• For some reason, I feel like the most disinterested pregnant woman on the planet.  I just don’t feel like writing about having a baby.  And, for better or worse, my mentality is as follows, “What?!  There are a bajillion babies born a minute, is something special going on here?” Of course, the creation and development of this child is special to me, but I’m just not excited enough to get detailed about how I’m feeling, what the baby is doing and blah, blah, blah.  If you are pregnant, however, I love hearing about your pregnancy.  I just don’t feel like talking about mine.  It bores me.

• People are bugging me for photos.  For what it’s worth, I hate having my picture taken these days.  I understand that I’m expecting and that my figure is supposed to change, but I feel fat.  As politically incorrect as that may sound, I feel fat and I don’t want fat pictures of me on the Internet.  So, some of you can expect some in your e-mail.  Everyone else will just have to use their imagination or fly to Florida and hang out with me  sometime before August 2.

• I have floating ribs.  Now, I’m not sure I know what that means exactly, but I know it hurts, a lot.  Basically, my left ribs are being pushed up and out as my baby grows.  It feels like someone is stabbing me in the ribs and twisting the knife they used.  I’m supposed to tape up my ribs to ease that pressure, but that’s just not working.    The more it hurts, the more I hate my doctor for not fixing it.

• People are starting to assume that I’m hormonal, so that’s why I’m being bitchy.  Look.  I am an extraordinarily diplomatic and lovely woman who is highly tolerant of people’s crap. When I’m pregnant, though, I lose the ability to tolerate crap.  If I have been mean to someone in the past seven months, or will be mean to someone in the next two, it’s not because I’m hormonal.  It’s because they deserve it and, normally, I’ve just let them get away with it.  For individuals wanting to avoid conflict with me, I suggest trying not to act like a moron for the next two months.  Then we can go back to pretending that you’re fine just the way you are.

• N. is really excited.  I mean, really excited.  This says to me that she has no idea what she’s in for.  I can personally vouch for the fact that the early years of being a big sister are not super fun.  Perhaps I should start teaching her the key phrases she’ll need until she’s about 18:  “Get out of my room, get off the phone, I need the bathroom, tell mom and I’ll kill you, you can have the remote, but then you have to be my slave for the next hour…Uh, no, that’s not my brother, I don’t know who that is…”

• I’m slowly trying to catch up on commenting and reading everyone’s blog.  I would never presume to tell anyone how to present their blog, but I have to tell you that if your blog shows up as a partial feed in my reader, I’m simply not able to get to it.  I know that sounds awful, but I just don’t have the time to click through to read the whole thing.  It disrupts my rhythm, if you will.

• My mother in law is the most lovely human being on the planet.  She has cooked, cleaned and taken of care of N. just as well, if not better, than I could.  I’m thinking of running away with the circus, as I’m not really needed here, anymore.  But, really, I’m going to sneak into her room one night and check for batteries because I don’t think any real human being can be that sincere, loving, patient, energetic, selfless and happy all the time.

• In variation of the classic NYCWD and LeSombre style I’m going to save the last bullet for the next person who says, “Wow, you’re getting really big, aren’t you?”

In the past few months I’ve written some posts in which my parents have been the subject.

I think I’m giving people the wrong impression.

See, a blog, to me, is a place where I can discuss things that don’t come up in the course of regular conversation.

Whether it’s political, social, or personal, I like to go with the flow of a conversation rather than direct the topics chosen.  Most of the stuff I discuss here, I wouldn’t bring up in the course of a conversation.

My childhood or my parents don’t come up a lot in every day conversation unless someone else has specifically brought it up, or it’s relevant to the conversation at hand.

As I said, on my blog I feel that I can discuss whatever or whoever I like.

The problem is I run the risk of leaving people with an inaccurate representation of who I really am… or who the people I’m talking about really are.

I need to tell you something.

Yes, my parents are flawed.

But no more than me, you or anyone else.

Yes, I care a lot about what they think.

But not simply because they’re my parents.

My parents are truly extraordinary people.

I care about what they think because they deserve it.

Not because I’m neurotic.

