We've been having a hard time getting to agreement on a name. My husband even taunted me with the promise of the turtle hatching trip saying: "If we go to see the turtles, I get to name the baby."
"Fine," I said, "I'm going to call the kid whatever I want."
Multiple names are not unheard of -- particularly in ethnic cultures like ours. This was confirmed and inspired me over lunch this week with friends from Zimbabwe who each had several names that family members used to refer to them. And two names for their daughter which different people used.
This was the best argument for a middle name that I ever heard. Up until now, I thought of middle names as useless Caucasian middle class inventions. The only purpose they served was to solemnize formal occasions like graduations or weddings or protect from identity fraud.
We put up a poll with our final six names to see what would shake out as the top two. My husband was not expecting the eclectic taste of our friends.
Out of:
Seth
Marcus
Miles
Zane
Zak
Miach
Micah and Seth (two that were not his picks) were the front runners. So the debate continues as the voting has reached 100 participants. Zak and Zane being in the bottom rung; we've promised ourselves to flip a coin if we can't agree on the order of the top two.
One thing I know for sure: these 40 weeks have been worry free. So much so I can't really imagine what it will be like when the guy is on the outside. But they all have to come out eventually.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
The Last One Out
Today our friend who was due three weeks after us gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Imagine our surprise and confusion at the news: we were all in a line and now that line is bent (almost as out of shape as I am!).
I called my friend who is in the U.S. and due four days after us. We moaned about these boys we are carrying that have no intention of coming out early. The two of us are the only ones in the summer line up who have come almost to full term. The thought of being 'late' was terrifying to me. Now I go between gratitude at all the things I've been able to get done and curiosity about when the guy will make his appearance.
This has thrown me for a loop because most of the children in my family are born early; almost all my nieces, and even most of us siblings.
I wasn't getting impatient until my husband kindly informed me he didn't want us to go to see the sea turtles hatch their eggs because it was an hour outside of the city.
Rightly or wrongly this imposition only made me furious: as if sitting around, getting bigger, hanging out with my mom wasn't slow enough. Now I was being banned into my house because of this kid who was so comfortable, his head wasn't even in the right direction to exit?
My mom shared a story about being left alone at home with a ten year old girl while the rest of her family went to see a boat at eight months pregnant. Unexpectedly I had an ally.
I tried to reason with everyone: Labor rarely lasts only an hour. After all even the baby girl delivered today at 4:15 p.m. started her way out the previous night at 2:30 in the morning.
The likelihood of my delivery taking only one hour was slim to none.
"Do you want to be in pain for an hour?" my husband was asking me, trying to talk me out of going up north to see the turtles.
This was the same man who felt so uncomfortable about my going to the US at seven months pregnant, that I didn't go.
"You kept me from going to the US," I said, "You and everybody else with your nervousness. I'm not going to hang around the house for no reason."
It's amazing how at this stage in the game, nine months, everyone has an opinion about what you should be doing.
Eat spicy food, they tell you, to bring on labor.
I'm Indian and my mother is visiting. It's impossible for me NOT to eat spicy food.
Walk a lot they say.
Since it's Qatar, the mall is the only place to hang out when it's 120 degrees outside. Walking is all there is.
"We'll go to the movies," my husband says, ignoring the fact we've been to three movies this week and watched even more at home.
Needless to say, I'm not thrilled with the idea of staying home. And I called my friend to say I'm going to see the turtles. And if the kid decides to come on the way there or the way back: well then, the hospital bag and car seat I've been driving around with for two weeks will come to good use.
I called my friend who is in the U.S. and due four days after us. We moaned about these boys we are carrying that have no intention of coming out early. The two of us are the only ones in the summer line up who have come almost to full term. The thought of being 'late' was terrifying to me. Now I go between gratitude at all the things I've been able to get done and curiosity about when the guy will make his appearance.
This has thrown me for a loop because most of the children in my family are born early; almost all my nieces, and even most of us siblings.
I wasn't getting impatient until my husband kindly informed me he didn't want us to go to see the sea turtles hatch their eggs because it was an hour outside of the city.
