The problem with autumn babies is that the summer months see me at my most pregnant. The heat is nigh unbearable some days, and I don’t know what I would do without air conditioning.
The other problem with autumn babies is that I get to miss out on excellent summer activities like tubing… pretty much the most fun I’ve ever had in the summer, and I missed it this weekend. In hindsight though I’m pretty happy I didn’t go, because it sounds like there was a lot more drinking done than last year.
My husband came home with some interesting stories to tell. I guess a lot more alcohol was purchased and more was brought down the river than was needed. He and his brother J had it out about who was wasted and who wasn’t, who bought how much alcohol, and whose judgment may have lapsed. It sounded like one of the petty arguments the girls have, except the subject matter was way more serious and the parents kept piping up about how disappointed they are that every time anyone goes to Cool Auntie’s house for tubing, it turns into a booze-fest.
Before J got home and started fighting with my husband, we discussed J’s friend who went with them and how he probably doesn’t get much exposure to alcohol at home, so here he is with an opportunity to get wasted and jumps on it. Maybe if he hadn’t had so much to drink going down the river, he wouldn’t have ended up in the hospital after having smoked himself on a rock twice.
I made the point that if drinking is a big taboo subject, a kid will be more likely to seize opportunities like this to get shit-faced. Neither Pops nor Big Momma agreed with me. They were both giving Cool Auntie shit for being irresponsible, but it seems that even with the older kids, once the “responsible” adults are gone, they let loose and do things that would normally be frowned upon. I think Cool Auntie figures they’re old enough to make their own decisions and they wouldn’t go crazy drinking at her place if the rules weren’t so rigid at home.
Flashback to my mom and I, 2002 or so when I first smoked pot, and she told me that she was okay with me experimenting, but she trusted me not to let it fuck up my life. And hey look, it never did. Neither did drinking.
It’s because I’m trying so hard to be good that I’m taken aback when we’re in the throes and my husband makes me admit to some of the filthiest desires I’ve hardly dared dream of. But it’s hard to hide them when his whispers in my ear of things completely inappropriate now that we’re married make me undeniably wet and trembling with desire. I have to remember that he has a dirtier mind than I do, and he won’t think I’m a bad wife if I admit to the things he has imagined us doing already.
I’ve recently started reading Tales of a Swinger which I found on the Magpie’s blogroll.
Swingerwife is very descriptive, and I have found myself (more than once) biting my lip and breathing a little heavier after reading some of her posts these last couple days. But here’s where I’m running into some confusion.
Since I got married and cleaned up my act, I am suddenly very conscious of relationships and what makes them work, what makes them fall apart. I took one look at Allie, wrapped in nothing but a blanket, sitting on the porch arguing with her mother about her fiance Lon following her to the little town of Seabrook, and about Noah, the man she’d just fucked senseless for two days. “Little slut,” I thought to myself. “She shouldn’t have gone.” Surprised, I realized that the old me would never have questioned Allie’s moral integrity. She and Noah were meant to be. Who cares that she cheated on her fiance?
In all my careful scrutiny of relationships, I find myself coming down hard on some of the people I used to hold in high regard as my best friends. Before the Tiger and I fell out, I questioned how she was treating people. The sense of entitlement that comes hand-in-hand with polyamory. Everyone is up for grabs because “everyone should be poly.” No respect for conventional relationships. I didn’t like her attitude.
Now, it’s not just the attitude, it’s the lifestyle in general. How decadent, how indulgent, to be able to fuck whoever you want. No sense of loyalty to any one partner, where’s the trust? I’ve learned to value the things these people won’t bat an eyelash at except to look down their noses.
But here I am, reading the account of a woman and her husband enjoying multiple partners, orgies, and all the indulgence of the world of the swingers… and getting turned on. How do I reconcile that?
I am a naughty girl. As anyone who knows me could probably tell you, I have an incredibly dirty mind and have been a sucker for sex since my cherry was popped. Most times it has gotten me in trouble, this insatiable appetite of mine, but I try not to dwell on the past. What’s done is done.
