All rather shocking

Week 11. Oh my god. That means I'm nearly a third of the way through this gestation, and given my blood pressure and the likelihood I'll pop some weeks early, more than a third the way through. What. The. Fuck.

Children have already made me aware that time operates differently. When I was herding Niece and Nephew around Europe, it got clear really fast the only way it was going to be nice was if I accepted Child-Time, and the fact that less gets done in more time when people are that age. At the same time the weeks with them whizzed by like a cheetah on meth.

And here we are - puking notwithstanding (I forgot to have a midnight snack last night so I was revisiting my misspent youth in the toilet again this morning), feeling like cancer notwithstanding (which I don't anymore), time has once more whizzed by and I'm for-realsies showing now. And soon - soon! - despite the worries, the preoccupations, the blood pressure - the odds are soon Ren won't just be a lovely little twitching white shadow on the ultrasound anymore, but will be a person who I'm holding in my arms. And soon after that, a person who's too big to hold in my arms. And soon after that, I'll be an old person who dies and leaves Ren without his or her mother. That's the optimistic projection, anyways. What a fucking world it is. I'm not complaining. It's just all rather shocking when you think about it.

On an only slightly lighter note. I have a lot more perspective in the BP issue now, BTW, since I got back in touch with Lexie's old mum, who is herself battling through the first trimester now. One of the reasons she had to give up Lexie was because she had a bit of a brain problem. Now she's got it all in control with medication. The problem, of course, is that the medication is contraindicated for pregnancy. Not just a little contraindicated, like the blood pressure medication I might have to go on if mine doesn't keep dropping, but quite contraindicated - like, won't-let-you-absorb-folate-and-it-is-quite-likely-there-will-be-problems contraindicated. However, if she starts having grand mal siezures again - well, that's not so hot either. Babies are well padded in there, I know, but having a grand mal siezure whilst driving or walking across something hard your head would make a jolly smash on - that's really not the way one would want to get through a pregnancy, to say the least.

I'm not facing any dilemnas or choices like that - my BP is too low right at the moment for me to need drugs, and since I'm almost out of the first trimester Ren's almost out of range for when BP medication has been suggested to occasionally cause problems. As generally futile as it is to make comparisons between people's problems, I understand - and draw some selfish comfort from - the fact that whatever choices I have to make about this matter are just not in the same league as the choices Lexie's old mum is going to have to make, or the choices women with chronic hypertension they've been on drugs for a long time for have to make, or the choices diabetic women have to make, or . . . well, most things, really. Perspective, Jessica, you fool. 

The perils of responsibility

I miss grass. A lot. It took awhile for it to really kick in - I haven't got high since I was in Belgium - but here it is. I think it's the blood pressure thing. I've always tested normal or low for blood pressure, and thinking back the main difference between all those tests and now - aside from the obvious little Ren in my belly - is that I don't smoke anymore. When all the breastfeeding is through - and since I'm hoping for long nursing followed by Ren's little brother or sister and more nursing that could be fucking aeons - I think I'll start smoking again. Or during business trips when I can pump and dump to make sure I'm not contaminating my offspring before they're ready to start contaminating themselves.

Of course, if my blood pressure goes back to normal after I pop, I won't have an excuse. Nor will I need one. I'm a big girl and I'll do what I like. Except I won't, of course. The deal I'll make with the devil inside, or the angel, or whatever the fuck my sociopathic excuse for a conscience amounts to, is that if I manage to keep not drinking coffee, I'll reintroduce the grass. One recreational carcinogen at a time's enough. And at the moment I miss grass far more than I miss coffee. At that, my dears, is a sentiment I never expected. I've always loved weed but I've loved coffee more. No interest at the moment, though.

Another part of it is the Great European Trip will be through the Netherlands for about a week, and I'll be stopping in towards its tail end with some people I used to do a lot of getting high with. And then Berlin. Most of this trip will be spent with friends and family but in aid of my blood pressure and just out of self-regard, I've decided to treat myself to three days on my own in a forest outside of Berlin. Not a spirit quest or anything. It'll be in a really nice B&B with awesome restaurants nearby. But I've always really, really loved being high in Berlin. I've loved being anything in Berlin, really. And gosh, going there for a few days in July is not gonna help with my nostalgia for it in the long term.

But that's fine. I just want to chill for a few days by myself in a forest in Berlin. This could be my last chance to do that for 22 years. And yes, a little weed would be nice with that. Oh well. The things I don't do for love.

Golliwhaaaa?

My blood pressure is noticeably down. It'd be nice to know which of the things I was doing to make it come down, if any, are working, especially given the acupuncture costs $50 a week (and that's mates' rates). But I'll just take the "down", and keep not eating salt.

I'll have to keep monitoring it over the rest of the pregnancy, but the one place in town that sells blood pressure machines - the place where I got my rental from - sells golliwogs too. I'm aware of the cultural arguments for golliwogs not being a disgusting memento of a racist past that hasn't quite ended yet. And you know what, if they were for sale in some other country with a different history with its black people maybe I'd be less utterly creeped out.

But considering European Australians have spent their history genociding all their black people off and otherwise being absolutely inhuman in a way that they don't need to face because it's been so thorough there's just a few thousand over left to complain and try to pursue lawsuits (ever heard of the Maralinga tests? I doubt it. A settlement of $13.5 million for a whole fucking community - that wouldn't cover giving one of them cancer in a country where they counted as human. Mind you, they fucked over their own white servicemen too in the service of the Mother Country's nuclear programme, so maybe it can't all be written off to racism).

Anyways, whatever the abstract rightness or wrongness of the continued commercial existence of golliwogs, I'm not giving any more fucking money to an Australian shop that sells them.

One of my colleagues in Shanghai, who I could make two of when I was still fit, had the same blood pressure issue I did, and she and the baby were fine after a non-induced three-week early delivery that turned into a C-section because the baby wouldn't take her silly little hand off its crown. Squidsy's wife, who popped over last night, had undiagnosed high blood pressure and descended into full pre-eclampsia - she got a C-section too, obviously - I guess when you're hemorrhaging and doing whatever other awful things happen at that point they don't wait for it to come out of its own accord. And she and the baby, ultimately, were fine.