Rightly or wrongly this imposition only made me furious: as if sitting around, getting bigger, hanging out with my mom wasn't slow enough. Now I was being banned into my house because of this kid who was so comfortable, his head wasn't even in the right direction to exit?
My mom shared a story about being left alone at home with a ten year old girl while the rest of her family went to see a boat at eight months pregnant. Unexpectedly I had an ally.
I tried to reason with everyone: Labor rarely lasts only an hour. After all even the baby girl delivered today at 4:15 p.m. started her way out the previous night at 2:30 in the morning.
The likelihood of my delivery taking only one hour was slim to none.
"Do you want to be in pain for an hour?" my husband was asking me, trying to talk me out of going up north to see the turtles.
This was the same man who felt so uncomfortable about my going to the US at seven months pregnant, that I didn't go.
"You kept me from going to the US," I said, "You and everybody else with your nervousness. I'm not going to hang around the house for no reason."
It's amazing how at this stage in the game, nine months, everyone has an opinion about what you should be doing.
Eat spicy food, they tell you, to bring on labor.
I'm Indian and my mother is visiting. It's impossible for me NOT to eat spicy food.
Walk a lot they say.
Since it's Qatar, the mall is the only place to hang out when it's 120 degrees outside. Walking is all there is.
"We'll go to the movies," my husband says, ignoring the fact we've been to three movies this week and watched even more at home.
Needless to say, I'm not thrilled with the idea of staying home. And I called my friend to say I'm going to see the turtles. And if the kid decides to come on the way there or the way back: well then, the hospital bag and car seat I've been driving around with for two weeks will come to good use.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
So Sorry Madam, None Available, Fully Booked Madam
This refrain is often what greets you if you call up and try to get a nail appointment on a Friday afternoon. Friday being the first day of the holiday here in Doha, it’s often the afternoon of choice for women to get waxed, washed, and generally buffed up for the weekend. After a frustrating few episodes of this, I caught on and made my booking early in the week or when leaving the previous one (or relying on my friend to make one for both of us after I chewed out the staff on one particularly frustrating incident. But that’s another story).
While beauty appointments are taken so seriously – you can be cancelled if you are more than ten minutes late and relegated to not being seen – I wish the same seriousness would be given to prenatal or doctor’s appointments. You can show up for your appointment thirty, fifteen, or ten minutes early and the result will be the same. You deliver your insurance documents (which they always have to photocopy even in your 9th month) and wait to be weighed and measured by the nurse. After this initial rush of activity in the first fifteen minutes, you wait. And depending on the time of day, you can wait thirty minutes up to two hours to see the doctor.
Yes, you have an appointment. An appointment that likely took you thirty days to get, despite trying the trick you learned at the nail salon of scheduling your next appointment after your current one.
“The schedule is not ready,” is often the explanation; you’re supposed to call or come back. In a country where women have an average of 4 children (many of them up to 9) the idea that a pregnant woman might have other things to do, concerns she’d like taken seriously, or in general be in need of care does not seem to register – even at the private hospital.
After all the hassle of getting one, your hard won appointment time is just a suggestion. The later in the day you go, the more unlucky you are and the doctor likely to be called away to do an emergency C-section or other equally important duty in the maternity ward. In the last nine months I’ve been told to sit down and wait on the two occasions we could not get anything other than the 8pm appointment slot.
On both instances I went back to the nurse at 9:00 p.m. to ask what was happening.
“There are three people in front of you,” she said once, “the six o’clock person hasn’t been seen yet.”
Did you know that when I was still at my house and coming to the hospital? Could you have called me and told me to bring something to eat? Or that there might be a wait?
What has saved me is actually the wireless access. I now go with my laptop and am able to make some use of the time that otherwise I would spend getting angrier and angrier. I made this discovery during one of the first many long waits on my mobile phone. A few Twitter/Facebook posts later and suddenly Twitter is blocked by the wireless interface. A coincidence?
Doesn’t seem to have affected the position of ‘quality in service’ award in the ironic form of a giant start that I’ve had visions of setting on fire on several of these unbelievably inconsiderate occasions.