For those who don’t know me very well, I am 6 months pregnant, 4 months married and living with my husband’s family on “The Compound.” It’s an acreage sporting three houses, and home to my husband’s parents, one set of grandparents, ten siblings and two daughters-in-law. Bit of a change for those of us who grew up as only children, but that’s another story.
My husband’s family is quite Christian. I grew up an Atheist, so living here has been adjustment in that way as well. The kids are GOOD kids. They come to church, they adhere more than willingly to the dietary restrictions (no pork or shellfish), they have jobs as soon as they can, buy their own vehicles and stay out of trouble.
Before I got married, I lived a very naughty lifestyle. I also surrounded myself with very naughty people and had no qualms about our topics of conversation which bordered on filthy some days.
Now, in the midst of all these good people with a very high moral standard, I find myself with an incredible shortage of people with whom I can talk about the naughty things that were never taboo before. It’s pretty much only my husband. I’ve talked about this before.
My husband is a very private person, and isn’t so much a fan of the idea to me writing all about our personal life and posting it here. But it leaves me with much less to talk about than when I first sat down to shapeofagirl, because so many people in the real world know who is behind these words. Granted, I am no longer in contact with a lot of them either by their choice or mine, but I know my husband would care just as much if it was completely anonymous.
My point here, is that since I’ve been married, I’ve cleaned up my act. I cut out the people who still threatened our relationship, and I’m trying so hard to be the good girl when I spent so long being bad. But no matter how hard I try, there is a part of me that misses being able to throw around what a dirty mind I have. There is a part of me (she has a name) that hates me for only letting her out during playtime with my husband. She used to have more control than that. Way more.
Well, here we are, last day of June. I’m sitting down at the communal laptop in the living room because my computer is buried in the chaos that is our suite. There’s dust everywhere, walls torn down, floors gone, and generally uninhabitable except for the bedroom. I didn’t do any planning for this entry, I’m just sort of typing with no direction or end in mind. I kind of like that.
I’ve really been getting into this whole book-making thing. Sister 1 and I have been to the dollar store and places like Staples and Wall-Mart for supplies, and we’ve got a craft table set up in her place. Some of the books I’ve been making are frickin’ beautiful, if I may say so. They make the other ones I’ve made look like lame. We got some “mod podge” that makes the covers all beautiful and shiny, and my husband reckons I could sell some of the nicer ones for a good 20-25 bucks. I’m stoked. We’re talking about doing the fall fair and maybe winning some prizes. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t taught the little girls though. If they’re not walking away from their mess and expecting us to clean it up for them, they’re wanting to use the really awesome tissue paper that Sister 1 and I got, or not cleaning their brushes. But you know me, I LOVE crafts.
So, hopefully our place is going to be done in the next week or so. I’ll be very happy to have our own place back. I spent a couple hours cleaning Sister 1’s apartment today, and it felt really good to make things clean. I think I’m nesting, and I really wish I could be putting our place in order.
I’m going back to AB in a couple weeks! We’re camping here for 2 days and then I’m going to fly out and my dad is going to pick me up from the airport. I’m excited because my grandmaman and Auntie L and little cousin are going to be there. I haven’t seen them for almost 2 years. I’m not so much looking forward to camping though… I haven’t had excellent camping experiences, and I have to get up to pee 3 or 4 times a night. *grumble*
I think that’s all for now, not really feelin’ it. Talk to you guys later.
Well. After that last post, I found myself almost writing more in the comments than I did in the entry itself. Have I mentioned how much I LOVE comments?
I just want to take this moment to say that I am still pro-choice. Partial birth abortion makes me want to cry and vomit all at the same time, and I wish that never had to happen to these poor little brand new people who never got a chance. But there’s so much beauty in the fact that the women who chose LIFE had a choice.
In the comments on my last post I mentioned those billboards that say, “Choose life – your mom did.” Your mom didn’t have an abortion. She consciously said, “No, I choose to give this child life.” And that’s amazing! I had a choice. I could easily (well, maybe not easily, but I could) have not said anything to A about how I was late, hid it from him until I knew for sure if there really was a little person in there, and then had an abortion. He never had to know. But I made the choice to tell him, to hope with him, to text him excitedly when I saw those little pink lines. I chose to give my kid a chance at life, the best I can give it.
