Hi I’m back!
I know, I know I haven’t written in a long time… and you know why. Yes ladies and gentlemen I’m pregnant. While I could blame the lack of inspiration on hormone levels, bouts of projectile vomiting or other fun pregnancy symptoms, those are not the honest reasons I haven’t written. The real reason I haven’t felt inspired to write in quite a while (or at least I haven’t felt inspired to write anything publicly) is because finally becoming pregnant has made me really, Über, super duper… please brace yourselves… happy. Yes it appears that the tiny little human being growing inside of me has somehow depleted my sarcastic bitter edge and here I am, shiny, wide eyed, smiley and lovey dovey… I am the kind of glowy, round pregnant woman who used to make me puke (nowadays lots of other things make me puke though, quite literally).
All you readers followed angry, bitter AnKa… so how will this happy-go-lucky version manage to keep your attention? I am afraid of being a boring blogger, so for these last few months I elected not to blog at all. But now I am back… and what can I do? I absolutely love that there is a little girl growing inside of me. I already love her so much more than I ever thought I had the capacity for… sometimes, when no one is looking, I idiotically hug my stomach. Like a complete moron. Don’t tell anyone. See I may be boring, but at least I still share secrets…
I am sappy and mushy and sentimental. I cry at everything. Thank Gd we don’t have a TV or I would be crying at commercials, guaranteed. At night, when I can’t sleep (or maybe this is the reason I can’t sleep) I worry about raising her…and how exactly I will avoid messing her up... I mean, I feel pretty messed up most of the time, so is it possible for an all-sorts-of-messed-up mom to still raise a healthy and well-balanced child? Sometimes, I make lists of little promises to her.
I’ll share some of these thoughts here.
Dear Daughter,
I will try not to mess you up by moving around too much.
I will try to make sure you never feel lonely or alone.
I will feed you healthy meals which we will eat all together as a family.
I will try to understand you.
I will try not to mess you up by infecting you with my food or self-image issues.
I will try never to fight with your Dad, and definitely never in front of you.
I will try not to spoil you (too much).
I will encourage you to explore.
I will encourage you.
I will be proud of you, even when it’s not for anything in particular.
I will pay attention to you, no matter how tired or bored I am.
I will accept you as you are.
I will teach you not to take shit from anybody.
I will teach you to speak your mind.
I will teach you to always think positive.
I will teach you to believe in yourself.
I will teach you to live life to the fullest and to always appreciate what you have.
I will teach you to look on the bright side.
When the time comes, no matter how it breaks my heart, I will let you go.
And I will always hope you come back.
Love,
Mommy
Showing posts with label pregnancy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pregnancy. Show all posts
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
My Mercedes
My mom just called and said she read my blog and that it sounds “so sad.” This is surprising! I didn’t think I was sad – I was going more for resigned and bitter, but whatever.
My days here in Jerusalem have themes. Like there are the “I'm going to trip and fall in oncoming traffic at least three times today” days, and the “I'm going to miss every bus and hit every traffic jam possible today” and the “every random guy is going to hit on me today” days... but my secret favorite of all these are the “every old man or woman I see today will stop to talk to me”. Now I know, this may surprise some people, and no I am not being sarcastic. The truth is, I love old people. Even the scary mafia babushkas that will maim any unfortunate shmuck that may accidentally step between them and the potatoes at the shouk. While old people may seem confused and outdated, they are wise and big-hearted and they smell like my grandparents (and cabbage). One of the things that I love about Israel is that while not everyone loves old people the way I do, everyone here respects them. Every babushka is everyone's safta, and every dedushka is everyone's “abballe”.
On one such “magnet for elderly people” day, a plump and sturdy babushka came and sat next to me on the bus, parking her typical Yerushalmi plaid granny cart in the aisle. I knew she would talk to me, because that is the type of day it was. She turned to me and said, “do you know what this is?” Referring to the cart full of groceries... an “agala?”I replied sheepishly, wondering why she felt compelled to test my Hebrew. “Nope,” she said smiling with all that wisdom in her puffy face, “it's my Mercedes.” That not only made my day, it made my week.
