen person on the planet.

In the past, especially when younger, I was drawn to stories about people who learned to transform in the face of terminal illness or a chronic incurable condition, and the heart of those stories always centered on living each day with joy, counting the blessings as they present themselves, until it becomes second nature. It never occurred to me that it was a message I would have to apply to my own circumstances in the same way.
I think sometimes we need to fight against something until that struggle transforms into a dance.

I am beginning to hear the beginning of a new rhythm in my life. It has been beneath the surface, waiting patiently, from the beginning.

So my goals this week?

Plenty to do. Our house is bustling with the activity of my amazing inlaws who have taken two weeks off of work to come over and rebuild our deck for us. I need to have my thesis outlined by, er, noon tomorrow. I am planning on trying to churn out the academic thesis part of this masters, rough draft, within a month, so that I can devote the rest of the time to the novel. Originally I hoped to try to balance the two. I don’t think that is going to work.

Mostly, I am going to focus my mind on the rhythm.

I think I can, I think I can...

The nausea has passed, leaving Alegra, the Little Miss Engine That Thinks She Can revving her engines at the gates. Only when the gates opened, Alegra leaped forth into a flood of Things She Shouldn’t Be Doing, such as deciding that it would be a great ‘workout’ to move cobblestone bricks for over two hours in an effort to help the beginning stages of rebuilding the deck. Alegra sputtered. Hissing came out from beneath her hood. Three days after the fact, Alegra was still stalling out every time she tried to pour coffee into her gas tank. Alegra has learned her lesson: This pregnancy, slow and easy wins the race. Alegra will now stop referring to herself in the third person.

Unfortunately, at about the point when I realized I needed to be  producing 10,000 words of polished, final draft thesis/novel writing a month, life, in its typical tornado way, began picking up barnyard animals and tractors to hurl in my path and my engine gave out. At least it has felt that way this week, but I can’t complain because at the end of the day, everything littering my path at the moment equals some form of blessing or opportunity. I just need to put one step in front of the other, make lists and cross things off as I go. I will be resuming the previous Monday goal blog schedule in an effort to support this.

The little one is not so little anymore. I went shopping the other day for some yoga-style pants. They are the perfect pregnancy wear. I put two pairs on the counter and the saleswoman looked up, did one of those quick ‘female lookie-overs’ and said, “Oh, no wonder you are buying two of these, pregnant women love these!”

My first thought was, “Wow, you are brave for assuming I am pregnant!” Because all women know that the golden rule is: You don’t mention a woman is pregnant unless they look like they have a basketball shoved up their shirt and the due date is probably sometime that day.

But secretly I was relieved that I look obviously pregnant at this stage rather than, well, odd. My first pregnancy I looked odd. I have pictures to confirm. I once got into an argument with a group of friends when I told them I was not a cute pregnant woman. “Sure you weren’t,” they said, rolling their eyes. So I brought them my pregnancy photo album and slammed it down in front of them. They took one look at the photos and said, “Oh, you’re right.” One benifit of having blown out my stomach muscles with two pregnancies and c-sections is the slight vanity of actually getting to look pregnant instead of like a woman who is slowly turning into a tuberous vegetable.

We are twelve weeks now and the baby is the size of a lime. I am convinced I am already feeling him/her move. It only happens at night when I am very relaxed. ‘They’ say that you aren’t supposed to be able to feel the baby until 14 or 16 weeks but I have always been super sensitive to the goings-on in my body, and, hey, how I look at it is, a lime is a sort of a big object to be doing somersaults in your body without you catching on to the action. Plus, being on my third pregnancy I recognize the sensation. It is my favorite part of being pregnant. They often refer to it as a ‘fluttering’ as if there is a butterfly moving around inside of you, but it feels more like pearls being gently rolled around in the dark by a gentle and tentatively curious creature.

We are going in for the 12 week ultrasound tomorrow and I can’t wait. Seeing the reality of the baby up on the screen and the reassurance that all is on track is a special kind of magic.

