“Ug, I hate small talk.” Not me. I love small talk. I’m introverted, socially awkward, I have trouble keeping up with conversations. Small talk saves me. I can talk about the weather, what a relief! Small talk gives me something to say (“It’s so pretty out!”), something to ask (“Have you heard what the weather’s supposed to be like this weekend?”).

Small talk leads naturally to bigger talk in a way I couldn’t have engineered myself. If I tried for big talk right away, I’d blurt out something that would make everyone feel uncomfortable. But with small talk, “Sure has been mild for this time of year!” leads casually to “Yeah, I even took the kids outside to play!,” which leads to, “Oh, how old are your kids?,” and before you know it we’re on comfortable ground: kids, schools, minivan brands, marriages, friends who are pregnant. Or maybe it leads to travel plans, trips taken, how travel has changed since September 11th, whether or not you can bring nail clippers now. Or maybe it leads to plans for the holidays, various family traditions, how crazy our in-laws drive us. We have material for hours if we need it.

Here’s what freezes me: NON-small talk. When someone comes up to me and says, “So, did you hear the giant sucking sound?” and I am like a rabbit in the headlights. Huh? What are we talking about? And it turns out we’re talking about jobs going to Mexico, a subject I know nothing about but can’t fake the way you can fake the weather (“I think it’s rainier than usual for November, isn’t it? Or maybe it just feels that way every November!”). Or when someone asks me a question about something I feel I ought to know about but don’t: “What’s this town’s crime rate like?” Me: “Um. Good? Oh! Rainy!”

I had an OB appointment today with The Cute Doctor. He’s my least favorite, because he’s too handsome for me to want to let him see my jiggly tummy. Also he’s my least favorite because he’s so clearly aware of his handsomeness. You can tell he’s used to pregnant women blushing and getting crushes on him. He has green eyes, and I notice he often wears green shirts.

I suspect him, too, of thinking of himself as “good with women.” Like, he’s explaining to me all the tests and screens I can have done, and I can almost see him thinking about how awesome he is for explaining all this just as if I’m his intellectual equal.

And this is the worst part. When he was done explaining, and he wanted to check for the baby’s heartbeat, I had to pull down the top of my pants–and my tummy, the aforementioned jiggly one I don’t want him to see, was all damp with sweat, and he prodded it a few times before putting on the gel, so I couldn’t even pretend the dampness was from the gel.

The OB offices are always SO HOT. They feel like they’re about 80 degrees, and then the little exam room door is closed so the air is stuffy. And then there’s a cute doctor talking to me, and I’m socially inept so I’m just barely grasping each “next appropriate thing to say” in time to say it, and whenever I talk to people I tend to get overheated and damp with nervousness, and also we’re talking about things that could be wrong with the baby, and all those things together make me a little sweaty. Which was bad enough when I was just painfully aware that my face was red and my forehead wet, but way way worse when I realized it was the jiggly loose much-stretchmarked skin of my stomach that was clammy, and there’s his hand coming towards it in prodding position. God.

I’m still working away at my NaNoWriMo novel. The month is half over, and I’m a little more than half done. Some days I feel like this is awesome and I am awesome for participating. Other days I feel like this is a colossal waste of time and energy.

Right now I’m stuck. My original idea for a plot was to have a woman pregnant with her fifth child—and, to make things more interesting than my life, have this fifth child be possibly the result of an uncharacteristic (and now ended) affair. I thought I could draw out the tension: is the baby her husband’s or her lover’s?—maybe until the end of the book. It turns out, I am not an interesting enough writer to make this tension last. I went ahead and revealed that it is her husband’s baby. And NOW what? It seems there is nothing left to say. It seems as if I should now just leave this family in peace to live their boring lives.

• That I will be washing a baby, and I will be so focused on washing the baby’s bottom half, I will not notice that the baby’s top half is under water.
• That I will be walking down the stairs carrying a baby, and I will trip, and I will save myself and not the baby.
• That the house will be on fire, and that after I get the children out I will have to decide if I want to risk going back in for the irreplaceable photo albums and baby journals, and that either way I will make the wrong choice.
• Things I don’t even want to type, involving the children being hurt or killed or in danger.
• Running into a guy who used to think I was hot stuff, and having him think “Oh my god, that was a lucky miss.”
• An emergency, and I don’t have my glasses. I feel so disoriented without my glasses on.
• Or not having my shoes. I wouldn’t feel right, running around frantically but with no shoes on.
• Dying while my children are still little.
• Wind storms.
• An emergency happening when we’re snowed in and can’t get help.
• Hearing emergency vehicles; seeing them all pulling in to the school parking lot.
• Any emergency where I can’t think fast enough of what to do, and I spend the entire rest of my life thinking, “If only I’d just…”
• When someone has started a fall from a tall place, and they’re still alive but they can’t be saved. They’re still alive, but they’re also already dead.
• The dark, especially if it’s cold.
• Spiders. Snakes. A dog suddenly going for my throat.
• Sociopaths. Knowing they’re all over the place, and they don’t care if they hurt us, and we can’t tell who they are.
• That I’ll completely by accident kill or permanently hurt someone else.
• I’ll be badly hurt, unconscious, in front of my children, and they’ll have to figure out by themselves how to deal with it.
• Carjackers who don’t care that there are children in the car.
• Being separated from my children in an emergency.
• Any noise at all coming from the basement. Having to figure out what to do if I hear one.

What are you scared of?

There are so many Hard Topics that are also Important Topics, and organ donation is one of them. I keep thinking I should write about it, but it’s so sad to think about, and it’s hard to write about. Also, I’m aware that there are some people who think that if their body loses any parts in this life, they won’t have those parts in their next life, and that’s a difficult thing to argue with–I mean, what do I know about what happens after we die?