Following my mother's observation about my sad blog, I decided to drop my constant companion, that fiddler that follows me wherever I go lately named Self Pity. I should remember the old lady on the bus with the Mercedes full of vegetables.
Unfortunately, losing the Fiddler is not as easy as it sounds. You see, he tends to pop up with his sad violin out of nowhere, and somewhat unexpectedly. For example on Shabbat my Awesome Hubby treated us to a day at the Spa. Self Pity was nowhere to be found, in fact I was even flirting with his arch enemy, Contentment… but then, out of the steamy changing room comes a gorgeous woman in a black bikini, hair blowing in the wind (in slow motion), swinging her miraculously cellulite free hips and proudly carrying her round, perturbing swollen belly with a popped up bellybutton, like a nose on a smiling face, looking better in a bikini at 7-8 months along than I do childless. And there he was, right behind her, with his annoying whiny melody, crying his crocodile tears right there in the girl’s locker room, where he was certainly not welcome, especially when I had successfully avoided him ALL DAY!
I have decided that from now on I will ignore the Fiddler. On the bus ride from work today I focused on other things. I will not let pregnant women (which are around every corner in this city) upset me. I will be kind, altruistic and generous. No jealousy here, nope.
Lalalallaa... the sun is shining... lalalala... it's about a million degrees on this bus... lalala... that old lady just about knocked that soldier over... tralalala... those screaming kids are enough to make me count my blessings... and then I noticed him. Nope not the Fiddler, a kid, about 12 years old, in fully Charedi getup, black hat, long black coat ,side curls hanging over his ears, the whole look, circa Hungary 1742. This little kid was staring at my boobs so intently I thought he might be hypnotized. Seriously, he was about a step away from drooling.
Now, in a city as divided and polarized as Jerusalem, the kid wouldn't have to be staring at a secular girl inappropriately for her to dislike him. She would be likely to do so by default. I was just about to turn my back in disgust and shoot him a look that would clearly say “you should be ashamed of yourself you prepubescent little booger”, but then I thought... it is so damn hot on this bus that I would gladly go skinny dipping in glacier water in Antarctica if it was an alternative to this ride and this misken adolescent is wearing enough layers for a Chicago winter. So if this is his only pleasure in life? Let him stare for a few more minutes, it'll be as close as he gets to a pair of these for a long, long time. And so I stayed where I was. See? I can be generous and kind and giving. The Fiddler was nowhere to be found and I rode that winding Mercedes the rest of the way home.
My days here in Jerusalem have themes. Like there are the “I'm going to trip and fall in oncoming traffic at least three times today” days, and the “I'm going to miss every bus and hit every traffic jam possible today” and the “every random guy is going to hit on me today” days... but my secret favorite of all these are the “every old man or woman I see today will stop to talk to me”. Now I know, this may surprise some people, and no I am not being sarcastic. The truth is, I love old people. Even the scary mafia babushkas that will maim any unfortunate shmuck that may accidentally step between them and the potatoes at the shouk. While old people may seem confused and outdated, they are wise and big-hearted and they smell like my grandparents (and cabbage). One of the things that I love about Israel is that while not everyone loves old people the way I do, everyone here respects them. Every babushka is everyone's safta, and every dedushka is everyone's “abballe”.
On one such “magnet for elderly people” day, a plump and sturdy babushka came and sat next to me on the bus, parking her typical Yerushalmi plaid granny cart in the aisle. I knew she would talk to me, because that is the type of day it was. She turned to me and said, “do you know what this is?” Referring to the cart full of groceries... an “agala?”I replied sheepishly, wondering why she felt compelled to test my Hebrew. “Nope,” she said smiling with all that wisdom in her puffy face, “it's my Mercedes.” That not only made my day, it made my week.
Following my mother's observation about my sad blog, I decided to drop my constant companion, that fiddler that follows me wherever I go lately named Self Pity. I should remember the old lady on the bus with the Mercedes full of vegetables.
