Crazy

Just as expected, these last weeks of pregnancy have not exactly been easy. In fact, to put it politely, I’m pretty @#$%^& miserable...and just a pleasure to be around. I do attempt to mask my misery behind a polite smile while I’m at work, but by 5:30 I’m pretty much done. This means my husband never sees that polite smile. Instead he sees the whiney, cranky, and downright crazy version of his wife. It should come as no surprise that Roger “handles” me like a champ – listening to me and nodding with sympathy and only occasionally attempting to liken my aches and pains to something he is experiencing (I mean, really? Do you want to go there?). He actually seems to have adapted to my craziness quite well – knowing when to indulge it and when to put his foot down and stop the madness.

And I’m afraid it is full on madness. Some of it is pretty normal though, I think – the books call it “nesting,” this obsessive need to have everything clean. Now, I’m a pretty tidy person (my college roommates might beg to differ, but I’ve grown up a bit since then), but I’ve never been too terribly concerned about dirt and germs. I live with two dogs for God’s sake! What would be the point? And yet, here I am – 9 months pregnant attempting to scrub floors and wash windows and organize everything from the condiments in the pantry to the tools in the garage.

Roger has only so much patience for my obsessiveness, and I can hardly blame him. I think he feels bad to find me sweeping the garage in 100 degree heat but he has a hard time offering to take over when he doesn’t understand what a clean garage floor has to do with taking care of our babies. “Robyn, I wasn’t aware we were going to let the girls crawl around out here,” he says with a straight face. I kind of want to punch him in the nose. But before I begin my attempt to justify my admittedly absurd actions, he takes the broom out of my hands and sends me inside.

There are other signs of craziness too. For example, what woman, 9 months pregnant with twins, decides that now would be a good time to install a full length mirror in her bedroom? For the past seven months, I’ve been fixing my hair and putting on makeup in the small medicine cabinet mirror that came with our house. The most complete glimpse I’ve seen of my pregnant self has been in the mirror in the bathroom at work – and even that’s just waist (or what used to be my waist) up and fully clothed! So you can imagine my horror the first time I stepped out of the shower and into the cruel judgment of that full length mirror. A normal person would have thrown something at it to make the terrifying reflection go away but the masochist in me continues to torture myself.

I’ve been told this particular brand of madness - the nesting anyway - will subside a bit when I give birth, but it’s likely that a different kind of craziness will take over. Great. But at least pretty soon I’ll be way too busy keeping two humans alive to notice the dirt in the garage or obsess about the misshapen girl in the mirror.