3rd Trimester: A Record of Insanity

Melinda Selmys wrote a hilarious pregnancy guide this morning that made me laugh, which made me cough, which made me pee a little.

After I sighed loudly and changed my underwear, I decided that there’s no time like the present to blog about pregnancy, too. Because I’m a follower.

But seriously, I feel extremely sorry for my entire family this pregnancy. It was going okay, honestly, until we hit the skids financially, and then our landlords (who are wonderful and who I will miss renting from) have finally decided to put the house we’ve been renting for the last four years on the market. Those two things combined to create a giant vortex of THINGS I CANNOT HANDLE, which quickly expanded to encompass my entire life.

So now even little things, like making lunches or staying awake, are falling into the vortex. And when I inevitably have to handle things in the vortex, I get irrationally angry and start crying, all at the same time. It’s really very exciting.

I keep trying to manipulate myself into seeing the situation differently, in the hopes that if I can convince myself that what is happening is not actually happening, I will be able to adjust, snap out of it, and go back to being the only-marginally irritable mother my children know and love. So yesterday, as I’m making beds and preparing the house to be shown, I gave myself a little pep talk.

Listen, Calah, you have to see this as an opportunity, my better half said. This is the chance to really get a handle on your woeful lack of housekeeping skills, an opportunity to instill the good habits of picking up and cleaning and sweeping and mopping every day. You know you’re happier when the house is clean, so being forced to keep it shiny at all times is really a blessing in disguise. See! Don’t the beds look happy when they’re neatly made!

Bad Calah: shut up shut up SHUT UP! I’M 30 WEEKS PREGNANT I NEED TO SIT AND EAT ICE CREAM FOR THE NEXT 10 WEEKS STRAIGHT! this is torture and I refuse to see it any other way! DIE BETTER SELF, DIE, DIE, DIE!

Of course, when one half of yourself is trying to light the other half on fire, it’s an unpleasant experience. So by the time my non-Pixar version of Inside Out had played out, I was sobbing and my hair was disheveled. But the house was shiny, which did make me happy. So there’s that.

Then I gave Lincoln exactly ten Duplos to play with and made him sit next to me and keep his clothes on for 45 minutes, which was a new and exciting kind of external battle. It culminated in him launching said Duplos at my head, which I just let him do, because man. I was tired.

Of course, after the 5-minute showing the other kids came home from school and proceeded to dismantle every clean corner of the house as if they had been trained from birth to do so. And so I yelled, and threatened to send them to bed without dinner if they didn’t sit quietly and do their homework, and then I did send one to bed without dinner before I realized that it was only 4:30 and that was a ridiculous decision, so I went and got him and apologized and gave him a hug. And then I yelled more.

This is kind of the pattern that our afternoons have followed since I hit the 3rd trimester. Hug, yell, apologize, hug, yell, apologize, repeat. On a good night, like last night ended up being, I will be able to pull myself out of the tailspin to salvage bedtime. If I can stop yelling and get a grip long enough to brush teeth, read a book, say prayers, give kisses, and sing bedtime songs, I am able to go to sleep immediately afterward without feeling like a total and complete failure. Because in this 3rd trimester of my 5th pregnancy, I have discovered that I need approximately 20 hours of sleep a day to stay awake for the other 4.

Last night I pulled the kids into my bed, read them Make Way for Ducklings, and said prayers before sending them off to bed at 7:30. I did not get out of bed after that. I choked down my prenatal vitamin, picked up my book to read a bit, and was asleep ten seconds later. Please note that falling asleep absurdly early is only made possible by my husband, for whom this pregnancy must seem 10 times longer and more unbearable than it does for me.

Seriously, I have extreme anxiety and guilt when I think about the enormous extra burden that is being placed on the Ogre. He comes home to a wife who is yelling and/or crying, and a partially cooked dinner of leftover fajitas and mystery vegetables (?) that I dug out of the freezer. The homework is done, but the children are suffering from PTSD because the process of finding pencils and sharpening them ended with someone in time out and someone else grounded “until the new baby is born or the world ends”, in those terms exactly. When the unpunished child ventured to ask if the world is likely to end soon, they learned that it’s very likely to end soon, perhaps even tonight, perhaps even right this second, if they don’t stop talking and do their homework.

So now they’re all convinced that the fate of the planet is inextricably linked to the relative completion of their homework, and the Ogre has to disabuse them of this notion while attempting to make dinner palatable, because I’ve waddled off to cry and clean something, and will only emerge once I’ve thought of 10 more ways that THE SELLING OF THE HOUSE is destroying everything, everywhere. And so he calms me down while getting the kids to eat, cleans the kitchen while I eat, and orders children into their pajamas while I go put mine on. Once we’re all (finally) asleep, he gets to finish cleaning the kitchen, eat whatever is left of the already-dubious dinner, and then make lunches. And then grade papers, and work on his dissertation, and write me a note reminding me that one child needs medicine in the morning and the other needs a banana in his lunch, because he knows I will forget and cry about what a horrible mother I am for forgetting. And when he finally climbs into bed, it takes him 20 minutes to figure out how to squeeze into the 2 feet of space that I am not splayed across, without waking me up.

God bless my husband. If we survive this pregnancy, I’m going to do something really, really nice for him. Like be totally perfect at Marquette for the next 5 years at least, until we’ve both forgotten what happens in third trimesters.

I don’t know what the point of this blog post is anymore. I’m not sure if I had one to begin with, but I have to go take a nap now.

Oh! I remember what I came here to say! I finally unhid my paypal button. It’s over there —->. Thank you again for searching for it, using it, and admonishing me to unhide it. Y’all have literally made an unbearable time infinitely more bearable, and I am so grateful.

That’s it. That’s all I meant to say. Sorry for the detour through the insanity of pregnancy. Happy Tuesday…ish? Is that a thing? Are Tuesdays ever happy? They’re not, right?

Have a crappy Tuesday!