2003-07-12, 1:30 p.m.

I'm supposed to go to this wedding today. That is, everyone will be surprised if I do go, and no one will be surprised if I don't. The main problem is shoes. It's a fancy evening wedding. My feet don't fit in proper shoes. My belly doesn't fit properly in the skirt I have. I have bad hair. "Blow it off, baby," says Peter. His ex-girlfriend will be there - you know, that one, the important one, the one whose husband he talks still about punching in the face. I don't really care about the girlfriend per se; it's the husband he wants to pummel. Why should you still want to pummel seven years down the line? This is why I worry about my hair, shoes, belly and skirt. There is nothing I can do to not weigh 200 lbs. right now. "But you're pregnant," says Peter. "You look beautiful. You're pregnant and beautiful and this is bullshit and just blow it off. The extra weight is because you're healthy. Because you're going to be breastfeeding. Because you're going to be taking care of our baby and he's going to be big and healthy and a genius." But why does breastfeeding demand that I have such a fat ass, why? I have the fattest ass in the world and I am about to have my first encounter with the Infamous X, Jessica. "Her ass is 10 times bigger than yours, believe me," Peter is laughing.

Then I remember that he is an ass man. He thinks that J.Lo. has a tiny, embarrassing butt for so much big talk.

I dreamt that we were going to watch Elimidate but when we turned it on, it was with these people I knew from college: Mark (my next-door neighbor the first year in Burton), Usha (his girlfriend, who was missing the top joint on one of her fingers - I always wondered why but was chicken to ask, even though one time she drove me to the Cleveland airport in a big, faded-green American car and it would have been the perfect opportunity to find out) and this girl going by the name "Marlene" (as in Marlene Dietrich) but who was really Susannah Goldmann, as I realized when I woke up. At first she kept morphing between Susannah Goldmann and Janice, Tony's sister on The Sopranos.

But then it wasn't Elimidate at all, it was A Baby Story. But there was no baby.

And, next thing I knew, I was being fucked by three men, one after the other (one was big beautiful stentorian-voiced slick molasses Ralph from translation school and AT&T), but none of them could keep me satisfied.

We woke up because the bell was ringing and it was nearly noon. I am groggy. I was thinking about yesterday's massage and I still don't know about the wedding. I spent about half an hour last night crying up the mountain over it (I drove home by myself from dinner because Peter was in his own truck) and half an hour till he got home - and right after - crying in the bathtub over it, wiping the snot off my lip with the purple washcloth. It made shiny snot trails which I dunked in the tub from time to time. Peter arrived, and even though I was sobbing into the washcloth he heard me and came in. What he said (in many, many words): I need to focus. The rest of this is all tripe. No one else even wants to go to the wedding. The marriage is only going to last - oh, he gives it four years, tops. He's sorry he got me all stressed out about Jessica and her husband. He hates them. He doesn't want to see them at all and will keep the entire space of the reception between himself and them. It will be boring. It will be hot. No one expects me to be there. I look beautiful. He loves my hair. Nothing is worth me getting stressed like this. If I want to get stressed about something, it should be something important, like the baby. It's just us and the baby now and nothing else matters.

I wasn't just crying about the wedding and feeling so ridiculously big and awkward, about having my feet grow from a respectable size 9B to an unwieldy and difficult size 9 1/2W. About being so hot and sweaty and tired and cranky at dinner last night, which was meant to be the last "nice" dinner before there are three of us to plan for. We were there with the D-Man and Akimbo and Akimbo was in a beautiful tiny black chiffon dress with dropped princess shoulders. She looked delicate and elegant and tan, though tired. She always looks tired now because she has not truly slept probably in 10 months. Just two weeks ago, after undergoing a painful three weeks of IVF treatments, including agonizing shots in the thigh and back twice a day, and all this on the tail of months of hope, hopelessness, hope, hopelessness, worry and anxiety, she was "cancelled" by her fertility doctor, who said there was no reason to go forward - her case was hopeless. She would never become pregnant and should consider using a donor egg. Her estrogen levels did not spike as they should have done after so many shots.