I do know what will happen after I die: any of my organs that can be of any use to anyone are getting removed from my body that doesn’t need them any more, and given to someone’s body that does. If my children die, same thing: losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a parent, and so I don’t know how I could withhold something that could keep another parent from going through the same thing. I’ll take my chances with the afterlife.

This whole topic is courtesy of Beth over at Diary of a Playgroup Dropout, who brought the subject up this morning. Rather than writing about it myself, I thought I’d just send you over to her:

Diary of a Playgroup Dropout, 11-13-2006, “Donate Life”

In case you were wondering, the “Chicken and Broccoli” Banquet pot pie has, like, one bite-sized broccoli stem, cut up into littler pieces. The luscious little florets? Who knows what happened to them, but they are not in the pot pie.

Nevertheless, I would like to formally thank the pot pie, which saved me this evening when I was in a must-eat-can’t-eat fit, pacing the kitchen trying to find something—anything—that seemed appealing, or even edible. I opened the freezer even though I knew there was no hope there, and there it was, the pot pie, appealing and salty, hot food in half an hour, reminiscent of childhood when my parents would have their one night a week when they ate dinner by themselves after we kids went to bed, and so we would get to have something delicious by ourselves: Kraft macaroni and cheese, Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, Banquet pot pies—those were our favorites. And tonight the little pot pie was called into service again, and it was good, and the fit has been extinguished, and I can get on with the evening.

At Edward and Elizabeth’s 15-month check-up, the pediatrician was concerned about Elizabeth’s speech: she was saying “da” for “clap” and “da-da” for both Daddy and Mommy, and that was about it. He said that if she didn’t make dramatic improvements by her 18-month check, he was going to refer her for speech therapy. (Edward’s speech is at exactly the same point, but apparently it’s normal for girls to be significantly ahead of boys in speech development, so while Edward is still within normal range, Elizabeth is well behind what the doctor would expect.)

My oldest son had speech therapy from age 2-1/2 until age 5, for an articulation delay. Here is what I noticed: one, that it was a hassle to have to bring him to therapy each week; two, that it made no discernable improvement in his speech; three, that once we were in the system, it was hard to get out. I am glad to have that system in place if Elizabeth really does need it, but I see her making steady–if slow–progress, and I don’t see any reason to worry about her speech: some kids speak earlier than others, that’s all. Practically everyone has a family story about some child who didn’t speak until age 3, and then spoke in complete sentences. Elizabeth isn’t going to be like that, but what I mean is that I think she’s just slow to speak, and not in need of intervention at this point.

So in the two months since the 15-month check-up, I have been plotting to mislead the pediatrician. When he says, at the 18-month check, “So, is she talking?,” my plan is to say, “Oh, YES. She says ‘shoe’ and ‘sock’ and ‘yes’ and ‘hair’ and ‘eye’ and ‘cat’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘here you go’ and ‘Maisy’ and ‘book.'” I won’t spell out that she says about half of those as “da” or “da-da,” and the others as “szs” and “heh” and “ah.” I’ll just let the pediatrician assume that I mean she says the words clearly. Not LYING, you see, just misleading.

The problem is that I have a hard time misleading this doctor. He asks a question, and I answer it, and then he continues to listen even after I’ve stopped talking: he looks at me and waits, thinking about what I’ve said and also seeing if I have anything else to say. This approach flusters me. I think I’m more than half likely to blurt out into the silence, “Of course, half of those are ‘da’ or ‘da-da’!,” and then laugh nervously. Sigh.

I am a person who enjoys a bargain. My favorite place—my heaven, let’s call it—is the clearance section of Target, where perfectly good stuff is invitingly priced at 75 or even 90% off. Things I wanted at the beginning of the season are already available to me for mere peanuts! Why, it would be a crime against nature to leave them behind! I have been known to consider purchasing a replacement carafe for a coffee maker I do not own, just because it is 90% off and it seems like at that price I ought to buy it.

I particularly enjoy seasonal clearances. This year I bought four fluffy frilly glittery costumes for Elizabeth to wear when she’s older, maybe for Halloween or maybe for dress-up, or maybe not to wear at all if it turns out she’s the sort of little girl who won’t have anything to do with that sort of thing, but anyway I bought them, and they were 75% off, and I rejoiced. Am I going to spend $19.99 for a few scraps of fabric calling themselves a fairy costume? No, I am going to spend $4.94!

I also bought a snuggly little tiger costume, really more like a hooded sleeper, for the new baby to wear. William and I saw a baby wearing this very costume a few days before Halloween, and we both nearly blew a cuteness gasket.

Here is the point, though, of this discussion. There was one time when I saved a great deal of money, and it was the stupidest money-saving decision I ever made. It was when we moved across the country with our 10-month-old baby (Robert, our only child at the time, which seems so hard to believe now), and Paul drove the moving truck and I took a flight with the baby, and I held him on my lap instead of paying the $250 so he could have his own seat. When I was booking the tickets, it seemed ludicrous to pay that much money for an infant who could ride for free if he sat on my lap. Five minutes into the first flight, I had completely changed my mind. Seven years later, I still regret it. It was miserable for me, miserable for Robert, and miserable for the poor, poor woman in the center seat next to us. Why didn’t I buy him a seat? He could have been strapped down in his car seat, maybe even sleeping. Instead he was twisting and fussing in my lap, wanting to GET DOWN. Instead he kept dropping his toy on the floor at the feet of the woman next to us.

There is saving money, and then there is saving money. Better to spend it on that airplane seat, and then make up for it ever after with the 75% off Halloween costumes.