So this week (now that the week is half gone), my goals are to:

1) Get the house in order for the arrival of my incredibly supportive and generous mum/dad-in-law, they are taking time off work to come stay with us and help us build the new deck

2) read through all the journal articles I have printed out and organize them into a thesis outline to present to my professor on Wednesday

3) finish and type up the first half of the novel synopsis with its new revisions, and, hopefully, begin to sketch out some chapters

4) set up a work schedule for the next six months

5) adore my new crosstrainer and watch many episodes of Weeds Season 3 while I break it in. Give my crosstrainer a name, just so I can coo to it while i work out.

6) to continue to chant in the face of tornadoes: I think I can, I think I can, I think I can

How has your week been? Plans for the week ahead? Anyone enter the Flash40 competition?

If we are good parents, this will be Sol's next birthday present.

Dan and I went to visit a potential school for Sol and Zaviera yesterday. I won’t name this school because well, first off, I believe in the potential of the school. I went to this type of school in highschool and I know the quality of human being it produces. Students emerge into the world as passionate learners, solid individuals and with their creativity firmly rooted in their worldview. Sounds great doesn’t it? Well, to me it does. The only glitch is that this type of education is…well, I think I might be able to best illustrate this ‘glitch’ with our experience. I am going to try to not take too many liberties with my paraphrasing here, so with that disclaimer in place, let us jump in to an Alegra-Dan moment.

Picture us sitting on small wooden chairs in a large room with pink pastel walls, gauze curtains and shelves filled with toys that consist mostly of: rocks and pine cones, plus a few ‘dolls’ that are nothing more than material tied around a soft round pillow the size of a softball (sort of like the ghosts you can make out of tissue paper and cotton balls but on a grander scale). The kindergarten teacher (who I will refer to as Ms. K) is sitting before us wearing knitted booties, a big shapeless skirt, no make-up, and gesturing with floaty-fairy hands (I will repeat this phrase ‘floaty-fairy’):

Ms. K: “This space is the womb within which we protect your children…”

Next to me I feel Dan shift at the reference to the salmon-pink walls as being a womb. And so it began. Next, the woman led us through a description of her wisdom about our children. Little gems such as:

“Now, your child must come here wearing a hat because while they must be moving all the time in order to expand and grow, their heads must also be warm or their growth will be stunted.”

“You will never see a kindie teacher wearing black. Black reflects nothing to the child. It does not allow them to grow or expand. Nor do we allow children to wear black. We wear nothing but colors that nurture and comfort the children. We also don’t wear any jewelry or perfume. These things corrupt the childrens’ enhanced senses and distract them. Nor do we allow them to wear any clothing with pictures on them.”

I would like to point out that both Dan and I are wearing black. Dan: black shorts, black hoodie.  Alegra: Dark grey pants, black long sleeve shirt, black vest. We are both wearing cologne/perfume and I am wearing *gasp* a beaded necklace. It was right about this point that my spine began to straighten and get a little tense, like a battle was on the horizon. And then the woman continued:

“We do absolutely no writing in front of the children. We leave that in the outside world (insinuating once again to the amount of stress we parents put our children through by writing and reading in front of them and wearing black). If we must write, we do it discretely so that the children do not see it. None of our books have words in them, just beautiful, nurturing pictures, and I personally would prefer no books at all until they reach the age of 7 when their consciousness is ready to handle that sort of thing.”

I wanted to chirp up with, “Well, I am a writer and a student. My kids see me writing and reading all the time, is this going to be a problem?”

She then went on to explain that they don’t believe in any toys that don’t allow the child to project their imagination on to the object. As in, anything with a face or defining features. They are given sticks, stones, cloth dolls with no faces, and er, that is about it. She declared that at this age, a child will pick up a stick and turn it into anything they want it to be. She hasn’t met my son. If I pick up a stick and tell him it is a snake, he will look at me and say, “Mommy, that is a stick.” “Well, we can play that it is a snake.” “No Mommy, we can’t, it is a stick.”

So back to the beginning of that ‘consciousness’ theme. At this point, the teacher paused, flourished her hands in the air, fixed us with her serene gaze and dropped the bomb.

