Keeping Quiet

This post is post-dated. I didn't write anything after being out till 1am on Thursday night. But this is as good a time as any to describe my issue. Thursday was J's last night in town. Aside: Every time I started to think about that, Ben Folds Five's "Steven's last night in Town" kept coming to mind. So, not that I need an excuse to go to Molly's for a Weiss bier or two, but it was J's last night so we were all going to meet out. Us, the rest of the team, the Austrians, the Italians (to be fair, only 1 Italian guy, the rest were girls at J's behest), and English J and his fiancee S (Czech).

E was keeping up her pretense of 'detoxing' to explain why she wasn't drinking. I am sure to the more attuned women this is not a very good excuse. E's Polish after all. After a couple of weeks of telling people she's avoiding alcohol to detox, the reasoning starts to wear thin. S asked E at Molly's if she was sure she wasn't pregnant. Like E is going to tell her at a bar. One of the nice Austrian couples brought their baby boy with them. This little guy is so calm and since Italy has instituted the 'no smoking' policy in restaurants and bars, and because Molly's is a laid back place, they often bring him out. I was transfixed by him. Maybe the beers were giving me a goggle assist, but I found myself focusing on the kid. Thank god the rest of our bar mates were on the sauce or they may have noticed. At some point I wanted to exclaim Aside: I remember in 8th grade Language Arts class when we had to write a dialogue for creative writing and everyone had problems with syntax; when to use quotation marks, how to punctuate around them and the teacher telling us we had to use more descriptive verbs than said. People were trying like hell to use exclaimed, described, decried, explained, lamented, stated, uttered, teased, shouted etc. So I'm putting in 'exclaim' when 'said' really covers it adequately. I never read 'said' or any other vocal action verb when I read a book. The dialogue itself conveys the context, you don't need to waste cognitive power on the verb choice "Hey, see that guy, that little one, we're going to have one of those in 8 months!"

See, I don't want to tell anyone about our baby yet for practical and superstitious reasons. I've read that most people wait until after the first trimester, until you're out of the danger zone for miscarriage, before telling people besides immediate family. I'm all for that. I don't have many people here that I'm dying to share the news with because we aren't that close and E doesn't have to worry about any recriminations from work, but I still think we should wait before informing the general public. E told a Polish friend of hers (mostly becuase this girl is married to a local Italian guy and knows who the good doctors are in town) and her old roommate from Dubai. That's cool. If we were living in Atlanta, surely I would have told a couple of my close friends; The Mayor (sorry for the psuedonym, dude, but Google is an all seeing monster) and certainly Andy. And I would tell my cousin as he and I have shared a lot in the last couple of years. But we're not there. We're here. Plus you only get to tell people once, so you can't screw it up. And, if you can do it in person it carries more weight. So I'm stuck in Italy without anyone to confide in. Sure, E can talk to her sister and her friend here about the changes and what she's going through and how it feels etc. But I can't. I find myself at work, suddenly overcome by some idea or thought or image, and I have to bite my tongue.

Eng-J and S were out to dinner with E and I the day we found out we were pregnant. We stifled any outwardly-projected joy and had a really nice seafood dinner with them, while inside my joy was brimming. The east coast of Italy is hell-and-gone from Atlanta, by any criterion you want to use. This blog, therefore, is my outlet. If my family gets to read it, great, its the best way to make sure everyone is up to date on the happenings here, but its also a chance for me to talk about what's going on without divulging anything to my work mates. For now.