Judecorp.

Little baby girl with her Nana and her Papa John. I can NOT get my mom to stop calling John "Pizza" or "Pizza Pop." I don't know how to explain it to her that we don't have Papa John's Pizza here in Western Mass and she will never understand what they are talking about.

So my mom is always like, "When are you going to send ultrasound pictures?" and on and on. She starts calling the first day I get home. I actually almost feel guilty that I don't scan them in that day or whatever, the way she goes on about it.

So today I actually sent her all of the pictures and added the most recently belly picture. You know, she's far away, maybe it would make her feel like a part of things.

I got an e-mail back. It said:

Hey, thanks. How are you feeling?

Yeah, thanks Mom. Maybe I should just keep my business on the internet. Y'all are way more excited about stuff.

I don't talk to my mother very often and we don't have a terribly close relationship. It's not surprising since my parents got divorced when I was three and I lived with my dad, but I think that my mother always had this notion that we didn't have a relationship /because/ of my dad and that we would somehow magically be close when I moved out of my dad's house when I was 17. Except of course that didn't happen.

We actually did start to get kind of close for a while when A. and I were together, when I was in Boston for grad school, and then when I moved to Maine to be with him. We talked quite a bit and she came up to Maine several times. When I moved to Ohio we saw each other occasionally but distance kind of killed that, and then she got really weird when I got divorced.

I thought at the time that she just had such mixed feelings about my getting divorced... she was going through rocky times with her husband and I'm not sure if my divorce from A. was really difficult for her or what. When Jen and I got together, my mom had a lot of trouble with that for a long time and seemed to have a hard time even saying Jen's name. She would change the subject a lot and stuff. I guess it's one thing to have your kid tell you she's queer and another for your kid to be a /practicing/ queer or something. Whatever. She's nice to Jen now and that's all that really matters to me... but we still don't have a relationship.

I decided to call her tonight since I haven't talked to her in a long time, and the last time I talked to her I was in a really bad mood and not much into talking... so I thought it would be a good idea to just catch up on stuff. I decided to tell her (why, I don't know) that I have been seeing a fertility specialist (I've seen reproductive endocrinologists a couple of times through the years, so she's aware of my fertility-type problems already) specifically because Jen and I want to start trying to have a baby. I thought... oh hell, I don't know what I thought, really, but I thought she might be kind of jazzed about it.

So I tell her, and her entire commentary revolved around the fact that I told her when I was 18 that I didn't want to bear children. And that's it. Not even in a question or whatever, although I tried to pretend it was like that and decided to go into the many reasons we were considering /not/ adopting right now, as well as reasons why I (and not Jen) am considering trying right now. And I talked about the whole fertility process and the costs and how we have to decide how far we want to go with this and how much we can realistically spend and yadda yadda.

And she changed the subject.

Aah well, I tried. At least she said hi to Jen.