I'm finding these stories, especially my co-worker's, incredibly reassuring. I know I could mess around on the internet and find unlimited happy and unhappy stories of how high blood pressure was or was not dealt with by pregnant chicks, and I've done a bit of that, actually, but when it's people you know, it's so much more believable, somehow. So much more real. There are a lot of things the internet can't do. It doesn't help that that all these forums seem to be full of messages from people who can't spell, punctuate, or otherwise write, and who I therefore find unreliable. God, the internet brings out the snob in me.

Airmiles and airport books

I have enough of them for a round trip to Rome. I just bought some tickets instead. I mean to say I'll be in Rome, but not flying in and out of there. Feeling a bit of an abstract urge to scarper. Lots of women love being pregnant but I suspect I'm not one of them. Now that I'm not particularly worried anymore - forewarned forearmed, etc., and Ren seems to be ticking along nicely down there as we round out this beginning 1:4 miscarriage risk period - I'm just sort of sick of being pregnant. I want to go for runs and camping trips and eat food with sesame oil, not to mention coffee. But lethargy, nausea and blood pressure's in the way, not to mention the tail end of that fucking plague I contracted in Melbourne. 

And I want to not be so fucking fat. I'm back up to the weight I was before I started running, and wondering how I stood it back then. I feel like a fucking elephant. It's not an aesthetic thing. I look pretty great, with my porn boobs and glow and minibump and all that. It's more the feeling - this feeling of being some sort of clumsy, loose-limbed mastadon. And I'm just at the beginning of it, too. Oh well. I think things'll get better in that respect when the goo clears out of my lungs well enough for me to run and jump in the pool, and we've got a Pilates instructor buddy who I'll learn some matt tricks with. I'm just so bloody sleepy and dopey all the time.

The good thing is that all the enforced relaxation is reintroducing me to the world of light reading. I'm reading Dashiell Hammett's short stories for the first time. I like Raymond Chandler's better, for their emotional richness, but not much. These are pretty damn sweet. Not Dorothy Sayer's though, which aren't particularly emotionally rich compared to either - not at all - but are fucking awesome and which I've also been reading. Also reading The Art Forger's Handbook, by a very interesting man called Eric Hebborn. The linked documentary is very interesting, worth a watch, but nothing to the book. While it's got a lot of quantity of methodology not immediately interesting to those of us who don't draw or paint much, its conclusions on modern art versus older art and the intrinsic value of artwork are absolutely fascinating. Despite or because of being written by a sociopath, no dissection of those topics has ever spoken to me better.

In the vein of slightlier heavier reading I've been going through Erasmus's Praise of Folly, which is a rather sweet read. I have a great-grandfather Erasmus who made it to 100 without breaking a sweat, named after him of Rotterdam I know not, but in case Ren turns out to be a boy I'm mounting a minor campaign for us to name him that. (Don't worry, it's going badly.) In the circumstances I should at least read some of his books.

Plan for six weeks of maternity leave

You know, considering how full of worries and trepidations I am, it's time to focus on the more likely outcome of all of this, which is that I have a nice healthy baby without too, too much trouble or excessive weeks in ICU or whatever else it is my nightmares conjure up.

So here is my ideal plan for the six weeks of mat leave I'm planning.

1. Hold, feed, bathe, etc. baby
2. Sleep when it sleeps
3. Watch shitloads of Doctor Who. I've never really watched it before but nothing with theme music that awesome could be bad
4. Wear really nice pyjamas

What do you think? Too ambitious?

The joys of unimmunity

Pregnancy continues pregnantily. I'm in Melbourne for a conference that I'm not at at the moment because I have no more immune system. Pregnant women don't have much of one, you see; that way, their own bodies don't turn on the embryos. Which means the common cold chews through you like a rabid fucking wolverine. Oh well. It looked like a crappy conference anyways. But I'd rather be home, of course, eating according to my very, very odd predilections, and not having to share a washroom with other B&B guests.

I'm keen on having my own kitchen back because not only are my predilections in terms of what I can eat odd, but eating is further complicated by how it's not supposed to involve much salt, due to my blood pressure, which continues borderline-I-gotta-see-an-OB-instead-of-a-midwife-hey-maybe-I-can-get-a-C-section-instead-of-pushing-a-bowling-ball-out-of-my-insert-whistling-sound-here. Of course this week it's involving salt, because it's involving restaurants. And that's fine by me aside from the health issues. Pregnancy isn't giving me a sweet tooth, sadly. I could sit here eating french fries all day, no trouble. Best not to think about it.

Well, that's enough of all that now. Time for more sleeping.

This isn't just a pregnancy blog, I swear

And to prove it, dear readers, here's the funniest thing on the internet. Nothing to do with me feeling crappier than dung beetle shit. Nothing to do with how I've never been such a fan of a woman's right to choose abortions because there is no way a human being should have to go through all this just because a damn condom broke and she lives in a country without the morning-after pill. Just pure, unadulterated awesome.

Joynoyance

Annoyance the first: I've been asking for lots of advice, unashamedly, unabashedly, for getting through pregnancy. Nothing to worry about, readers, but it looks as though this pregnancy will not be the 100% uncomplicated push-it-out-in-a-manger romp through the hay all us Catholic girls hope and pray for. Because - it will turn out to the surprise of no-one who has waded through my frequent, inconsequential, but heartfelt rants - my blood pressure is bordering unhealthy levels and my third trimester will be a big fat pre-eclampsia watch. All that's not as bad as it sounds, but it's not so hot either. And in any case, I've never done it before, it's frightening, it's the first trimester so I feel like I've got fucking cancer, etc.

What I haven't been asking for advice for is how to live my fucking life when it comes out. Now, luck always plays its part, of course, but I've worked really hard to get to a point where I'll be able to breastfeed and cuddle whenever, besides some key hours on Thursday and Friday, and where the F-word only works part of the week. And he's worked hard to get to the point where he can probably take the full year of unpaid parental leave. I can't, or rather, I won't. I outearn him by 300% so it would be a ridiculous choice for our family if I did that.

