I heard a lot about the emotional volatility of pregnancy but wasn't really experiencing such until this weekend. It was as though a freight train barreled through our home and it wasn't pretty. Sweets and I were fighting, I was crying, it just didn't end. By midday sunday things were back to some degree of normal, but I don't suppose they'll really return to normal ever. Because, you see, when I have my body back I will also have a baby.

I have to confess, there are days when I wonder to myself "what have I done??" This is a big change in my otherwise peaceful life and I think I should have room to consider the loss of my non-mom self.

There are people in my life who like to rejoice in their telling me about how my life is now made meaningful by the birth of a child. My life is now more whole because I will have been responsibile for initiating an entirely new beginning. These people even go so far as to imply that my life had no meaning before baby. I resent the party line. I resent the implication that I wasn't a whole woman or a realized person prior to conception. I refuse to believe that my own biologic ability to suffer nine (ten) months through a pregnancy and birth automatically enrolls me in the whole woman club. Seriously. Does this mean that I am less of a person than the sixteen year old crack addict because she has three babies and I am on my way to having just one? (I don't wish to downplay the individuality of any other person by the way, I'm just using age and lifestyle decisions to draw a comparison.)

So a lot of this sort of stuff came out over the weekend. And then there was the discussion of the realization that I most probably won't be terribly wealthy in this lifetime. I will do good work and I am satisfied with that, but I won't be able to send my kids to summer camp in the south of france each year. When reality meets fantasy, there will be tears. Or maybe it's when reality meets pregnancy there will be tears.

And then there is Thanksgiving. Last year sweets and I spent the entire four day weekend shuffling from one family to another. Neither of us was happy with the arrangement and we felt that it was time to stop making our multiple sets of divorced parents happy and time to work on our own family. Because we don't want to end up divorced, you know? So we decided to make Thanksgiving OUR holiday. His parents and my parents can fight over who spends the winter holiday with us, but we get thanksgiving to celebrate our own little family. It seemed like a good decision at the time.

But now that the turkey is ordered and the menu is planned, our relatives have decided to try at a second round of changing our minds. Maybe they never believed that we would actually follow through. So my father has decided to take the "can't beat 'em, join 'em" style of negotiating and has invited himself to our dinner. This is only a small problem because we only ordered enough turkey for two people. But he has taken it a step further by inviting my little sister and my step sister to stay in our little apartment over that weekend. Yay?

Meanwhile, I am getting the impression that sweets never told his mom the absolute reason we're not attending their dinner. I think he told her we were going to spend the day in New York with my friend instead. Granted, this was an early plan. But plans change and we stuck by our original plan to spend the day as a nuclear family. She wasn't told. So when I emailed her on Saturday to ask her if she had any special recipes she might share with me so I can make my sweets happy, she didn't respond. No- instead she emailed sweets and asked him again to join her in Providence for the day. She waited a day before writing me back with a short and snippy "I don't know what he likes. Why don't you ask him?" (well, duh. I did ask him, which I said in my email to you!)

Soooo, my mother in law and I are on very thin ice these days. Sweets and I are recovering from a weekend of fighting. My father is coming to visit and he's bringing a flock with him. And I just can't stop crying. this is going to be great!