with a spoon

Everyone keeps saying how great it is that I have reached the point where I must be feeling better. I do feel quite a bit better sometimes, but not always. I seem to have a several hour  stretch midday with the nausea, and a frequent night case of heartburn. I think they are slowly diminishing, but it’s slow. What’s upsetting is that another symptom has popped up this week and that is gagging. I had been gagging when brushing my teeth for some time but this week it has become intense. Really. It also no longer limits itself to toothbrushing time. Today I had to stop and dig for a mint and hope it would get me into the building without children thinking I was crying because I was in front of my school gagging and therefore tearing up. I am still fighting it. My breakfast is sitting next to me, a lovely dependable type of yogurt and granola bar that I eat almost every day, and I know that I am hungry and that if I do not eat very soon I am going to get the nausea. But I still feel very close to gagging and I am scared of eating.

I also have developed the biggest weight complex of my life. This is not saying much, I should point out. Prior to this, the biggest unfounded weight freak-out was when Melissa and I decided to go on a diet when we were 14 and 3 hours into it I found her eating a bagel and became furious and swore to never diet again. Or something like that. I forget how that story goes. Anyway, I didn’t diet again, and I didn’t worry much about food or weight until a couple of years ago when I decided that I was drawing the line at not being able to shop in regular stores and that I refused to go beyond a size 14. I had already, but I wanted back down because I didn’t feel good, was at a weight that stupid BMI thing deemed obese (PLEASE someone do a new, reasonable-for-short-people BMI!) and I hated shopping. And I was about to try to make a baby. I went on Weight Watchers and lost 27 pounds in 8 months and was pleased. And then I stopped and started ttc. And, naturally, put on exactly all of the weight I had lost in the next 18 months what with the stress and the sadness.

So I was right back where I started when I got pregnant and that was fine. I chose a doctor whose practice I knew was concerned about weight and I just decided I would ignore them if I got a lecture. I assumed, given my normal ability to gain weight awfully quickly, that pregnancy would be blimp-out-city for me. But I was charmed by my doctor’s kind suggestion of a weight gain goal and her insistence that I not worry about what I ate for the first 15 weeks, at least. She said we could adjust my diet if things got out of control by that point. She told me that the reason for their weight guidelines was to avoid gestational diabetes and that seemed wise to me. That certainly seemed like something I wanted to avoid. But I thought I could easily manage to not worry about it for now.

And then two things happened:
- I only gained one pound in the first 12 weeks. And that made me awfully cocky.
- I started spending time on snarky Urban Baby message boards. Where people spend a lot of time talking about their weight gain. And, because this is NYC, they have all gained about 3 ounces and are bemoaning that fact. And at first I just hated them and dismissed them. But… I suspect that they have been taking up residence in my head because suddenly, yesterday…

I got on the scale in my nurse’s office (I don’t have a scale and like to have an idea of what I might see when I go to the doctor next week) and I seem to have gained another 5 or 6 pounds. Since week 12. Two and a half weeks. And I was extremely surprised to find that this bothered me. Because I have always prided myself on not caring. I have always celebrated the fact that my sister and I somehow came through adolescence wholly unscathed when it comes to body issues. And now… I am flipping out over a possible 7 pounds? While PREGNANT? What is wrong with me?

I am most disappointed in myself about this – the caring about it, not the weight gain. Mind you, it is not the kind of freakout that will in any way endanger my appetite or ability to put away food like you wouldn’t believe. I am hungry and eating. But I am thinking about maybe switching to lowfat cheese. That’s all.

Because all I want to eat is cheese.

Yesterday I ate:
yogurt and granola bar
odwalla snack bar thing
tomato soup, apple, small piece of cheese
cheddar bunnies (duh)
2 sugar cookies
2 small cheese quesadillas
grilled cheese
some sort of chocolate chip blondie crumb confection

The last two items on that list were consumed at the Tea L*unge, where I was attending the first meeting of a small, newly-formed pregnancy support group. I leapt into this thing without thinking much and only shortly before the day arrived did I start to worry about it. I worried that they would all be perky, happy pregnant women and I would arrive and crap all over their chipper little pregnant bellies with my dark, dark place. That is sort of what happened. There were 3 others there, and all of them are 10 weeks ahead of me. All due within days of each other, so that kind of already made me odd-woman. And the woman who organized it is very touchy-feely and made everyone tell their stories and naturally 2 were unplanned surprises and the other got pregnant on her second try or so. And then there was me. After I told my story, and told them how I had worried about coming because I didn’t have any excitement or faith in this pregnancy, the touchy-feely woman told me that I absoulutely had to watch The Secret. And it was all I could do not to run screaming. I couldn’t even smile politely. I think I smirked accidentally.

I will probably go again. They really seemed fairly normal other than that and it is nice to have people to compare symptoms with. But we’ll see. It may just be dumb, seeing that I have much more appropriate support online where everyone knows that I am not to be told to do anything having to do with self-actualization or positive thinking.

Oh, but I couldn’t resist telling them about attending Melissa’s birth. You should have seen their perky, pregnant faces. That was some fun, fun shit.