Unfortunately, losing the Fiddler is not as easy as it sounds. You see, he tends to pop up with his sad violin out of nowhere, and somewhat unexpectedly. For example on Shabbat my Awesome Hubby treated us to a day at the Spa. Self Pity was nowhere to be found, in fact I was even flirting with his arch enemy, Contentment… but then, out of the steamy changing room comes a gorgeous woman in a black bikini, hair blowing in the wind (in slow motion), swinging her miraculously cellulite free hips and proudly carrying her round, perturbing swollen belly with a popped up bellybutton, like a nose on a smiling face, looking better in a bikini at 7-8 months along than I do childless. And there he was, right behind her, with his annoying whiny melody, crying his crocodile tears right there in the girl’s locker room, where he was certainly not welcome, especially when I had successfully avoided him ALL DAY!
I have decided that from now on I will ignore the Fiddler. On the bus ride from work today I focused on other things. I will not let pregnant women (which are around every corner in this city) upset me. I will be kind, altruistic and generous. No jealousy here, nope.
Lalalallaa... the sun is shining... lalalala... it's about a million degrees on this bus... lalala... that old lady just about knocked that soldier over... tralalala... those screaming kids are enough to make me count my blessings... and then I noticed him. Nope not the Fiddler, a kid, about 12 years old, in fully Charedi getup, black hat, long black coat ,side curls hanging over his ears, the whole look, circa Hungary 1742. This little kid was staring at my boobs so intently I thought he might be hypnotized. Seriously, he was about a step away from drooling.
Now, in a city as divided and polarized as Jerusalem, the kid wouldn't have to be staring at a secular girl inappropriately for her to dislike him. She would be likely to do so by default. I was just about to turn my back in disgust and shoot him a look that would clearly say “you should be ashamed of yourself you prepubescent little booger”, but then I thought... it is so damn hot on this bus that I would gladly go skinny dipping in glacier water in Antarctica if it was an alternative to this ride and this misken adolescent is wearing enough layers for a Chicago winter. So if this is his only pleasure in life? Let him stare for a few more minutes, it'll be as close as he gets to a pair of these for a long, long time. And so I stayed where I was. See? I can be generous and kind and giving. The Fiddler was nowhere to be found and I rode that winding Mercedes the rest of the way home.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Brunch Blues
If you ever lived in Manhattan then you are probably familiar with the Sunday late morning scene in the East Village. It was by far my favorite moment of the New York week: waking up in that border state between still drunk and slightly hung over, putting on your daytime best and meeting your sunglas- sporting, vintage-clad fabulous girlfriends at 7A for shrimp and avocado eggs Benedict, cappuccinos, mimosas and juicy boy stories from the night before. Straight out of Sex and the City.
Three years later, I am still a brunch person and my favorite part of the week is Friday morning brunch at Tal Bagels in the German Colony. Definitely the See and Be Seen equivalent to 7A, except instead of shrimp and avocado it's omelets, cheeses and Israeli salad, and instead of mimosas it's fresh squeezed orange juice and “cafe afuch.”
There are a few more differences. Nobody is hung over at Tal Bagels, and the tables are not full of singles recovering from a night full of dancing and drinking, they're full of young mothers recovering from a night of diapers and breastfeeding. But much like the Sex and the City girls, these young mothers show no signs of sleeplessness or exhaustion. All head coverings are perfectly tied, hiding freshly washed curls, skirts tidy and pressed, sandals exposing manicured toes, dangling earrings framing their smiling faces. And just as my East Village girlfriends would sport their latest found vintage designer purses or shoes, these women (about the same age as their NYC equivalents) show off their tiny wrinkled bundles of joy or their swollen pregnant bellies.
I made the foolish mistake of working for a Jewish non profit and living in Manhattan (both of which are perfectly peachy decisions, they just should never be done at the same time). This pretty much left me unable to have anything new, shiny, or fashionable to show off at my weekly brunch in The City. I was lucky I could buy brunch! And who would have thought, three years later, on the other side of the world, I would find myself in the same situation.
