100th Post and a Guest Blogger

So my friend sent me the following and I so thoroughly enjoyed it I asked if I could post it. To be clear, this really is a friend, not me saying it's a friend. I am still at the stage where when engaged friends stick their rings on my finger I flip out because I fear that the ring will never come off and I feel terribly constricted and tied down. . . .

Dear Bitter Friend,

So, after a few months of social disconnectedness, accompanied by much unplanned weight loss in an unwillingly bulimic sort of way, I'm finally feeling human enough to do productive things like read the last 20 weeks or so of getting bitter and thereby getting some sense of what other people did all summer while I threw up. I am strengthened in this endeavor by the fact that as of this week I've finally managed to reattain the weight I was at in April when the unpleasantness began.

See, despite repeated assurances over many years by many physicians that such a thing was medically improbable, if not impossible (for lots of dull reasons), it came to pass that I got knocked up. And just to make sure that I didn't come to doubt the continuance of this unlikely state of affairs, God has allowed me to experience every possible disagreeable pregnancy "symptom" (if it's not a disease, why are they called symptoms, I ask you?) during the last four months. The highlights? Well, next to the constant nausea, bizarre food/smell aversions, and daily (sometimes hourly) opportunities to throw up what little I had managed to consume, they'd have to include boobs so sore and swollen that they've actually popped the underwires out of my bras, horrible acne, and blood vessels bursting all over my face. Are you really excited about being pregnant someday? It's so, so much fun.

Pregnant. With a little hiccup-prone person swimming around inside me, accruing a wealth of things to resent me for over the next 50 years, like the fact that the only thing I've been able to keep down is that nutritional paragon, the mocha frappuccino. Weeks and weeks of daily injecting my unborn child with caffeine, refined sugars, preservatives, and non-organic, hormone-studded dairy. Also, a wealth of early pregnancy health violations including the consumption of sushi, hard liquor, lunch meat, soft cheese (oh, how I miss you, soft cheese) and salami, which I blithely ate, secure in the knowledge that I was incapable of conceiving. Ooops. I've made up for that by managing to eat as little as possible after those first 4 weeks, and the poor thing must be starving, because it kept trying to shove its hands in its mouth during my last ultrasound.

Other than that and getting laid of from one of my two jobs (the other had obligingly promised to lay me off in December), it's been a pretty low-key summer here. I'd say the highlight was when my in-laws came to visit and my father-in-law ate some bad clams. For once, I wasn't the only one getting sick, though I did have to cede our one bathroom to him and throw up in a bucket for a while. Babies. Doesn't the thought of it make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

In truth, I'm not bitter about being pregnant. I'm delighted about it. Really. I'm just bitter that every woman I meet says something like, "Oh, yes, I felt a little queasy for a day or two early in my pregnancy. No, I didn't throw up, but my tummy was just a bit upset once, I remember." Grrrrr. Or, even better, from a friend who's busy growing her second mini-me, "Oh, well, I haven't thrown up with either of my pregnancies, but I'm just a trooper about that sort of thing." A trooper? A trooper, you say? No, you haven't thrown up because you haven't been sick. It's not something one does because one is a pansy, or weak-stomached. (Before this, with one exception, I hadn't thrown up since third grade!!!) It's something that happens when one's entire body convulses in a horrible paroxysm of rejection over the mutant you're making it sustain!

Forgive me, I begin to rant. Therein the root of my bitterness.

Love,

Your Acerbic Friend Plus One.