#73, 11 ways you're screwed (also hi)
Months and months passed, oops. We took the kids to California, including two days in Disneyland. I went to yoga pretty regularly. I bought some Madewell jeans, liked them enough that I bought a second pair. Got more Botox. Went to a moms weed party. Did some work I was proud of. Things were kind of chugging along in an okay and normal way, do you see where I am going with this?
On June 6, I published a story about how, precisely, The Atlantic is putting more women in charge. It seemed like a pretty feel-good, easy story, but that afternoon Twitter and then the wider press seized on something that Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg said in the interview about women and 10,000-word cover stories. On Then on Twitter Goldberg claimed I had misquoted him. I hadn’t (also, I had recorded the interview). In another part of the interview, which though it was on the record I hadn’t quoted in the published story because I’d feared it would be misconstrued and make him look bad, he had told me it was “really surprising” to him that any mother who worked for him would ever be afraid to come tell him that she had to leave work to do something for her kid.
“Obviously something in the culture has created a kind of sheepishness around this subject and I’m a little bit confused about why,” he said.
But it can’t really be surprising to you, I said. You realize why women don’t want to talk about their kids at work, right? He said yes no of course I get it and then later he said no well actually I don’t get it, I actually am surprised by it, I love kids, I would be totally happy to have babies around at work.
When I got home that night, I put the kids to bed and prepared to settle down on Twitter with a bottle of wine, but first I took a very old pregnancy test that I had. It seemed actually impossible that it would come back positive, but my ears had been feeling really strange and clogged and my stomach was suddenly unusually flat like all the water had been sucked out of my body, and I just wanted to make sure. I took the test without looking at it and was about to throw it away when I noticed that it was positive. I went back downstairs, opened the bottle of wine, poured some into a glass and then insanely dumped the entire bottle down the drain and was unable to sleep for the rest of the night. That’ll show you, I thought. (You being me, me for thinking things were figured out.)
In the first couple weeks, I read a lot of mom blog content about being pregnant with a third. 7 Ways Your Third Pregnancy Is Different From The First, 10 Ways, 11 Ways, 6 Ways, I knew it would prepare me for nothing, that I was consuming junk, but I could not picture how this was going to go and so I was scraping for something, anything.
All of the lists were the same. You thought you were fat the first time? You’re going to get so, so fat this time. You already can’t button your pants; who knows if this pregnancy’s gonna stick but you look 40 weeks pregnant RIGHT NOW. Hope you hate sleep since you’re never going to sleep again! You won’t have time to worry since the rest of your life’s already a living hell. God, you’re so old. Good thing you can rely on biology to kick in to make you love it because otherwise, seriously, OOF, ya big fatty.
I’m 18 weeks now and we are having a girl. Here is a difference between the first pregnancy and the third: This time it was literally “click through to find out the sex.” When I was trying to get pregnant with Alice I kept having the urge to go online and find out if I was pregnant. Six years later that was basically possible: I got a blood test on a Tuesday and the following Wednesday I received an email that was basically a paragraph about Down syndrome being unlikely and then a clickbait slideshow that ultimately ends with your baby’s sex.
I can sometimes feel her moving now. I went to Austin with some friends this weekend and in a restaurant I saw a woman’s gigantic bare pale shoulder (via a kind of shoulderless shirt that is not seen in Cambridge) and I immediately registered this shoulder as a newborn’s head and thought LOOK AT THAT TINY BABY! A good sign, or certainly not a bad one.