Perhaps what is even more frustrating about this hurry up and wait process is that the doctor, scattered and equally unimpressed that you’ve managed to get pregnant, grow a baby, and come down to the hospital to see how it is, spend an average of 15 minutes on you. They do scan the baby much more often here than they do in the US or other places. Many of my friends only saw their uteruses for the first time at twenty weeks. I had a thorough peek during a Friday morning trip to the emergency room when I couldn’t get my period to stop and one every visit since then.
Of the two official ultrasounds they gave us in radiology, the doctor came in and seemed more interested in manipulating the instrument and his charts than telling us anything about what was happening.
This after we had heard the scary words: low placenta and breech position.
I picked up the DVD of the seventh month scan, knowing that family and friends wanted to see the progress of our little one, but the images that our expert had taken were little more than black spots on a grayish screen.
We have an appointment tomorrow and now will likely go once a week. The itchiness has died down which is comforting in terms of the condition they had predicted. The fact we requested a secondary blood test a week ago and they never called back is not.
Being a woman of iron clad convictions and also work schedule, being at the mercy of uncertainty is a new, humbling prospect. I don’t know when or if my water will break.
Will it be at night? And we’ll congratulate ourselves on putting down the shower curtain the midwife recommended so we don’t come back from the hospital to a ‘mangy’ bed.
Will it be at lunch with a friend, or running into someone you’d rather avoid like in the movies?
The prospect of being “late” or going over my due date has me slightly in dread, if only because my return date to work looms before me. As does scheduling a visit by my aunt from India to coincide with my mother and brother being here.
Being in the ninth month is interesting or maybe it’s because I now no longer try to hide the enormous mountain that has become my ‘bump’ because it would be humanly impossible to conceal.
At the bank this week, the manager actually took me out of line to a private counter so I didn’t have to wait. An acquaintance at the grocery store on my behalf yelled at two men who did not pick up something that was knocked down and proceeded to get it for me herself. Even my husband carried heavy parcels after we went to the movies instead of telling me we’d come back later to get the car floor mats I’d wanted for several months.
I’ve even put up a few pictures on Facebook, despite not having done this since month five.
What hasn’t changed is people sharing their opinions of how big or small they think I am.
A colleague walked in for a meeting a few weeks back and said:
“How many months are you?”
“Eight.”
“Oh, you are not that big…”
“We don’t care,” I said, though she was oblivious to what I was saying and kept on sharing her opinion, “pregnant people actually don’t care what you think of our size.”
The woman at our weekend club asked me yesterday “When is it coming out?” Bless her; she’s the one who also said I looked too big at eight months. She just doesn’t really know better I don’t think, so I let it go.
Whatever the reason, the reaction is markedly different now in the home stretch from everyone. They keep saying it’s not far away now. Not knowing when it will be, I can’t really agree or disagree. It could be three more weeks (until the due date) or it could be five, if this guy decides he’s just fine where he is.
I do know that in the middle of the night when I slide out of bed to go to the bathroom, my legs are a lot more unsure than they used to be at the ten, fifteen, even twenty pound stage. Thirty pounds and nine months in, I not only get up early to pee in the morning, I’m now forced to clean out my intestines at least twice a day or risk major discomfort. In other words: my tenant is growing larger and the accommodation is not keeping up.
I do want to tell him that there is more room outside than inside – if judging by his movements (which apparently may not be many more but just felt more by me, the host, since he himself is bigger) he wants to break free.
I’m torn between wanting the baby to come now, so that I can use all seven weeks of maternity leave to get used to him (vice versa for his sake) and looking forward to three weeks of finishing up projects that working for a startup has not allowed me even to ruminate on since March.
My husband is in a full scale panic because we still have not come to agreement on a name. A name, he feels, is essential knowledge prior to driving to the hospital.
Sage is now out because it’s too feminine. Axl had a brief moment of consideration before being grimaced off the list by his co-workers. Riz has been laughed at (means rice in Arabic) by mine. Max I can’t really fathom using in real life and now Solomon, once so noble sounding, seems too formal.
The search and the wait continue. Tomorrow we start the day with a 4D ultrasound which will hopefully yield a photo worthy of sharing until he arrives in person.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Is Your Blood Pressure Low?
