Part 9

I really did like working at that gas station. One of the things I remember fondly is how there was this one guy who would ask me out whenever he came in. Under different circumstances, this type of behavior would have made me feel terribly uncomfortable, but at that time, I was super-huge pregnant. I was also married.

The guy didn’t really care at all about either one of those things, and even though he had a mullet, I was flattered. I needed the flattery.

I could not believe the transformation of my body throughout that pregnancy. Even before I started doing meth, I was underweight all through high school. I simply was not accustomed to being anything other than a stick. I went from 93 pounds to 180 pounds between March and November.

It was CRAZY.

The first area of my body to quickly transform was my chest. I was super-skinny, and basically wore bras because they kept my nipples from sticking out. By the time I was three months pregnant, I was a C-cup.

I had always been envious of girls with big boobs, and would have assumed that my suddenly sprouting rack would have made me feel good. It didn’t.

First of all, HOLY STRETCHMARKS BATMAN! You may think this is TMI, but I don’t give a shit – there were stretch marks all over my body by the time that baby was born. Literally everything between my ankles and my neck had stretch marks. It was CRAZY.

Second of all, those new appendages hanging off of my chest really took a lot of getting used to. They were always in my way – I couldn’t even open a cabinet to get a bowl or something without feeling like I was fighting my way through a mall at Christmas time.

Also, I began “leaking” (when the mammary glands produce a nice thin, sweet liquid in preparation for the newborn, there will sometimes be a preemptive flow of fluid from the breasts) really early in my pregnancy. I had to wear nursing pads (circular, disposable pads inserted in the bra to protect the clothing from the excreted liquid – maxi pads for the boobs) all the time from about the fifth month.

Although the part of the nursing pads that actually touched my nips was cotton and soft, the backing was plastic to keep the fluid from leaking through. It was summer time, and it was HOT. I thought I knew humidity from growing up in Atlanta, but I was wrong. Humidity right next to the ocean in the southeast is stifling.

By the time I would get home after work and take off my uniform and free my gigantic gourds, they would be all wrinkly and sore from being so hot and not breathing because of the nursing pads.

I could really go more into the description of my changing boobs, but it is starting to make me feel like a freak show again.

Because that’s what I was – a freak show.

For some stupid reason, I had a full-length mirror and would occasionally check the progress of my rapidly growing body. Oh my god. I was traumatized. I felt like a giant mama gorilla.

Ugh.

By the time October had rolled around, I was nearing the end of my bike-riding days and really enjoying the break from the heat.

We had moved into a townhouse in the same complex so that there would be room for the baby. I loved the townhouse – the separation between the two floors made me giddy. I mean, that place was tiny, too, but there were two floors! AND two bathrooms! AND the kitchen and living room were separated by an actual hallway!

Just to clarify, I am not in any way being flippant about that townhouse. I grew up as an upper-middle-class-white girl in an upper-middle-class-white town. My bedroom growing up was almost 2/3 of the size of that first apartment in Charleston. Within one year, I had left the big house in the burbs I had known my whole life, downsized to my car, upsized to the floor in an apartment (with two other people living there) that actually was smaller than my room growing up, upsized again to a bigger apartment (with four other people living there), downsized to that apartment I hated in Charleston, and then got to live in this luxurious townhouse.

It was heavenly. And then I got too big to be able to even get on my bike to go to work, or to go to work at all, and because I didn’t really know anyone or have a car, I was able to get very familiar with that townhouse over the next month.

Sidenote: by the time the 1995 World Series final game occurred, my primary location was on the opened futon downstairs in front of the TV and near the bathroom and kitchen. The baby’s daddy was at work, and I watched the Atlanta Braves – my hometown team – win the World Series for the first time. Well, the first time in Atlanta (they had previously won in 1914 in Boston, and then in 1957 in Milwaukee). I was torn. I had been watching that team since I was a baby, had gone to games every season, loved them when they sucked, rode out the torturous minutes of the final games of the previous three seasons, and there I was, a big blob laid out on a futon by myself, not even living in Georgia, when they won the World Series. Bastards.

Towards the end of my pregnancy, my mind began to slip. I wished and hoped every day to go into labor, starting a month before my due date. Then I got to my due date, and still no baby. I was beginning to actually believe I would always be pregnant - forever. It was not until ten frigging days AFTER my due date that I finally got induced.

I won’t go through all of the details of the delivery, but I did end up having to be fully sedated for an emergency c-section, so I wasn’t there when he was born.

I woke up in a recovery room discovering that I was alone again in my body. I asked about my baby – they said he was over 8 pounds. I was pretty sure they were thinking of a different baby. I couldn’t imagine ever having a baby that big.

I wanted to see him so badly – I had dreamed about the moment I would finally get to see his face. I asked to be moved so I could meet my child. The staff apparently was in the middle of a shift change, and a whole lot of other bullshit, and it was not until five hours after he was born that they even put me in the hospital room.

I sat in the bed staring at the door, and finally, FINALLY, a nurse walked in with my baby. I held my arms out, fully expecting her to hand him over.

Except she didn’t. She wanted me to have a lesson in breast-feeding first. I asked her if I could just see what he looked like. She hadn’t known I hadn’t even met him yet, and quickly put him into my arms.

And there he was – the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

I think that may have been the first time in my life I felt so safe loving another human being.

To be continued…
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