that was so very important.
Now I am here in Paris, some four years later, and nothing fits. Not my jeans. Not my jackets. Not my communication skills with my husband. I can’t slide into a warm cognac to help ease all these jangled nerves and anxious edges. I am a spectacular mess of not-fitting. My husband has not-fitting down to a cheerful science, mainly because he insists on wearing white tennis shoes for the duration, which is clearly against Parisian law. I am unable to care about the Louvre, St. Chapelle, or the Seine. I am very interested in crepes and places where I can sit. We head over to another monument, and my interest extends only to the benches surrounding it. I do love those crepes and devour numerous ones before lunch with a low moaning sound that makes Brian eye me uneasily.
Yes, it’s possible I would have chosen the crepes over my husband. Along with the startling realization that bathrooms are too pedestrian for the French, I came to understand that traveling with my husband is rather difficult. He is an engineer and has a plan for everything. When Christmas comes, and we receive a large electronic gadget of some type, he is gleefully in that box, sniffing around for the instructions. He unfurls them with great pleasure and will proceed to read them with a pile of unopened presents still sitting before him. I am not sure he is human.
I am of the firm conviction that instructions are a waste of time. I “throw things together.” I “rig stuff.” I don’t “follow the straight and narrow,” because “that’s for pansies.” Why? I don’t know. Straight lines are boring. In the case of this trip, some basic instructions like, “Plan ahead just a bit” would have helped. I didn’t plan anything for Paris, down to bringing the wrong type of clothes to wear in the frigid weather. When my husband gently inquired about all this, I responded with remarks like, “Details are annoying” and “Leave me alone.” As much as I value planning and organization, for some reason, I decided we were on vacation so I adopted the theme of, “Hey, let’s just wait and see!” This all stemmed from a deeper theme of “I am absolutely terrified of this trip for some reason!” Incidentally, quotation marks gloss over a lot of fault lines in my personality. In hindsight, there should have been a bit more planning on both our parts, but I had insisted I would do it all, and then I didn’t.
Before we left, it would have been good to look over the materials list for our trip:
• 1 Newly pregnant wife so tired she can master napping while standing. Oui!
• 1 Overenthusiastic husband who is fired up about the availability of ESPN in France. Oui!
• 2 Completely differing views of how this vacation should proceed. Oui!
We were doomed.
We were also doomed, of course, because I was scared about being pregnant. Yes, I was also scared that Brian would wear K-State everything and mangle his French—those fears were pretty much realized at the Paris airport. I was scared we would get lost a lot, and we did. And I was scared that I would somehow get separated from Brian, and there wouldn’t be any crepe makers or a bathroom for miles around. This, thankfully, did not occur. But mainly I was deeply freaked out about having a little one growing inside me. I was so not ready for this whole baby thing. And this scratched at me because I wanted and needed to fit in. Fitting in would be: going to Paris, taking a lot of pictures of “le baby on board,” and glowing about it the whole time.
Instead, my anxiety levels were at code red, which means disaster was set to strike at any moment. Feeling ill at ease and abnormal were actually normal for me. This trip packed all those uneasy feelings, along with a tiny baby and an uncomfortable bladder, into my tired body. I was surprised I was able to buckle my seatbelt over this entire bloated malfunction on the plane. But of course I did, because we were probably going to crash and die, most likely while we were over the ocean. The latest technology was kind enough to show me exactly how much of this trip was over the water through a handy-dandy massive screen detailing our trip on the cabin wall right in front of us. Of course Brian found this to be helpful and interesting. I just stared at the expanse of blue on the screen and nervously looked around for extra flotation devices. I would be floating for two.
Today I know that anxiety is a real ailment, not some floating feeling that surfaces from time to time, but an actual, diagnosable problem. Anxiety can be dealt with and treated. It didn’t have to be scooted around in my brain as something silly. Clearly, my issues with anxiety were not going to go away, but so far, I had only dealt with them in the most logical way I knew how: have a glass or two of wine and voila! I am okay. Edges are muted. Fears are eased. Or, at least they are all spread out, like melted butter on toast.
At that point I had six more months of no more smoothing the sharpness and folding the corners down. I had to deal. And I had to be happy about it because it’s a baby after all, not a prison sentence. How I hated myself for not wondering about the magic that was going on in my nether regions. After three months in, all I could feel was nauseous, and looking at a glass of juice made me want to pee. I didn’t feel maternal or glowing. Just bloated. And very angry with myself.
Self-directed anger tends not to sit well with me, so I argued with the nearest target instead: my rather clueless and thrilled-about-all-that-water-below-us husband in the seat to my right. And the fights continued, all through the trip.
“Look, there’s a museum over there about World War II. Cool!”
“I need to pee.”
“You do? You just did over at the museum about all the dead people under the city. Again?”
“I don’t care about World War II. I just need to sit. My hips are widening as we walk. I feel like I’m giving birth right here, for Pete’s sake.”
He eyed me and my hips and looked very unruffled.
“Dear, it’s impossible to go into labor this early in the pregnancy. Unless, of course, there are complications or something.” As the words left his mouth, I saw it: that slightly befuddled, blank expression he makes when he realizes his inner engineer just said something very cold and clinical, which is about to clash with the overly emotional vat of weeping that is his wife.
“How could you say that to me? I just can’t believe you would even say such a thing.”
“I’m sorry. I just meant that—”
We had now become the battle of the loud talkers. Very Parisian people walked past us and smiled. They were right at home with irritated loud talkers.
“You do not care at all about my comfort. I am miserable, and all you care about is if we have enough museums stuffed in us by the end of the day. I hate you.”
“What? You hate me? Really? No. Listen, we’re on vacation.” He gestured around helplessly, to help remind me that we were in a different time zone and all. I sniffled in the background. “I just . . . well it seems to me you’re being just a bit—”
“Don’t you dare say it!”
He said it. As the word “over-dramatic” left his mouth, I already contemplated how much it would cost to buy a separate plane ticket home and a separate house to live in when I got there. Brian, who at this point had realized this trip didn’t have “fun-filled vacation” written all over it, fumed off in disgust to look at something about Hitler.
I fumed off to find some place to sit, in the sullen hope that somewhere close by I’d find a gleaming, tacky McDonalds with a large booth, and, of course, an even larger bathroom.
