2001-05-29
I heard the baby's heartbeat this morning. That was pretty cool. Very fast.
My appointment was with the one nurse-midwife in the practice I'm seeing. I liked her fine. Everything seems to be right on track. My uterus is the size of a grapefruit, the size it is supposed to be. The fact that we've heard the heartbeat greatly reduces the likelihood of miscarriage; that's good to know.
B and I spent much of the three-day weekend refinishing the floors in his office. Well, he did; I offered moral support and went to the store for supplies. These are my two strengths when it comes to home improvement projects. The project was a great success--the room looks fabulous. In fact, we were both surprised at how dramatic the improvement was. Now we just have to do my office (soon to be the baby's room), the bedroom, and the living room. We'll be doing these one at a time--we don't have the space to empty out two rooms at once. We expect these other rooms to take less time now that we know what we're doing.
I spent a fair portion of the weekend in varying degrees of emotional distress. Saturday night B and I had a very uncharacteristic--well, I guess fight is the word I'm looking for though that implies a much greater volume of interaction than we had. Essentially, he got fed up with me for behaving in a self-centered and immature manner and it didn't really blow over until late Sunday morning. This rare tension, coupled with teeming pregnancy hormones and my reaction to B's generally low level of interest in the pregnancy thus far got me pretty bent out of shape. I felt as though he hated me, as though he believed that I had tricked him into this whole procreation thing.
I mentioned these feelings to him and he set me straight: he does not hate me, though he had been mad at me, and he knows that we decided together to try to have a kid.
The fact is that he agreed to this kid thing based soley on its importance to me--this has always been clear. This is quite a thing to agree to, and quite a testament to his love for me and his interest in my happiness. But/and, in my more hormonally-charged moments, I can feel a little sorry for myself that he's not as excited about it as I am.
In late 1996, shortly before I met B, I was in London for a week. I met up with an old friend who lives there, and we were talking about relationship stuff and for some reason that escapes me now she started talking about the TV show Friends, about the relationship between Monica and Tom Selleck. She said, "He told her that he was willing to father her children, even though his kids were grown and he was really fairly glad to be past all that. That he loved her enough to go through it again, even though it wasn't really his first choice. And she walked away because that wasn't good enough for her. She shouldn't have done that. His being willing should've been enough."
Well, now Monica's married to Chandler and will presumably start having lots of little Bings, but I've been thinking back to this remark for obvious reasons.
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