And this is why I won’t condemn anyone for the choices they make. Because it is their choice, the 15 year old rape victim has just as much right to terminate than 35 hopeful mom. If they choose not to, it’s beautiful. If they choose to, then hopefully they will give a chance to another kid someday in the future.
But your mom chose life… so you could have a choice too.
I first heard about Jill Stanek from a friend of mine who mentioned her in his facebook status. He called her “an anti-woman terrorist and accomplice to murder.” Sounded interesting, so I looked her up.
Jill Stanek was a Registered Nurse who worked at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, IL until she became aware of certain practices going on at the hospital and devoted her life to anti-abortion activism. It was thought by my friend after MSNBC’s partisan-in-chief Keith Olbermann falsely accused Stanek of posting the addresses of 2 late-term abortionists, that she posted the addresses of these doctors because she wants them dead and hopes some of her supporters are radical enough to pull it off. It turns out all she did was post pictures of their clinics which happened to include a couple vehicles and their license plates. I guess in the aftermath of late-term abortionist George Tiller’s death on May 31 of this year, tensions are running a little high in the fight between pro-lifers and pro-choicers. But it doesn’t really interest me, this political mudslinging of who is right and who is wrong. And I’ll tell you why.
When I was in high school, the big pro-life activist in my grade put on a presentation about abortion. I went because I was curious. Of course, the entire presentation consisted of a video of late-term abortions, little face after little face suddenly getting sucked away in a cloud of red. I was sixteen. I kept my pro-choice stance while vowing to myself that I would always choose life, no matter what.
When I became sexually active, the stakes got a little higher, and as the memory of the slideshow of dead babies faded and I had a late period scare or two, eventually I resolved that I would terminate any pregnancy in the absence of a stable, long-term relationship. Even a month before A and I conceived our child, the decision whether or not to keep it would have been much more difficult than it ended up being, had I gotten pregnant a few weeks earlier.
What caused me to focus on Jill Stanek’s cause rather than any spotlight she happened to put on such and such a doctor, was the video on her website of her talking about “partial birth abortion.” Essentially what happens here is in the 2nd or 3rd trimester the doctor inserts a pill which opens the cervix and causes the baby to come out prematurely (this is how many miscarriages happen – weak cervixes can’t keep baby inside).
Now, what shocked me was that because these pregnancies are being terminated so late, the babies can come out still alive, and then they are allowed to die on their own. Some of them live for several hours before suffocating due to underdeveloped lungs.
So, is it just me, soon to be a mom, who is absolutely disgusted by the thought of a tiny, second trimester baby struggling for air and eventually suffocating in the arms of a nurse because its parents don’t want anything to do with it?
But the big question is, why does partial birth abortion make me want to vomit, and yet I still hold the opinion that a woman’s body is her own business and that when she discovers she’s pregnant, it’s her choice whether or not to terminate?
When does abortion become repulsive? Is it that, if the fetus comes out dead and recognizable as nothing more than a blood clot, it’s okay – but if the fetus comes out alive and is able to survive for any length of time, it’s wrong? Shouldn’t it be all or nothing? Isn’t it usually that any abortion is wrong, or none of it is?
And what about the reasons for it? When a woman finds out she’s pregnant and decides to have an abortion, it’s because she doesn’t want it. There could be a million reasons why – she’s not financially prepared to have a child, she’s too young, she was raped, etc. But when a pregnancy is aborted in the 2nd or 3rd trimester usually it’s either because the baby is a threat to mom’s life, or baby has a disease or disability of some kind which will either result in its death shortly after birth anyway, or it will be dependent on its parents for its whole life and mom and dad decide they can’t handle it. But do the reasons really matter? Does a 15 year old girl who gets raped have less of a right to terminate her pregnancy than 35 year old mom who is told by the doctors that her baby, if carried to term, won’t live to celebrate its first birthday and she can’t stand the heartbreak?
