something to worry about

i touch my computer, it breaks, stops responding, etc. ted turns it on, and it works. i guess there's a reason i keep him around. you can thank him for this lovely post about t.v. and my period.

~b



I mean. . . I probably shouldn’t be getting sex ed. information from Mad Men.

“That’s not a thing, right? I mean, that doesn’t mean you’re pregnant. I don’t think that’s a thing.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been pregnant.”
“Well, that happened to me. . . and. . . I think that’s not a thing. It’s not a thing, right? Right?”
“I don’t want to tell you it’s not a thing if it is a thing.”

My cousin is two years older than me and has been trying to get pregnant for at least five years with no luck at all, only teary spells from the hormones. And what if I wasted my fertility on frat parties and hangovers and waking up in strange beds? And even worse, what if I had a baby? Where would I put it in my studio? In a suitcase? The top kitchen shelf I have to stand on a chair to reach? Or worse than worse, what if I’m not a cute mom with outfits, but one of those old ones with the saggy eyes??

It’s hard enough on regular days, thinking about it, even without Betty Draper with her perfect hair and her perfect skin and her perfect waist teaching us this lesson via Netflix.

So Ted Googled it. And of course it’s a thing because everything is a symptom of pregnancy. And when everything is a symptom, I have them all.

And that was something to worry about.

“What would we do?”
“I don’t know. It would make things harder, but I guess we’d deal with it. But let’s not worry about it until it’s a thing.”

I don’t know what I wanted him to say. (“Love it.”? That would be a little cliché and a little more insincere.)

In a book of short stories, I once read an interesting thought about how we spend our twenties trying not to get pregnant and our thirties trying to have babies. I wish I could remember the sentence, the author, the book. . . .

I worried ‘til I fell asleep, didn’t have to worry long after I woke up.

About that.

There’s always something to worry about.

~beatrix