How Can This Be? Playing With My Memory. Don't you see? There'll Be Nothing Left of Me

Yes. As the last post hinted, I am pregnant. Please don't congratulate me on the pregnancy. There are few things I hate worse than being pregnant. I'm very excited for a new baby. Very, VERY excited. But for me, being pregnant is just awful.

It's not just that I'm more than four months along and still throwing up. It's not just the extreme tiredness, the headaches and the pregnancy pains. It's the fact that I'm a different person when I'm pregnant. And I really find myself loathing Pregnant Me.

First off, Pregnant Me thinks differently. Retrieval failure started before the nausea hit. Everyday I find myself stopping and staring into space; knowing I've forgotten something but just can't remember what. I'll have a phone conversation in which someone will tell me to come drop off my car. I'll hang up the phone, wait two hours, then call back and ask why they are so late in coming to get my car. I can't remember the names of the kids in my Sunday School class. Something will spontaneously appear on the counter, and I'll wonder about it for hours before I remember putting it there myself. I cannot carry on intelligent conversation because I can't remember facts correctly. Yesterday I bet Drek a back rub that the Prophet Joshua lived to be more than two hundred. I was SO SURE. And then Drek looked it up. I was wrong.

Secondly, Pregnant Me reacts differently. I consider myself an easy-going person. I try not to take offence and usually succeed. People have bad days, people make mistakes. I get that. I like to let things go. Except when I'm pregnant. Pregnant Me takes EVERYTHING personally. Pregnant Me is offended every single day. A few days ago I had the most bizarre phone conversation with a customer service person. The person actually went crazy while I was talking to them. Really, he threw a tantrum for no reason that I could fathom. Normally, I would have found it so bizarre that I would have laughed it off, and maybe blogged about it for other's entertainment. Pregnant Me spent hours and hours wishing I had recorded the phone conversation so I could send it into the company and gotten the man fired, then sent it into his wife so she see what an idiot she was married to and leave him, then post it on YouTube so he would never get a job or be respected ever again. Really, HOURS. Talk about an over-reaction. Sometimes I know that I am over-reacting, but sometimes I don't. It's gotten to the point where I have to keep everything bottled up, then explain the situation to Drek and ask if my reaction is normal or crazy. He usually responds crazy. Because Pregnant Me is a crazy person.

Third, Pregnant Me is a crappy mom. My child has watched more TV in the last three months than she has in her whole life combined. Sure, we've read more books and had more cuddle time, but my temper is short, and my energy is gone. I don't get down on the floor and play with her anymore. I don't chase her when she runs. I just yell and give angry glares.

Fourth, Pregnant Me is very unhealthy. In June, I was very excited about the fact that I was eating so healthy and cooking such delicious meals. I didn't eat meat or dairy or sugar. I was cooking everything from scratch and my family was enjoying real whole foods. And then the morning sickness left me hating food. All food. Hating the smell, hating the sight, hating the idea. We eat out a lot. We eat a lot of cereal with milk. I can't make things from scratch so we buy a lot of processed, filled with sugar, MSG and HFCS crap. Because we have to eat something and I probably won't keep it down anyway.

Fifth, Pregnant Me is ugly. I love to listen to women who think their pregnant bodies are beautiful. They inspire me. I think other women are very "cute" pregnant. I applaud that model who walked down the catwalk six months pregnant. But I just can't come to love the way by body just keeps getting bigger. I put a lot of effort into ignoring the way Pregnant Me looks, but this has the side-effect that I never wear make-up, I don't do anything with my (woefully short) hair, and I don't really care what I wear, as long as it doesn't make it even harder to breathe (my number one complaint). A few weeks ago I thew up over and over again in a few short period of time. I didn't even have to time to breathe in between. When it was finally over, I looked in the mirror and noticed something off with my face. Two days later it was still there and I realized what it was; pregnancy mask. That was possibly the worst moment I've had in front of a mirror since discovering, at nine months pregnant with Ash, that I had grown stretch marks.

So, yes! I am expecting a baby! Hooray! It's so great! But that also means that right now I'm pregnant. Which is not so great. It is, in fact, terrible.