Fittingly, the mistake’s birthday is on the 13th. Last year that was a Saturday, this year it’s a Sunday. Tomorrow. That may explain why I didn’t wake up with a bad vibe constantly nagging at me. It’s probably not today we have to worry about. It’s tomorrow we have to worry about. However, with two city complaints lodged against them, maybe they’ll only do four hours’ worth of ball games and not the stereos. We’ll see. If there’s any major shit from them, they’re gonna have to pay for it, that’s for sure. I just don’t know how they’ll pay, but they will. Maybe it won’t be so bad, though, cuz not only are my vibes not that bad, but I have three things on my side for this final Mistake birthday. The complaints, there being no dog over there, and his not living there. I’m sure he’ll be over doing his laundry and banging his bitch, though.

I haven’t shit yet today and am not the least bit surprised over that, even though I had bean soup yesterday that’s high in fiber. The reason I’m not surprised is that I woke up at 110½ pounds. The fact that I had less than 1000 calories yesterday and woke up only a pound lighter, tells me that it really is true that I’ll never get down to 100 pounds again without total or very near starvation. And it really is true that if I were 100 pounds at the snap of my fingers, I’d just go right back up between 110-115 in a matter of days.

Tom, who bullshitted me yesterday about wanting more sex, has gone off to drive his race car on his computer. Why oh why is he such a liar and a joker when it comes to sex/kid? Can’t he give it up? It’s old, Tom! I understand, though, that he wants to keep his energy to get through these last few hours of work that need to be done, even if I don’t think it should affect a guy that was even older than he is. He and I both are tired of setbacks. But as I know damn well, as soon as he’s finished with this, it’ll be on to something else that’ll be very time-consuming.

Before we went out yesterday, I ended up taking up Andy’s and Marla’s offer to call Linda. She was very nice and she spoke well to me and very openly, too. She was quite talkative too, and I even had a hard time getting a word in edgewise at times.

The main reason I called was to ask about the HSG exam. She said everyone’s different, but having a high tolerance to pain, it didn’t hurt her. She said it was cool how you could see the dye running up the fallopian tubes.

She told me all about the things she’s done and went through as far as getting pregnant goes. She started the testing route when she was 30 and didn’t have kids until her 40s. That’s because the technology wasn’t where it is today when she was 30. Today, they guarantee virtually everyone they can have kids. Different states vary in what they offer and what’s covered by insurance. In California, you pay a flat rate fee of about $20,000 for a certain number of tries. If you don’t get pregnant and have a kid, they give you your money back. In other words, this is for the rich.

She was one of those cases where there started off being an explanation as to why she couldn’t conceive, then she was one of those unexplained infertility cases for a while. She said it’s not that she couldn’t conceive, it’s that she’d always miscarry. They found one clogged tube, but technically you only need one tube as long as the sex is normal with the guy you’re with and as long as he’s willing to cum regularly. A little more than regularly in a case like that. But then no one knows to this day why she couldn’t carry the non-invitro pregnancies. She said she could get pregnant on Friday and lose it by Monday, although I don’t see how you could know you were pregnant if you lost it just three days later, so maybe that was an exaggeration. Maybe after they did the in vitro, they gave her some sort of hormone medication. I forgot to ask. Anyway, maybe it was God’s will to do whatever he felt he had to do to keep her from having kids until she was in her 40s. Maybe there’s a reason too, why he felt she could only have them by way of in vitro. Who knows why he does the things he does? As she said, the assholes live long, healthy lives, while the good ones die young. This is why I always worry about Tom. It’s like he’s too good for life, in God’s eyes. Also, the ones that are too young or too fucked up or both, never seem to have a problem getting pregnant.

She said that the most common causes of infertility are clogged tubes or something within the uterus lining. So I’ve heard. I’ve heard just about everything she told me, except I didn’t know that in vitro causes multiples. I thought only the drug they give you to make you ovulate more eggs did that. She said she had three of them but lost one after she began hemorrhaging.

Anyway, she said they check women for hormone levels, to make sure they’re ovulating, and things like that. I don’t know how the hell they can check to see if a woman’s ovulating, though. I wish my case was and wasn’t a case of a clogged tube or wacky hormone levels. A part of me feels it’d be nice to have the problem be simple so I could have more options open to me, but a part of me also hopes they tell me my uterus is hopeless, cuz that’d make the decisions easier if there was nothing to have to decide, even though God gets the final say in all of this.

You can get pregnant, then lose it, if your hormone levels go wacky during pregnancy.

