Hot bun in the summertime
WHEN I FIRST got pregnant, I knew that I would probably feel overheated during the summer months, which conveniently corresponded with my third trimester. But because I had the shivers every few minutes at the beginning, feeling hot was tough to imagine. “Your body is adjusting its temperature,” my doctor explained, with the knowing tone of a Best Buy salesman explaining the features of a self-cleaning convection oven.
I did my best to ignore my inner thermometer until the third week of July, my seventh month of pregnancy, when -- lo and behold -- Mother Nature decided to coordinate the global warming process with the warming process in my body, turning Southern California into a gigantic furnace overnight.
After insisting to friends and strangers alike for weeks that the heat “wasn’t too bad,” suddenly I was soaking through my clothes within minutes of putting them on. I started checking the forecast on Yahoo and planning my movements accordingly, but that proved fruitless because the forecasters consistently underestimated the heat. “High: 94. Currently: 106,” the site would read every afternoon.
It was a regular old heat wave for everyone else, hellfire and damnation for me. When the air conditioning faltered at my doctor’s office, no one around me seemed to notice; meanwhile, I had to lay down on the couch in the waiting room to keep from fainting. At a conference one afternoon, as the temperature outside rose to 111 degrees, the guy next to me turned and asked, without irony, “Does it feel hot in here to you?” Apparently he didn’t notice the fact that I looked like Mike Ditka after three chili dogs, or that my body was radiating more heat than a small forest fire.
“I’m pregnant, actually,” I answered. “To me, it would feel hot on the dark side of the moon.”
“Oh, no wonder you’re glowing!” he said. By “glowing” he obviously meant “big and fat and sweat-drenched and, frankly, disgusting.”
Other friends have been similarly romantic about my state, taking pains to remind me that it’s completely natural for a pregnant woman to feel hot.
I’ve quickly come to resent the whole “natural” concept, either in reference to the walking nuclear reactor that I’ve become or as an excuse for touching my bloated stomach on a blisteringly hot afternoon -- an entirely natural urge, I am assured. “You’re going to be a mama!” one woman yelped when she saw me. “I have to touch your belly!”
“No, please don’t,” I said. But it was too late; her mitt was already planted right in the middle of my personal onboard George Foreman grill.
“So, are you having an epidural or are you going to go the natural route?” she inquired. Of course. It’s always the stomach-molesters who want to talk about the Big Event. In fact, it’s a subject that everyone but me seems to want to discuss ad nauseam.
This time, though, I was agitated enough to reply without hesitation. “I’m having an epidural -- two, if they’ll let me -- because ‘nature’ doesn’t appeal to me. Nature has everything to do with mortal fear and mind-blowing pain and the struggle for survival. I prefer to lean heavily on the miracles of modern medicine. I prefer comfort to nature.”
“But women have been giving birth without painkillers for years,” she said.
“Yes, they have, the poor bastards,” I replied, having heard it a million times before. “And sometimes -- very naturally -- they died gruesome deaths right in the middle of the whole thing!”
Hadn’t any of these women seen one of those epic Chinese dramas in which the hero’s poor mother meets a very bloody, very excruciating end during childbirth? How had such suffering suddenly become idealized as courageous and heroic and not the brutal, nasty mess it so often was?
From the sweltering heat to the kicking squirrel in my belly keeping me up at night, nature doesn’t have a lot to recommend it. Of course, I’m more than happy to be having a kid, but if I could spend the remainder of my pregnancy -- let alone labor itself -- in a drug-addled haze, I would do so in a heartbeat. But this personal-space invader didn’t seem to register my talk of suffering and death. Instead, she rubbed my stomach, gazing dreamily, then murmured, “Isn’t it just amazing? Are you soo excited?” Apparently by “excited” she meant “huge and bloated and covered in a film of perspiration at all times.”
“Yes I am, I’m very excited,” I replied, meaning that I was flushed and itchy and feverish and my head was on fire and, more than anything, I was hoping against hope that the heat wave would end very soon.
