Awkwardness

This is me, 16 weeks pregnant. As I said, we missed 15 weeks. I really don’t like the head part of this picture. My face looks so weird! I look like a cartoon character, I think. I look much better straight on when I don’t have a fake smile on my face. Anyway, it’s for the belly, so I’m not going to obsess.

There are a number of things getting more awkward as this pregnancy advances. I’m hitting my huge boobs on doorways because I’ve misjudged how much room is there. I’ve heard pregnant women do this with their bellies later on, but it’s already happening to me. With boobs. Last night in the mall with my bf (*LOL…this really should read bFf. No. I don’t have a boyfriend in addition to the husband*) I dropped my half-full cup of root beer when I tried to put it in the cupholder of her stroller. In the middle of Forever 21. So I had to go over and tell someone what I’d done. I really wanted to blame it on the pregnancy, which I think is halfway true anyway, but I have always been a klutz. I can’t blame it on another person now just because he or she is adding to it right now.

Okay, and also adding to last night’s awkwardness: the obligatory conversation with the ex-boyfriend right there in Meatheads (which is amazing, by the way) in Schaumburg with Bethany and Zion sitting across from me. The (still very eccentric, I must say) ex-boyfriend who MARRIED the girl he dated before me to whom he was so mean while he and I were dating and with whom the two of us had a film class together. She actually worked on my film, bless her. I don’t think I would have been woman enough for that. Just for the record, I objected pretty strenuously to the way he reported treating her both before and during the time we got together. He must have changed a lot since then…

Anyway, this meeting was not quite so awkward as last year’s accidental meeting. I guess it was wierd that after hearing Zion’s name he still wasn’t sure if Zion was a boy or girl and the main wierd thing that is always wierd in those moments which is: everyone in this room knows what we did together and now we’re all married to someone else – in fact, I’m carrying someone else’s child. Shudder. LAST year, Henry, Johannah and I walked down to Tate’s Ice Cream in Wheaton on a Friday night little knowing it was some kind of summerfest. So what we thought would be a quiet stroll and a sit on a dark bench with ice cream was actually a raucous party in the streets. I saw him before he spotted us and thought; “Urgh, if we don’t see each other at the same time then you don’t have to come over here…we can all just pretend we don’t know each other.” But he was always interested in retaining some kind of connection; like that was the right thing to do somehow…I don’t understand it either. So he saw me and came over with his wife and they stood across the sidewalk from our bench. Awkward conversation ensued. And THEN…our THERAPIST, our COUPLES THERAPIST walks unknowingly right in between us and the awkwardness quotient goes up exponentially. So, there’s the fact that Ex and I dated, right?, and the fact that he and my sister knew each other from then which is wierd for his wife along with the fact that she was right there the entire time we dated and he no doubt told her all of the gory details about everything. Then there’s Henry, who knows it all too and is still a little mad about some of it – let’s be honest – and he’s trying to be nice to Ex and we’re all trying to look good to each other and do the RIGHT THING. THEN, we see our therapist who doesn’t know if we are cool with greeting him in public or not so we have to decide to initiate conversation with him – which we do because a) we like him and feel a lot more comfortable with him than with ANYTHING ELSE going down around us and because b) I discover I’ve had his daughter who is right next to him in gymnastics classes. So WE have to introduce him to my sister as our therapist – the last thing you want to just come out and divulge to your ex and his spouse…am I right? Even if seeing said therapist says nothing about the state of your marriage – even if it says GOOD things about the state of your marriage, which it does. And Steve our therapist doesn’t know my Ex and his wife are standing there, so he’s standing in the middle chatting to Henry and Johannah obliviously. I wished I could squirm myself down between the cracks of the bench and behind Henry’s back.

Thanks be to God we have not had these encounters often. I’m just over it. I say, what’s done is done. I care about your life, you care about mine, but let’s keep it in the abstract okay?