And frankly, I don't want to. That might change, but at the moment I can't foresee a situation where I take a year off from a job I love, that I do from home and whose hours still let me cuddle, breastfeed, co-sleep, etc, so the F-word - a professional early childhood educator, BTfuckingW - can commute an hour a day to the next town over and support us on a fraction of the income my job provides, while my fucking brain turns to baby mush and I stop being able to afford wild-caught salmon.

Being in this state of mind, readers, being advised on attachment parenting being a woman's natural choice, and how I should take as much time off as I possibly can, is not what I want to hear. It is bullshit advice. It is highly subjective advice generalized to include my very specific situation. It is infuriating advice, frankly, when we've gone through what we've gone through to organize our present situation for ourselves. And it comes from a guy who I used to fuck and his stay-at-home wife who both reckon they're some sort of feminist and who don't have enough money, so it is also, to a degree, comical, I-dodged-a-bullet type of advice.

You know, people warned me that eventually the advice would start annoying me, but I wasn't expecting it until I started showing and strangers started telling me to stop running, or something.

Maternal slap-in-the-face of joy the first: to rule out anything wierder than a family history of hypertension causing my high blood pressure, we had our first ultrasound yesterday. It was lovely, the little thing. Heart beating, little limbs twitching, great big head. For the moment we're calling it Ren. For obvious reasons. Nine week old embryos do bear a certain resemblance to him. Suddenly what's happening to me stopped feeling like cancer and started feeling like growing a person who I'm gonna love more than I've ever loved anything.

Doctors, midwives, nerves and judgements

I'm cued up now with a doctor and a midwife. Good news, all in all. The midwife comes recommended from a good friend here who had her better pregnancy with her . . . the doctor is an unknown quality, so we'll see how that goes.

I expect to be a reasonably demanding patient. For example, when I was in Canada, I got to spend lots of quality time with Lexie, my cat, who has taken to my parents like a duck to water. Which was lovely. And she spent the winter being an indoor cat, in a place without mice, which means she wasn't likely to be tracking around any toxoplasmosis - but then Mum let her out a few times the last days I was there.

It's fairly ridiculous for me to be worried about toxoplasmosis. I spent years in France and Belgium eating raw-ish meat, and I spent years living in close quarters with Lexie while she was running around outside assaulting things and chomping down rodents in my Cabbagetown dive like a boss. The odds of me not having contracted toxoplasmosis years ago (when it would have been perfectly safe as far as Fetus is concerned) and then contracting it during the two days out of the three weeks I spent with my sweet Lex when she would have been tracking around toxoplasmosis she picked up in a couple of ten-minute walk-rounds the garden, or the one time I changed her litter box in that time whilst holding my breath and washing myself down afterward, are really quite negligible.

Nevertheless I'm concerned enough to ask for a test. My guess is the test will show I have antibodies, because I have not let a toxoplasmosis-free sort of lifestyle (see years of raw meat in France and Belgium) and then there will be another test to figure out how recent my infection was and then Fetus will need to get a blood test once it's born, just to reassure me, and all this fucking shit will be on my mind for, like, a fucking year.

The good thing about me as a patient is that if Fetus is really just Fetus, Singular, and not Multiple Fetii (which would explain why I've been eating my own weight in meat every day), and all things being equal, I'm going to spend most of the second trimester elsewhere, away from my midwife and family doctor, so their most pressing job in the next few weeks besides the introductory appointments is going to be writing down what they reccommend I pay medical people in China, the UK, Belgium etc. to do. I don't know if I mentioned but I have quite a travel schedual in the second trimester. DV, Fetus will have visited 10 countries whilst still in utero.

He or she might as well get used to it. I don't think it's possible to be my kid, or the F-word's kid, without understanding that the world is awfully, painfully big but not as big as it seems, and the tricks behind straddling continents. Which I suspect is a very unAustralian outlook, BTW. Yesterday Squidsy told us his grandmother in Adelaide had died. Adelaide's a two hour plane ride away. He didn't go, not to see her when she was dying and not for her funeral, despite her appeals and his mother's appeals. No time - despite being functionally unemployed - and no money - despite having the cash to sink a bottle of quality wine a night. I guess I have to stop thinking of Squidsy as representative of Australians. It doesn't do them favours.

No eating on an empty stomach, or with a bunch of assholes

I think I've cracked the riddle of why I'm not puking anymore, despite continuing to feel a little nauseous from time to time, and it does have to do with jet lag; since I'm not even close to getting an uninterrupted night's sleep and always have a little snack when I have to get up and around, my stomach doesn't get to that empty point where it starts puking. I'm avoiding, for the moment, that disgusting merry-go-round of empty tummy, puke, no appetite, more puke, try to eat, it's disgusting, empty tummy, et cetera. We'll see if this lasts but I'm pretty chuffed. Never thought it would feel so good to sleep so bad.

What I am a little concerned about, though, is getting as big as a fucking whale because I'm eating constantly. I already look like I'm showing, probably from a combination of water retention and having spent the last couple of weeks eating everything I could hold down and then falling asleep in exhaustion after something as easy as climbing three flights of stairs.

I'm not too concerned, though. My energy levels seem pretty decent now. And I'd rather be overweight than underweight while there's a bun in the oven, that's for damn sure. But I am a little concerned. Oh well. I'm just making sure that anything that goes down the hatch is wholesome, and I'll keep getting an hour of exercise a day, even if it's not all running anymore. The run yesterday was lovely. I think I'll keep going out for a half hour a couple of times a week until I'm too big. I take it really easy and my joints weren't playing up at all - they seem to get iffier when I'm moving around the house in a sudden-type of fashion.

Another thing on my mind is family, of course. How couldn't it be? Today it's the F-word's family. There's a whole big swathe he's become estranged from in the last year. I'm not getting into it, of course, but suffice it to say I don't blame him for the estrangement, and I'm a little surprised by how I wish it to extend to our children - I don't want my kids to have anything to do with this set of people.

