Pop goes the Belly.

So, last night I sit down to watch LOST (which is just SO good right now) and when I get up…something has changed.   My stomach has literally doubled in size.   I had been experiencing  some pretty intense upper abdominal pain, almost as if I had done hundreds of crunches (as if I have any idea what doing HUNDREDS of crunches would feel like.  I usually cap it at 12.)  Since this monstrosity arrived, the upper abdominal pain has really started to fade, so I have to assume the two were related.

It’s a weird feeling to suddenly look down and feel like you’re looking at someone else’s body.

Do you watch How I Met Your Mother?   (You should.)   There was a great episode last season called “THE FIERRO.”   To sum it up, Marshall has been hanging on to his car from High School and refuses to let it go.   It’s a souvenir of who he used to be, and it reminds him where he came from.    Well, I have a tattoo stretching across my quickly expanding belly, and as it turns out…that tattoo is my fierro.

For everyone who's asked me to lift up my shirt over the past few months so they could see what a real pregnant belly looks like: There it is. (This is likely the last you'll see of it, 'cause I'm pretty sure it's all down hill from here.)

When I got it, I was nineteen years old and living in New York, and let’s be honest, at nineteen, I thought how much I paid for this indelible mark on my body was more important than who put it there, so I bargain shopped.   I ended up at a place on 8th Street called Andromeda.   (Or maybe it was the place across the street named after some other celestial body…but I digress.)   Originally, it was blue, and it went from hip to hip.   (Apparently at nineteen years old, it didn’t occur to me that my stomach wouldn’t be flat forever, so I thought a piece that indicated where my hips used to be was a good idea…as my belly grows in pregnancy however, I see that maybe where your hip bones were in college is not-so-much something you need a daily reminder of.)     Eventually, thanks to my bargain shopping tactic, the tattoo, which was poorly done, would start to fade out in spots, and I would have to have it redone by a very talented but very gothic artist in Toluca Lake who let’s just say took a little too much creative license.   (He added thorns to cover some of the non-symetrical elements of the original tattoo.   I’m not exactly a thorns type of girl.)   Of all of the things I did to “express myself” in my younger days…this remains the most amusing.   Because, well…the holes from my facial piercings have long closed, the Jerome Russell hairdye has long faded out, and even the jailhouse belly button ring that I got when I was twelve (with a safety pin and a quarter) had to go to make room for baby.   But the very large, very gothic, very abstract tattoo on my stomach remains.  (As do my other two, but they still hold their meaning for me.)  So anytime I lift my arms over my head, someone who didn’t know me way back when sees this remnant of my former self, and asks for a better look.   A look that my 27-year-old self would really rather not give them.   Thanks 19-year-old me.   At least I’ll always have something to remember you by.