I don’t have the answer. I’m not here to preach, or to try to convince anyone that what I think is more right than what they think. It was just this new spin on late-term abortion that got me thinking… especially since I’ve always been pro-choice. And I CHOSE life.
The spread of gossip is like if you were to stand on the roof of your home with a feather pillow and a pair of scissors on a windy day. Cut a couple big holes in the pillow, give it a shake, and the wind will carry the hundreds of feathers in every direction. How stoked would you be to chase after every single little feather, trying to collect them all and return them to the pillow? Not very, I think.
Ever played telephone? Looking back, I can kind of see that game as a way to teach us early on that the more times something is repeated, the more distorted the facts get. And in real life, the more damage can be done. No one likes to be talked about, yet everyone seems to do it. I am surprised when I meet people who are guarded, who keep most things to themselves. They don’t talk very much, but they’re also not spreading rumors about the people they know.
Is it such a problem to be guarded like that? I’ve always lived very openly, my ears always open for a good story, and I spent time with people who would gladly oblige me. But now, I am finding that I have to change the way I approach conversation. I was on the phone with the Wompoo last week, and started to tell her about the scuffle Sister 1 and Sister 2 had when we went job hunting, when my husband hollered at me from the other room, “Can you please not gossip?” At the time I was a little put off because there’s not a whole lot going on in my life right now and that was one interesting thing I could have told my long-distance friend. But of course my husband was right. How would those sisters feel if they knew I was going around telling my friends about their petty disagreements? Probably none too happy.
I even have to watch what I say when I’m writing in my blog. I am learning lessons the Olive Tree tried to teach me nigh on three years ago now: My girlfriends don’t need to know every intimate, disgusting detail of my love life. I have to now respect my husband enough not to be telling everyone about the love we make or the fights we have, because those things are our business and it won’t do us any good for me to be complaining about our disagreements because we resolve them, and most of the time I’m just overly hormonal anyway.
But I still bug my friends for details, because I need to live vicariously somehow. My husband isn’t too pleased when my Poet friend and I get to gossiping; he thinks it’s negative energy that I don’t need, and there are more positive things to focus on in my life right now. But oh, how I love when my Poet friend and I get on the phone and shoot the shit, and he tells me about the drama in his life – a life that I left behind. Even though I’m married with a bun in the oven, I’m still a 21 year old girl, and other peoples’ relationship drama still interests me… especially now. I feel like, when I hear about problems in peoples’ relationships, the answer seems so clear how they should fix it. It’s a brand new perspective.
I love to shock people. I love telling a story that makes people gasp and wonder if I could possibly be telling the truth. I love scandal, I love posting naughty poems that make people a little uncomfortable to read.
I used to always be among people who gave me a run for my money when it came to the outrageous and scandalous, and those stories were our regular topics of conversation. But again (and I know I talk about this a lot), I am surrounded by people who it is very very easy to shock. A and I were asked by his parents to keep the sexy talk to a minimum around the kids. Fair enough, but even the older ones have not even dreamed of some of the stuff I could shock them with.
Yesterday, a few of us were sitting outside on the deck in the early evening as it was starting to cool down. I don’t remember how the conversation started, but C was telling me how little b knew what masturbation was, and she’s only 11. We laughed a bit and C said that she didn’t know what it was until much later, and that kids should not be learning that stuff so young these days. (So many good Proper Condom Use moments flew through my head and I wished you were there, Poet friend.) Eventually the foreign exchange student piped up and said that he thought his brother knew more about sexy things than even I did. I just looked at him, smiled, and said, “I have to bite my tongue so hard around here, you guys don’t even know.” C and Big B cracked up, and that was the end of that.
I just wish that I had someone around here with whom I could be just as inappropriate as I’ve always been. I have to be so careful. And even when I’m swapping stories with my almost sister-in-law who’s only 2 years younger than me, I have to bite my tongue and watch what I say.