That's not the way I ever expected to feel about members of my kid's extended family - I'm Italian enough to feel fairly strongly that family is identity to a very large degree - but there you are. They're the sort of people that I want my children to understand are not the sort of people you sit down and eat dinner with. I'm not talking drug dealers or slave traders or government assassins or merchant bankers or commodities traders. The world is more complicated than that, some of my favorite people are for-realsies fascists, and I'd sit down for dinner with a pig (although these non-vegetarian days, the pig'd probably be on the dish), because pigs can have quite decent dispositions. But these people . . . well . . .

Anyways, I guess the F-word'll be the one to decide if the estrangement continues or not, but in any case of course it throws my own family into relief. They're great. Not strange or estrange or anything. And they're so fucking far away . . . oh well. We'll get round to doing something about that before long.

The reassurance of pukery

Well. I've now been in Australia for something like 32 hours and haven't puked, or really seriously wanted to, once. Some nausea, especially last night, which I suppose my body has decided is the morning now, but nothing serious. And you know what I think of that? I'm fucking petrified. After everybody telling me it's just gonna get worse for the next month or so, I'm afraid this means there's a problem.

But I'm already tired of thinking everything's a problem. (Also even as I type I'm starting to feel pukey.) There is just so much "information" available about what to panic about, and what not to panic about, that I'm just gonna say fuck it; I'll panic when I feel like panicking, attempt to keep feeling like panicking to a minimum, and just enjoy my massive new porno boobs. Anyways, I've signed on with a local midwife, and Luke Duke's midwife-wife is accessible anytime with a phone call, so it's not as though I don't have experts to refer to when I lose faith in my own gut instincts and the creepily ubiquitous What to Expect When You're Expecting.

One thing I feel a bit funny about is running, not because of the fetus, but because of me. I'm hyperextensible, which has caused more fun than pain in my life, but was behind the tearing of my ACL a few years back, and I suspect is behind some common-ish loose-ligament symptoms I'm feeling now, like sneezing hurting my tummy and odd spots of back pain.

Last night I had grand plans to head to the pool, even though I kind of hate swimming in pools, and then didn't when jet lag hit me like a tonne of bricks around six pm. I guess I'll try a little run on a playing field this morning and see how that goes, but maybe I'll be better off focusing on kayaking and trying to develop a taste for swimming this next little while. Pools are fucking disgusting, though. It's like taking a chemical bath with hundreds of strangers. Eeurgh. At least when you're in a lake or river there are actual creatures in there that keep things regulated, which reassures me even though sometimes, as in Lake Nipissing, the creatures cause mild skin diseases.

Feeding the fetus, part 1

Well, vegetarianism, you and I will probably meet again. Godspeed and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Pregnancy continues carnivorously. Now that I'm back on my home turf and now that my rhythms of what's morning and what's not seem to have been utterly thrown off by massive jet lag, giving me a break from the really severe nausea I was feeling in Canada (I'll let you know if this continues as a cure; Diclectin is so fucking expensive that a trip to Australia could work out to be good value), I'm trying to control what I eat a little better. No more Cheez Wiz. But lots of organic meat, baked potatoes, and pasta carbonara, which, let's face it, is probably no better for me, but at least I know what's in it.

And now that I'm back in the tropics I'm eating more fruit, since it's tastier. The lemonades in our backyard are just about ready - still pretty sour, but always less sour than they start out as tasting, which is a really charming thing about lemonades. Bananas that always taste like bananas. Passion fruit. I'm not enjoying it all as much as sausages, but it's all going down a lot easier than the veggies, that's for damn sure. It's the cruciform ones whose bare idea makes me want to hurl up food I ate thirty years ago, but aside from cucumbers and red peppers, the whole institution is unappealing at the moment.

And joy of joys, the eight bottles of Mado's hot sauce I brought home survived the three plane trips unbroken. Last time I only brought two, and they lasted six weeks or so - the F-word and
I have a habit of spreading it on sandwiches so we run through it fast. Hopefully the eight'll last until someone indulgent visits us from Toronto. Get it at the House of Spice in Kensington, Indulgent Ones.

Crotches and their repurcussions

You know something about Labyrinth? It's justly famous for all that David Bowie cock. There are lots of sweet things about that movie, but David Bowie's cock is definitely in the top five. Frankly I don't give a fuck whether his crotch was stuffed or not. The thing is it's impossible to watch five minutes of most children's/young adult films without seeing vast riches of hyper-sexualized feminine erogeny, if you count boobies, which I most certainly do. And if you count boobs the odds of single one out of dozens of pairs being real in any meaningful way are laughable.

But I can't think of another such movie besides Labyrinth that showcases men's genitals in quite such an exciting way - as something so very obviously attached to some magic goblin dude who can control time, walk upside-down, and do all sorts of other crazy fucked-up shit, but who can still be managed with the application of a little logic, imagination and fearlessness. I either credit or blame - generally credit - that movie, at least in part, for the nature of my relationships with cocks today.

Alright, after a bit of cock talk I think in good faith I can now continue to write about being pregnant. I'm in the middle of the trip back up to L_____, which pisses me off on every level except that of being happy to be returning to the arms of the F-word. I started Canadian Sunday Night, and will arrive back in L____ Australian Tuesday Afternoon. And once again, couldn't be doing it faster. It's been shit - the five hours to Vancouver followed by the 15 hours to Sydney followed by this hanging about in an airport full of Australians. I won't do that again if I can help it - definitely will break the journey in Vancouver with Elvis and Co. But I'd already resolved that, of course, and couldn't help it this time, given that the trip was executed impromptu and in haste. And who knows how many more such emergencies will come?

 Every time I leave Canada I feel a little dumber for doing so, and now I feel super-dumb for doing so, given that I was leaving an environment full of friends and family full of concern and love sparked off by my present delicate state, returning to an environment where - well, where we have some really good friends. But this distance is starting to seem bigger and bigger. The idea of doing what I've just done with a baby makes me want to vomit. I mean, more so than already. Which is less than I had before, happily.

