All posts by Savvy Spoonie

I am an artist, writer, jeweler, and a Spoonie. Before becoming a Spoonie I was a very busy high achieving attorney and advocate bent on saving the world. Now I'm struggle to redefine my life to fit within my reduced energy level. Some days are better than others. I have fibromyalgia, trigeminal neuralgia, and chronic daily migraine.
Motherhood/body image, Otter, pregnancy

He’s going to rock that belly!!

6 Comments

It has begun. Otter is now big enough to rock that belly!! Yes indeed, last night Lee and I were talking when Lee stopped and stared hard at my tummy.

“That was wierd, your whole stomach moved.”

Yes it did! He is rolling and kicking and moving around so much that I look like the first stages of alien release!! We sat back and enjoyed the show together for a bit as Otter was quite willing to put in a major performance.

At Ellen’s suggestion yesterday I checked of Shape of a Mother and submitted some of my pictures. It is an amazing site to go to. I am so angry that our image of what women should look like is impossible to acheive.

I mean, I was a thin and muscular teenager, I had an excellent body, and I remember scouring my image in the mirror for fat and “consoling” myself with the knowledge that Cindy Crawford had the same measurements as I did, so I didn’t have to be heroine thin to be cute. Come on!! How sick is it that our healthiest fit women in our culture still have to convince themselves that they are okay looking because they are not anorexic? Ugh!

My mother helped me a lot when I was younger. She told me she had always been unhappy with her appearance and then was looking back on photographs of her younger self and really felt angry that she had never enjoyed her looks then. That really stuck with me and I was able to work at being really happy with the way I looked. But it took work. I was probably 20 before I really felt that I was hot stuff, and that only lasted until I was 25 and got pregnant with Marlena. I wasted years of concern worrying about imaginary fat or a few zits, or the fact that I couldn’t wear empire waist shirts without looking pregnant. It’s sickening.

So, here I am, 31, and heading towards a true jiggly belly as soon as this baby emerges. I had better get my crap together and start learning how to be okay with my body, actually no…. I want to learn to be proud of it! I am really strong! I don’t really want to look like a model! They have teeny arms and legs lacking in muscle. They can’t lift my 5 year old and tromp around the house blowing zurberts!!! They can’t swing her around “swing kids” style until she giggles breathlessly! They can’t hoist baby, diaper bag, briefcase, and groceries into the house all at once! Or move thier own living room furniture when they want to redecorate without the immediate opinion of their spouse! (Sorry honey, sometimes a woman’s gotta do it on her own. But I am always willing to put it back if you hate it.)

So, here is another foray into the land of artistic expression and unself-concious body acceptance.

Granted, the true irony about pregnancy is that once you accept your body as is, it changes again. And again. And again. However, it is an amazing thing, this ever changing body of mine. After all, it has grown two people. One of whom is running around in Kindergarten and the other who is still waiting to pop out and say hello. I don’t really know of any other thing as amazing. It is so unreal that what starts as a little nausea and tiredness becomes another person. A whole other human, who will eventually go to college and change the world… somehow.

Anyway, check out Shape of a Mother, if you haven’t already. Then take up the banner with me and agree to try to stop longing for a shapeless American Stick Insect body. Who wants to resemble a clothing hanger? It’s Mayan Fertility Goddess for me all the way!

health, house"keeping", Motherhood/body image, pregnancy

The game’s a foot!!

3 Comments

Yesterday we felt a foot! Or was it is hand?

It was definitely an appendage of one form or the other, and Lee and I each got to feel it rest right under our hands. I almost felt it in my hand at first! It had edges and definition. He becomes more and more of a little person each day.

Monkey sings Otter a lullaby at night after I sing her one, and he kicks mightily away as she sings into my tummy. He is really going to know who is sister is when he comes into this world. She is so excited that she has really spent a lot of time talking and singing to him.