This past week has been really trying at both the hospital and home. What started as an innocent foot rash, caused by cardboard in a pair of ballet flats, grew inflamed when the AC in our bedroom blew only hot air inside with the 100+ temperature outside.
I started itching, thinking it was the heat and having heat stroke. I couldn't sleep because of the furnace I was carrying around inside me. For the first time in nearly a year and a half, I cried uncle and didn't go to work. I took it easy and waddled around the house - only to find the itch spreading to my hands.
My husband's colleague, a nurse, identified this as the early signs of a condition that starts in the 36th week of pregnancy: obstetric cholestasis, where the rash was not just a skin issue but my liver releasing bile salt into my blood. There were scary words thrown around: still birth, inducing delivery. All of this at the end of a pregnancy when there had been literally no complications.
The hospital has been no help as no two doctors will tell you the same thing. The first test we took said the salt level was high (165) but not so high (in the 1000s) as to cause poison to the placenta and thus the fetus.
So I'm scratching away and hoping that they are right; it's not to a level to be concerned. We'll hopefully find out more on Sunday at the next appointment.
I started itching, thinking it was the heat and having heat stroke. I couldn't sleep because of the furnace I was carrying around inside me. For the first time in nearly a year and a half, I cried uncle and didn't go to work. I took it easy and waddled around the house - only to find the itch spreading to my hands.
My husband's colleague, a nurse, identified this as the early signs of a condition that starts in the 36th week of pregnancy: obstetric cholestasis, where the rash was not just a skin issue but my liver releasing bile salt into my blood. There were scary words thrown around: still birth, inducing delivery. All of this at the end of a pregnancy when there had been literally no complications.
The hospital has been no help as no two doctors will tell you the same thing. The first test we took said the salt level was high (165) but not so high (in the 1000s) as to cause poison to the placenta and thus the fetus.
So I'm scratching away and hoping that they are right; it's not to a level to be concerned. We'll hopefully find out more on Sunday at the next appointment.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Prickly Heat
For the past 8.5 months, pregnancy has been really good to me. Other than having to wake up early to go to the bathroom and the occasional leg cramp (which are a frightening window into labor) I have fared well compared to the stories I read, hear, and imagined.
Then, this weekend.
Thursday morning I could tell from the sweat beading lightly across me as the sun peeked into our bedroom that the air conditioning was out (again). Every ten weeks or so, the filters get clogged (only in our room) and then we have a few days of stale air. Up until now, the temperatures in our desert state stayed below 40 degree Celsius (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit) so this was not too huge an inconvenience.
But now that it is summer and I'm carrying around my own heater wherever I go with 34 week old baby boy, the air not being on was not a good option.
I was in a hurry to work and thought that I could get the maintenance guys to come on Saturday - Friday being the Muslim holiday - so only one more night.
Needless to say on Thursday night when I still hadn't fallen asleep by 6 a.m., right next to my blissfully snoring husband (who would want me to say gently, barely snoring) I was kicking myself for not having made the time.
Saturday came and went with the guards on the compound who deliver all the information to the work crews and like to keep tabs on our lives shaking their heads at us. After nearly three weeks of visits by the water crew to fix our water heater, we now had even more problems? They had that South Asian disbelief my parents raised us with when we said we had a headache or had been in a car accident.
Why? You could almost hear the question forming on his lips.
I stayed home from work on Sunday after a second sleepless night; waiting for the maintenance crew. Luckily I used the time to do what many would refer to as 'nesting'. Having another crew of carpenters in to assemble the Pack 'n' Play, move furniture, get the nanny's room ready, move the crib upstairs.
Still no sign of the crew.
I wrote 2,000 words for a manuscript long over due.
No air conditioning guys.
I dropped my car in the industrial area (a separate city from where the rest of us live) and came home.
Nobody but the busy carpenters, hanging shelves in the nanny's room. Why couldn't they fix the air?
I took a nap downstairs where the air was working, on one of the sofas. And then the doorbell rang.
At 6:00 p.m. they came.
And said they would come back today to double check it was working (it isn't) and they didn't.
Additionally because of the heat, I have a strange itchiness on my feet from flats I bought that apparently made my feet sweat. The open toe shoes or the mostly leather ones I've been wearing my adult life were too high for this late in the pregnancy. Though people say there is no way to avoid the leg cramps, I was all for trying.
