Some of the more stereotypical pregnancy symptoms are appearing for me now that I am safely ensconced in the second trimester. Suddenly, my sense of smell is so acute I can tell if someone on the 20th floor at work is popping popcorn. And, I sit on the 14th floor. It's a blessing and a curse because I can tell where the good food is coming from, but I can also smell that panhandler from three train cars away.
And, these hormones. Holy Weepiness! In my first trimester, I probably only cried about 5 times. For those of you who aren't thinking in trimesters, that means I cried 5 times in 13.3 weeks. For me, that is unheard of. I can cry 5 times during a re-run of Happy Days, which, thanks to TiVo, only lasts about 23 minutes. Now, when I did cry, it was an all out, "is the baby ok if I shake this hard while I cry" kind of cry, but only 5 instances in all that time. It seems that now I am making up for all those days without cries. I melted down 6 separate times today. I cried to a group of strangers about being afraid of what kind of mom I would be. I called my professional mentor and asked her if she supported me in quitting my job, which she emphatically did NOT, especially when I explained that the reason was that (i) I was bored, and taking the lack of work personally, and (ii) someone had edited a brief I wrote and I decided it meant I shouldn't be a lawyer.
I thought my logic was impeccable, but apparently, people who have thoughts that come from somewhere other than MY HEAD, think that quitting a good job because you are taking the recession as a personal failure or expecting a senior attorney not to add her $.02 to a brief is more about hormones than injustice.
Later on I cried because I was eating my daily dose of Cracker Jacks (and, excuse me, but where the hell are the peanuts in the Cracker Jacks these days?) and I had such a vivid memory of my Grandmother Tate's farm where we would feast on snacks made of Cracker Jacks and Hershey's products. Is there anything more sublime than a doting Grandmother who also has a wicked sweet tooth? Come to think of it, most of the "strange" foods I have been eating really are nostalgic picks. There's the Cracker Jacks, and every night I eat an ice cream sandwhich. There is no single food that more reminds me of Virginia Tate than the ice cream sandwhich. She had a deep freezer in her car port (that's a garage to you city folk) that always had two things in it: Frozen pecans and boxes of ice cream sandwhiches. I am not the first to link food to memory, and I think Proust http://www.fisheaters.com/proust.html probably wrote about it best, but the memories are starting to flood back to me. Let's hope we can keep it on the sweet side because this is the same Grandmother who used to use leftover bacon grease and onions as salad dressing. Wish I was kidding. She lived into her 80's on a diet consisting of more butter than biscuit and more bacon grease than lettuce. A size 4 she was not, but she was awfully fun to visit.
I wish my kids were going to know her. I also wish Jeff could know her. It's one of the drawbacks of being a late bloomer-- my grandparents are gone and Jeff has only 1 left, Grandma Ruth. I think it would be so funny if my kids came back with the same stories we would come home with after some time with Grandmother Tate. She used to tell me that the inside of a Fig Newton was made of little girls' boogers. That actually backfired a bit because I kept tasting my boogers and wondering why they didn't taste sweet and delicious like Fig Newtons. Maybe hers did and maybe that skips a generation and little Pepps' boogers will taste like Keebler snacks. That might help me down the road when I use that little suction thing to get boogers out of my kid's nose. Once, I saw a woman who I consider an excellent mother just put her mouth up to her young son's nose and suck. That is now the benchmark for motherly love: will I love Pepps enough to sick my mouth up to Pepps' nose and suck with all my might so that my child can breathe easier? While I can't be sure until it happens, I can feel a love like that growing inside of me. Plus, I sort of think I am off the hook since my kid is coming in the summer and probably won't get a booger nest clogging the vital passage ways until about January, and by then, we will have taught Pepps only one thing: How to blow her and or his baby nose!
You have to have priorities.
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