Today, I am 21 weeks and 2 days along in my pregnancy. I know I am having a little boy and I feeling him moving around inside of me more and more everyday.

At first, pregnancy was a bit of a struggle for me. The Husband and I so badly wanted a baby, but after I got pregnant, it wasn’t at all what I expected. I felt like an alien had taken over my body and I almost began to resent the little life inside of me. But it seems that motherhood has finally found me.

I feel love growing deeper and wider inside of me every day. I can’t imagine ever resenting this little life inside of me and wanting to do anything other than protecting him and giving him the best life possible.

Slowly but surely, motherhood is descending upon me, and I’m beginning to look forward to each new change it brings.

When you think of someone who trots from one phase of life to the next with no real ties to her past, you think of someone who takes risks and tries something completely new and different.  But that’s never been me.  I always make the safe choice.

I chose my high school because I had family history there, a dad next door, and knew few people from summer camp.  I chose my college because I wanted to stay in-state to cut costs and, frankly, I was scared to move away from my family (although I did live on my own for the most part).  I never studied abroad because spending all that money seemed frivolous.  I worked in restaurants because it seemed the surest way to make money.

Every choice I make seems to be the practical one.  And while it may not be a thrilling life, I’ve still found it incredibly fulfilling.  I’ve made wonderful friends and had amazing experiences.  I’ve met a wonderful man who has become my husband and have maintained strong ties to all of my family.  I’ve branched out just enough to feel that I’ve “lived a little”, but stayed close to my roots.

I may not be plowing any new trails, but I’m still mostly happy with the choices I’ve made on this well-worn path.

Babies are expensive, and there’s no deferring payments on them.  I just keep thinking that for the next 18 years of this kid’s life, I’m paying to feed it, clothe it, entertain it, and generally care for it.

Then I started thinking about my own parents.  I was in and out of their house until my wedding and never paid them any rent, contributed to bills, or purchased food.  I was a hardcore moocher.  My immediately younger brother is nearly 26 and shows no signs of moving out any time soon.  He too is a full-fledged moocher, as is his girlfriend who lives with her parents and spends significant amounts of time at my parents’ house.  Then there’s my youngest brother.  In one year, he’ll be graduated and moving back home and most likely be crashing at my parents’ house for the foreseeable future as well.

My parents just can’t get rid of us!  And my mother, bless her heart, even mentioned that if my little family and I fell on hard times because of my layoff, we’d be more than welcome to move back in as well.

I know that ultimately, my mom likes having us around.  She likes the sound of a full house, she likes a family to cook for (although that’s something she definitely didn’t enjoy as we were growing up, so it’s funny that it hit her later in life), and she just generally enjoys having us there to chat with.  My dad…well…I guess I don’t really know how he feels about it.  But I’ve gotta imagine that he would prefer his paycheck went to funding his life with my mom rather than feeding his kids who just won’t leave home.  For 28 years, they’ve been stuck with kids in their house non-stop.

So with all this in mind, I realize that this little baby inside may pull the same crap my siblings and I have, and that housing it in my womb is just the beginning of DECADES of caretaking I might have ahead of me.

At what point do I decide to cancel my cable in order to fund this baby’s lifestyle for the next 30 years?

I don’t use gossip as a way to talk about my friends behind their back or spread rumors or ruin reputations.  I like to gossip about the facts.  Well…unless it’s celebrity gossip and I’ve read it in Us Weekly and I consider it fact even if it isn’t proven…

I like to be in the know.  I like to know things.  I like to be the holder of all information about everything.  I have a great paranoia about being out of the loop or in the dark.  I want to know who’s pregnant, who’s engaged, who got a promotion, who’s on the brink of firing, who’s got a boyfriend — everything.

When I talk to friends, I can’t stop myself from being overly nosy and pushing for details that I have no business knowing.

Yet it seems that my love for gossip and knowledge of everything keeps me from knowing anything in-depth about anyone.  I push so hard for the juicy details, that I usually wind up missing the big picture and the real story.

Lately, my goal has been to steer clear of the gossip and ask for the story.  It may be a subtle difference, but knowing the whole story is really knowing, whereas gossip only gave the illusion of knowing.  And I’ve discovered that I understand more about my friends, and I understand more about how I can be a better friend to them.

Gossip is fun, but knowing the whole story is better.

Am I the only one who worries about what will happen if I become famous one day and all these words written in the heat of the moment come back to haunt me?

But even though I worry about how people will perceive, misconstrue, or understand my words, I can’t stop myself.  On this blog and even moreso on my other blogs, I simply have to put these words out in the universe.