Instead I now have a strange heat rash that the nurse at my husband's work says is 'prickly heat'. Bless him, he's swabbed my swollen toes with rubbing alcohol (which a friend was promptly worried about getting into my blood stream and into the placenta).
We bought some powder today and calamine lotion.
Hoping it will work (the powder has taken away some of the burning already but I feel it starting again as I type0.
The air hopefully is much cooler now than it was the last few nights.
And so it continues, marching towards the end of this journey -- which is only the beginning of our little one coming into the world.
No one said it would be easy. And I know most people would not consider this hard.
I felt proud of myself today when someone came into the office for a meeting and said:
"I thought you'd be much bigger. You're okay."
I repeated my Facebook status to her that I had up a few days ago.
"We don't care what you think about us."
And that's true. I haven't actually embraced being pregnant until this last month. And the truth is there: we don't care. We are too busy with powder on our feet, sleepless nights, and leg cramps.
And this is before the baby shows up!
Then, this weekend.
Thursday morning I could tell from the sweat beading lightly across me as the sun peeked into our bedroom that the air conditioning was out (again). Every ten weeks or so, the filters get clogged (only in our room) and then we have a few days of stale air. Up until now, the temperatures in our desert state stayed below 40 degree Celsius (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit) so this was not too huge an inconvenience.
But now that it is summer and I'm carrying around my own heater wherever I go with 34 week old baby boy, the air not being on was not a good option.
I was in a hurry to work and thought that I could get the maintenance guys to come on Saturday - Friday being the Muslim holiday - so only one more night.
Needless to say on Thursday night when I still hadn't fallen asleep by 6 a.m., right next to my blissfully snoring husband (who would want me to say gently, barely snoring) I was kicking myself for not having made the time.
Saturday came and went with the guards on the compound who deliver all the information to the work crews and like to keep tabs on our lives shaking their heads at us. After nearly three weeks of visits by the water crew to fix our water heater, we now had even more problems? They had that South Asian disbelief my parents raised us with when we said we had a headache or had been in a car accident.
Why? You could almost hear the question forming on his lips.
I stayed home from work on Sunday after a second sleepless night; waiting for the maintenance crew. Luckily I used the time to do what many would refer to as 'nesting'. Having another crew of carpenters in to assemble the Pack 'n' Play, move furniture, get the nanny's room ready, move the crib upstairs.
Still no sign of the crew.
I wrote 2,000 words for a manuscript long over due.
No air conditioning guys.
I dropped my car in the industrial area (a separate city from where the rest of us live) and came home.
Nobody but the busy carpenters, hanging shelves in the nanny's room. Why couldn't they fix the air?
I took a nap downstairs where the air was working, on one of the sofas. And then the doorbell rang.
At 6:00 p.m. they came.
And said they would come back today to double check it was working (it isn't) and they didn't.
Additionally because of the heat, I have a strange itchiness on my feet from flats I bought that apparently made my feet sweat. The open toe shoes or the mostly leather ones I've been wearing my adult life were too high for this late in the pregnancy. Though people say there is no way to avoid the leg cramps, I was all for trying.
Instead I now have a strange heat rash that the nurse at my husband's work says is 'prickly heat'. Bless him, he's swabbed my swollen toes with rubbing alcohol (which a friend was promptly worried about getting into my blood stream and into the placenta).
We bought some powder today and calamine lotion.
Hoping it will work (the powder has taken away some of the burning already but I feel it starting again as I type0.
The air hopefully is much cooler now than it was the last few nights.
And so it continues, marching towards the end of this journey -- which is only the beginning of our little one coming into the world.
No one said it would be easy. And I know most people would not consider this hard.
I felt proud of myself today when someone came into the office for a meeting and said:
"I thought you'd be much bigger. You're okay."
I repeated my Facebook status to her that I had up a few days ago.
"We don't care what you think about us."
And that's true. I haven't actually embraced being pregnant until this last month. And the truth is there: we don't care. We are too busy with powder on our feet, sleepless nights, and leg cramps.
And this is before the baby shows up!