“You need to know we believe in reincarnation, while we are based on a Christian worldview we do not bring any of this into the curriculum but we do interact with your child with this belief in reincarnation and if we feel we need to get a better grasp on who your child is, we will do a ‘child study’.” (I am assuming based on the idea of the child’s past life).

At this point, Dan shifted in his chair again and I was feeling my teeth clench. Why, out of all the potential teachers at this place, did we have to get this woman as the introduction? My gut was screaming, “Take your children and run…” while my mind was battling with the fact that I have experienced this type of education at the upper levels and I believe in its larger picture. I know it works.

So, just as I was about to walk my black-wearing, pen-wielding, perfume wafting self out of that woman’s womb, the principal of the school showed up to give us the rest of the tour. The first thing I did when I saw her was to blurt out, “Hey! She is wearing black! Isn’t that WRONG?”

The principal was hilarious, down to earth, professional, my kind of woman. She has three kids, two of them have been through this school. At this point in the game I figured if I couldn’t be straight-up, this whole situation was not going to work, so I cornered her and said, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Yes.”

“My husband and I are pretty middle of the road kind of people. We are never going to be airy-floaty lalalalala people. Is this going to be a problem?”

She cracked up, “Hey, I am a middle of the road woman.”

“Yes, that is why I am asking you about this.”

“Look, half the people at this school are hippies, the other half aren’t. The uniting thing with all of the parents here is the concern with quality education. It is unfortunate that all of the kindergarten makes your kids look like quakers but trust me, home life and school life can be very separate.”

“I have no problem with hippies, half my friends are hippies,” I said, “What I am concerned about is getting in trouble for wearing black!”

As in, I am not going to enroll my child in a school with a teacher who thinks that my child is being stunted by the fact that Dan and I will not take on an extreme worldview that requires us to fill our house with pine cones as toys, paint the walls in pastels, hide all visible writing, eat plain food, never use words to discipline our children, and ditch the deodarant, black clothing (I wonder if that is why Spaniards are so fiery and ambitious – they were influenced by all of the black-favoring fashion), and well, I could go on. I don’t want a teacher to be projecting a bunch of ‘issues’ on to my children because Dan and I don’t fit into her worldview of what we should be. Teachers should be partners with the parents and I think this woman wants devotees.

I got home and had to vent, so I grabbed my dad on the IM and we started coming up with ways to torment this teacher. My favorite is this one:

Send Sol to school in a black t-shirt with big words on it saying:

Sometimes a stick is just a stick.

My dad never fails me when I need a partner in evil scheming.

Dan and I realize that any school is going to come with its annoying teachers and that compromises need to be made. We are going to put ourselves on the waiting list and keep exploring our options because I know this woman represented the extreme end of the spectrum. She represented everything about this type of school that has put me off the idea of enrolling. The dilemna is that I know the education works. I have friends with kids that have gone through this program and like Dan and I, they are black wearing, middle of the road kind of people.

Oh yeah, goals.

This week: I read through some articles, submitted a story to the Flash40 competition (Editor Unleashed) and um, not much else. The nause is still here, but slowly backing off, so hopefully I will pick up steam next week.

Wow, this has been a long blog! All these WORDS. Naughty, naughty words. At least they aren’t written in black.

POST NOTE: Dan just summed it up when he came home and said, “Babe, I had the most bizarre dream, I think it was from that teacher. There were all these older women dancing in the woods and they were all pregnant but they were too old to be pregnant and there was this one woman in the middle of all of them and she had all of these children trapped in her womb, she wouldn’t give birth to them, and their hands were trying to reach out of her…”

How bizarre is that? I didn’t even give Dan my tagline of ‘the teacher whose womb knows no bounds’…but that sort of summarizes my gut instinct towards this particular woman, she felt as though she were the true parent to all of these children and that we were invaders of sorts. Ah, the journey of being a parent….