Now I would try to paint myself as an selfless, mild, good natured person who only looks at all those young mothers and their beautiful little creatures with happiness and endless patience, but that would just be a big, fat, ginormous lie. While I am happy for my friends who have kids or who are about to, and I love my friends' babies,(I even love the ones who are yet to be born) there is a very not-so-tiny voice inside my head throwing that big Russian/American/Israeli hissy fit (previously mentioned in the last entry) screaming “WHEN IS IT MY TURN??? WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?” Now I know from many a single friend that they look at me and my marriage and wonder the same thing. I know that I should count my blessings, that I am not even 28 yet (let me savor these last few weeks) and I do (theoretically), but this is my blog and I'll cry if I want to!
I wake up every morning and pee on a stick. Then I put the stick in a monitor at which point its screen begins to blink. It stares at me and blinks for five minutes and I stare and blink right back at it.
This is the conversation going on in my head for those five minutes every morning:
Maybe today it will say I am ovulating...
Don't be stupid, you're getting your hopes up! You said today you wouldn't care!
So why are you even sitting here waiting? Go brush your teeth!
I will in a minute, it's almost done.
I thought you didn't care what it said...
I don't, but maybe the bar will go up...
And then it stops blinking, I take out the test stick and inevitably the result is the same as the day before. Then I dive swiftly and quickly like a pro baseball player going for a foul ball to capture my mood before it hits rock bottom. Practically this means making coffee and listening to uplifting songs on my ipod the whole way to work. I hope I don't miss the ball one of these days, I never was much of an athlete.
Three years later, I am still a brunch person and my favorite part of the week is Friday morning brunch at Tal Bagels in the German Colony. Definitely the See and Be Seen equivalent to 7A, except instead of shrimp and avocado it's omelets, cheeses and Israeli salad, and instead of mimosas it's fresh squeezed orange juice and “cafe afuch.”
There are a few more differences. Nobody is hung over at Tal Bagels, and the tables are not full of singles recovering from a night full of dancing and drinking, they're full of young mothers recovering from a night of diapers and breastfeeding. But much like the Sex and the City girls, these young mothers show no signs of sleeplessness or exhaustion. All head coverings are perfectly tied, hiding freshly washed curls, skirts tidy and pressed, sandals exposing manicured toes, dangling earrings framing their smiling faces. And just as my East Village girlfriends would sport their latest found vintage designer purses or shoes, these women (about the same age as their NYC equivalents) show off their tiny wrinkled bundles of joy or their swollen pregnant bellies.
I made the foolish mistake of working for a Jewish non profit and living in Manhattan (both of which are perfectly peachy decisions, they just should never be done at the same time). This pretty much left me unable to have anything new, shiny, or fashionable to show off at my weekly brunch in The City. I was lucky I could buy brunch! And who would have thought, three years later, on the other side of the world, I would find myself in the same situation.
Now I would try to paint myself as an selfless, mild, good natured person who only looks at all those young mothers and their beautiful little creatures with happiness and endless patience, but that would just be a big, fat, ginormous lie. While I am happy for my friends who have kids or who are about to, and I love my friends' babies,(I even love the ones who are yet to be born) there is a very not-so-tiny voice inside my head throwing that big Russian/American/Israeli hissy fit (previously mentioned in the last entry) screaming “WHEN IS IT MY TURN??? WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?” Now I know from many a single friend that they look at me and my marriage and wonder the same thing. I know that I should count my blessings, that I am not even 28 yet (let me savor these last few weeks) and I do (theoretically), but this is my blog and I'll cry if I want to!
I wake up every morning and pee on a stick. Then I put the stick in a monitor at which point its screen begins to blink. It stares at me and blinks for five minutes and I stare and blink right back at it.
This is the conversation going on in my head for those five minutes every morning:
Maybe today it will say I am ovulating...
Don't be stupid, you're getting your hopes up! You said today you wouldn't care!
So why are you even sitting here waiting? Go brush your teeth!
I will in a minute, it's almost done.
I thought you didn't care what it said...