As for testing Tom, she said they’ll test him last as a last resort if they don’t find anything wrong with me. Great. Then I won’t have to worry that he’ll decide not to do his part. I know the problem’s me, and she too, knew since she was 18 that she’d have problems getting pregnant. And she didn’t have the DES, the years of drugs, and all these things against her. There was nothing to say she couldn’t get pregnant. Only her gut instinct. I don’t know if I was 18 when I knew a child wasn’t meant to be for me, but it does seem that for most of my life, I knew I’d never have one, fertile or not.

She said she’s not ashamed of how she got her kids and that if I find I am right about there being something wrong - it’s not my fault. I know that, but it still makes me feel picked on by God. It’s like, wasn’t his having me born to the kinds of people I was born to more than enough of a cruel punishment to dump on me?

She said she’s no doctor, but my erratic light periods could be a sign of early menopause. Or maybe I do, as Tom suggested, have a hormone problem. But that doesn’t explain my infertility in the past when my periods were normal. Oh, the questions that eat at me! I just hope I get some answers. Right now, the question isn’t am I going to have a kid? I know that’s not meant to be no matter what. The questions are what is wrong with me and what am I going to do about it?

I asked Tom if he’d have a kid if he wasn’t 100% sure he wanted one, and he said he wouldn’t if he had any doubts.

I asked Linda if she believed God made me as I am for a reason and that I shouldn’t fight it, or anything else she thought, but she said the same thing Tom said. God wouldn’t have given us the brains to figure out how to get almost anyone pregnant if he didn’t want us doing that, but again, you don’t need to be sterile in order for God to make sure you don’t get pregnant. If you do everything that technology has to offer in order to get fixed, have a normal sex life, then still don’t conceive, then yeah, it really, really wasn’t meant to be and it’s just God’s will for whatever reason be it fair or unfair, right or wrong.

I admitted without hesitation that if it were between 1994-1997, I’d have jumped at the opportunity of getting fixed and getting pregnant, but I just don’t know if I want that anymore. I don’t feel that deep-down desire I used to feel. I didn’t get into why I feel I’m incompetent to have kids or our freak sex life, but I don’t know if I’d even enjoy motherhood with all its burdens, responsibilities, and restrictions, and the desire’s just not there anymore like it used to be. Only the questions remain. I automatically say how I don’t want to give up my life and freedom, but when I think about it, it wouldn’t kill me to shuffle things around and do the things I do much less often or at scheduled times. It wouldn’t kill me if I couldn’t sing at 2 AM, but it’s the not having any time to myself or with my husband that I would worry about. And the sleep schedule, my temper, and my lack of patience and experience.

She wondered if maybe I’d given up a little and I told her I did that a long time ago. Knowing a kid isn’t meant to be whether I wanted one or not, I could never in a million years go as far as she went and go through years of testing/trying, even though you don’t have to anymore.

I just don’t know what to do, though! Do I want to get fixed if I’m told I can be fixed? Should I bother to be “normal” when I know what’s fated to be? Is there any way I could be wrong about God and Tom controlling and limiting me and my being fated not to have a kid? Is there any way I could be wrong about not enjoying or being able to handle motherhood? I don’t see how I could be wrong. God’s gotta have made me sterile for a reason. Just like Tom has his reasons for being the way he is in bed, which is fear. He may not consciously know it, but he doesn’t want the time a child would take up or its responsibilities, and he doesn’t really think I’d be a good mom like he says.

Let’s just start with finding out whatever I can before I decide what to do about it. Until I have all my options at hand, I can’t say for sure what I’m gonna do.

She told me a couple of other things I didn’t know, but that didn’t shock me, cuz it’s so common. She started off by acknowledging how shitty my folks were and that no one did anything about it. That was the way back then, I told her. Society looked the other way.

Anyway, Milton, Norma’s husband, was a whoring gambler. They’re somehow related to me, I guess. Some kind of cousins.

There was some couple at the beach too, that was once friends with my folks, her folks, and others that were in the same clique, who turned out to be child molesters. Not the wife, but the husband. They had 4 boys and a girl, Linda said, and the husband molested the girl, I guess, and God knows who else.

Let me take a break now to go call Paula, who left a message yesterday at a new number. A new address too, no doubt.

Later…

No answer at Paula’s. I left a message.

I got my daily call from Andy yesterday after I left a message telling him I talked to Linda (I’m still nervous about Monday, though). He said he was proud of me for calling her. Whatever. He also said he kept his mouth shut at a temp agency that gave him a few days’ worth of work. Yeah, yeah. He’ll subconsciously set himself up to be fired before the New Year.

Later…

I’m not looking forward to this prep kit any more than I’m looking forward to these appointments (especially the female-related one). I had to drink a solution that tastes like shit and take some pills. Even worse, I have to shove a suppository up my ass.

