It’s beautiful and sunny outside. My first trimester is over and my nausea has faded into a whisper of a suggestion. I’m slowly but surely reclaiming my house from the two long months worth of mess that accumulated while I whiled away the hours moaning and gagging and wishing I were dead (ok, a bit of an exaggeration, but not much). I’ve now heard the strong, rapid heartbeat of a new little life, and I’m off the torturous hormones. With all this wonderful news, how come I’m not joyfully dancing around the house, singing and dusting like a pregnant Cinderella?
Because the people downstairs are at it again. Once every couple of months the owners of the hair salon below us develop amnesia, forget that they have upstairs neighbors and that the building has terribly thin walls and floors, and blasts music for several weeks until one of us (usually my wonderful husband after hours of my nagging) asks them please to turn it down. Under the best of circumstances this would be annoying. If the music were good music, and we could hear more than the thumping bassline, this would be annoying. However, the fact is that we can only hear the bassline, it literally shakes our floors, they’ll often start the music about 8:30am, and (I swear this is true) generally they play only one song. Repeatedly. All day long. By the end of the day that bassline melody is so cemented in my brain that I hear it in my sleep and I would gladly crack my head open to remove it.
So I’m sitting here thinking to myself that I should just bite the bullet, march downstairs and ask them to turn down the music, in a quiet and polite way, like for example, with my hammer, or the blunt end of our camping hatchet. It’s not that I haven’t had these urges before. I regularly used to day dream about heading down there with a baseball bat, standing theatrically in the doorway for a moment- a dark, menacing shadow, watching their heads turn and eyes widen- and then calmly walking over to their stereo and beating it to a grizzly, plastic pulp. The daydream used to help get me through the long, tedious, floor-quaking hours. However, these days, with all the crazy chemicals floating around in my exhausted mind, it’s no longer the stereo that is the focus of my violent imaginings.
These homicidal urges don’t stop with annoying neighbors. I find lately that all Ben needs to do is make a polite suggestion, that we go dancing, for example, and suddenly it’s like a Freddy Kruger monster rises up inside me and all I can think of is taking my prenatal-vitamin strengthened nails and using them to inflict as much damage as possible. Before I can respond to his request I always have to take a step back and remind myself that I love this man, and that he is the father of my baby, and that, however much I might want to scratch his eyes out for suggesting swing dancing to a nauseous, crampy, pregnant lady, he means well and once my sanity has returned I’d feel awfully guilty for blinding him. This is usually enough to allow me to make a short, concise, carefully worded reply that makes me sound like I’m right on the edge of spontaneous combustion. Which I am.
If these rages were all the crazy Lela I had to deal with, it would be more than enough, but, of course, hormonal roller coasters are just that, and with every psychotic, dish-smashing, eye-gouging high, there must be a sentimental, depressing weepfest of low. Several weeks ago Ben and I attended a beautiful, sunset wedding at a winery in Sonoma. As emotional and nauseous and pregnant as I felt, I managed to make it through the event with minimal tears. However, since we had rented a car for the whole day, Ben and I decided to squeeze in a little grocery shopping that morning. There we were in a crowded, noisy Wholefoods on a Sunday afternoon, getting in everyone’s way, everyone being in our way, the usual story. Because even at his best, Ben’s terrible in crowds, and because I’m the unemployed wife who can’t claim to be contributing to the household in any other way, I told my husband to wait in a quiet corner while I negotiated my way through the battle field of a produce section. At first, I was on the ball. I was weaving and dodging and spinning. But then I got that knocked-flat pregnancy exhaustion and nausea I am familiar with yet never prepared for. I stopped moving, instantly overwhelmed by the crowd, the noise, how sick I felt, how we had so much more shopping to do before we could eat, how unfair it was that we were going to a wedding at a winery and I wouldn’t be able to have the wine, and how, with my pregnancy bloating, my dress would probably be just small enough to look acceptable but hamper my breathing and eating all night long. I felt so sorry for myself I wanted to cry. In fact, my eyes were just about to spill over when I realized I was standing here in the middle of Wholefoods, tearfully staring at a big bin of potatoes. I imagined the people around me, glancing over and wondering what sort of dark, potato secret I must have that would leave me such a state. The thought was enough to shake me out of my personal puddle of self-pity and finish what I was doing.
The truly frightening thought is, while I know this hormonal craziness will end, I have also seen and heard enough to recognize that these episodes are nothing compared to the wild, emotional chaos of new motherhood.