A friendly game of quarters

Sorry for the absence, everyone! All is well with me and Dr. Husband and Baby #1 and Baby-#2-in-the-making. I hadn’t intended to be gone from here for so long and certainly hadn’t intended to cause anyone any concern. In fact, I hadn’t fully realized just how long it had been until a kind reader wrote me to see what the deal was. (Thanks for the nudge, KF!) I have no real excuse—it just sort of…happened. A sick babysitter one day, an urgent need to shop for a dress that’s flattering to my 10-weeks-pregnant constant-cereal-eating-stomach to wear to a wedding-like event this past weekend, a few days of travel, a head-cold, a two-day-migraine, a visiting in-law, plus the standard pregnancy exhaustion—and here I am, nearly two weeks later and unable to remember how to write.

These are…letters? And they make…words?

I’m now officially ONE QUARTER OF THE WAY DONE WITH THIS WHOLE PREGNANCY SHENANIGAN, and can I just say, HELL YEAH! If memory serves (and as any mom knows, it doesn’t), the worst part is OVER! Oh, yes, sure, there will be four to eight more weeks of nausea and scent-of-coffee-induced barfing, but by this point I’m sort of used to it. Sort of resigned this hideous new lifestyle of gagging at the smell of my own kitchen and my own baby’s diapers and, occasionally, my own body. Nothing’s as bad as those first days of OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS THIS BULLSHIT—those days when the hormones in your system are still ramping up and every day is worse than the last. By now I’ve plateaued, and though I’m no longer excited by the once-soothing flavor of red Gatorade, I’m not yet repulsed by it either.

I know, I know, the end of the third trimester is totally sucky, too—the indigestion and varicose veins and insomnia and inability to get physically comfortable EVER—but nothing is worse than living in a state of constant nausea and seeing no end in sight. (Okay, there are lots of things worse, but none that I have yet to experience in a pregnancy. And, frankly, I’d take migraines or back pain or heartbreak or depression or anxiety or visiting in-laws over nausea any day.) Also, by the end of things, you’re counting down to A BABY, whereas at this point you’re counting up from an embryo to a fetus*, which, while miraculous, is considerably less, um, motivating. Your typical less-than-a-quarter-ounce, kumquat-sized alien is not something you want to visualize bringing home in a few days.

(An aside: it is because of my visiting in-law that I am able to sit down and write this right now rather than spending my morning reading Cookie Monster’s Circle Book over and over and then reiterating over and over, that, no, we cannot eat a cookie right now. It is also because of my visiting in-law that I am able to sit down in a room by myself eat a cookie right now. Thank you, visiting in-law!)

Being one-quarter of the way done with a difficult task is really quite a lot, right? You’ve finished the hardest part of getting started, and you’ve established some momentum—enough, really, to trust that you’ll be able to keep going, even through the hard parts. I mean, imagine being a quarter of the way done with building the Golden Gate bridge or a new house or world peace. A quarter is a lot.

Right?

(*Note: the embryo apparently just became a fetus this week. Now I can count up from alien-seeming fetus to human-seeming fetus.)