Eating at the moment:

-unlimited helpings of pasta carbonara
-ABSOLUTELY NO cruciform vegetables besides crispy picked cabbage
-most deep-fried things
-FUCKIN' NO cruciform vegetables. GROSS GROSS GROSS.
-Rice Krispies
-Montreal-style bagels. Except now I'm back in fuckin' Australia, with its fucking lack of Montreal  Jews and the attendant Montreal-style bagels.

Ah, fuck this fuckin' place.

Ask not for whom the wax depilitates, it depilitates for thee

Flying back to Australia tomorrow. About time I guess, as I miss my old man, but it hurts to leave here, a little more each time, especially now with a bun in the oven and that awful wake-up call about the mortality of the people I love.

And I'll miss Toronto. I'll miss its stories. Yesterday I had my face, pits and legs waxed by a Vietnamese woman who'd been born when her mother was 50. Her parents had been rich and her father had colluded with the Americans during the war, so they lost everything and got sent to the countryside to farm after the withdrawal. All her brothers and sisters were barred from university and had to learn trades. But by the time she was born, far later than anyone expected, the laws had been changed, so she became the apple of her father's eye, pushed to excel in highschool and university, and his assistant in his new, rapidly thriving business. But once her father realized that his business would never get past a certain point due to the absence of loans or government support, he decided to send her abroad for work and study, either to Australia or Canada. She chose Canada, because she'd watched Little House on the Prairie and wanted to see snow.

(The charm lasted as long as it always lasts for those of us who don't ski when the winter comes - three days.)

He's since died, and his business ran into the ground by her brothers, who inherited everything from the family - her fortune, her mother expected, to be made when she meets her husband, which she fears she never will, since her weeks are spent waxing people and her weekends going to business administration classes at Ryerson University, and her nights worrying about how she'll ever get a job in her field when she can't even get a call-back for an internship.

Sweet mother of fuck. Does it ever occur to you just how much of the good shit in your life is 100% down to luck? I've never been of the school that the fortunate shouldn't whine about their bad shit. Obviously, if you read this blog for more than 30 seconds, that isn't the way I feel. But I do feel it's wrong to ascribe our good shit mostly to our own cleverness, aptitude, or moral uprightness, when a five-minute glance at the rest of the world shows that so much of the good shit we have is just pure dumb fucking luck.

The next time you hear some self-righteous jerk-off comment that street addicts need to clean the fuck up and get a fucking job - well - I don't know what you can tell them, or at least what you can tell them that they'll actually hear. The truth is it's very hard for fortunate people to accept that good fortune is almost as random as bad fortune, and the only thing that's intrinsically better about a fortunate person over an unfortunate person is that fortunate people generally weren't born to drug-addled homes in some shithole like Saskatoon where the only coping strategy for difficult situations that they learnt, sometimes whilst still in utero, was to get monumentally fucked up. I know that there are plenty of people from drug-addled homes in shitholes like Saskatoon who only get taught chemical coping strategies who still manage to 'make it' and the human spirit is capable of amazing things . . . but if you're not one of those people, the next time you're feeling self-righteous, imagine how fucking great you'd be if you had what amounts to a life-long hangover because your mum couldn't stop pounding them back while you were a fetus.

Anyways. Have you noticed how the goblin characters in Labyrinth are just the right height to make you stare at David Bowie's crotch? Next time I'll blog about Labyrinth, just to make sure this doesn't turn into another pregnancy blog.

Give me the drugs

You know what's remarkable about pregnancy in modern media? Nobody ever tells you how miserable and rotten the first trimester is. From all accounts so far it seems nothing blows like the first three months and the last two weeks, when the baby is too big for the tummy and kicking the shit out of you, and otherwise it seems reasonably pleasant. But nobody likes the first trimester, I get told now that I'm smack in the middle of it myself.

First and worst is the constant worry because the odds at this point are really only a B (75%) that this embryo inside you is going to go to term. I've never been satisfied with Bs and I'd like a surer bet. But there's nothing for it. If the egg was badly flawed or the winning sperm was badly flawed it's just not going to happen, which is perfectly natural and perfectly right, but goddamn, is it ever a headfuck. Especially these days in which I find myself are worrisome. My midwife sister-in-law tells me the odds of not carrying to term go right down if you make it past weeks six to ten. Yeah, okay, great, I'm in week six, so I get to spend the next month shitting myself if I get a tummyache.

Anyways, considering the body spontaneously aborts something like 30% of the fertilised eggs it gets going just for not being good enough, I'm wondering how long it'll take for pro-lifers to start arresting healthy uteruses, the most ruthless aborters of all. But that's a rant for another day.

Then there's the puking of course, and the worries attendant on that. In a situation where you'll eat anything that you think is likely to stay down, it's hard to think about actual nutrition in a useful way for either mother or child. I have a good appetite for:

1. Bacon
2. Tornado rolls from Spring Rolls
3. Sriracha hot sauce
4. More bacon

You know what the nutritional value of that is? The F-word and I actually usually eat almost obsessively well. I mean, no ingredients we don't recognize, as much as possible from scratch, etc. etc. But at this point I'd eat MSG-flavoured android cock if I thought I wouldn't puke it back up. There is something distressing in that, to the purist part of my Jessica-brain that's nervous about over-processed food. But put a plate of crispy store-bought bacon in front of me and it is gone in three minutes, nitrates and all, fuckin' gone, Purist Jessica being reduced to an annoying little background tweet as Pukey Jessica and Hungry Jessica wade into it, mouth-open. In a way it's reassuring; I'm still planning to spend the first month of the second trimester in Shanghai, and anything that doesn't have pig in it there is either Uighur food or not food.

