Thankful

I wanted to write a little more about my pregnancy.  I hope I don't bore you.  Part of it is that I have been thinking these things in my mind the past couple of months but haven't been able to really tell anyone about it.

 

First off, I can't say enough how thankful I am to have found MIJ (married in Japan blogs) about two years ago and how grateful I am that the moms are so detailed in their stories.  I have never been a "oh I want to get pregnant" type of person.  I love kids and want a billion (but will probably settle for 3) but do not like the idea of having them one bit.  Scary stuff!  So if I hadn't of gotten hooked on these blogs I would never have gone out and done the research myself.  But people like gaijiwife, gaijinshifu, umebossy, nay, nooh, and Always Leaving Things Unfinished have totally helped me read up on the subject while being extremely entertained at the same time.  None of them have sugar coated much and for that I am extremely grateful. I am also indebted to the woman who writes the "Surviving in Japan (without much Japanese)" blog.  I literally went through the "questions for your caretaker" posted their verbatim with my Dr. (ok- so I translated a few of them into Japanese and also made my husband read through them).

 

My husband is Japanese but he has less knowledge than I do about this whole baby thing so I am sure he is extremely thankful as well.  For example, at one of our last check-ups the nurse was asking my husband what religion his family was and if they were going to observe inu no hi (dog day).  He had no idea what was going on but thanks to blogs, I could pipe right in and say that I had read about it and would be interested in directions on where to go in the area and what to do.  My husband was really surprised (and probably a little embarrassed) that I knew more about his culture/religion than he did.  He thought the nurse somehow knew that we had a dog.

The second thing is how excited I am about how nice my Dr is being.  One thing I have learned from reading the above mentioned blogs is how Japanese Dr's can be a little mean, er, strict with foreign women.  I have heard how they can be impatient with foreign women asking too many questions or making too many comparisons to their home countries.  I have also heard about Japanese Dr's making comments about natural weight gain.

 

But so far my Dr has been extremely nice in all of these areas.  He sat with me while I, as I said above, got online on my smart phone and translated questions from a blog.  He also has yet to mention my weight at all, even though I am bigger than all of the other Japanese women who I see visiting him.  Then again, this might be due to the fact that I started going to him long before all of this baby business (for the pill and general check-ups) and my weight hasn't really changed much in the past couple of years.

 

This month I have been in his office basically every week for one small thing or another, and he has always been really calm about everything and very sympathetic.  When I showed him my boob last week (which was quite red and swollen from the mystery lump- sorry if TMI) the first thing he said was, "Wow, that looks like it hurts!"  (OK- so he said "ええ！痛いそ！”). 　He then gave me all the time in the world, even though I had been a walk-in that day, and he even said I should take time off of work.  I expected him to be like, "It's nothing- good luck."  I hope he stays this way (although I fear that after summer break in America he will change his feelings about my size- oh Lord help me resist the wonder that is American cuisine).

 

Anyway, just wanted to give thanks to these people as they are life savers.  My family and friends have been supportive, but they can't begin to understand what it is like for me to do this in a foreign language.

 

And of course my husband, who has gone above and beyond to an almost unnecessary point of treating me like something that is going to break any second.