Meat!

Praise to Allah and Jesus and the Cow Farmer because Uncle Ben has lifted the fatwa against meat! I just ate a French Dip, the bread nice and soggy and collapsible from au jus. It tasted like sunshine. Not once did I gag or have to poke at it with a fork but ate the whole thing like the big girl I am. I hope Uncle Ben continues to be merciful. I haven’t felt queasy in days, and I am very cautiously beginning to hope that my week of not-quite morning sickness is just that.

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is grab my boobs. With most of the obvious symptoms not yet lurking around, my boobs have become the bellwether of my pregnancy. The boobs hurt, therefore, I am pregnant. And then I sit up and wonder why I go through the whole grabbing rigamarole because they hurt so bad it feels like Caleb held a lit match under them as I slept. As soon as I sit up, gravity takes over, and the millimeter or so that they fall feels like they have conspired to free themselves from their fleshly prison and skydive to the floor.

I have never had big boobs, and I can admit fairly honestly that, aside from spying the occasional screen goddess on the cover of a magazine with a sexy rack, I have never wanted big boobs. I’m athletic and I think they would just be in the way of all the running and jumping. When I was seventeen and first on the pill, my boobs got all billowy with estrogen, and when paired with a sassy push up bra from Victoria’s Secret, I had an honest to God rack. I can’t remember where I was going that day as I walked out the door, my head and chest held high, but I remember scuttling home hours later like some misshapen dwarf, my rack sucked into rib cage, my arms crossed over my chest in shame. The stares, the creepy whistle-slobbers they attracted! It was truly shocking how weapon-like my body suddenly felt, like I was kid whose hand just closed around the steel of a .38 special. I switched pills and waited happily for the male gaze to return to my legs, where at least I had the power to run away if things got too creepy.

But now my B cup bra actually fits, and at the rate they are expanding in their strange lateral direction, I might have to upgrade soon. I don’t think I mind. I am proud of my perky little B minuses as Caleb called them, but with all the change that is swirling around us right now, I think a C cup is one more thing I can handle. As long as I don’t get freaky soda can-sized nipples. Because miracle-shmearacle of motherhood, that’s just gross.