I enjoy capitalizing on my hormonal craziness as material for punchlines but I actually have a deep respect for the emotional processes of pregnancy. Even when it feels like a form of madness to find myself awake at night rifling through memories as though I have been called to discover a hidden treasure, or when I become inappropriately annoyed because just when I have fallen asleep my husband wakes me up because he is a big man and makes big noises, I don’t believe any of my experiences are simply a nasty side effect of baby-making hormones. With my first pregnancy I began to see very quickly that as my body was changing to make room for this new life my entire sense of self was being transformed as well. When I look back at the last four years of being a mother, I can see distinct patterns of growth with the birth of each of my children, things I needed to learn, things that Sol and Zaviera with their unique personalities are continuing to teach me.

Lately I have been feeling as though the most difficult part of being a parent is the fact that I want to run through the wildflower garden of my children’s world without the responsibility of taming it.  I realize it is a necessary responsibility of parenthood. I know that in order for them to take root and survive in this world, weeds must be pulled, wildness must be encouraged while also pruned and trained so that it gains strength.

I also realize that right now this taming has more to do with myself than it does with them. I have to constantly tend to my own garden because parents provide the first soil for their children’s imagination to take root in. Who I am, my relationship with my husband, how I respond to Sol and Zaviera, how I feel about the world, will be a big part of what my children absorb as ‘life’.  It is a massive responsibility. It is also the most profound opportunity and gift. I understand more and more the concept of being given a second childhood through our children. As an adult and parent I am neck deep in responsibilities that can sometimes make me feel squeezed, tense, but as I watch my children explore the world, to respond to it with joy and passion, I find myself shedding old, restrictive attitudes. I find myself understanding that while the responsibilities will never go away, I can find freedom within them.  Life is full of challenge and work, the difference is that as children we hungered for these things, we found joy in them. I see it in my children daily and remember that place within myself. That hint of heaven at the edges of all things.

I don’t ‘zone-out’ well and so the last month of nausea has been difficult for me. I admire Dan for his ability to phase out the world completely and lose himself in a distraction. Even when I am distracting myself, I am not distracted. Whatever is going on in my life will still be engaged with whatever it is I am using as a mental vacation. If I am watching back to back episodes of BSG or Grey’s Anatomy to escape the nausea, my mind is busy thinking, thinking, thinking. The closest I ever get to freedom from this mental engagement is when I am surfing on the face of a wave. So combine all of this thinking with an inability to do anything but be prone on the couch and throw in the catalyst of hormones making all of my emotions more acute…well, yeah, this first trimester of pregnancy has been quite a journey for me. But as the nausea begins to fade, I have found myself settling in more and more into a new phase, I feel quiet, playful, aware of the world in a way unique to this pregnancy and most likely to the personality of the child growing inside of me. Last night I had my first dream about the baby. It was a boy and he was beautiful. He had a calm presence and spoke in two word combinations that contained the kind of wisdom that can not be translated.

I am not quite at the end of this tunnel just yet, but I am getting close. Close enough to look back over the last five weeks with gratitude rather than the desire to run to the toilet.The baby is the size of a kumquat and officially a fetus. Everything is there, including fingernails. Now, it is all about filling in, strengthening, and growing. The next two trimesters are going to be an adventure.

My goals for this week now that the week is almost over? After I post this I am going to take a nap. And then I plan on reading through at least 2-5 journal articles. By next week? I hope to have written a story to submit to Editor Unleashed and to have finished reading my journal articles with an outlined ‘plan’ for my thesis.

I eat shiny happy people and then I get sick

I have to point out that living with commonwealth spelling has messed up my instincts to the point that I second guess myself when it comes to spelling a simple word like ’shiny’. Ugh. Have you ever had the experience of looking too closely at a word so that suddenly it makes no sense to you? Shiny has just morphed into a very strange looking collection of letters. Methinks Alegra has a brain swamped by hormones. Actually, I don’t need hormones as an excuse, I would probably be doing the same thing on any normal day.

Starting last week, the nausea manifested a new symptom. It has turned me into a curmudgeon. A Grinch Who Wants to Steal Christmas. A Rain On Your Parade Girl.