My husband and I discussed our “mistakes” a little while ago. He was trying to convince me that having premarital sex was a mistake. His reasons of course were Biblical, and he tried to tell me that we would have been better off if we had never gone through all the emotional bullshit that came with the connection we made when we had sex. The shit we went through wouldn’t have been so bad because he “wouldn’t have given a shit,” and we wouldn’t have been so financially strapped with a baby on the way, etc.
But I figure, if we hadn’t fucked, we wouldn’t be together now.
First of all, because of the frame of mine I was in when we met, I probably wouldn’t have given him the time of day if he hadn’t shown me (even before we met) that we were the perfect sexual match; if he’d said, “I’m waiting till marriage,” I would have said, “Seeya!”
Secondly, if we had gotten involved and gotten so close to marriage as we did and I left, I would have had a much easier time letting go of him, just like he would have had a much easier time letting go of me.
Also, premarital sex in general. He said he did a disservice to both of us by fucking around before he found me. By not saving it for me.
I look at it quite differently. I lost my virginity when I was 17, and have had sex with more people than I usually care to admit to. True, most of them, I regret. But the ones that I don’t taught me so much about myself and what I wanted out of relationships, that I wouldn’t give up those experiences if I could do it all over again.
I’ve never bought into that reason for waiting until one is married: “To avoid emotional turmoil” or whatever. I have been heartbroken to the point of physical pain, and I loved it. I mean, it was terrible, but I was so happy that I could feel that strongly about another human being. It meant, “I GIVE A SHIT!” and how is that a bad thing? In my 5 years of relationships, I’ve stretched my heart as far as it can go.
I have issues with accepting my sexploits as MISTAKES, especially every time I made love to my husband. I have a hard time thinking of some of the most beautiful lovemaking we’ve ever had as MISTAKES. To accept something as a mistake is to wish it had never happened. To regret it. And I won’t do that.
He said it’s important to realize the mistakes we make so that we can recognize related problems in our relationship later on. “Like what?” I asked. I’m pretty sure neither of us is going to be having premarital sex again anytime soon. “The money issue,” he said. The fact that if we’d been married before we got pregnant, we would be having an easier time financially. Sure, I get it. But it’s one thing to say, “Yeah, I’ll admit that there was probably a better way that we could have done this baby thing,” and quite another to say, “I wish I’d never had sex before I met you. I made a mistake.”
So yeah, marriage before baby would have been good. Should we have gotten married when we had originally planned? No, I don’t think so. I wasn’t ready. But see, all of these what-ifs lead me to exactly the place where we were, and exactly the things that happened. We needed the weekend during which we conceived our kid to clear the air and put everything on the table. If we had never had sex, we could not have gotten a hotel room and would not have had that weekend.
I just find it pointless to think of these things that I DO NOT regret as mistakes. Waste of my energy.
Usually, after church, he will ask me what I thought about the sermon. It’s rare that I ever have anything really substantial to say, because of course, I’m still on the fence. I like going to church. I like the messages, I like the singing, I like the people, I like the food, I like the discussions afterward. I have always been interested in religion, and here I am immersed in it every day. But I am just a spectator, as it stands.
I talked to my Poet friend about the whole Creationism thing, and he laughed and said that this was the first of three conversations we are going to have that are going to end with me deciding to convert.
But not all of it clicks like Creationism did. I am not sold on everything. My husband has said to me several times that when it comes to the Bible, it’s either that none of it is bullshit, or all of it is. It’s no good to sit on the fence. But of course, I feel like there are too many things that make sense for me to call it bullshit, but too many things that I don’t agree with to say none of it is bullshit.
My husband asked me last week, “What do you think about Satan?” I thought about it. Whenever I think about whether or not I believe in God, the answer is always, “Sure,” and I think the same might be true for Satan, but “sure” is still more non-committal than “yes” or “no.”
After I called off our engagement and moved back to AB, I entertained the idea of God and the Devil. A had always said that he thought God sent us to each other, and so I took that and announced in a poem that if God really did want us to be together, then Satan was keeping us apart and I would rather be catering to him than to God. But Satan, as an actual being who acts against God by tempting humans away from Him? I don’t know. I’m just having a hard time with the “all or nothing” approach. I’ve always been an advocate of religious patchwork-quiltery – exploring different options and collecting the ideas that seem to make sense in a kind of patchwork quilt of beliefs.