So I got a prescription for a sort of anti-puking pill called Diclectin, whose mechanism doesn't seem too frightening - it's more or less an antihistamine combined with a B vitamin - and started it last night. Today it seems to be working, and I have high hopes of being able to choke down some sort of vegetable product that isn't part of a B-heavy BLT. But of course I'm nervous about that, too. So many historical horror stories about anti-puking medication turning out babies with dreadful problems. Nevertheless I'm taking it. It turns out I have more or less zero patience with severe discomfort. Any bets on how fast it'll take me to demand an epidural, given I'm presently absolutely opposed to getting one, but apparently seem to be one of the biggest sucky babies in the universe?

Poor old Charlotte Bronte

Had one of the last meals being served, apparently, at the first five star I ever ate at, as the Four Seasons begins its migration to its new home, shutting down the hotel-owned restaurant in favour of renting space out in the monstrosity currently being constructed a few blocks away. It was good. Gnocchi with wild mushrooms in a sort of creamy sauce. Delicious.

Oh, fuck all this not talking about it in the first trimester. I'm pregnant. Everything I eat's delicious. Or else I can't eat it, because I'm ralphing. I know, I know, it's early days, one shouldn't announce it until the second trimester, which is still a good half trimester off, blah blah blah. But frankly, dear Internet, if this pregnancy goes wrong, we'll need to talk about it. And if it goes right, we'll need to talk about it. You might as well prepare yourself now. Because this is very much a wanted pregnancy, probably only one of two pregnancies in my extended family that was actually planned to some degree, and I'm happy, excited, and scared that something will go wrong, and scared that I won't be a good mother. (Not, interestingly, scared that the F-word won't be a good father, which I had half-expected to be. I think he'll be a winner.)

On top of that, that's pretty much all that's going on in my head now. With Mum firmly on the road to recovery, and me feeling like I'm at not-quite-the-tail-end of alcohol poisoning yet 24/7, I either don't blog or I blog about this. Or I don't talk, or I talk about this. How do women who don't announce until the second trimester do it, I wonder? I'm an exhausted, pukey, yet glowing mess at the moment, not to mention looking like I just got a boob job (and they hurt). Do I just pretend to the world I have a case of the Beauty Flu and they don't have to worry because it's not catching, and oh, yeah, I'm not drinking at the moment because it's Lent and I'm such a great fucking Catholic?

I mean, how do other women avoid making it obvious that they're constantly planning the easiest escape route to the bathroom for a bout of hurling or incredibly frequent urination when they're out and about? How do they write off falling asleep mid-conversation? How do they write off cancelling dinner engagements because the only time they feel decent enough to face the world is lunch? I suppose if I was in Australia at the moment I could go without telling people in Canada, and indeed we haven't told people in Australia yet, except for a few friends who are helping us out with doctors and midwives and things, but how can you avoid letting people you spend time with know about it?

I guess some women don't get morning sickness, which would help. My mother, who had four of us, assured me that she had never had it, and since this was before mine struck, I had some hope I wouldn't either . . . oh well . . . I'm taking it as a sign everything is going alright. And what's happening to me isn't nearly as bad, so far at least, as what I've heard of happening to other women. Like poor old Charlotte Bronte.

Are you fucking kidding me?

My mother is significantly better, and so am I, now having the mental energy to be perturbed that she's hesitating from getting some sort of financial redress over what happened. It was some sort of combination of doctor fault and equipment fault - the doctor has said as much - and while she is going from strength to strength she won't be able to pick up toddlers anymore, travel with big suitcases alone, haul around her own 99-year-old mother whose right leg stopped working around the same time all this happened, and she'll need to hire someone to clean the house, since my father seems to still believe vacuuming isn't a man's job.

I have to say this is grinding my gears, that she won't seek redress. Probably more than it should, since this isn't my event - this is hers - and I've said my piece politely and then shut up and stewed because it is 100% her decision. I understand it was an accident, but it's an accident she'll have to pay for financially and in terms of what she just can't do for the rest of her life, and she doesn't have accident insurance, while the doctor does have malpractice insurance.

Oh well. I have to just sort of back off my anger about all this. If she wants to take the financial hit, well, she's got the finances to cover it, and maybe it's about time she stopped hauling around her mother, her grandchildren, and vacuum cleaners anyways. But this is the sort of thing I have to remember and analyze in my own personality - this tendency towards self-abnegation and not getting punchy about one's own interests, this superfluous putting-forward of other people's interests when it isn't even particularly in their interests - I mean, doctors have fucking malpractice insurance for a reason; it's for accidental shit like this, not because they get sued for being Dr. Fucking Evil or something.

Anyways, I really gotta back off all of this anger - I've been getting pissed off at the drop of a hat these days. Being in North Bay always summons muscle memory of all those angry adolescent hormones, I guess.

Barking mad

Things are calming down and getting better here, which gives me more time to think about the university course I'm going, and gosh. I'd forgotten what undergrads are like. Of course it's even more dramatic by correspondence since what the loud ones say is there, written down, forever. The teaching assistant is being so sweetly encouraging, several times more than any ever were in Canada, and basically in a different universe from Paris. And you know what . . . I'd acclimatized to a near-constant of criticism or indifference. This is weird and juvenile now.

Anyhoo. Some of the readings are interesting and I'm going to do a sort of fun report on a terrorist organization that is even more likely than most to not exist. Combine my love of absurdity with constant studenticism.

Continuing down the humanerdities track. Since I got my e-reader I've picked up the unhealthy habit of downloading semi-random journal articles at will and reading one or half a night before conking out, and last night, while I was reading a paper by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood about deity personalities in the Hellenic world - she had a very punchy style. Very punchy.
"This is evident, this is wrong, this has never been argued, this is indefensible -" and I realized halfway though that she, and just about every classical scholar, and indeed just about any humanities scholar and a fair chunk of them in other disciplines is absolutely barking mad, by modern definitions of madness.

I'm morally certain that there would be an established label, a psychiatrically defined pathology in 2012-era Western civilization for a man who chose to devote several months of his life to studying the foundation myths of one particular Greek colony in southern Italy for a "salary" that hardly kept him in pot noodles, or for a woman like Sourvinou-Inwood, who was almost visibly angry in what she was writing about how wrong so many people were, and how right she was, about how the Pan-Hellenic notion of Persophone was so different from the Epizephyrian Locris local "Persephone". There is certainly something deeply obsessive in all that which, if caught as a tendency in a child, would - I'm certain - result in medication, autism diagnoses, etc.

