Life in Knocked-Up Mode

Getting married, getting pregnant and becoming a mother: are steps that people normally would want a woman to go through. They say, your womanhood is not complete before you have fulfilled all these three steps.

Peer pressure, social norms – these put a lot of strain on every woman’s shoulders:

When you’re 17 to 25, people ask you why you haven’t got a boyfriend yet.

When you’re 25 to 30, people ask you why you’re still not in a serious relationship, why you’re still unengaged and unmarried.

When you’re 30 to 35, people ask you why you’re not pregnant and not having at least one child yet.

When you’re over 35, most people think your life is kind of over and those ovulating days will soon become a distant memory if you’re not rushing to get married and get pregnant right here and right now.

While, actually, getting it all – partner, marriage, children – is a choice and not everyone gets there at the same time.

These are the standards. And standards, sometimes, can be ruthless and extremely stressing.

J & I got married when we were pretty young – we were both 23. And as soon as we got married, the classic peer pressure question started popping from nosy people: families, family friends, even strangers: “Why aren’t you having a baby yet?”

When I got pregnant for the first time last year, I had just gone off the birth control pill I had been taking for years. And I miscarried. It was dreadful, very dreadful. Six months later, I got pregnant again and miscarried again – the experience was even more dreadful than the first one.

And after that, we kind of gave up trying too hard. We just wanted a baby, but I put no more target on my mind. We thought, the baby would come when the time would be right.

But somewhere deep down, I was haunted by the question of infertility. Am I infertile? Can I ever be a mother? Can we ever conceive? I was scared. Secretly and silently scared. What if I could not have a child? What if I was barren?

Meanwhile, around me, my friends, cousins, also went about their lives, and I found out that I wasn’t the most miserable one, that the infertility question was silently cried in their hearts, too. Some louder than the others.

A cousin, married since almost a decade, now in her mid 30s, lost her uterus to some uterine fibroids/myomata and uterine polyps/cysts. She was devastated. She has always loved children and had wanted one badly for years and years…with no results. She still keeps this a secret, but I know, and I would never tell her I know. Because I understand how stressing a life with constant pity from others would be. And all my heart goes to her.

Another cousin, also in her mid 30s, was diagnosed with uterine fibroids and also cysts, but she was too afraid to undergo the operation and the treatment that will follow afterward. Her mother booked her the appointment with the best specialist in town three months ago, and the day she was supposed to check in at the hospital, she backed out because she was too afraid, too terrified to cope with a possibility of infertility. She didn’t want to hear the obgyn telling her that they would have to take her uterus out or that she could never ever have any blood descendants. Until now, she still insists on not being operated and all my heart also goes to her.

But if there are women who truly deserve to have children, yet they couldn’t, there are the ones that don’t deserve having any progeny. Because they want children due to sheer selfishness. Sheer envy. And this is clearly not a good reason to have any offspring. And these women are not just jealous, but bitterly enraged. Let me tell you about one of these stories.

I made a promise with myself not to talk about the perpetrators of these stories anymore, because hate only brings hate and the last thing I need for the sake of the baby is hate, but some days we need to leash out. And this is one of those days.

The jealous old witch and her fantasy life

One, is 36 but tells everyone she’s 32 or 33. Disgustingly sacked by her ex two years ago (he dumped her for a girl, not prettier but ten years younger), since then she has been collecting pieces of her broken heart in the fantasy world she creates herself. She is not a beauty, no, nature has not been kind enough toward her in granting her that point. But she didn’t seem stupid and she was quite a nice companion at that time.

I appreciated her, I thought she was a nice friend, she had been through this hard breakup, and she’s struggling to make ends meet. I noticed a strange thing about her, which was, she always bragged about splurging money, buying this and that, but twice, she asked me to lend her a sum of Rp 100,000 because she had nothing in her bank account and some other days borrowed little cash here and there – I never minded. We were friends. But my husband noticed that and told me he didn’t understand why she had to brag about all the pricey treats she got if she didn’t even have any money? It didn’t make sense. Then she started acting strangely. Growing distant – I asked her what happened, she ignored me. And little by little, she started showing some seeds of envy toward us.

Then one day, she just couldn’t restrain her jealousy anymore and started her campaign in hating me.  We cut off ties and after that, she just can’t help spying me, noting each and every thing we buy, and then does her act of mimicking it in her own so-called grandeur.