During our last set of Holy Days, we all watched a movie called Fireproof. Husband and wife fighting, husband feels disrespected, wife feels neglected, husband very angry, yelling, wife requests divorce, husband is talked into the Love Dare by his born-again father, falls back in love with his wife, happily ever after. The Love Dare is a religious-based book that takes you one day at a time through a journey back to your spouse when shit hits the fan.
There is one chapter near the end of the book (we got it as a wedding present from some friends of the family who were visiting at the time) that talks about following your heart and why you shouldn’t. Apparently the heart is tricky and untrustworthy and can easily be tempted by Satan. There are several passages in the Bible about not trusting your heart because it is reckless and blind. So when your heart tells you one thing and your mind tells you another, which is more likely to be influenced by Satan?
So, if I cannot accept everything in the Bible as true, it is because my heart is telling me it’s bullshit? Or that too much of it is bullshit to ignore? And should I listen? Right now there is not much else I can do but sit here on the fence, waiting for something bigger to click.
Either way, the fact remains that I am not surrounded by like-minded people. As much as I get along with them and enjoy spending time with them, they are not on the same wavelength as I am. We watched some MTV movie awards flask backs and when Will Ferrell made out with Sascha Baron Cohen, rolling around on the ground, everyone except me thought it was disgusting. This is going to be harder than I thought.
This whole job hunting thing is starting to wear me down. I’m looking for a job to take the pressure off of my husband a little bit, and ever since we decided it was time to start looking, we’ve both been on a mad dash to find some work.
My sisters-in-law are looking too; Sister 1 already works at a restaurant and has a fabulous resume and cover letter, and Almost Sister needs a work permit for any place that wants to jump through the extra hoops to hire her.
When we set out, we were all jazzed, ready to take on the world. We had a very productive couple of hours – and when I say productive, I mean we handed out lots of resumes but it was ridiculous how many people weren’t hiring. I guess everyone has their summer staff already.
The wind went out of my sails when my husband called and told me he got a one-day job unpacking boxes of merchandise and shelves for the new Urban Planet store at Rutherford. But the one day just so happened to be monday, the day of my ultrasound. We were supposed to go together and hold hands while we see our kid for the first time. And now, because we’re so broke that we can’t pass up any kind of work at all, he had to miss it.
Things got even weirder when we were in Staples while Sister 1 photocopied her resume and cover letter, and she got a phone call for a second interview. Almost Sister is unemployed, Sister 1 isn’t. Almost Sister wasn’t pleased.
So, with Almost Sister and I feeling a little defeated and Sister 1 feeling quite smug and pleased with herself, we headed home. It’s a weird dynamic, the three of us. As we were leaving in the morning at the beginning of our hunt, I voiced a desire to go to karaoke, a desire that I’ve expressed to both of them numerous times. When Almost Sister said, “Been there, done that,” and they proceeded to tell me about the wild and crazy night they had at karaoke a little while ago, I felt left out. Just because I’m pregnant doesn’t mean I can’t still have fun, right?
Sister 1 was telling me the other day about how she and Almost Sister have been planning Almost Sister’s wedding, how Almost Sister is very particular about all the things she wants and Sister 1 is kind of scrambling because the wedding is in a month. “Usually,” she said to me last night, all this work I’m doing would be done by the maid of honour. But then Almost Sister turns around and says, ‘Oh yeah, and Auntie will be my maid of honour.’” Sister 1 is miffed because Almost Sister and Auntie haven’t spent a whole lot of time together, and it seems like it’s just because Auntie is the cool Aunt who’s only 9 or 10 years older than us oldest kids, and she knows how to throw an excellent party, that Almost Sister picked her and not Sister 1.
And now this Urban Planet thing… I just don’t know if any of the three of us particularly adores the others, but we hang out because we’re the three oldest girls and have the most in common.