Don't get me wrong - I've worked with autistic children, autism isn't some tabloid myth, it's a real pain in the ass - but the more I see parents saddled with pathology labels for their children who are just a bit wierd and who might do something perfectly worthwhile but utterly bizarre with their lives, like ancient philosophy or something, the more I think our behaviour and social burdens are almost as, well, burdensome as they ever have been. At least for children.

I don't know. I'm thinking a lot these days about what motherhood is likely to be like, and being home at the moment, and so conscious of my mother and my daugher-love, that I'm a little bit more in touch with the wierd little kid I used to be. I grew up before the deluge of child-psychology-pathologies young ones seem to be swimming through at present but if I hadn't, or if I'd had more frustrated or less experienced parents, who knows what I would have got dosed up with. I haven't lived conventionally and the only reason I haven't been written off as a nutter by most people who know me yet, I think, is that I make a lot more money than most people without selling my pussy.

Not sure where I'm going with all this. Mostly just to say, I think, that I really distrust a world that distrusts madness so much.

Flying and falling

I went cross country skiiing today for the first time since the 80s and it was awesome. You know, I really could have liked North Bay a lot more than I did when I was a teenager if I had liked sporty things then. In a way I'm glad I didn't, though, since I'm not too bothered about being untalented at them now, and since then I wouldn't have had any sort of gadfly driving me around the world, which I quite enjoy. And I did a lot of fun things that wouldn't have mixed properly with being sporty, like drugs.

Well, I might have done different drugs, but sports drugs look so unpleasurable. I guess a lot of the high is from watching your performance get enhanced, but considering I'm sufficiently pleased for myself if I run around for an hour without stepping in a dog turd, I think they'd be wasted on me. I don't expect drugs to enhance my performance - that's not what they're for. Drugs are either to stop me from getting diseases or else to make everything look pretty. Probably why I've never enjoyed blow.

But back to cross country skiing. It was ace. Even being very bad at it, it still felt like flying. Like rock climbing, doing it once and only falling down five times left me enamoured, and like rock climbing, I can't do it back in Australia. Actually I CAN do it - there's snow in some mountains in the south and because everybody wants to ski downhill the cross country trails are often free or cheap - but I won't, because the prices being charged for the shittiest accomodation there are incredibly extortionate. Surprise, surprise. 'll do it in New Zealand the next time I visit Romola, I guess. And retarded as it sounds, I'm thinking of buying some gear here, second hand of course, because if I spend three days skiing next winter it'll be cheaper than renting. Hmmmmm. The fucking vagaries of living on the retarded end of the planet . . .

The epic of Spliffgamesh

All's not well yet, but it's getting there. Probably it is all well and I'm just too nervy to admit that in case I jinx it. What a kick in the fucking face this has all been, and what a kick in the arse it is to start thinking more seriously about leaving Australia. Here's the timeline:

SATURDAY

1. 8:30 am: I stumble out of bed, make coffee, etc., look at the palm trees, consider whether to go about my day in a sarong or nothing - for some reason I wasn't planning on kayaking, as usual. Had I been up late the night before? I don't even remember now. Oh yeah, I was sick.

2. 8:45 am: Which just made all the proceedings that little bit more pleasant when I opened my Facebook and saw a message from Magnum that seemed to make it imperative I get back to Canada.

3. 8:48 am: I start checking on flights. There's no way I can make it to Canada within 24 hours. There's only one direct flight from Oz to Canada each day, out of Sydney, which leaves at 12:15 and which I didn't have a prayer of catching that same day. All the other options are shit. Even if the F-word gives me a lift to Brisbane instead of the regional airport, which he's willing to do as soon as he's awake - after Magnum's email I'm too distraught to decide whether or not to wake him up - any flight to Northern Ontario is going to involve a minimum of five incredibly time wasting transfers, many of them in the US where I get to fester like a fucking boil in security line-ups.

The fastest option, it becomes clear, is leaving the next day from Sydney on the direct Vancouver flight, and the smartest option is taking the night train there, since then I can just pay for a sleeper instead of the incredibly overpriced hotel room I'd otherwise have to get, since there are no flights from the regional airport that are guaranteed to get me to the Sydney airport on time for the 12:15 departure.

4. 8:48 am: Complicating all this at the time is a bunch of Skypes and phone calls with Magnum, Luke Duke and Elvis, after Elvis gets home from work, as we all figure out what to do and try to work out how serious the situation is.

5. 9:30 am: The news from Magnum's end is that it's very serious, but will almost certainly be resolved one way or the other by the time I can make it to Canada.

6. 9:42 am: I dither, and the F-word pulls me up - reminds me that I'm rich, and that if I stay home I'm gonna fret more than is worth the $3400 this fucking odyssey is about to cost, whatever the outcome, and I realize even in a best case scenario I'm going to be needed here for a couple of weeks. My boss, who has been in a similar sort of emergency situation, agrees, and tells me not to worry about this week's issue if things are bad.

7. 10:00 am: I buy all the tickets and pack my bags as sensibly as I can given that I'm about to head into temperatures a full 60 degrees Celsius colder than the temperatures I'm presently in. We ruin the evening of some friends whose kids we'd promised to babysit so they could catch a concert; the F-word needs to drop me off at the train station and I realize I can't be alone, not for as long as I can avoid it. I realize I don't give a shit about ruining our friends' evening, despite my chronic social guilt, which strikes me as odd at the time. They are all support, of course. They're good guys.

8. 10:00 am to 7:30 pm: The F-word spends hours feeding me, and dealing with my fretting, haphazard packing, and explosions of tears. He is all patience. There is something about having a man whose emotional life has been difficult enough that when your own hits the wall you know he knows what he's talking about.

