So, moving on from yesterday’s unpleasantness. I’m still really annoyed by all that, but I guess all I can say about it is when your blog moves from a struggling to get pregnant blog to a pregnancy blog, you’re bound to alienate some people.
Yesterday I had lunch with a friend (yes, me in a restaurant – things are looking up!) and told her. She is a single woman, around 50, with no kids. I wasn’t sure how she’d react, but I have to say I think I underestimated her. She had nothing but pure joy for me; I didn’t pick up on any mixed feelings or jealousy or anything. One thing I will learn to do differently is give a little preamble about “this is something I’ve been trying for a while”, etc, because I just blurted out, “well, I’m pregnant,” and the first thing she said was, “are you going to keep it?” (again, one of the many differences of doing this as a single person – nobody would ask a married woman that!). I rejoindered, “well, I went down to the sperm bank and got myself knocked up, so I certainly hope so!”
On the walk back to her house we had the ol’ “cry yourself to sleep or be picked up” conversation, and I have to say I’m still really confused by this stuff. My mother was very much of the “just let her cry” generation. I’m sure it means she got a lot more unbroken sleep than the alternative. But I don’t know if I want to do that – a friend says when you never check in on the baby when he/she cries at night (well, except when you know they need to be fed, obviously) that the kid doesn’t “learn” to sleep, that they just give up and realize that their needs just aren’t ever going to be met. The friend I was talking to yesterday said she knows a couple with a baby who was a great sleeper, who at a certain point became not a great sleeper, and they kept going in to pick up the baby and it got more and more frequent until they were both utterly sleep deprived and exhausted and decided to just let her cry, and soon enough she was back to normal sleep patterns. I really don’t know what the right thing to do is in this situation – I should probably do a lot more reading about it. On the one hand I don’t want to repeat all my mother’s parenting patterns…but at the same time I don’t want to totally indulge bad behavior, either, under the guise of being more “loving”. Definitely something I need to look into.
There has been a new spate of “marriage gone bad” TV shows lately – which have become my guilty pleasure. “Who the bleep did I marry?” “I married a mobster?” etc. I think I just need all the validation I can get that no, marriage isn’t all sunshine and roses for everybody and I’m a-ok on my own. Been re-reading “Fear of Flying” which I first read around this time last year. I cannot tell you how much I love this book. I have it as this month’s book club selection, and I don’t know how the ladies are going to feel about it – most people I’ve talked to who have read it said they kind of hated it. But to me as long as you can keep it in an historical perspective (it’s pretty dated – very early 70s feminist) it’s pretty great. Came across a passage here that I thought was particularly relevant:
“The diaphragm has become kind of a fetish for me. A holy object, a barrier between my womb and men. Somehow the idea of bearing his baby angers me. Let him bear his own baby! If I have a baby I want it to be all mine. A girl like me, but better. A girl who’ll also be able to have her own babies. It is not having babies in itself which seems unfair, but having babies for men. Babies who get their names. Babies who lock you by means of love to a man you have to please and serve on pain of abandonment. And love, after all, is the strongest lock. The one that chafes hardest and wears longest. And then I would be trapped for good. The hostage of my own feelings and my own child.”
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