The day we bought the iPad, the next day she had to tweet that she will buy at least 2 iPads. The day we bought the iMac for the office, she tweeted that she will buy also a bigger iMac for herself.  When she found out that J bought me an Hermès Kelly watch to go with the old, black Birkin I inherited from family, she had to have her say that she thought Hermès was for nouveaux-riches and that she would buy a Patek-Philippe worth 10 times my Kelly instead. When she found out we were about to buy an apartment, she said that she was going to buy a bigger and better one for twice the price. When she found out we were going to exchange our car with a bigger one to accommodate the upcoming baby, she said that she would buy two cars.

But none of that never happens. Until now, she still lives in her tiny house far away from all civilization, she still takes ojeks everywhere, she hasn’t bought any of the things she said she would buy just to beat us – and she still asks some common friends to lend her little sums of cash – Rp 50,000, Rp 100,000 – does that make me think I am better than her? No – I just think that she must have an enormous burden of having to cope in that imaginary world of hers…

And that is plain sad. Plain pathetic.

She lives in a fantasy world about guys who are supposed to be crazy, head over heels about her, only that these guys don’t exist. Well, they exist, but they don’t give a sh*t about her. She teaches these guys Indonesian Bahasa and daydreams that all of them are totally deeply madly in love with her – but they actually aren’t. At all. There aren’t that many Gaulois in Jakarta and they know each other, I accidentally found a common acquaintance with one of the guys that she baptized Greek God, and I learnt the truth. She also fantasizes (and has been, for nearly a year) about J’s little brother, who turned 23 last month (Oh, won’t she feel like a paedophile?? I’ve known J’s little brother ever since he was 16 and totally think he’s also my baby brother). This list about guys who are supposedly in love with her goes on and on forever.

This is endless. When she knew I was pregnant, she vomited horrendous things about me, and then she decided she wanted a baby, too. Then when I knew we were expecting a girl, she had to find out and told everyone “baby girls suck, boys are better” and that she was going to have a boy.  And when she found out that we were going to have Silver Cross Surf, she googled to know what it was and decided she wanted a more expensive stroller.

And even though she is flaming in her baby-making project, she is still single and struggling to have a life. She doesn’t date anyone and with her picky, drama queen attitude, I don’t think she will ever get laid anywhere soon. And yet she puts a swaggering display of baby-papa-drama every week on her social pages, by repeating that she wants a baby but she wants to be a single mother because men only bring troubles (yet, she contradicted herself in her previous act of damning “baby girls suck, boys are better”) so she wants a guy to impregnate her and then just leave her alone, because she “can raise the baby alone, without the douche-bag father”.

And she does all this just to get even with me. To be in my league. To compete with me.

But a baby, a child, is not a tool for competition. A child is a responsibility. Not a toy. Not a thing to express your jealousy. Not a thing to be sacrificed because you hate someone. A child should not be conceived as an act of selfishness, a fake bravado, but as an act of love.

I don’t hate her anymore, even though sometimes I feel like I do. I pity her. Because that is not a life I would want for myself neither would I wish for my loved ones at her age.

She lives in a dream world she creates herself, constantly lying to herself, putting a happy façade, a poker-face attitude trying to impress people. Spending her life in constant lies. Going to sleep every night thinking that she finally had nothing to be proud of, nothing to be happy about, and that she drove people away because of her unpleasantness. Her constant need to hate.

And even though she hates me so much, I know deep down she wants all I have. Because Abel was killed by Caïn not because Caïn hated Abel, but because Caïn was jealous. Extremely jealous. And Caïn couldn’t stand the feeling of being inferior – just like nobody else does.

I wish her the very best in achieving her goal of conceiving a baby, but I also wish that she would see the world in the right angle and realize that having a child is not just about getting level with other people, especially the ones that you hate – and if she wants to have a baby, it should be because she finally found someone she could envisage a future with, not a “douche-bag father” like she said.

And thus I learnt that, trying to conceive can be about love and hope, but also about envy, jealousy and sheer selfishness.

Well yesss, I am back from the second visit to the obgyn.

So actually our tiny darling pea is 6 weeks and 1 day old, not 7 weeks as I previously thought.

There are two methods in determining your pregnancy age, the first one is: counting the pregnancy age from the first day of your last menstrual period. If that was the case then it should be 8 weeks – I mistakenly thought that it should be counted from the last day of my period, giving it 7 weeks.

But it is, based on the USG results, actually 6 weeks and 1 day old.

So based on that, my estimated delivery due date is 1 August 2011 (!!!!!!). I actually thought it would be like, end of August? Or even early September. But no, it’s the first of August. A summer baby.

And I just realized one thing, one thing that has just made my heart beat like a crazy drum: 1 August was actually the date on which we met. Is it a coincidence? I guess it is. But a lucky date? I guess it is, too.

Seven years and a baby – summer 2011 would be a great summer for both of us.