Example: Last night Dan and I were cuddling on the couch. Actually, cuddling might not be the right word because I am not cuddly or Care-bearish in any way right now. My feet were in his lap and my head turned towards a pocket of clean air uncontaminated by any scent that might send me to the toilet. That is my version of ‘cuddle’ right now. Dan starts to talk about how excited he is to workout in the morning, how pumped he is, how strong he is feeling, the plans he has for the circuit class he runs. I turn to him, trying not to breathe, and say, “I don’t like shiny, happy, healthy, fit, toned, pumped, can’t wait to work-out people right now. I thought I made this clear a week ago. Perky people are the bane of my existence. Go be perky elsewhere! I only welcome flabby, nauseated, exhausted, bloated people.”

Dan responded by flexing his chest muscles and doing a few bicep poses. This is why we get along so well. It is also why being named after the biblical Daniel character suits his personality perfectly. The man loves to tame lions. He better, he married a lioness.

I say this next bit in a whisper, in a just between you and me voice, “The nausea may be starting to back off.”

Don’t tell anyone. I am afraid the powers that be will decide to use me for more amusement. I had a few hours in the morning yesterday that were almost normal. By next week (week ten of the pregnancy) the placenta is supposed to be attached which means it will take over some of the work that the nausea creating hormones are currently responsible for. I am almost certain that by week eleven with my previous two pregnancies I was almost back to normal. Hey, at the least, it is a flicker of hope to get me through this next week, if relief fails to manifest, at least I got through another week.

So goals! I do have them still. Last night I was able to work on a short story that I might enter in Maria Schneider’s flash fiction competition. I have been searching through journal articles for my thesis. This week I plan to read through at least 10 articles, take notes and come up with a rough plan to present to my professor on Wednesday. Also, shampoo the carpets, keep exercising, do a little catch-up cleaning and try to figure out a way to make my dog smell like lavender and lemon balm.

How was your week?

Please excuse me while my writing drives over the yellow line into the oncoming traffic of bad taste. It is difficult to compose anything with one hand poised to dive down my throat at the command of my nausea. I have been trying to figure out what is different about this pregnancy as opposed to when I was pregnant with Sol and Zaviera. I was nauseated with both of them and it was not pleasant but this pregnancy has been particularly brutal. There is very little I can eat and when I do eat, I often have to throw-up about hour after I have eaten. At first I thought the obvious: I have two other children to take care of, it is making it more challenging. But that doesn’t explain the degree to which I get nauseated. The only pregnancy I threw-up with was Zaviera and that was only once.

Not that figuring any of this out is going to relieve the experience but hey, a woman has to find some flimsy sense of control when her body is swerving all over the place. So my theory (as of today) besides this maybe being another girl, is that with both of my previous pregnancies my diet was radically different. The previous first trimesters featured such staples as: gummy worms, marshmallows, BK Chicken burgers, Subway, mochas, blueberry white choc muffins, choc in general…you get the picture. The first trimester has always featured junkfood because it was all I could stomach and then i would go back to my usual healthy eating for the remainder of the pregnancy. I think one of the many ways I have disappointed my father is that when Dan and I came back to the USA with Sol’s pregnancy I was, as he said, “A boring pregnant woman.” No wild moodswings, but more importantly, no wild food cravings. My dad was looking forward to those food cravings, to being sent out on missions that meant he would have an excuse to eat whatever I was eating.

This pregnancy? The most refined carb on the menu, the closest thing to sugar my body has experienced is hot chips. I really think the constant nibbling on ‘lollies’ (Kiwis call all candy ‘lollies’) might have not necessarily relieved the nausea from my last pregnancies but made it less acute. I promise to try not to write about my nausea every week for the next 3-4 weeks but right now it is all consuming.

I have decided to allow the Monday blog to become a Tuesday blog (like how I make this sound as if it was a conscious, focused choice rather than the fact that I couldn’t function today?) because Tuesday is the official day I reach a new week in the pregnancy. A new week equals a week closer to the safety zone of the second trimester and, more importantly, the nausea-free zone. I am now officially eight weeks pregnant and the baby is the size of a lima bean, and is starting to develop like crazy. Hoooboy can I feel it!

