kiwords

I had a conversation today with a friend about pregnancy. No, neither of us is pregnant. She’s…fixed, and as for me…well, I don’t think God does immaculate after the fact conceptions.
Anyhow.
We were talking about the real symptoms of early pregnancy. Not the standard ones, like nausea or tiredness. The symptoms that are unique to each mother. For instance, I know one woman who could always tell she was pregnant because the smell of hairspray was suddenly revolting. She told me a story about this time she was standing in an elevator with her toddler daughter, and the woman standing in front of her must have just applied some hairspray, because the stench was overwhelming. She stood there, gripping her daughter’s hand, with these vivid fantasies going through her mind of smacking this woman in the back of the head with her diaper bag. “Oh yeah,” she added, “angry mood swings too. That’s a sure sign of pregnancy for me.” Um…she has only two children.
For me, the surefire symptom of pregnancy was always stupidity. When I was very early in my pregnancy with Tre, I remember this moment I had one morning after I got out of the shower. I stood in front of the mirror, comb in hand, trying to remember which side I parted my hair on. I puzzled there for a good five minutes. Finally I went to find a picture, because I just couldn’t figure it out. That didn’t really help me, because I kept holding the picture up next to me, looking at it in the mirror, and trying to figure out if the image was backwards or not. I don’t remember what I finally did. Since I was pregnant, my solution was probably to take a nap.
When I was newly pregnant with Max I spent about 20 minutes one morning trying to get Tre’s shoes on his feet, only to realize later, after I’d given up, that there were socks balled up inside the toes of the shoes.
But my all time best newly pregnant stupid story is from when Raphael was just sprouting. I was trying to change the toilet paper roll, and for some reason both Tre (then 5) and Max (then 2) were with me in the bathroom. Tre was watching me patiently as I struggled to get the new roll on the spindle. It just would not go on, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. I peered inside the new roll to see if there was something in there, in the way. Nothing. I went back to vainly trying to push the new roll onto the spindle. For some reason it just didn’t fit. Finally Tre piped up, “Mama? When you’re…done, can I have that cardboard tube?”
I had failed to remove the tube from the old roll of toilet paper. I looked at that, and I must have still had a few brain cells floating around, because I knew. I looked up and met my own eyes in the mirror, and said, “You’re pregnant, ya moron.”
Couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day.