98 days out
“I need dresses that my fucking fat ass fits into,” said Marie.
Everything feels a little snug on my wife lately. Seems like a solvable problem, right? There are, like, stores. And some of those stores contain clothing. And that clothing comes in various sizes. And those stores don’t just contain clothing. They sell it. So she could just, like, buy the clothes. Right? Or she could go to a website. One that sells clothes. And, like, buy clothes that fit.
. . . am I missing something?
Yes. I must be missing something because the subtle, nuanced, step-by-step solution to Marie’s problem that I’ve outlined above hasn’t been employed.
“I don’t fucking want to be fucking pregnant anymore,” Marie continued.
Marie was seated next to me on the couch staring morosely into a previously unexplored pocket of the internet of which she had a need but little interest and no enthusiasm. It was a website for maternity clothes. All of the women wore breezy, colorful dresses and radiant smiles with an air of ease and imminent laughter. The images were still, but you could imagine their Instagram reels — flipping their blown-out hair, pivoting to the camera then looking off into the out-of-frame distance with a subtitle: Pregnancy is a journey, and I’m loving every minute of it. #pregnant #bump #thirdtrimester #blessed.
“Fuck these women,” said Marie.
Marie has gained sixteen pounds since the start of this adventure and hasn’t purchased a single item of maternity-wear. Actually that’s not true. She has purchased more than a dozen items and returned every single one of them. This is the opposite of retail therapy. Marie is an investor. She respects money and the effort it takes to obtain it. She has no problem spending it on vacations, renovations, excellent meals or giving it to worthy causes. But she has a psychological revulsion from spending money on clothes that she will quickly outgrow then never use again. So part of this is practical and comprehensible.
And part of it isn’t.
I’m starting to think that my wife may have a cognitive deficiency. She keeps referring to herself as fat. Regular readers will recall the card that Marie gave me fourteen weeks ago when she informed me that she was pregnant. One line that I didn’t share was this postscript warning:
As you can see, not only does she think that she’s fat, she blames me for it. But she isn’t fat. Her belly is expanding because she’s pregnant. There’s a growing being inside of her. It may seem like I’m belaboring an obvious point, but my highly intelligent wife is actually struggling with this notion.
She’s also struggling to read her monitor. At the end of most days, Marie and I go to our living room. I watch whatever streaming show that doesn’t require her full attention — currently Welcome to Wrexham, a heartwarming documentary series of an ongoing drama (that I highly recommend despite the fact that it revolves around soccer). And Marie puts her feet in my lap with her Dell in her lap. She closes the day by responding to business emails while I rub her feet. But lately our workday unwinding tradition is getting interrupted by laptop-shaking eruptions from Marie’s abdomen. The baby kicks. Then Marie yelps. Then I blaspheme. Then Marie turns back to her monitor. I turn back to the television. Whatever recently surfaced returns to the depths of my wife’s belly. And we all pretend that nothing happened. But reality is inevitable and impossible to ignore. The being in Marie’s uterus has recently become powerful enough to affect change in the outside world.
And speaking of this mysterious creature, the websites and books that we are reading don’t actually cover this, but I think we’re in the Bigfoot phase of pregnancy. Think about it. No one has ever seen this thing except in dark photographs. There are a scant few phantom images of it caught on video. And even those only contain partial shadowy outlines. We refer to it as a him, but that’s little more than conjecture at this point. Here’s what we know for certain. It is sucking the nutrients out of Marie’s food. If she doesn’t consume enough calcium, it leeches what it requires from her bones. It is loosening her ligaments to allow its eventual escape. It is presently growing teeth and hair and talons. And it’s getting stronger every day.
We’re on the precipice of trimester #3. Brace yourselves, dear readers.