ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Friday I went out for lunch with three of the girls from accounting, and we met two other girls who used to work at our company. So there were four of us in my car headed to Chipotle in Waldo and two of us (not me) were pregnant. Pregnant women have a mysterious power to direct all conversations toward their radical state of distension, and since I’ve never been around very many pregnant women before, everything they said was mostly all new to me.

Before my car ride with these ladies, I had known very little about pregnancy other than the patently obvious.

1. You get fat and crave a lot of weird foods, maybe even things you have never seen before and can’t describe to anyone. Also, you throw up more than usual.
2. You are not allowed to do anything because it might cause your baby to die in the womb, or worse, be born retarded, and then it would be ALL YOUR FAULT.
3. Terrible things happen to your butt.

But there’s much, much more to it than that, as I learned. You can get diabetes and sometimes it doesn’t go away! You can alternate like 60 times between constipation and diarrhea in just one week and fiber does no good! Sometimes you get so sick to your stomach that you can’t eat anything, but you still gain weight because your body is betraying you!

On the way back from lunch, they were discussing who they wanted to have present for their deliveries, and whether they were worried about that or not and whether they wanted to have an epidural. The conversation came to a natural pause, and then the other girl besides me who is not pregnant asked loudly, “Are you guys afraid of pooping on the table?!”

While everybody was laughing, including me, my mind suddenly riveted back on a long buried, far distant memory. When I was six and my brother was born, my parents decided I should be present for the miracle of his birth. His birth turned out to be A) not miraculous and B) totally gross. But I remember now that at the time, the worst part was that very issue the other girl had brought up. Later I consulted with my Indian friend, who is also recently pregnant, but she said that they usually give you a “big enema” before the delivery to “make more room”. I think these pregnant people are way braver than me. I have no desire to do this very gross thing. Maybe I will adopt an Asian baby someday. Or, I would take a Russian, too.

So who’s hungry?!