Wednesday, August 26, 2009

I Just... Forgot.

All right, so my history with birth control pills is pretty sketchy. I've started taking it three different times and stopped twice for various reasons, i.e: I didn't have a boyfriend anymore so why bother, and: I misread the label and took the wrong pills transitioning from the first month to the second, which resulted in a nine day long period the third month. Yeah, I wasn't really into that.

This time around, I've been doing great! I take my pill as soon as I remember, every day. Usually that happens sometime between waking up and about three in the afternoon. But this week? I forgot for a WHOLE DAY and had to take two on Tuesday, and today, I didn't take it until almost six-thirty.

I don't think that Boyfriend will stop using the pull-out method regardless, but I swear it's my subconscious trying to get me pregnant. I SWEAR.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Why I'm Weird (And It's Not My Mom's Fault)

When I was a baby, my mother locked me in the car. No, she wasn't abusive. I may be unbalanced sometimes, but that's not her fault! She just got stuck with a weird kid.

The story, as I remember it, goes like this:

She and a friend had gone grocery shopping together for a dinner get together. They were unloading the groceries from the back seat when somehow, the door ended up closing. Locked. With me still sleeping in my car seat. And the keys still inside. Oh, and by the way, it was definitely summertime. In Georgia. (I learned on the radio this month that inside a car with no A/C, the temperature gets as high as 140 degrees in about half an hour. Scary.)

My mother, understandably, was frantic. She called my father, he rushed home from work, and they got me out of the car with no ill effects. Apparently, I slept through the whole thing.

I don't know a lot of the details of this story. It's not one that gets told a lot. I'm sure my mother considers it one of her failing moments as a mother and would prefer not to talk about it.

I considered the full implications of the situation for the first time today when my Fiction Workshop professor said something about asking our parents for stories about our childhood for writing inspiration. I imagined what it must have felt like to stand in the sweltering July heat, able to see baby!me, but unable to help me. I imagined the fear that must have grown exponentially with every minute that my father took to get home with the spare keys. And how much worse must it have been for baby!me to be asleep, utterly still and quiet? Screaming and crying would have been horrible to watch, but babies die locked in hot cars. I'd rather see a screaming child in that situation than one that isn't moving or giving any sign of life.

I am realizing, slowly, that I might one day turn out to be the world's most paranoid, nervous mother. Or perhaps just the weirdest. I mean, who wants to see their baby crying?

Monday, August 24, 2009

An Open Letter to My Boyfriend

Boyfriend, you have worked quite a lot this past week. Seventy-one hours in five days is a lot, especially when your job requires a lot of physical activity and heavy lifting. You are still tired, even after three days off-- so tired that you can't stay awake to do things you would normally do in a heartbeat, like wait for me to get off work at 1 AM. Because my car is broken, still, for the seventh week running. And I don't mind that at all. I can get rides from other people. I want you to rest.

But it's hard to express to you that even after you've been home all weekend, I miss you. I didn't get to spend enough time with you between work and other people, and I miss you terribly-- it's like someone carved out part of my stomach and hid it from me. I need it back. People say that when you have children, you love them more than you knew that you could love anyone, ever. But I don't know. Because if that love hurts worse than this, well... I don't know if I can handle it.

On the other hand, all the love in the world does not stop my annoyance when I come home to the kitchen I cleaned five minutes before going to work, and find that my teeny tiny kitchen is so full of dirty dishes that I don't know if they will even all fit in the sink. I am so glad you had fun, hung out with good friends, and enjoyed a good meal. But for Christ's sake, couldn't ONE of you at least RINSE the dishes before everything got all crusted on?

I was thinking about those dishes just now, because they've officially been sitting out for over 24 hours in the kitchen that has one of the worst roach infestations I've ever seen, and I hate feeding those damned bugs. And you do this all the time, not just when you're tired. And combined with my current out-of-control hormones, the thought of cleaning that up makes me want to burst into tears and crawl under my blanket until someone creates a world where there is no such thing as a roach, or a dirty dish.

But then I look over at you, sleeping restlessly because of the light from my computer-- or possibly for some other reason (hopefully for some other reason, so I won't feel quite so guilty). Our child-replacement of a kitten, Icarus, has just curled up on your chest, purring loudly from the pleasure of being near you in a way that he doesn't with me, and even though he's just a cat, I can tell he has a special bond with you. In a way, you're his daddy, and he loves you.

Dirty dishes don't matter so much in the face of that kind of love, because I know it's the kind of love that you will one day inspire from our children, and the kind of love that you inspire in me every day. If dirty dishes are the biggest problem in our relationship after a year and a half, I think I might be okay with them.

But could you maybe rinse them, at least? Pretty please?

Hugs and kisses forever,

Liss

Thursday, August 6, 2009

I Want Them

I want babies.

I am 21 years old.

My boyfriend and I have been living together since two days before we started dating, since April 5, 2008. That was my twentieth birthday, by the way, and he was the best present I could have gotten.

Except, maybe, babies.

And now that we've gotten to the point where it's not if we'll get married, but when, this irresistible urge that has been building in me since I was eleven years old is really presenting itself.

I see him play with his five-year-old sister and I see what a great dad he'll be. I see a woman with a baby in a grocery store and I feel a pang of longing. I see a pregnant woman come into my workplace and I'm jealous. I stop in the middle of fantastic sex and think... we could make a baby, right now.

I'm a ball of hormones that birth control pills will, hopefully, contain and control. But until all my crazy urges are in check, I'm crying when I read mommyblogs, not because they are sad, but because I want that experience too. I'm sobbing over my kitten, because he's not quite what I want. I wailing over nothing at all, set off by the sound of a child's laughter on television. And so I join the ranks, blogging, not about my own children yet, but about what I see, what I think, what I anticipate.

It might be a few years before I finally get my babies, but until then, I'm here. I'm writing, getting out all of this emotion, all this irrationality. And if things go according to plan (as they never do) I will graduate with my B.A. in December, have an engagement ring soon after, be married by August 2010, and have that baby-- that beautiful, long-for baby-- by mid 2011. We'll see. For now, I'll post about my silly crying fits, my moments of overwhelming joy, my explosions of anger and frustration. And maybe, just maybe, someone will even read it.