Yesterday I got fed up with having to play toilet day in and day out, among all the other problems this old house has, so I tried to fix it. That only helped a little, so while we were out yesterday getting more shingles, we got a new toilet valve and flusher. This is a push-button one. So far so good, but for some reason I’m as hexed with toilets as I am with sex, so we’ll see how it holds up. As long as we can get by, we can just let the next people deal with it. It doesn’t affect the house’s value. The next owners should replace the whole damn toilet if they have any smarts.

Tom and I were just talking about moving and he said we might want to go with just one acre not as far out of town, rather than twenty acres further out of town, and put our money into soundproofing. This way, it won’t matter that the city’s still close by and we could afford the property taxes. If we moved further out and got many acres, and if the city really did catch up to us, that’d up the value of the property and cause us to maybe not be able to afford the property taxes. The closer you are to the city, the costlier the land is. Well, if I could have something just as good that only took twenty minutes to get to stores/doctors/etc., rather than forty, I’d take the twenty.

We went and got that cage. It is huge! And so nice too. With its bass on the ground, it’s an inch shorter than me and about 3’ wide. If it were on wheels, it’d be taller than me. As our luck would have it, we were missing parts so we couldn’t get it up on wheels. Tom will pick up those parts, as well as some ramps that you can get for this cage to make easier access going up and down the 4 different levels. Its bass is a light-colored plastic. Almost like a big litter box. The walls and top are black wires. They’re thick and solid and the whole cage is pretty heavy. At first, I was worried that Mickey, my new rat, would get through the bars, but he couldn’t. It has 3 light-colored plastic shelves that you snap on each level to make floors. One of each of the 3 shelves, has a hole in it for connecting a big tube. Just like how the mice’s cages have floor tubes.

Hey Joebitch, enjoying that banging? Yeah, he’s up on the roof now with hopes of being done at 2:30.

Anyway, there are three tubes. A T-shaped pink one, a straight yellow one, and a curved purple one. Ratsy can get to the 2nd floor just fine, and he can get through the curved tube that leads to the top floor, but will he ever be able to get through the straight tube up to the 3rd floor? He’s physically capable of it, but I don’t know if he’ll ever want to bother. This is why I’m going to get ramps. I also want a couple more rats too, at some point. This cage would be perfect for four rats if you’re not gonna house a ferret in it. I think that if Ma gives us just $50 and not $100 each for Christmas, I’ll get a couple more rats since I won’t be able to get that angel doll. Oh, I hope I will though! But if I can’t, I can’t.

So far, Mickey’s pretty brave and friendly, but not very active. He’s in the old wooden burrow a lot that I put on the bottom along with the black wheel that Ratsy uses. The 2nd floor has Ratsy’s favorite straw-like burrow that’s round with four openings. The 3rd floor has a curved green piece of wood, and the new dark green wheel I just got. The 4th floor has a purple burrow just like Ratsy’s favorite one, only it’s smaller and it’s of thick plastic, and the deep purple hammock that came with the cage. As with the Play City cages, there are other accessories you can add on. You can even add on walls and floors, but this is plenty big enough! Mickey has more brown than Ratsy does. It extends a little further down his neck and more than halfway down the top of his back. He also has dark spots on his tail. Ratsy just has a dark head, with just a little darkness on the sides of his neck, one small dark dot on his upper back, and that’s it. He’s mostly white.

It was pretty funny when at the checkout counter I saw what looked to be jumping fish in no water in a bag that a woman behind us had. Tom, who was closer to her, told me they were crickets that were probably used to feed a lizard. Oh. To me, it looked like little fish in a bag with no water.

Later…

Tom just went to pick up some more shingles. Only a small spot in the center of the roof is still unshingled, so I uncovered my dolls and set them back up. I missed them.

Although it’s now freeloader prime time, no activity and no bad vibe yet. The white car should be in any time now to pick up the bitch. We’ll see what I wake up with tomorrow for vibes, though.

I forgot to mention that Ratsy and Mickey get along very well. Ratsy still doesn’t like Tom, though, and he bit him twice.

Linda said that the only real discomfort she found in all the fertility testing/procedures was when they measured the distance from her opening to the back wall of the uterus for when they went to inject the fertilized egg. She said that when they hit the back wall, that caused cramping. Yeah, I’ll bet.

She said C-sections are a killer compared to having it vaginally, cuz it’s major surgery where they go through the muscle and have to push around organs to get at the baby. She said when gas and shit go through the intestines and all that for the first time afterward, it’s tough, and you can barely move for about a week. She said as long as you don’t tear vaginally since what hurts down there afterward is the pee going where the stitches are, you’re fine. How can a vagina be fine after having something 4-5 inches wide go through it? I’d think it’d have to tear. I mean, that’s quite a stretch!

She also said that once the labor pains peak, all you feel is like you have to push and take a dump. Once again, how can all you feel be labor pains? What about the pain of the baby passing through the birth canal? Was her crotch numbed?