The Belly That Ate New York

I've long maintained that I wasn't going to be ready to actually have the baby until my belly reached the ridiculous stage. Sadly, I was unaware that one could progress from ridiculous to sublimely absurd, which is about where I am now. What I don't understand is why I have to be pregnant in my ass as well.

Steven and I are not large people, and yet I seem to be about to give birth to a linebacker. Which leads to all sorts of speculation about what kind of other genetic anomalies my future child could be sporting.

This kid is so big that when he moves around now my entire belly along with all of my internal organs shake, at which point I can't help but wonder what the hell he's still doing in utero. Clearly he is big enough to be on the outside so why doesn't he just get a move on already?

And even though I have had nine months to get used to the idea that in the near future there will be a third person living in this narrow Brooklyn apartment, it still seems utterly inconceivable. How can there possibly be a person where now there is air and an empty crib? And the permanence of it is terrifying - there is no sending the kid back once he gets here.

My hormones, and therefore my emotions, have been stampeding all over the map during the past few weeks, as I vacillate between excitement, terror and sheer exhaustion. Which means that quite frequently I will burst into tears or yell at Steven for something that only hours later seems completely absurd. A sampling of things I have gone completely batshit about in recent days:

• The fact that Steven insists on removing the hair trapping drain thingy from the shower whenever he takes a shower.
• The two large dust bunnies that sat in the hallway for a week until I accused Steven of not helping out at all and leaving all the cleaning up to me, and doesn't he understand that I am physically incapable at this point of bending over and picking things up from the floor? And what kind of dirty, disgusting dust-collecting household are we bringing this baby into anyway?
• When he said he wasn't interested in reading the opening chapters of What To Expect The First Year until after the baby came home I sobbed hysterically that he was clearly planning on having me doing all the childcare and leaving everything up to me and I can't do it all, and you tell me what you're supposed to do when the baby cries and how you know when to change his diaper and by the way did you NOT see the dust bunnies in the hall?
• And finally, my tearful breakdown over the fact that I was having a tearful breakdown over dust bunnies and therefore had clearly lost my mind.

Oh, I'm a joy alright.

But the thing about Steven is that when I begin to act like our marriage is over because of the dust bunnies, he doesn't say back to me, no, our marriage is over because you are a crazy lunatic. He says, I'll pick up the dust bunnies and I don't need to read What To Expect The First Year because I actually paid attention and took notes in our Newborn Care class and if it's really that important I won't move the shower drain hair trapping thingy.

And then he follows through. He cleans the hallway and makes me dinner and cleans the kitchen and fluffs the living room pillows. When I apologize a few hours or days or sometimes even weeks later he just laughs as though he's been patiently waiting for me to return to the land of normal and now that I have it's kind of cute and endearing. I don't know how he puts up with me. I would have told myself to fuck off long ago.