Yesterday

Yesterday I had this moment of panic when I saw that S from Fort Worth had left a comment on my blog. S from Fort Worth has found my blog! Yikes! But on closer inspection, I think that it is a different S from Fort Worth. There are many people named S, and I'm sure that there's a lot of them in Fort Worth. Still, my first thought was that out of all those people that it must be the S from Fort Worth that I knew. Silly of me to think that, and more so to think it was something to get upset over. It isn't. "--if I did not want it heard, I would not have said it--" and all of that. And I've never said anything bad about S anyway.

Still, I would rather keep things the way that they are.

Anyway, that was just a minor thing that happened yesterday after I came home. The major thing that happened yesterday was I went to see the baby. I had seen the baby before, but that was more than a month ago when he was still in the hospital.

I have not spent any considerable time around either babies or pregnant women since I was maybe ten or eleven. You wouldn't think it was possible for a forty year old woman to spend so little time around babies and/or pregnant women. You would think that while you may or may not have been around babies and pregnant women when you were younger, depending on chance and the size of your family and your family's social contacts, you would be more and more likely to be around them as you get older. You might have a baby yourself, or friends might have babies.

But I did not want a baby myself, and I have been lucky so far that I've not gotten pregnant. I do not have many of the romantic notions about it that most women do. Not that I don't have them at all, but my main thoughts on pregnancy tend to run towards it must be a lot like carrying a parasite from an Alien movie, only that it takes much longer to die from it and you get really fat while you are waiting to die.

Also, I've never been overly impressed with the babies themselves. It seems that most other women automatically think that all babies are really cute and at some point they will just be unable to go on with life if they don't have one. I don't share that feeling at all, and I fail to see what is so wonderful about a person who just happens to be very small and bald. They can't talk or really do anything cute. I don't really get it.

So you might think that the reason I've not been around babies or pregnant women is that I've deliberately avoided them. You wonder if maybe I'm going along in my life, hear that one of my friends is pregnant, and then avoid her for the next five years or so.

Perhaps it is the reverse. Perhaps the pregnant women are avoiding me. And maybe this is true in a few cases. As a teenager I would sometimes here that someone from school or even from church "had to get married", but this was something I usually heard after the fact from somebody else. None of them ever came to tell me that they were expecting. Well, I suppose that if they didn't feel comfortable telling me that they were having sex it shouldn't surprise me that they weren't comfortable telling me that they were pregnant. So that was probably part of it. But mostly in those cases it was just that the friend and I had drifted apart somewhat before all of that happened, and then after there was actually a baby to think about she had a whole different life that did not include school or whatever it was where we normally saw each other.

Similar things happened as I became an adult. It wasn't that I refused to be friends with them anymore, but people get older and get married, and sometimes the getting married part means that they move away. And even when they don't move away, they tend to make other friends, and those other friends also want babies, so by the time there's actually a baby in the picture we don't see each other that much cause they spend more time with their new friends.

So at some point I was a single person with other single friends who didn't have any babies, and then a bit after that I was a married person who didn't want any babies, and I mostly had friends that were married and didn't have any babies. It just sort of worked out that way. Later still, I ended up being friends with either people who didn't have children, or people who were older and did have children but the children had all grown up.

Now there's someone who I've drifted away from somewhat, but not entirely. And she did not move to a different state or even a different county after getting married. Sure, she wants to make new friends who also have babies, that's only natural, but she hasn't yet done much in that direction yet. So I'm hearing this and that about being pregnant and baby stuff that I'd never heard about before.

I am so glad that I'm not going through any of this myself.

I'm not completely in the dark about such things. I did know that while a woman is pregnant that the baby moves around, that babies "kick". What I did not know was that it is something you can actually see happening. Really. It looks like something from Stan Winston's special effects studio.

Guess the Alien parasite bit wasn't too far off.

And I knew that pregnant women were always running off to the bathroom, because of the baby pushing on the bladder. And I knew that there was such a thing as an episiotomy, that often the doctor will cut a woman to help deliver the baby. And I knew that even under the best of circumstances the couple isn't supposed to have sex for at least six weeks. What I didn't know was that sometimes even after the episiotomy the poor woman tears even more tissue than the doctors thought to cut, and that after delivery the poor woman might still be running off to the bathroom and having gas and all of that. Sometimes, in a really bad case, it isn't just the baby wearing the diapers.

I am really glad that none of this is happening to me.

She looks really good now. You wouldn't know that she'd been pregnant less than two months ago, unless you maybe look at the stretch marks. And she didn't have a Hollywood trainer getting her back in shape or anything like that. I think she looks just the same is she did before, but she says she still has a bit left to go. But however she looks, she still hurts from the delivery.

As for the baby, he didn't cry much in the hospital. The new parents were then fooled into taking him home, where he cries whenever the mood strikes. But after a miserable two or three weeks, they are getting used to him. And the baby squirms a lot when held. I didn't think that babies this age moved around so much.

Other than that, it appears that he does nothing but eat and sleep. I know that isn't quite the case and that he is already learning stuff, like the important people speak English with a Texas accent.