Pregnant, Part One
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
No, not now! It has been almost exactly four years since I found out I was expecting Julieanne, so I thought I would write a post on my pregnancy.
2005: October/November -December
Just a few more weeks!
Believing it was my sacred duty to be a stay at home mother changed my senior year in college, but not until after I found out I was pregnant. Since it was my senior year, we weren’t really actively trying to prevent pregnancy, though we weren’t really trying for pregnancy, either. Bob adamantly wanted two kids. I wanted four. (Wouldn’t you know, now I have one, and he has one and six stepchildren!)
Feeling some soreness in my breasts and a skipped period led me to take a test. Negative. A week later, I took another test. Also negative. I gave up! A few days later, though, I had a dream about a little girl running through a field. I knew in my head it was meaningless, but something about it made me decide to take one last test. It was positive! Now to tell Bob. Even though his birthday wasn’t until December, I bought him a birthday card and signed it from baby and me. It took a minute for the light to dawn, but when he found out, he was thrilled.
I wanted to keep it quiet because my mother had several miscarriages, and I didn’t want to go through the agony of the entire church finding out, then having to tell them all about a miscarriage. I was fine with telling family and close friends, so Bob called his parents and Steve (haha!), and I called my parents. Happiness everywhere!
Bob didn’t keep it quiet, though. Pretty soon, the entire church knew. We were quite poor, and they all knew exactly how much money I made, so I know there was much speculation over whether or not it was an accident (like it was their business!). I know there was, because one of the men walked up to me one day and said, “Things don’t always work out the way we plan or expect, but God has a way of taking care of everything.” Huh? We hadn’t said anything one way or another! The memory still makes me laugh!
Things hadn’t been great with Bob before, but they had been bearable. Somewhere during those nine months, though, we hit a new low. I think part of it was that Bob really didn’t expect how difficult pregnancy was going to be for me. I couldn’t manage much. I slept 10-12 hours per day, and was always exhausted no matter what I did or didn’t do. I read multiple articles encouraging pregnant women to exercise because exercise would help women regain some energy. I bought a prenatal exercise DVD. I did ten minutes of it before collapsing on the floor completely exhausted and slept 24 of the next 48 hours. Before pregnancy, I had been walking and jogging regularly, so I don’t know what happened. My GPA for that semester went from a 4.0 at midterms to a 3.0 from November to December. Bob was not understanding of my exhaustion. He worked two jobs, and when he came home, he just wanted to collapse on the bed. Unfortunately, his second job was working at Pizza Hut, and the smell of him when he came home made me sick. I couldn’t so much as kiss him until he had a shower and brushed his teeth. This made him quite angry, but I couldn’t help it. Once, he told me his mother still managed multiple kids and a job when she was pregnant, so what was wrong with me? Oh, yeah, those were fighting words!
Bob didn’t seem to really care about my pregnancy. Something changed. He began working later and later. I didn’t always believe he was working. Sometimes, I would wake up and call him at one or two in the morning, and he would tell me he was playing video games at Steve’s house. That he would do it so late without telling me and causing me worry enraged me. He would come home and say he would call next time, but he wouldn’t. I suspected he was doing things he wasn’t telling me about. I suspected he was smoking, looking at porn, and possibly having an affair or at least flirtation. I know now he was smoking and looking at porn–two things that bothered me primarily because he lied about it. Additionally, the porn bothered me because he expected me to be like that and he still expected sex every night. Furthermore, we were ministers in a conservative church where porn was a huge no-no. As far as affairs are concerned, I don’t know, nor shall I probably ever. Steve suspected some kind of affair, though, too. One night, Bob came home and laughed, saying Steve asked him if he was having an affair. Looking back, I don’t know if he was honestly incredulous or if he was trying to gauge my reaction. I laughed, too, but when he said Steve suspected, too, I became very suspicious.
Nevertheless, I was convinced that things would get better in the spring when I no longer faced first trimester sickness. I have been wrong on many, many things, and this was no exception.
Click here for part two.
Tags: Baptist, fundamentalism, minister's wife, ministry, religion, religion harm
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