I don't, but maybe the bar will go up...
And then it stops blinking, I take out the test stick and inevitably the result is the same as the day before. Then I dive swiftly and quickly like a pro baseball player going for a foul ball to capture my mood before it hits rock bottom. Practically this means making coffee and listening to uplifting songs on my ipod the whole way to work. I hope I don't miss the ball one of these days, I never was much of an athlete.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
To share or not to share?
I have spent a full 24 hours deliberating how honest I really want to be with this blog… in other words, how much dirty laundry is it appropriate to put out there into the e-world? And since I am quasi anonymous here, I am going to go ahead and share. Otherwise, where’s the fun, right?
I just finished the book “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert. It’s pretty cute actually. One of my favorite lines in it is when she equates the decision to have a baby to deciding to get a tattoo on your face. You have to really know you want it. Having co-raised some very young siblings, that sounds about right to me.
This seems as good a time as any to reintroduce my Russian/American/British friend “P” (previously introduced in yesterday’s entry). She will quickly become known for brilliantly simple answers to some of life’s most difficult questions (at least in my life). When asked if she and her hunky hubby were planning to have kids soon she repeated the quizzical head tilt from yesterday’s story and said “a baby? Where would I put it?”
On the other side of the spectrum is a lawyer friend of mine who used to refer to children as something along the lines of “screaming disgusting unnecessary appendages” who is now a glowing, floating on air, radiant eight months pregnant.
So what happens when you decide that yes you want the face tattoo, you save up your money, come up with the design, and go to the ink parlor all excited and ready to go… and the damn tattoo artist refuses you? Or the ink just won’t go into your skin, or whatever metaphor you want to come up with? What happens then?
I’ll tell you what happens if you’re an overly theatrical, hypo-emotional Russian/American/Israeli. You summon all the ancestral Russian tragedy, Jewish victimhood, American sensitivity, and Israeli anger and throw yourself Anna Karenina style on the train tracks of fate in a full-on hissy fit. This fit lasts about a year (because when you are a Russian/American/Israeli, if Drama asks you to tango, you do your stretches, fill up your water bottle and put on those dancing shoes, because you are in it for the long haul!)… At the end of the year you get up, brush yourself off and go see your friendly neighborhood fertility specialist. Only if you live in Jerusalem, you have to wait a month for that appointment. To be continued.
I just finished the book “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert. It’s pretty cute actually. One of my favorite lines in it is when she equates the decision to have a baby to deciding to get a tattoo on your face. You have to really know you want it. Having co-raised some very young siblings, that sounds about right to me.
This seems as good a time as any to reintroduce my Russian/American/British friend “P” (previously introduced in yesterday’s entry). She will quickly become known for brilliantly simple answers to some of life’s most difficult questions (at least in my life). When asked if she and her hunky hubby were planning to have kids soon she repeated the quizzical head tilt from yesterday’s story and said “a baby? Where would I put it?”
On the other side of the spectrum is a lawyer friend of mine who used to refer to children as something along the lines of “screaming disgusting unnecessary appendages” who is now a glowing, floating on air, radiant eight months pregnant.
So what happens when you decide that yes you want the face tattoo, you save up your money, come up with the design, and go to the ink parlor all excited and ready to go… and the damn tattoo artist refuses you? Or the ink just won’t go into your skin, or whatever metaphor you want to come up with? What happens then?
I’ll tell you what happens if you’re an overly theatrical, hypo-emotional Russian/American/Israeli. You summon all the ancestral Russian tragedy, Jewish victimhood, American sensitivity, and Israeli anger and throw yourself Anna Karenina style on the train tracks of fate in a full-on hissy fit. This fit lasts about a year (because when you are a Russian/American/Israeli, if Drama asks you to tango, you do your stretches, fill up your water bottle and put on those dancing shoes, because you are in it for the long haul!)… At the end of the year you get up, brush yourself off and go see your friendly neighborhood fertility specialist. Only if you live in Jerusalem, you have to wait a month for that appointment. To be continued.
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