Some posts are snapshots into my psyche, some are mundane and simply fill space, some are forced, and some tumble out of my fingers before I even have time to register what I’ve just written.  I feel compelled to write them all.

Since I was in 4th grade I’ve kept a diary.  And now as an adult, I keep a blog.  My thoughts are just as private, but I’m less embarrassed by them now and there’s comfort in the collective.  But I know that I set myself up to be taken out of context, as well as taken at my word when I write about something I’m feeling at the moment.  I have a hot temper and part of my rage management is getting those feeling out on my blog.  Writing about how I’m feeling so that I can stop festering over those feelings.

I try not to involve others in my blogs.  I don’t name names, but that doesn’t necessarily ensure privacy.  So all I’m doing is standing naked before you all, telling you that these are my words, these are my thoughts, but these are not all me.  So do with them what you will, but understand that I am so much more than just these peepholes into my soul.

Okay…now that I’ve gotten that out of my system…

I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook.  I’m sure we all do.  But I feel like I spend more time thinking about it than most.  Of course I do.  God forbid I spend a substantial amount of time ruminating on the ills of the world.  No, better I expend that energy thinking about how Facebook affects my life.  Well, that, and whether or not the right girl won America’s Next Top Model.  Priorities, people.

I was ALL ABOUT facebook when I first signed up.  I could spend hour reading people’s profiles, building my own, hunting down old friends and lost loves.  I’ve always been nosy by nature and facebook suddenly made that socially acceptable.  It was WONDERFUL!  But then, like every other time one has too much of a good thing, it started to make me sick.  I OD’d and there was no way to rid myself of all the FB info I’d ingested.

Suddenly, not only was I comparing my life to the lives of my actual friends (you know, the people I call to make plans with, spend every weekend drunk with, go on trips with — the people whose lives I actually know) but every person I’ve gone to grade school, middle school, high school, and college with.  The fact that I went to a high school where everyone was prettier, wealthier, and smarter than me did not help things.

Since that first log-in on FB, I’ve felt like a tragic underachiever.  I got married later, got a house later, and now I’m starting on kids later than everyone.  Former co-workers and classmates give numerous updates about the various sources of bliss in their lives (generally an amazingly romantic husband) while I bumble about in my average life.

The thing is, I’m really happy.  No seriously.  I am.  I’m so, so happy with my life.  I’m so happy with my husband and my home and my dog and my friends and really, when I think about it, my career.  I’m so happy that I don’t need to talk about it on FB.  Maybe because my happiness isn’t something to brag about.  It’s such a normal, happy, existence that to an outsider, it might appear downright boring.

Do I wish I had more money? Yeah.  Do I wish I could take a decent [sober] picture?  Certainly.  Do I wish my house was bigger? Yes…except then I’d want a cleaning lady because I can barely keep our 2,000 sq. ft. livable and clean.

The thing with FB is that it’s not showing reality, and I always forget that when I’m looking at adorable baby pictures, over-the-top weddings, and fancy dinner parties.  I don’t know what’s really going on with most of the people I’m friends with on FB.  And if I don’t know the whole story, then what’s the use of comparing?  I know my whole story, and I know that I am happy every single day.  I suppose I’ll always wish for something more and better than what I have, but that doesn’t change the fact that I love my life as it is.  And my life gets better every year.  FB may not tell that story to my “friends”, but I don’t need it to.  All that matters is I know it.

Right?

Right around my 136th singing of the song that evening, I began really thinking about what I was singing.  The song suddenly started sounding so needy to me.  And it really got me seeing the King of Siam in a new light.  My Yul Brynner — needy?

Okay, perhaps I was taking it all too literally.

But really, the lyrics did get me thinking about my feelings on neediness.

It got me thinking about my high school boyfriend — the boy I truly thought I was going to marry.  That boy was wonderful.  Honestly, I have nothing bad to say about him.  He was a good person and he treated me like a queen.  But while our relationship may have looked right, it was all wrong.  We were completely co-dependent.  He needed me and I needed him and that is exactly how we wanted it.  We needed no one else but each other.

Looking back, that relationship sends a shiver down my spine.

Today, that kind of neediness absolutely makes me bristle.  I HATE neediness.  Don’t get me wrong — I love to be valued and appreciated and desired.  But I hate being NEEDED.  The very thought of neediness makes my skin crawl and any time someone in my life becomes a little too needy — a little too clingy — I immediately take major steps back to distance myself.

I don’t know exactly where this disdain of neediness came from, but I can only assume it came from my experience with that high school boyfriend.  As much as I enjoyed that relationship until the last couple months, being with that guy was like being in Wonderland.  I fell down the rabbit hole and got completely lost.  And that’s what neediness represents to me.  I pull away these days because I want to steer clear of that rabbit hole.