9: 7:30 pm: The train leaves for Sydney. I have a sleeping car to myself, which I full with gales of tears until I'm tired, and then I lie down around 8:30 pm. I have a refreshing but intermittent sleep, during which I get up every two hours or so for the water fountain; I try to fight the uphill battle of staying hydrated whilst travelling whilst recovering from a cold and whilst a lot of water is coming out of my eyes. I also use my private fancy sleeping car bathroom, which is the coolest thing I've seen in Australia that wasn't flora or fauna. I'll upload a picture for you someday. Once or twice, I bust one of the coach-class customers in my private bathroom, and give them really dirty looks, before I remind myself my pinko sentiments are meant to abhor the idea of separate train classes.

AUSTRALIAN SUNDAY

10: 3:30 am: Magnum sends a text saying that the worst of the danger seems past. I do a lot of hysterical relief laughing and God-thanking.

11: 6:32 am: The train arrives in Sydney central and with aplomb and assurance, I catch the overpriced airport train. I get there super fast. So fast that I have two hours before the check-in for the flight starts. I spend the time eating lychees, making faces at babies, and feeling alternately relieved and worried.

12: 8:30: In the line for check-in. At this point, I start cursing Australia for being so far away. It's been 24 hours since I got the panic button news. If I lived in any other place I've lived in my life, or even been to in my life, New Zealand excepted, I'd either be in Northern Ontario or near to it. But the only place I'm in at this point is a shitty city that I hate an eight-hour drive from my house, on the opposite side of the planet from where I'm aiming to go.

13: 9:15: Through security, I shop for presents for my younger relatives and do qi gong, since I know what lies ahead.

14: 11:15. The flight takes off on time. I'd ordered a veggie meal the day before but the caterers hadn't delivered it. A flight attendant showed me my name on their list and explained it was the caterer's fault, as if that was meant to make me less hungry. I eat pretzels, and I watch:

- A Dangerous Method
- Jack and Jill
- The Immortals
- J. Edgar
- Les femmes de sixieme etage
- The Ides of March
- The Swap, a short film about awkward swingers

They are all crap. LFDSE came closest to not being crap, but it was still crap. Masturbatory gross old French man fantasies about how a dewy young Spanish woman could come to love him masquerading as a romantic comedy. Crap. TIOM also could theoretically have avoided being crap, given that the performances were all quite good, but was hampered by one of those clever-17-year-old scripts that seem mandatory for 'intelligent' vanity projects. J. Edgar was poo on a stick; I need more than two hours of Leonardo di Caprio playing dress-up to think that a movie is worthwhile. The Immortals - look, I understand 95% of films made are highly formulaic, but I hope at least a film will make some effort to make its formula less evident, or palatable, or something . . . for heaven's sake . . . please.

Anyways, the films were all crap, and by the time I was done watching them, we still hadn't arrived in Vancouver. That's how far away eastern Australia is from western Canada. More than seven shitty movies distant. The voyage is through time too, as you fly over the international dateline, so when I arrive in Vancouver it's Australian Monday, but presently

CANADIAN SUNDAY

7:25 am: Have you noticed that this is before I started the flight on Australian Sunday? Neat, eh? It's actually 14 hours later. The flight is theoretically a through one to Toronto, all on the same plane, but there's a two hour break where the passengers have to clear customs and re-check their bags, since we'll be arriving in Toronto's domestic terminal. I breeze through customs and past all the suckers waiting for their bags, and get some hash browns. They are fucking good hashbrowns. They are so fucking good that I linger over them more than I should.

8:30 am: I'm sweating it out in the security line, which suddenly got crowded; the Toronto flight leaves in half an hour. As my bags get checked, the guard finds my nice Swiss army knife in my purse; in my abstraction the day before (two days before?) I'd not checked to make sure it wasn't there, and apparently the security at the Sydney airport ain't too tight. There's no time to mail it to myself so I lose it. I'm momentarily perturbed - I'd had it for ten years, and it was a memento of the Bluebird chapter of my life, and as unedifying as that period was it's not easy to let go of such mementos. But as I rush to my gate, I realize that despite its many bells and whistles, in practical terms I could replace it by buying myself a nice new corkscrew, since in ten years that's all I'd ever used it for.

9:00 am: The plane for Toronto leaves. The flight is uneventful, except that I accidentally kick a guy in the nuts whilst getting out of my seat while he's standing in a way that I think was meant to be out of my way but was just really awkward. He goes "hee hee" in a really pained way in sort of doubles over, but doesn't fall or turn red, so I conclude it was a glancing blow, and he's just a bit shocked. Otherwise, I nap.

Canada is big: the flight takes five hours or so and we cross some time zones, and arrive in Toronto at

4:15 pm: Bang on time. The next plane to the town in Northern Ontario with the hospital is, however, delayed. I realize I'm gonna miss visiting hours at the hospital, which makes me sad, and I get some very poor Thai soup to console myself. I go down to my terminal at the appropriate time, and it being domestic there's a lot of doors casually opening and closing onto the tarmac. The air that comes in is cold. I check: it's fucking -27 degrees cold. When I left L___, it had been in the low thirties. I wonder if I should put on my long johns but don't.

7:35 pm: The final plane leaves. I'm sitting up front so at least I can stretch my legs out. The flight attendant won't let me use my e-reader on take off which annoys me because I'd just got to the bit of Dangerous Liasions where everything is going to shit.

8:24 pm: I get to Sudbury. Luke Duke and Elvis are waiting, and I'm over the moon to see them, especially since they're gonna smuggle me into the hospital.

9:17 pm (or around 1:17 pm on Monday in Australia, in case you're keeping track - a full two days and a bit since I started moving to get there): I get into Mum's room. She's awake. She looks like shit but still better than I'd been expecting and I hug her carefully around all the tubes. After some words of endearment, she tells me I was very silly to come all this way.

I smile and bite my tongue, successfully not saying "well, it was silly of you to get elective surgery with all its inherent risks of complications when you could have just switched from red wine to white wine instead." I'll save that one until she's feeling a little better.