The pregnancy question

Every year around the time that summer turns in to this dark, cold and bleak view outside my window, I convince myself that I am dying of cancer. Most years I am certain it's ovarian cancer because ovarian cancer is considered the "silent killer" which suits my lack of symptoms. This year, after a bad day with an overly tight sports bra, I talked myself in to believing I had boob cancer. I googled "sore boobs" and webMD didn't have any answers for me. If I pointed to the chest area of the symptom guide, it kept assuming that the pain I was experiencing was "chest pain" and telling me to go to the emergency room immediately. I was tempted to actually go. Technically I was having chest pains. But since everything I read was just making me feel inferior to a heart attack, I gave up. But the Internet did not. The Internet decided, without really telling me about it, that I was pregnant. But instead of just coming right out and telling me, it started to drop hints instead. First there was the Old Navy banner advertising maternity clothes. Then there was Target pamphlet that arrived in the mail with coupons for Prenatal vitamins. It went on like this for long enough that I seriously began to wonder if perhaps I was pregnant. I mean yes, my husband had a vasectomy two years ago but he never did go back in after the procedure to check if it worked. And yes I have one of those five year birth control devices but those things don't always work either. And maybe, even though it took us three years to conceive our first child, maybe since then we've developed the kind of reproductive organs that can kick start human life from a simple look. And maybe, even though I was very clearly pregnant when I was pregnant, maybe this time I'm not going to show and I'm going to have one of those secret pregnancies that doesn't reveal itself until I'm sitting on a toilet giving birth one night. And maybe all those months of morning sickness and lethargy during my last two pregnancies have been replaced with a general sense of well being and an energy level that is border line normal. I can't see why not. It's dark outside and I'm stuck inside the house and for the life of me I can't see why I shouldn't take a pregnancy test. So I do. I have these things in my cupboard since my last pregnancy, unable to throw away a $10 top-of-the-range pee stick and now I'm glad I didn't. So I pee on it like I did three years ago and then I wait, which is not my strong suit but I do as I'm told. But, much to my amazement, the line does not show a plus or a pink line or a "pregnant" or whatever the fanciest pee stick is supposed to do and it is then that I start to see how little my chances of being pregnant really are. My boobs were only sore for one day after all. I did just have a period that ended like yesterday. And then as I am starting to feel embarrassed by the chain of events that find me in my bathroom imagining a pregnancy, I catch sight of the expiration date on the pregnancy test and note that the pee stick has passed its expiration date. So, what I'm saying is that maybe I'm pregnant, that's all. But I guess we'll never really know.

Does this shirt make me look pregnant?

Potting

I took a sleeping pill one night and then made the happy mistake of getting online and buying stuff. The next morning it turned out that I had bought myself eight pottery classes for three hours on a Monday night. I thought about canceling just like I think about cleaning the hard to reach windows upstairs and of course never actually did it and promptly forgot all about it. Then Steve came home from work one Monday and gave me this funny look and said, "Is that what you're wearing to your pottery class?"
"Pottery class?" So, I jumped in to my dungarees (this is a clothing blog so I'll tell you that dungarees are exactly what you're supposed to wear when sitting at a potters wheel unless you're planning on being the Patrick Swayze character in Ghost in which case you can go shirtless) and motored to class, leaving my Dearly Beloved in charge of our hysterical two year old and oblivious five year old.

Now to be fair, I have done a pottery class before so I knew what to expect, sort of. Except this time, we had a new teacher who had the people skills of a Customs Officer. Every single thing I said to Margaret (not Maggie, but Margaret) was met with a blank stare.
"I thought we were only allowed an ounce of pot."
Nothing.
When my clay pot fell to pieces on the wheel I announced, "Ah-ha! Now the student has become the master."
Nothing.
In fact, nobody in the classroom found me amusing at all which only took me about three classes to realize and finally quit trying, by which time the class had halved in size.

And this is precisely the point at which things became really relaxing. I don't know how things are in your town or country or home, but I live in an atmosphere of intense parenting competitiveness. In my little world it's not uncommon for every mother within a half mile radius to crane their necks when you open your picnic to see if you have packed enough anti-oxidants and organic free range carrots for your children. If you pick up your phone to make funeral arrangements for your dead sister while pushing your child on the swing at the park, someone will take a photo of you and write a very long moan on facebook about how parents are no longer present for their children. It's a fierce game of mothers-against-mothers out there and the only defense is to surround yourself with like-minded people who know how to return fire during a drive by criticism from a parenting busy-body.

It's exhausting and I'm looking forward to the day we all realize how unreasonable it all is and return to parenting like our parents did, which is to say, hardly at all.

In the mean time, there are pottery classes. A room filled with women all doing their best to make something out of nothing. All mothers, all learning to do something they have never done before and mostly finding the result to be completely different to the product they set out to make. In this room where the wheels spin and hum, where we all have our heads down concentrating ever so hard at our own task, it is not possible to criticise each other. When Donna's pot spins in to a lump of curved clay beneath her hands, there are sympathetic words from all of us because we all know we're one wheel spin away from making exactly the same mess. And when you have your hands on the clay and the wheel is pushing you around and making you doubt yourself and then suddenly your hands grow stronger and your arms tighten and for once you have a real idea of what it is you're making and you can feel hope that it'll all turn out fine and you let out an involuntary happy squeal, it is then that you'll feel a room full of women sending you their best.

The Swim Suit addition

Here is why I don't give you advice about what swim suit to wear this summer. In my experience there are only two swim suits; the one you wear when you feel good or even good-ish or good enough or better-than-I-used-to-look about your body and the one that you wear when you hate your body. Yes, HATE. Those articles that give you three swimsuits you could wear if you're self conscious of your boobs or you bottom fail to acknowledge that a large portion of the population just feels bad about their entire body, even their elbows. And at any given point in the summer, you could fall in to one or the other of these categories since the way you feel about your body has absolutely no basis in what your body actually looks like. One day you feel great about it, the next day, you hate it- same body. Well I spent all of last year loving my body and the first three months of this year wishing I had a winter moo-moo. So, with that in mind, I bought the following swim suit:

Yes, it's a real swim suit!

It's a 1950's swim suit made out of cotton table cloth fabric, complete with studs for me to pin my push up bra and I bought it on Etsy for $5. There are so many great things about this swim suit:

Number 1: I can still wear my underwear under this thing. I have no idea why I might want to do that but you never know, you just never know.

Number 2: Every time I get in the water to swim a lap, the handsome life guard on duty assumes a woman in full clothing has fallen in to the pool and he dives in to rescue me. Win!

Number 3: I am equally dressed for swimming as I am for taking off in a sprint for my run-away children or doing ballet or posing for my portrait on the nose of a fighter plane, it's just so versatile.

Number 4: Since there is only one of these swim suits in the world, I will never have to face a comparison with someone younger, taller and more buoyant than me.

Number 5: Also, at this point in my life, I would rather be on this side of the "she can do better" than on that side of the "she should cover up" chatter beside the pool.

Number 6: This only came in one size which is "chunky" and so I have room to grow AND when my breasts develop, I'll have some place to put them. Great news.

Here I am looking in to that wonderful gap between my body and the swim suit and imagining the potential.