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
The Shoes that Were Lost and Then Found
Imagine my sheer delight when digging through the closet, hoping to find a sweater I was fairly sure I had given away to charity after years of use, I found the missing Aldo shoes instead!
The ones I thought I had left in the parking lot because of sheer exhaustion that Friday at the mall.
Tears came to my eyes, partly because I knew that my brain, while a strange rabbit warren of a place these days, had not yet betrayed me to that limit.
I don't know if it's nesting, or if the fact that my body is getting larger by the day is prompting me that this is really happening. I am really about to have a baby and bring someone else into the world. I'm reading my fourth or so book about pregnancy - a non-medical, email exchange between two expectant mothers, and convinced that I could write something just as good. It's no accident that as a writer I'm more interested in narratives about motherhood than what doctors want you to do.
When I first announced that I was having a baby over the summer, our management was slightly out of wack - though they said all the right things - about how I could be replaced. My maternity leave and how the work would get done was a constant subject of conversation which didn't really help me come to grips with what was happening to my life. I felt pressure to behave as though everything was fine: more than that, because I hadn't had any complications, I did feel more or less fine (other than getting slightly rotound). But that was six months ago and we've managed to hire three new people (to offset the work I was doing for the last 10 months).
The new people, the fact I saw us all through the launch phase, and have generally been the same have tempered the reactions of but-what-will-we-do-when-you-are-gone that plagued me the second trimester.
Now it's the middle of June and I have two more weeks of 'work'; work outside the home anyway. The idea of two months away from work yawned before me in April/May but now I realize the time is going to fly by. I will have my mother here and the nanny, then my aunt and my brother. Plus: The baby!
So two months will actually be short, as everyone is warning me.
For the first time in my life, I find myself getting up from work voluntarily, coming home and sleeping. Not because I am depressed, as slightly happened to me in 2006 when I made the switch from an American univeristy to a national one. But because my body actually wants that much sleep. The entire drive home, all I could was yawn. Yawn and try to steer the car in the right direction.
The office is going to be different without me. That isn't me having a big ego but a fact because of the ten or so people there, I hired 7 of them, and worked with them as the sole manager for the past 6 months. Art from our home hangs on the walls (that were bare when we set up shop) and most of the policies and procedures that we've established have been because I was the sole offical employee for a long time. I'm proud of what I've been able to accomplish over the last year and a half.
I also think this baby is well timed. While I'm out for two months the team will have a chance to get to know the new people who are coming on board and also the new Managing Director who has just moved to the country.
I am a big personality and with me stepping out for a few months, he will have the change to make his own impression. And quite frankly, because of our space crunch, they need my desk! I'm sure there will a slight tussle over who can use it first.
I'm not at the point where I can say that I want to stay at home forever. But I am looking forward to the break like a first year college student for summer.
And wondering what that moment will be like: when we drive to the hospital.
It would be good to have a bag packed...
The ones I thought I had left in the parking lot because of sheer exhaustion that Friday at the mall.
Tears came to my eyes, partly because I knew that my brain, while a strange rabbit warren of a place these days, had not yet betrayed me to that limit.
I don't know if it's nesting, or if the fact that my body is getting larger by the day is prompting me that this is really happening. I am really about to have a baby and bring someone else into the world. I'm reading my fourth or so book about pregnancy - a non-medical, email exchange between two expectant mothers, and convinced that I could write something just as good. It's no accident that as a writer I'm more interested in narratives about motherhood than what doctors want you to do.
When I first announced that I was having a baby over the summer, our management was slightly out of wack - though they said all the right things - about how I could be replaced. My maternity leave and how the work would get done was a constant subject of conversation which didn't really help me come to grips with what was happening to my life. I felt pressure to behave as though everything was fine: more than that, because I hadn't had any complications, I did feel more or less fine (other than getting slightly rotound). But that was six months ago and we've managed to hire three new people (to offset the work I was doing for the last 10 months).
The new people, the fact I saw us all through the launch phase, and have generally been the same have tempered the reactions of but-what-will-we-do-when-you-are-gone that plagued me the second trimester.
