TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 177

[Tobie Shapiro]

March 12, 20000007


Dear deep in my bones,

	It's Alex again.  Feyna's friend, Alex. 
He and Natalie (and Feyna makes the threesome) 
are planning a trip to Tijuana.  When are they 
planning it?  On Passover.  Feyna wants to go. 
But of course she doesn't have the money for 
plane fare, and she asked to borrow it.  I told 
her she already owes me close to a hundred fifty 
dollars and I'm not loaning her any more, 
especially to go the Mexico when she should be 
helping make the Passover meal.  We're having 
something like seventeen people over.  Oh, Feyna 
went up and down about how she would try to get 
back by the afternoon of the big family Seder. 
But the first night, which is the most important, 
is on the 2nd, and she's not planning on being 
back until the 3rd.  I told her her place is with 
her family.  And besides I'm not loaning her 
money.  She thought maybe my mother would.  I 
told her she wouldn't.  She even went into trying 
to convince me because Alex had gone to such 
trouble to try to get reservations and work it so 
that Feyna could go with them.  He may have spent 
hours.  I was unimpressed.  I told her I didn't 
care what work Alex had put into it.  It had 
nothing to do with him.  Why don't you care? She 
asked.  Why?  She was belligerent.  But I was 
pretty stiff myself.

	Not on Passover.  No.  And not so that 
the whole task of cooking for seventeen people is 
left up to my mother who will be 87 and me.

	But I may never get a chance to go to 
Tijuana again with them.  Also, Alex, it seems, 
HAS to go to Tijuana for some reason.  He lived 
in Mexico for five years, speaks fluent Spanish. 
But why does he HAVE to go there?  Can anyone 
tell me this?

	And tomorrow is Feyna and Meyshe's birthday.  Whoopie.




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Pregnant with twins

	I've heard that every pregnancy is 
different, but I've had only one and it was not 
easy.  They tagged me as a high risk pregnancy on 
several counts.  First was my age.  I was almost 
thirty nine when I conceived.  Next was the fact 
that it was twins.  That always complicates 
things.  Wait.  There's more.  I had chronic 
urinary tract problems, was prone to bladder 
infections that backed up into my kidneys giving 
me pyelonephritis, and I was allergic to a broad 
spectrum of antibiotics.  There were only a few I 
could take, and none of the ones I could take 
orally was good for a kidney infection.  This 
meant that if the pregnancy should put pressure 
on the urinary tract, which it was guaranteed to 
do, in such a way that it resulted in a bladder 
infection which in turn backed up into my 
kidneys, I would be in the hospital taking I.V.s 
of some antibiotic to which I was not allergic. 
They would watch over my pregnancy very 
carefully, because they didn't want to lose me or 
the babies.

	That created a pretty grim back drop. 
But for the first couple months or so, I was 
positively giddy as a school girl.  I was 
laughing, acting up, doing the things that little 
girls do to amuse themselves, like swinging my 
legs when I was sitting on a bench, doing silly 
dances, making faces, squirming with pleasure. 
It was remarkable.  I felt like a cartoon, 
bouncing around ecstatically, my arms and legs so 
loose it felt like they might unhinge and run 
away by themselves.  David didn't know how to 
deal with this because he required a certain 
amount (a deadly amount) of decorum.  There was 
no decorum in my first trimester.

	I did get cravings.  Odd cravings.  I 
started heating up a glass of milk, a green 
plastic glass on a thick stem, in the microwave. 
Then I'd stir honey and vanilla into it.  This 
was the most delicious thing I'd ever tasted. 
But it needed a balance.  It was sweet.  I needed 
salt.  So I'd buy gallon jars of Clausen half 
kosher dill pickles and I'd fish one out of the 
jar, wrap it up in a paper towel and stand there 
in the doorway to the bedroom drinking my honey 
milk and eating my crispy, garlicky, salty 
pickle.  Then one pickle was not enough.  I 
wrapped two pickles in the paper towel.  Soon the 
two didn't do it, and I was standing in the 
doorway with a big glass of warm honey milk in my 
right hand and three Clausen half kosher dill 
pickles wrapped in a paper towel in the other. 
It took a while before it dawned on me that, 
except for the temperature, I was eating pickles 
and ice-cream.