One of the positives of this first trimester madness (when it isn’t working against me) is the way my senses are enhanced. Dan took me out to Japanese food for Mother’s Day and the taste! Ooooh the taste! And while I hate enclosed spaces because of all the lingering smells, I love being outside. I went on a long walk today to get my exercise in and it felt like being a child again, the way the world was so vividly alive. This time of year usually brings a mood disorder to NZ’s weather, or, as others like to say, “Four seasons in one hour”. Yesterday a sudden thunderstorm shook our house on and off for about an hour. It was like a dark, echoing shute had opened in the sky above us and the universe came roaring down. At one point I looked outside to discover the lawn had turned white with hail. It piled up in the streets so quickly that roads flooded. Today we are back to our rain/sun, rain/sun weather but evidence of the hail still exists in small dirty piles on the lawn and gathered around storm drains and on my walk the air had this crisp beauty to it that brought me back to all the autumns of my childhood.

I have still been unable to write but I am reading like crazy and I have discovered that this is actually more important right now. This week I stumbled on to a discovery, a book called Hunting Humans that has brought to the surface the thrust of some of the issues I want to explore in the novel as well as in the academic component of my thesis…more on this later, I am itching to write about it but I am being swamped by my bugaboos right now.

So my goals for this week?
Survive. Get fresh air. Try not to cry about the nausea. Read. Have faith.

And you?

I am obsessed with sushi and chinese food right now.

Last Wednesday I sat in a room at the University that I’ve named “The Aquarium” because of the large window in front of a desk that looks out on to the foyer. Surrounded by shelves of books, old equipment and smells, I was tap dancing away on my keyboard, looking up every few minutes to watch students and professors interact, the tutorial room buzzing with gossip and banter, and to stuff my mouth with an odd assortment of sushi. My breakfast. I only meant to buy hot chips (fries, only thicker and covered in this yummy salt stuff) but when I arrived at the University cafe I became mesmerized by tuna sushi, sushi covered in seaweed and mushrooms, and, well, eggrolls. Life was good. I was handling the nausea. I managed to smooth out 5,600 words of the first chapter, meet with my professor, and go watch the V-jay Monologues with a few friends that night. I actually enjoyed the V-jay performance by the way. I thought I would be traumatized but I wasn’t. I laughed so hard I was stomping my feet and a few times it brought me to tears. But the main thing is that it didn’t make me want to vomit.

I woke up the next morning and it had all changed.

The nausea hit and hit hard. I am lucky in that I don’t vomit like some women do but I am nauseated from sunrise to sunset. I don’t even want to get descriptive with how it all feels right now. Let me just say that I have been incapable of doing anything for the last five days other than watch Battlestar Galactica, read Silence of the Lambs, take a few notes for the first chapter and second, and try not to cry. Oh, and I downloaded a free novel writing program:

http://storybook.intertec.ch/joomla/

It looks like it is going to be incredibly useful, putting into a program everything I have been trying to do with crude paper and pen. I just need to figure out how to back it up and print out whatever it is I have entered into it. I am paranoid like that. For good reason.

Also, for any of you who need inspiration to get wordcount done for an essay or story, my friend Kemari turned me on to this:

http://lab.drwicked.com/writeordie.html

Yesterday I went to the doctor for my first prenatal appointment. Now I understand why people become so loyal to a specific doctor. This man is so good at what he does and it is such a relief to find someone like him. I won’t go into the boring details but I go in this afternoon for the first ultrasound to make sure there is a viable little boogar inside of me causing all this beautiful misery. He also prescribed me nausea medication. I am only going to take one a day which gives me about 7 hours of reduced nausea. It doesn’t take it away, but it takes the edge off, I am hoping enough that I can get back on track with my work and not feel like I am on the verge of nervous breakdown. Only five days into the full swing of the nausea and I was on the verge of tears, trying to keep perspective but not knowing how I was going to manage 6 more weeks of feeling that way. So here is hoping!

A late and uninspired Monday blog, but it is done.

How was your week?