So the baby’s started doing these little stretches. I can feel him pushing against one side of my belly, because a little hard lump presses up, and when I put my hand there and gently examine this little knot in my abdomen, he decides, “Don’t touch my head! I am going to the other side.” Half a minute later, he’s back pushing on the side he started out on. Plus I am starting to feel him turning over and over in my tummy… it’s funny. I just smile when he gets up to this stuff.
Oh yeah, and the belly is seriously starting to swell. I’ve got a bump for real. It’s weird, because when I look at my naked belly it doesn’t seem that big, but when I put on clothes, it seems far more prominent. I wonder why that is? I am just amazed. Amazed I tell you. At any rate, Queen Helene’s Cocoa Butter gets a massage into the belly after baths (who am I fooling, no baths in this part of the world… it’s all showers!) and so far, no stretch marks…
I did this Chinese Lunar Calendar test on Pregnancy Weekly, and according to it, this baby is a boy! HA! But we all knew this ent? I’m going to try and get an ultrasound done soon to confirm it for sure, for sure, but in my heart I know this is a boy, I knew it as soon as that EPT came up positive. If it turns out to be a girl, it really will shock everyone me included.
Me… I’m just watching my belly grow with awe. More, now that I can feel him moving around, I’m even more awestruck.
A good friend of mine is going to loan me a real old fashioned crib. My mother says it’s exactly like the crib I had when I was a baby… so it’ll be interesting. She also gave me a small bag of some baby things… and people are saying they’re going to send me stuff. Which is good, because you know doing this and being unemployed is really stressful. Trying to figure out how to afford all of this is pressure, oui? Pressure to add to pressure.
I am still struggling with a lot of emotional responses to the things that have happened to me in the last few months. I suppose I feel better… at least I am not weeping in anger and frustration any more; my anger is for the most part under control. It’s kind of a slow burn, rather than a raging hormone induced conflagration.
This baby’s father is working hard on being a deadbeat. He still refuses to make any effort whatsoever to do the right thing and is determined not to support me or the baby. I guess this is one of the things I’m really struggling with. How someone who professes to be a ‘good man’, an ‘honourable man’ could screw and make a child and feel no responsibility towards the baby? I mean how could he have cried down so many black men for making babies and not taking care of them, and not actually take care of his child? I mean the baby didn’t do him anything. To be truthful, neither did I, but you know, why cause the baby to suffer because of what happened between he and I?
The thing that bothers me most, is that when Dayo is born, and grows and starts to ask me questions. I cannot lie to him. When he asks me, “Why doesn’t my Daddy love me?”, “Why doesn’t my Daddy come and look for me?”, “Where is my Daddy?” I don’t know if I can lie to him, but know I’ll have to kind of fudge the truth a little, because I don’t want him to grow up hating his father. Yet I know I’ll have to be honest with him, I can’t lie and say it’s because of this or that. To be honest, the father’s behaviour, while typical of a certain kind of man, is still a mystery to me. Maybe a part of me doesn’t want to believe that he could be so cruel to his only son.
I know what that feels like. To be constantly in pain because my father didn’t care about me enough to come and see about me. I know what it is to have a father who never contributed anything to my upkeep or upbringing. I know the kind of stuff I had to struggle with when I came of age… and you know I didn’t want that for my children. I think one of the reasons I have been so angry, is because Dayo’s father professed to be so different. To be one of those men who take care of his children no matter what.
It comes to a point where it’s like choosing to let the father off the hook, or choosing to fight for his recognition of the child; and it’s a hard choice to make.
I guess in a lot of ways, I’m just trying to understand the depths of the man’s hypocrisy. Crying down black men left and right for abandoning their children, and doing exactly that. Worse, claiming Orisa spirituality and doing that? Shucks, where I come from man who don’t mind they children does suffer, oui? It just throws me that for all his intelligence, all his claims of spirituality and high understanding, that he doesn’t seem able to grasp that simplest of spiritual concepts.
I’ve seen it with my own father. He has five children and didn’t take care of one; disrespected the mothers of all his children and he is suffering right down to the grave with no relief. After getting to know my father as an adult, I know my father is riddled with regrets for the way he did things, never mind he has a thousand excuses why.
So in a way, I wish I could spare Dayo the confusion of not having a father who gives a shit about him, and spare the fucked up individual who impregnated me the suffering that will come from ignoring his son.
I guess you can want something, but life doesn’t always give you what you want. Certainly I wanted a baby, but you know a lot of the circumstances around this pregnancy was not how I envisaged it was going to be. I suppose there is little I can do about it now. I wanted a father for my boy, but not if it meant I had to stay in an abusive situation. I would NEVER want my son to see me mistreated by his father. I would never want my son to think that’s the way a man is supposed to treat a woman. I want my son to understand that putting your hands on a woman is unacceptable and the only way to do that is to not accept it and explain to him why.
:sigh: I guess in some ways I hope he won’t miss what he doesn’t know. And at the rate his father is going, he’ll never know him. All I can do is love Dayo enough for two parents.
So besides worrying about the effect of not having a father that looks out for him is going to have on this baby, I am for the most part starting to take some pleasure in being pregnant and starting to come to grips with it all.
The nausea is gone, and although I’m still getting headaches and dizzy spells, and still get very tired very suddenly I’m feeling more comfortable all around. I’m also getting little aches and pains across my lower abdomen… not cramps, just I think the muscles there are softening and stretching. The only other amazing thing to me is the amount of times I urinate in any given day. It’s just unbelieveable. I mean, I’m sure it’s between twenty and thirty times a day. It’s as though my bladder just cannot tolerate anything in it.
At least I am getting loads of sleep. I am usually down for the count before 9pm and sleep (don’t watch the three or four bathroom runs in the middle of the night) until sometime between 2am or 4am. Then I’m up for an hour or so, and then sleep for another few hours until about 7am. Sometime between 10.30 and 11.30 I literally fall out of consciousness for a couple of hours. My body just shuts down for a couple of hours.
So there you go… my report for the week.
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