	Then came the fat craving.  Meat fat: 
the ribbon of fat on the outside of a lamb chop, 
the fat imbedded in a prime rib of beef, the 
layers of fat enclosed in a good piece of tripe. 
Not oil, not butter, but fat.  I'd hang over my 
prime rib when we went out to dinner and admonish 
David, "Better look away now.  I'm going to eat 
the fat."  He'd wince and turn his head while I 
sliced up the slab of hot fat, as if it were a 
pie, and chewed on it, tasting whatever it was my 
craving demanded I taste, before swallowing it 
all down.  "Eating for three," I'd say, wiping 
the grease off my lips.

	There was nausea, too, what is referred 
to as, "morning sickness," but there was no 
specific time when it liked to trespass on my 
day.  Morning, mid morning, late morning, noon, 
early afternoon, mid afternoon, late afternoon, 
early evening, evening and middle of the night 
sickness.  Unfortunately, there was no vomiting 
which might have relieved me some, but from my 
days as a bulimic, I acquired a revulsion at 
vomiting that was worse than the nausea that 
brought it on.  I'd lie there whatever time of 
day it was, trying not to moan.  It might have 
scared David's boys.  There on my back, the tide 
of nausea would rise and recede, rise and recede, 
and then suddenly disappear, being replaced by a 
desire for hot honey milk and pickles.  The 
sickness was short lived in my first trimester, 
way before I began to show.  In fact, I didn't 
look remotely pregnant.  My stomach was flat and 
my breasts hadn't blossomed yet.  No one could 
tell that Feyna and Meyshe were growing inside of 
me: about the size of a walnut, but growing.

	We hadn't told anybody but my parents. 
Until this was a sure and secure pregnancy, we 
didn't want to let the boys know.  They would 
naturally tell their mother, and she would freak 
out in some awful way that would wind up being 
dumped on them, some jealous fit, a new round of 
complaints through her lawyer.  But when the call 
came from the clinic that did the chorionic 
villus biopsy that the twins were both in 
excellent genetic shape, a girl and a boy, we 
announced the news to Alex and Ben.  Alex looked 
like he was going to throw a tantrum.  He was 
thirteen.  Ben, eleven, got up from his chair and 
wandered around the room.  "I can't believe it. 
Somehow I thought everything would always stay 
the same."  Neither was enormously happy about 
this.  A single baby brother or sister would have 
been a huge adjustment.  But twins!  You just 
can't compete for attention with twins.

	We wanted to get married as soon as 
possible, but David's wife was stalling.  There 
was always some piece of financial pettiness in 
the way.  So the lawyers bifurcated the issues. 
All she had to do was to agree to the divorce or 
contest the divorce .  She couldn't very well 
contest it.  She was living with Richard Katz, 
the ex friend of David's, the one with the shit 
eating grin.  I predicted that Vicki would wait 
until the last possible moment, and then sign it. 
I was right.  In September,  right at the 
deadline, she signed the papers.  David went down 
to the courthouse to put his hand on a Bible and 
say, "I don't," and we planned our wedding.  We 
had two weeks.  It was quiet, in my parents' 
living room, with very few guests.  I wore the 
same dress I'd worn at my first wedding with 
Dweller.  I had called him up and asked 
permission.  Yvonne, Earl, Alex and Ben held the 
posts of the Chuppah.  I walked around David 
seven times.  We read our vows to each other.  He 
promised to protect the marriage from the ravages 
of complacency.  (He broke his promise.)

	We planned a honeymoon in Maine.  It was 
early October.  All the inns were filled.  It 
took a while before someone in Maine informed me 
that that was the week of the Fall Foliage 
Festival.  So I had to employ some push, 
something convincing to shoot us to the top of 
the priority list.  As I called each place, I 
didn't know whether to tell them it was our 
honeymoon, or that I was pregnant with twins. 
Which would win us a good room?  Should I also 
tell them that I'd had a miserable childhood? 
Oh, give it a rest.

