six word memoir

Adjunct Whore tagged me for this meme last Friday.
Instructions:

1. Write your own six word memoir

2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like

3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere

4 Tag five more blogs with links

5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

(Which AW totally didn't do, but that's okay because I subscribe to her on bloglines and never miss a post. Also, I'm not going to tag anyone, because almost everyone has done this except Sfrajett, and I can tag her by walking across the room, so I'm hardly one to talk.)

I immediately knew what I wanted to write:

It's still snowing, and nothing fits.

Because it was snowing last Friday. On March 21st. Snowing so hard our power went out, just as Sfrajett was putting together our new dining room table. (It's getting hard to eat hunched over our old "dining room table," aka the coffee table in front of the television.) At first this seemed kind of fun--new furniture, and a whole day to spend together without the guilt of needing to work because, no electricity equals no computers equals, I couldn't sit down and work on the stupid, worthless, lame book on once beloved, forgotten author who I am wholly sick of writing about/hawking/being invested in.

(Pause for a quick rant: that's basically how my publisher described it when she turned my project down, only her words were "I just don't think we can pull this one off." Even though the two books I've published with her on my forgotten author have, in fact, done well, and got me a great job, and get me recognized at my sub-specialty conference by the very authors who inspired me to do this work in the first place.

Oh well, as my co-editor put it, this publisher seduced and abandoned us and our forgotten subject even as the ink dried on our contracts, so move on, move on. But still, it smarts! Believing in this author is like being Jimmy Stewart in Harvey. I swear, she's right there! I can see her!)

But back to that snowy day in March. Our fantasy of staying in and being cozy and warm in our darkening apartment was ruined by our having opera tickets that night. And not just any opera, the last opera in our series and a Tchaikovsky at that. We'd been excited about this for months. But going out in the snow? To the opera? The problem is that even though we have nose bleed seats up with all the other academics, and aren't expected to do super fancy opera attire, I don't feel comfortable wearing jeans to the opera, and the right now the only warm pants that fit me are my Secret Fit Belly jeans (yeah, that would be jeans with panty hose sewn on the top. Shhhh. It's a super secret!) Because back half a lifetime ago when I started showing it was also winter, and I bought a few pairs of cords with a demi-panel, thinking they'd get me through the winter, if not the entire pregnancy. But it's still winter! And even though they fit my butt and my legs (which is to say, this is not my fault) the demi panel doesn't fit around my no-longer demi belly, and if you let it slide under your belly, like the impossibly cheerful model, it squishes your bladder and makes you sad.

So I had a melt down, because this winter has been too long, and I can't bear the snow, and I don't want to buy more maternity pants, and nothing fits. End of story: I pulled a pair of black pants, their cuffs whitened by salt from the roads because I also don't want to pay to get maternity pants hemmed, from the dry cleaning bag, pulled on a couple of layers of t-shirts and sweaters, and we went, driving through McDonalds on the way, which tasted really, really perfect.

And since it's snowing again today, a week later, and still, nothing fits (though I have nowhere to be, so it doesn't matter) I figured this would be the perfect time for my six word memoir.

Halfway There

Holy hell, how did it get to be March already? February was one long, dark miserable snow storm, with layers of ice freezing over layers of ice on our narrow street. Thank God for In Treatment, (anyone else feeling kind of crushed out on Gabriel Byrne?) or I never would have made it through the winter. You know spring is almost here in my ugly little stretch of Chicago when the ice has thawed enough that the inexplicable chunks of long, curly, reddish brown hair (which I think, hope, pray came from a wig), which were laying in the street in front of my building before the snow fell, begin to reappear. It's almost as moving as that first crocus.

But this week the temperatures are finally crawling back into the forties and with daylight savings making the days longer, everything is seeming much better. I'm officially halfway through my pregnancy this week (20 weeks). Yesterday we had our anatomy scan, a super thorough, 45 minute ultra-sound at the hospital, where they check to make sure the baby has a spine and ribs and a four-chambered heart and a liver and kidneys and bowels, etc. People like to tell you horror stories when you're pregnant, especially when you're of Advanced Maternal Age, and we've heard some doozies, so we went into this feeling mostly like everything was okay, but looking forward to reassurances.

And it's all good, folks. Mrs. Dalloway, who was really more of a Mrs. Joe yesterday, kicked and squirmed like crazy the entire time (guess I shouldn't have pounded that orange juice in the waiting room), so much so that the doctor (a neo-natal specialist, not my regular ob) got a little irritated, and was so rough with the ultra-sound thing when he was trying to get a good picture of the brain that I left with my stomach feeling bruised all over. I felt like apologizing, thinking, I can't believe my child is already misbehaving in public, but I wasn't really sorry, because I didn't like him. When he walked in the room he was looking at my chart with confusion and said something like, "Well, you're not Mrs. Shall I call you Miss, or Ms.?" I said, "You can call me doctor." Then he looked at GF and said, "And are you a friend, or a special friend?" with a sugary intonation on special. Seriously. I hated having his disgusting, hairy arm all over my bare, lubed-up stomach while he moved the ultra-sound around. Happily the first half-hour was with a dykey technician who was chatty and kind and who worked diligently to get the hyper-active baby into a position where we could see the sex, which was the real excitement of the day.

She found it, and I know I shouldn't care, and I would have reported this news with joy and excitement no matter which sex the baby is, but I must confess to being giddily happy to say that Mrs. Dalloway is a


drum-roll . . . . . .


GIRL!!!!!!!!!