So she was sitting there, perfect and petite in her black chiffon dress, estrogen-less, childless but determined to be cheerful. And I was sitting there, big and sweaty and overripe and so pumped full of estrogen and other hormones that I have been half-crazed for the last nine months, that I sometimes act and think like a person I swear I don't know, terrified to become a parent, on the fence about that still (as my crazy thoughts driving home will attest - thoughts of abandonment with me as the abandoner, thoughts of running away because "I just can't do this"), about to give birth any day now, any day. "Akimbo would give anything in the world to trade places with you," Peter said to me in the bathtub (I was sitting crosslegged in the tub, he was kneeling beside it), and of course I know that.

This is one thing that has made pregnancy so hard. I do believe it is the hardest thing I have ever gone through. It occurred to me this morning that it has been an overdose of hormones, like alcohol poisoning. That I was not designed to handle such large quantities of these hormones. Something makes me cry nearly every day, and the front end of the day may be glorious - just yesterday afternoon at 2:00 I was telling Jennifer the Midwife that I now feel the best I've felt all pregnancy, that I feel so great, I don't quite want it to end - while the back end is tragic, misshapen, alarmingly Sturm und Drang. There are the Crazy Thoughts and the Slough of Despond, the rages and crankiness out of nowhere. There is me doubting myself as I haven't done since college, and doubting Peter and doubting all of this. All of This.

But this is the thing that makes it so hard: Besides the "minor discomforts" - and you'll find that chapter in every book, the "minor discomforts of pregnancy," as if we might be discussing hangnails on another day, in another context - you are supposed, you are expected to feel radiant, happy, excited, blessed. It is a great Blessing. Yes, it is, to bring life into this world, to be taking care of Life, incubating Life, possibly (one may think) even Creating Life. It is known as the Happy Event. And so how wrong not to feel happy. Lately it has been better - I have felt happy some of the time, contented even. During the first six months I don't think I had a single honest smile in me. I didn't feel in the least bit happy but was informed by everyone else's reaction that I was expected to be. I was expected to feel it, and I didn't and this confused me and made it even harder to feel happy. I mean, I was happy, wasn't I? I had chosen this, hadn't I? But sometimes I didn't even know that - if I really was happy but just not feeling it, if there was a connection unplugged somewhere between what I perceived and what was what.

It was a terrible time of darkness and confusion, when I no longer felt myself and didn't recognize myself. When I had not yet gotten over being uprooted and new here, when I didn't trust anyone and had no one, it seemed. When I felt constantly debilitated by things that felt like constants. Some were just passing through, though, like morning sickness. It was exhausting and frightening to spend part of every day crying and not know if I meant it. To not know if something was wrong with me but to think there must be. Why else would everything seem so difficult, seem so repulsive, like the brother and sister finding out the mouse carries tiny jelly sacs of babies inside her in Katherine Anne Porter's "The Grave"?

I think about this story all the time. It captures all my negative feelings about pregnancy. It correlates perfectly with a story of my own, emptying the crab traps at Gulf Shores with Uncle Guilliard when I was a kid. But one of the crabs, a big juicy promising one, turned out to have her entire abdomen, if crabs can have abdomens, distended with hundreds of gelatinous crab eggs. She was gelatinous and distended and bloated and awkward-moving and disgusting. We let her go, of course. "You can't eat 'em when they're pregnant," Uncle Guilliard said. For some reason, I assumed only that he meant because they didn't taste good then, and this seemed even more repulsive. I lost my taste for crabmeat for that day.

Sometimes, in my body, pregnancy feels like these images. And then I repulse myself. All those hundreds of clear-jelly eggs, fanning out the lower part of the poor crab's body. How could she even move? And then to get trapped.

At least we let her go.

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