Morning

"I'm tiiiiired." I whine, about thirty minutes after my last alarm goes off. "Baby doesn't want to get out of bed, either."

"Baby can sleep anytime and anywhere," he says.

Good point.

I poke my belly.

"There, Baby. Now you're up, too."

I roll out of bed.

Fourteen

I'm fourteen weeks today. Officially second trimester. I feel like it's my birthday.

Sometimes

Sometimes a good talk with Mom helps to sort everything out.

Sometimes sugary cereal is exactly what you need.

Sometimes it's ok to have french fries (and only french fries) for dinner.

Sometimes a 3D kids' movie is the perfect thing to re-awaken your imagination.

rant

i'm going to cut my hair.

i'm going to look at magazines and cut out pictures of people with beautiful naturally curly hair.
i'm going to call the hair salon and make an appointment.
i'm going to take my most favorite magazine clipping with me.
and the stylist will cut my hair.

and hopefully, i will no longer drag myself to the shower in the morning thinking, "i hate my hair." the funny thing is when i think that, i feel guilty. so, i have to qualify it in my head. i tell myself, "well, i don't want to be bald, if that's the alternative. what i mean is, i'm really sick and tired of not knowing what to do with my hair."

so, i'm going to get a haircut.

and i really hope that i won't hate it.

Overkill?

To what extent are these pregnancy dietary restrictions overkill? I mean, I can live without bleu cheese and sushi, because I was always wary of them anyway. But, no hot dogs? I really miss my Hebrew Nationals, y'all.

Fiona Robyn, borrowing my blog

Ruth's diary is the new novel by Fiona Robyn, called Thaw. She has decided to blog the novel in its entirety over the next few months, so you can read it for free.

Ruth's first entry is below, and you can continue reading tomorrow here.

*

These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It’s a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we’re being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.

The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they’re stuck to the outside of her hands. They’re a colour that’s difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.

I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I’m giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don’t think I’m alone in wondering whether it’s all worth it. I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I’ve heard the weary grief in my dad’s voice.

So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I’m Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I’m sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?

Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat; books you have to take in both hands to lift. I’ve had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I’ve still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.

Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about; princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad’s snoring was.

I’ve always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I’ll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say; ‘It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for’, before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It’ll all be here. I’m using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I’m striping the paper. I’m near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I’m allowed to make my decision. That’s it for today. It’s begun.

Continue reading tomorrow here...

So...What's It Like?

I'm only twelve weeks along, so I think only the most astute eye could tell that I'm pregnant. But I certainly feel pregnant.

I think what has surprised me the most so far is this sense that I've been here before. Early pregnancy feels a lot like my first (and only) really big, scary lupus flare-up. Not in terms of fevers and joint pain, because thankfully I don't have those. But, in terms of the fatigue and limited energy and the sense that I need to get back into the habit of counting my spoons. In terms of the general feeling of illness that I have.

I find myself dragging down the hall at work feeling brain-foggy and run-down, and it takes me back to when I had first returned to law school after taking a semester off due to my illness. I walked more slowly. I did everything more slowly, and everything--reading, grocery shopping, doing laundry, walking around the neighborhood--took more effort and energy.

On Sunday, it took me at least four hours to clean the apartment, when I used to be able to zip through in about two hours max. I have to take breaks. I have to take naps.

Right now, pregnancy feels a lot like lupus. I'm tired, and really looking forward to that second trimester that everyone says is so much easier.