I am still nesting, the instinct growing stronger and changing form as we get closer to Delivery-Day. This week it is a scrapbook of artistic images of me and my belly to commemorate this pregnancy. I wanted something to remind me of what it looks like for me to be pregnant. It is a pretty neat project so far. I am having fun with my Photoshop elements program and my pictures. Most of them I will not post on the Internet, as they involve no clothing, and once you put naked pictures out there, out there they stay. However, this one is I feel is harmless enough.

I am trying to capture the sense of quiet peace that fills me from time to time. So much of pregnancy is hard, and so many of our culturally supported memories are the hard ones. Nausea, sleeplessness, cramping, feeling fat, etc. I wanted to create memories for myself that reminded me of peace, and beauty, the internal sense of fulfillment one gets when you’re growing a baby. That way, even though I more often look sleepy, or a little rumpled, or tired and grumpy, I will remember feeling beautiful and calm, and ready for baby.

It has been an interesting project. When Monkey was in my belly I had a cast done of my torso, but I have not gotten it from the artist, and recently found out he had passed, so it is unlikely that I will have that memory, in any form other than a memory.

Of course my mom took a ton of pictures of me while I was carrying with her, so it’s not as though I have no memories of that time, they just aren’t full on belly nudes.

I am also making curtains and designing a little book and doing all the other stuff that lends itself to a sense of readiness for baby. We have our first meeting with Ellen, who is our Doula for the grand day, this weekend, and our having our tour and birthing class the following weekend.

I am still anxious about delivery, and a little sad that this is my final time doing this. It is such a complicated thing, pregnancy, I can’t imagine signing up for a life of it, but I am sad to see this part of my life slip into the past. Sometimes I wish life’s experiences were less ambivalent.

health, pregnancy

John Hurt

1 Comment

I am in a John Hurt way at the moment…

He is trying to break out of my stomach in a bloody screaming horror movie mess!!!

Okay, not really, but that is how it feels sometimes. The problem is this, I have really sore Round Ligaments and have had them since early month 4. The spot is so sore that I actually hit my doctor when she poked at it.(Really though, why poke at the exact place someone tells you is hurting?)

Otter, in his fiendish babyiness, has decided to roost flush up against the round ligaments on my right side. He has been pressing his darling little back up against them for a week now.

This lovely snuggling results in me feeling a rolling pain in my side every few minutes. It keeps me up at night, it keeps me up during the day! I can’t get comfortable! I tried pushing against him to get him to move, but doing so hurts too much.

Argh!!

And of course, there is nothing you can do for it. Well… except take tylenol, which is the same as doing nothing, but with a nasty after taste. Ow! There is goes again! What makes it worse is, when he wiggles and kicks around, he presses further into my side. OOW!!

This kind of pain is bad because I recognize on some level that it is not even on the scale of labor pain, so how can I plan a natural childbirth if I can’t just breathe and soothe this lovely pain away? If I can’t soothe away pain that hasn’t even hit the scale yet, how in the world am I going to soothe away pain that does hit the scale???

A random note about pain scales. I am a horrible patient to deal with becuase I have suffered from Migraines for about 19 years. Therefore, I do not have the ability to answer the question, How badly does it hurt on a scale from 1 to 10? You see, I start examining the pain and I think, well, I could go to work like this, or school, I could drive a car, I could go to a place with many people, and it wouldn’t hurt more than it does now. So it must not be high up on the scale. Granted my comparison pain is migraine pain. A 10 on a migraine scale renders me drugged on percoset in a dark silent room lying down for three days. So really, should the scale be higher than 10? Should there be a different scale for me to work with?

Back to the John Hurt experience. On a scale of I don’t notice it to Oh MY God I need a doctor!!, the pain is around a, occasionally takes my breath away.

I am getting tired of it though, and I start to wonder if there is something going on. Am I in early labor? Are these pains braxton-hicks contractions? (BTW, despite medical science’s reassurances to the contrary, they are not freakin painless.) Should I be calling my care provider? I get them all day long, but I am still pretty sure they are the baby in collusion with my body, tormenting me.

Sigh. Please send me some energy and any hugs you have to send, I could certainly use them.