Now it's the middle of June and I have two more weeks of 'work'; work outside the home anyway. The idea of two months away from work yawned before me in April/May but now I realize the time is going to fly by. I will have my mother here and the nanny, then my aunt and my brother. Plus: The baby!
So two months will actually be short, as everyone is warning me.
For the first time in my life, I find myself getting up from work voluntarily, coming home and sleeping. Not because I am depressed, as slightly happened to me in 2006 when I made the switch from an American univeristy to a national one. But because my body actually wants that much sleep. The entire drive home, all I could was yawn. Yawn and try to steer the car in the right direction.
The office is going to be different without me. That isn't me having a big ego but a fact because of the ten or so people there, I hired 7 of them, and worked with them as the sole manager for the past 6 months. Art from our home hangs on the walls (that were bare when we set up shop) and most of the policies and procedures that we've established have been because I was the sole offical employee for a long time. I'm proud of what I've been able to accomplish over the last year and a half.
I also think this baby is well timed. While I'm out for two months the team will have a chance to get to know the new people who are coming on board and also the new Managing Director who has just moved to the country.
I am a big personality and with me stepping out for a few months, he will have the change to make his own impression. And quite frankly, because of our space crunch, they need my desk! I'm sure there will a slight tussle over who can use it first.
I'm not at the point where I can say that I want to stay at home forever. But I am looking forward to the break like a first year college student for summer.
And wondering what that moment will be like: when we drive to the hospital.
It would be good to have a bag packed...
Sunday, June 6, 2010
I'm Pregnant Not Handicapped
But I have been using the handicapped bathrooms and parking spaces (with negative consequences). It's a toss up here where people are much more lenient with pregnant people than in western countries. I haven't used it at work but it's in my personal life I would like a little more leeway.
I was at the mall with a friend and though I should have gone before leaving the conference we were both attending: I didn't. We started laughing so hard I knew I had to go to the bathroom before it looked like my water had broken. I dashed to the bathroom without any of my belongings in the effort to get there faster. And before I came to the one with the stalls, I saw a female handicapped one. And I ducked inside. I may not have been in a wheelchair but I was pregnant and my body in an altered state from what it normally was.
Imagine my relief turning to dismay when, after washing my hands, the lock wouldn't turn in the tumbler. I panicked because the person I was with didn't know where I was - I didn't have my phone or my purse in my rush to get to the bathroom.
There was I was: in a foreign country, at the mall, locked in a bathroom. If I hadn't been worried I'd spend all night in there, I would have laughed. Instead I started pounding on the door, unsure how I would communicate with the passerby that I was stuck, reviewing my Arabic, hoping someone would hear me over the noise, as twenty minutes went by and my heart beat threatened to floor me.
And amazingly, someone did. A woman's voice, in Arabic, not sure what my problem was, but telling me she would help.
I wasn't so lucky with the police officer who gave me a ticket for parking in the handicapped spot even after 30 minutes of trying to find a parking space at the mall (without success).
Am going to take my belly into the station and see what happens.
I was at the mall with a friend and though I should have gone before leaving the conference we were both attending: I didn't. We started laughing so hard I knew I had to go to the bathroom before it looked like my water had broken. I dashed to the bathroom without any of my belongings in the effort to get there faster. And before I came to the one with the stalls, I saw a female handicapped one. And I ducked inside. I may not have been in a wheelchair but I was pregnant and my body in an altered state from what it normally was.
Imagine my relief turning to dismay when, after washing my hands, the lock wouldn't turn in the tumbler. I panicked because the person I was with didn't know where I was - I didn't have my phone or my purse in my rush to get to the bathroom.
There was I was: in a foreign country, at the mall, locked in a bathroom. If I hadn't been worried I'd spend all night in there, I would have laughed. Instead I started pounding on the door, unsure how I would communicate with the passerby that I was stuck, reviewing my Arabic, hoping someone would hear me over the noise, as twenty minutes went by and my heart beat threatened to floor me.
And amazingly, someone did. A woman's voice, in Arabic, not sure what my problem was, but telling me she would help.
I wasn't so lucky with the police officer who gave me a ticket for parking in the handicapped spot even after 30 minutes of trying to find a parking space at the mall (without success).
Am going to take my belly into the station and see what happens.
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