The husband does not need me.  He was complete before I came along.  But he wants me.  Oh sure, there’s certain things he needs from me, but he doesn’t need me.  It’s hard to explain the distinction, but there is one, I assure you.

I’ve spent most of my life loving that bald-headed beauty, Yul Brynner*.  After analyzing this song, though, I don’t think I’m going to be able to see him in quite the same light.  Bald might be sexy to me, but neediness certainly isn’t.

*Yes, I’m aware that Yul Brynner is only playing a character, but that character defined him — he kept his head shaved because of that character, so I tend to view them as one in the same.  I mean, he played the King of Siam over 1300 times on stage, and played him right up until his death. So you can’t blame me for blurring the line between real life and a story.

As I grew older, I grew less curious, but was still completely confident in my ability to hold an intelligent conversation and discuss many topics on an intellectual level.

I don’t know what happened to me as an adult.  I don’t know where my confidence went (or perhaps, more accurately, where my intelligence went).  My grandpa once said to me something to the effect of, “You’ll never be the prettiest, smartest, or funniest girl in the room.”  And he wasn’t saying it to be mean.  I could be hard on myself and he was saying it to me to let me off the hook.  To let me know I didn’t have to be the ‘-est’ anything.  But I’m still sad that something I was once so confident in has left me.

So now, here I am as an adult, spending much of my time discussing celebrity gossip or my favorite memories, which are inevitably soaked in an alcohol haze.  I spend more time trying to figure out the science of mixing various alcoholic beverages without getting a hangover than I do trying to learn new information.

And maybe that’s inevitable.  Maybe as we grow older, we actually do realize that what my grandpa said is generally true.  I think the difference is, a lot of people keep trying to better themselves, whereas I seem to have simply shrugged my shoulders and taken to the bottle.  I don’t know if I should feel bad about this, or realize that no matter what, I’m happy and I’ve made a lot of friends in bars.  Far more than I ever did in school.  Learning is distracting, but wine brings people together.  And hell, I’ve had some REALLY good ideas over a good bottle of wine.  It’s the hangover that prevents me from acting on those ideas…

Listening to her tell me about her marriage, and then tell me about the new man in her life, I couldn’t help but compare my marriage to the things she was talking about.  She said that she found her soulmate, her perfect match, her reflection, in this new man.  That this new man was everything her [soon-to-be-ex-] husband wasn’t.  That she married someone who she had little in common with, when obviously she should be with someone who was exactly like her.

Obviously listening to all that got me thinking about my relationship with the husband.

I must admit, I started panicking a little bit.  The husband and I are not a perfect fit.  We have different interests and we bicker over stupid things and we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues and we have different political beliefs and were raised differently and even perhaps have different values.

But then I always think of that Seinfeld episode where Jerry is dating Janeane  Garafolo, and how he eventually gets sick of her because they’re exactly alike and who wants to date themselves?  I’m a huge pain-the-ass.  I’d never want to date myself.  I can only handle one of me.  So why would I want to date someone who is just like me, who shares all the same interests?  How would I grow if I had no one to challenge me.

I then began thinking about all the other relationships around me that I have long admired.  My parents are so different in so many ways, and have been [mostly] happily married for 28 years.  Both sets of my grandparents were total opposites — my mom’s parents were married until death, my dad’s parents are still married after 50+ years.  Each of those marriages are something I would be blessed to have.

I widened the circle of influence and thought about more marriages I look up to and realized that everyone had the same story.

For me, it’s not about finding your perfect match.  It isn’t about being with the person who loves the same things you do and thinks the same thoughts.  It’s finding the person who you respect, and who respects you.  It’s creating a mutual and powerful love despite all the quirks and hiccups and appreciating the merging interests, but valuing the individuality and independence as well.

I wish my friend nothing but happiness for her future.  But I know that her definition of true love could never be mine.

Nice is probably one of the worst things I can say about someone, mostly because it means that ‘nice’ is the only generic descriptor I can come up with.  To be nice is to offend — it is bland, it is unremarkable, it is simply agreeable.

But I would prefer, when I dislike someone who’s merely nice, that they not be nice at all.  Because invariably, the husband will accuse me of treating a perfectly nice person meanly.  In his opinion, unless someone has wronged you, there is no reason to dislike them — even if they’re boring, forgettable, and merely agreeable.

The husband is right, but that doesn’t change the fact that I tend to dislike those types of people all the same.  So I guess I wish that the dull and unmemorable of the world would have the decency to quit being agreeable so that the husband and I could quit fighting over my disdain of someone whose only redeeming quality is “nice”.