	David's parents had come down from 
Seattle for the wedding and were staying in 
David's house.  We moved out to the Durant Hotel 
in Berkeley for that night.  We would leave for 
Maine the next morning.  I was four months 
pregnant and not showing.  I crawled into the 
hotel bed and when I tried to lie down on my 
stomach, I felt pressure.  It was as if I'd had a 
skeet ball in my belly.  It was uncomfortable. 
So started the sleeping on my side.

	In the fifth month of my pregnancy I came 
down with a raging kidney infection.  Off to the 
hospital to be pumped full of Gentomycin.  What I 
remember most vividly from my hospital stay was 
the food.  I was in the maternity ward.  The tiny 
little trays of petite meals they served us were 
a joke.  We were all pregnant women.  We could 
and probably should have been eating monumental 
amounts of food.  What's this?  A chicken leg and 
a tablespoon of peas?  One miniature French roll, 
and one pat of butter?  Fie on ye!  What was the 
matter with these people?  I had my family bring 
in contraband food so I could satisfy my hunger, 
which was prodigious.  I felt sorry for my 
starving room mates, most of them further along 
than I was.

	After the kidney infection, the doctors 
watched me like a hawk.  They sent me home with a 
high tech monitor that I strapped to my belly, 
which was becoming round.  Very round.  The 
monitor relayed to the doctors information they 
needed to know about the state of the fetuses: 
the state of my womb address.  What we learned 
from this was that whenever I rose to my feet and 
started running around, I was getting 
contractions.  So to be safe, they had me in a 
wheelchair.  I was not to get up and twirl around 
anymore.  It was okay.  I didn't feel like 
twirling.  My twirling days were done.

	The boys would vie over who would get to 
push the wheelchair.  They both liked to give me 
a shove and then let go on a downhill slope. 
This produced some agitation.  They'd wait until 
the last moment to run ahead, grab onto the 
handles of the wheelchair and bring the thing to 
a stop before I got tossed out into an 
intersection.  They thought this was great fun. 
It filled me with anxiety.

	The name of the game, in fact, was 
anxiety.  Legal grenades were being lobbed from 
Vicki's half of the court.  And personal time 
bombs.  She told the boys that they didn't love 
her.

	"Yes, we do, Mom!"

	"No, you don't.  If you love them, then 
you don't love me, and if you don't love me, then 
I don't love you."

	This was dynamite.  There was havoc in 
the home.  New custody grenades, new 
psychological bombs.  My blood pressure went up. 
My nerves were shot.  I was being pressed to the 
limit.  Daily recountings of the news from the 
lawyer was my bread and butter.  As I'd been 
giddy in the first months of being pregnant, now 
I was in tears, angstful, distraught.  What kind 
of family was I bringing my twins into?  Both 
boys were at war with me for having upset the 
balance.  My gynecologist told me to leave the 
scene.  Get away from the stress.  Go stay with a 
friend.  I had no friend that I could stay with. 
I moved in with my parents.  A different kind of 
stress.

	In my seventh month, huge, over huge, a 
beach ball with twigs sticking out of it, we 
bought a bigger house and moved into it.  It was 
the easiest move I ever made.  Everyone else did 
all the work.  I just sat in my wheelchair 
saying, "Put it over there."  And the last months 
of my fascinating pregnancy were spent lolling on 
my left side with a pillow between my knees, 
watching old reruns of night time soap operas, 
trying to rise to a standing position, walking 
with a cane inside the house and being wheeled in 
a wheelchair outside.  I was bursting.  I was 
ready.  I was done.  But no signs of labour 
arrived.  The twins were late.  Late for twins: 
thirty nine and a half weeks, when twins are 
generally expected at thirty six weeks.  I was 
truly and properly huge.  I was frightening to 
behold, a skinny little woman with a mound of 
clay mounted on her belly the size of a planet. 
It took two able bodied men to pull me out of a 
chair.

	The C-section could not have come too 
soon.  Meyshe and Feyna, their legs and arms 
tangled together, were lifted from my sliced 
planet and cried their first cry of realization 
at 8:00 and 8:01 on Friday morning the thirteenth 
of March.  I was green.  A photograph taken of me 
after the delivery showed me to be green.



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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net