Archimedes Inside and Out:
Chronicle of a Pregnancy
by Yumiko Shinoda
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Part 3: Tapeworms and the Unknown
Month 4
I'm not completely convinced I'm pregnant. One pregnancy website has space devoted to a "Belly Gallery," and compared to the women who actually send in pictures of their guts, I look like a Slim Fast diet in progress. I don't feel an urgent need to be enormous like the girls of the Belly Gallery, but the disparity makes me skeptical about whether this pregnancy thing is real.
Comments from random people encourage my doubts. Like the masseuse with a sweet Texas drawl who gave me a prenatal massage and said, "Are you sure you're pregnant? You totally don't look like it!" That was jet fuel for my suspicious imagination.
I can explain away almost all my pregnancy symptoms. First, I may have gained weight because I'm stuffing my body with disgustingly healthy dark leafy greens, and the occasional Krispy Kreme doughnut. The ensuing food comas easily explain my temporary narcolepsy as well.
What's more, I haven't had any typically odd cravings like chocolate-covered kumquats or peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. Apparently pregnant women want stuff they don't normally crave. Sadly for me, that means I now have longings for gin and tonics, cigars, and Cheetos. Mmmm. That definitely doesn't sound like any fetal survival instinct kicking in.
Third, the whole situation requires placing a lot of faith in technology. At the very beginning, an innocuous blue strip on a plastic stick announced Archimedes' impending arrival. How do I know if those things are accurate? I should have gotten another pregnancy stick and made my husband Liam try it to see if he could make it turn blue too. Who knows? It could have! And while I was at it, I should have tried it with a diet Coke or chicken soup too.
Fourth, the mood swings have gone away. Perhaps the tight pants I was vainly trying to squeeze into were the source of my grumpiness. Bizarre dreams still pepper my sleep, but I'm assigning full blame for those on to The Book, which causes massive anxiety and stress in both my waking and subconscious minds. Anyway, those problems have been solved because The Book is now making itself useful by propping up a lopsided bookcase in my study, and I have acquired a nice collection of elastic waistband sweatpants.
It's a bit harder to explain the first ultrasound, which looked like a blurry NASA probe photo. But really, the ultrasound technician could have shown me my kneecap and I would have blindly believed her. For all I know, she could show the same blurry video to everyone, and no one would be the wiser.
Archimedes' heartbeat is pretty compelling. Even so, it could be a heartbeat on tape…or… it could be a tapeworm! A tapeworm would also explain why I'm able to eat more. My husband thinks this theory is totally stupid, even offensive. But hey, I'm just considering the possibilities.
My doctor thinks this is all funny enough, except she lectured me about gin and tonics and cigars. I told her I had belly envy. She laughed and said I could very well get stoned to death by a horde of emotional pregnant ladies if I said that out loud in her waiting room. (I bet they're still reading The Book.)
My doctor also said that I'll probably feel "more" pregnant after the second ultrasound, the one that lets us see if the baby is a boy or a girl…and then she asked whether or not we wanted that information. Are you kidding me? Of course! Absolutely! Giddyup! For me, not finding out would be like turning off the air conditioner in the middle of a Houston summer: senseless torture.
Liam wasn't sure whether he wanted to know or not, but given my inability to keep a secret for more than ten seconds, he wasn't left with much choice on this decision.
Everyone whom I've told about the pregnancy almost immediately takes a guess at the gender. Liam thinks it's a girl. My mom thinks it's a boy. My dad thinks it's a girl. My sister is just psyched for shopping at Baby Gap. And so on and so on. I don't have any real sense one way or the other, especially as I'm still not convinced I'm really pregnant.
Some friends who are recent moms assure me that one can tell the sex from a couple of key things:
- If you are a projectile-vomit-machine in the first trimester, you're likely to have a girl; little-to-no barfing means boy. I had bouts of mild sickness, but they may have been more a function of my stupidity in gulping down a big glass of calcium fortified orange juice to load up on vitamins, forgetting that I'd just inhaled a trough full of high protein cereal. What also made me sick was my super keen sense of smell; I was like an olfactory Aqua Man, but I smelled any and all garbage within twenty nautical miles. Especially banana peels.
- Girls are said to sit lower in the belly and be wide, whereas boys sit up higher and cause the belly to resemble a large, firm basketball. I can't tell a thing from my barely existent, mushy belly.
- No one had theories on dreams, but I have had some disturbing vivid and strange ones about Archimedes' sex. In one, I dreamt an eleven-pound, one-ounce girl just fell out of me — four months early — because it was so freaking enormous. In another, I dreamt that I was a cocktail waitress (not likely) and drank a very cold Budweiser (which I hate) from the bottle (would never happen) with Doug Flutie (who has always sucked rocks) arguing that the Canadian Football League was underrated (yeah, whatever!). While I was mocking him, I went into premature labor, which lasted about ten seconds. I was then handed a bundle of white blankets and a very small baby boy, who was a rather unfortunate shade of bright safety orange due to a Cheeto binge in the first trimester. I'm not sure what any of this means, other than I will probably need large doses of therapy in the near future.
On top of all of this and despite my overriding skepticism, I'm massively worried that all the stupid things I did before I knew I was pregnant — trying to sweat off ten pounds in the steam room, eating diet Coke and pretzel dinners — may leave permanent scars on this total innocent. Plus there was all that stupid stuff I did in high school. And college. And then there was that incident in Tokyo a few years back. I'm hoping hard that Archimedes (or Archimedea) is alive, kicking, and healthy. And not a tapeworm. 
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