Like this:

First up, I need to grocery shop. I’ve been away from my house 16 days, or at least according to the kennel where I leave my dogs, though I thought it only 15 days. None the less, I paid for 16 days, so let’s just stick with 16. I have ice cream in the freezer and some boxed food, but the boxed food would require some help, ie. I have boxed humus but that would at least need a pita or some vegetables. My fridges isn’t a terrible sight, just a little worrisome. There is about a pint of eggnog remaining in a carton that I am actually afraid to dump in the sink because I am sure it doesn’t smell so eggnoggy anymore. There is a Tupperware of vegetable soup with lemon grass that is likely now “fungi surprise”. I don’t even remember what is in the vegetable draws but I am sure it is a compost delight.

This being said, I am a pregnant woman who gets hungry. I can go without food for a fairly long period of time, maybe 12 hours, but then I am so hungry I could cry. Yesterday morning I planned to get myself to the nearest town, a 60 mile round trip away, to do my grocery shopping but by the time I woke up I was so hungry I decided to start my day by having breakfast at the local diner. I ordered pancakes with bacon and a side of oatmeal. I stumbled home in my carb wasted state to have a conversation with my husband because I too was fast asleep, much thanks to being on Kuwait time. When I woke I was groggy, no problem, I would take a bath and then be ready for my trip to the grocery. Right, until I lay on the couch for “just a moment” and that moment lasted until about 6pm. Now, I could have gotten up and made the grocery drive, I would have gotten there by 6:45, shopped, and home by 9pm, which means I would have missed my evening chat with my husband. Ever the glutton to make sure I didn’t wake up to eat another half jar of applesauce as I did the night before, I headed back out to the local diner sporting information I knew to be “top-secret”.

I saw her before I was even in the door. Her lips spelled out “she’s back”…which I took as “She’s back from Kuwait”…but one could have taken as “She’s back for her second time of the day”. However, the words came from a girl who works the evening shift, so I didn’t even see her at breakfast but I was a keeper of her secret and she didn’t even know it. She and the cook joked about what I would order and assumed it would have bacon. She then referenced her craving for “fry-sauce”, the nasty combination of ketchup and mayo. I played “uninformed”. She then just said “I’m pregnant!” and I of course congratulated her. I knew she had been trying to conceive for 7 months. Nevermind you that she’s 21, newly married and does not have health insurance, doesn’t have a clue about prenatals or folic acid and hasn’t even touched a pregnancy book. I am trying not to be judgemental. And this isn’t the point anyway.

It was the surprise. I was told her secret by the cafe owner that morning, but she said “let her tell you”. So, of course I did, and I think it has meaning that she got to say those words. But I am a lover of the art of surprise. In fact, it stretches into other areas of my life. For example, my husband pointed out my stretch marks the very first time he saw me naked. Yep, to my total dismay. I thought at least he wouldn’t say anything. But he ran his hand up my hip over the marks that were left from sprouting about 4 inches in one summer. I don’t think they are that bad, but when they are pointed out to me, I feel like I am wearing the mask of death. When I mentioned, months later, how this hurt my feelings, and he proceeded to say that he’d never seen them on a woman, which hurt my feelings even more considering how many women he’d seen naked before me, only made me feel worse. So, of course, he says “well, I have stretch marks too!” and I say “I never noticed.”

It doesn’t matter if I had known this or not. I believe for a moment it made him feel as if I didn’t pay attention to the flaws he consider a part of his body. And honestly, I didn’t pay attention. Just as I would have wanted him to not pay attention to those marks on my hips. If he could have just praised the thinness of my body and the small orbs that were my pre-pregnancy breasts, or the curves of my hip bones, I think for that moment, I would have felt amazing. But I was left feeling inadequate and less of a woman. He could have been “surprised” by the marks a year later as I pointed them out to him in my concern to not get any more during pregnancy. I have ever since that day been concerned that all he sees when he sees me without much on, even just a bikini that these scars are of course the very first thing he notices about me.

Sometimes, I think, feigning surprise is the best reaction.

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