Not because they brainwashed me or mentally tortured me.

Not because they placed huge expectations upon me in an effort to prolong my dependence upon their approval.

But because they deserve it.

The United States, 1974.

They didn’t know anyone, save for some friends of friends.  A typical immigrant story?

It’s not.

My parents weren’t your typical “huddled masses” immigrants.  They were from wealthy, educated and highly respected families.  When they came here, they didn’t bring any of that money or status with them.  In fact, in a way, they didn’t even bring their educations with them since foreign degrees aren’t automatically accredited.

So, they left much more behind than what they gained in America.  They started over.  With less.

Part of the reason my father left was because of he felt stifled by his family’s status.  He wanted to live a life that wasn’t encumbered by expectations and visibility.  You might not get that, and I didn’t for many years.  But, that really is the reason.  His life, other than this particular detail, was better in Pakistan in every way.

My mother came here because she was committed to making a life with the man she had just married.  And I suspect because she was most likely a little too strong willed and accomplished not to encounter some sort of opposition in a mostly male dominated field in a male dominated society.

They moved from fairly opulent households where they had never had to wash their clothes, clean up after themselves, or go grocery shopping into a one bedroom apartment somewhere on the south side of Chicago.  Most people they encountered initially in America had never even heard of Pakistan.

My dad, who was a lawyer, worked in a bottling factory as a foreman.  My mom, a neurosurgeon, became a housewife.  At least, until she passed accreditation exams and got a residency in Florida.

I can hear people wondering why they would leave wealth, status and power behind for a humble existence in a foreign land among people who spoke a different language, looked nothing like them and, for the most part, didn’t care to know much about them.

But, I don’t wonder.

I know why.  Because of me.  And my brother.

And that’s one of the reasons I care about what they think.

I know what they gave up for me.  They deserve for me to care what they think for that reason alone.

And, yet, there are more.

When I was growing up, my father sat with me almost every day after school and tutored me.  In math.  In history.  In politics.  He asked me to read passages from different books and then write one page essays about them.  He never returned the essays.  He never corrected them.  He always looked them over and said in heavily accented English, “This is very good.  Are you sure you didn’t copy this from somewhere?”

A deep sense of pride would well up inside of me and I would say, “No, daddy, I wrote that myself.”

And he would say, “Wow.  Even people my age cannot write this well.”

I know there were grammatical errors on those essays.  I know there were spelling errors.  But he looked at those papers and said, “Even the people who write for Reagan cannot write like this.”

I was eight.  He was lying.  But he made me feel like the smartest person in the world.

When I was seven, my father’s younger brother died in Pakistan of a heart attack.  He left behind a wife and five children.  My father went to Pakistan to see to their affairs.

He has visited them every year since then to make sure that they were alright.  In a patriarchal society like Pakistan, a widow with five children is in the position of being under siege in the social and financial sense.

I remember resenting my father for the time that he devoted to my aunt and my cousins, but, now, I get tears in my eyes as I think about how if that were my brother’s family, I would do the same.  No questions asked.  Besides the fact that my brother is generally awesome, I think part of the reason I care so much for him is because I witnessed how much a person can, sorry, how much a person should love their brother.

I care about what my father thinks because he deserves that much from me.  And more.

Even casual readers of my blog know something about my mom, I guess.  But they know what I’ve written about accomplishment, respect, reservedness and calculation.  And about how her and I are very different.

I’ve written that, sometimes, I feel like I’m not good enough to be her daughter.

What I haven’t explained is that I think she’s amazing.  Sometimes, I don’t think anyone is good enough for her.

My mom is not just a doctor.  She is the woman who will leave her home with sleeping children at two in the morning so that an eighty year old woman who is breathing her last breath won’t have to die alone.  She is the one that holds that woman’s hand, and whispers, “It’s alright, I’m here.  You’re going to be fine.”  She is the one who does not get paid to do that, but does it because it is good and right and because that woman is somebody to someone.

This hasn’t just happened once.  I have witnessed this dozens of times.

I feel like people should know this before they decide who she is.

I feel like people should know this before they think I respect her only because she’s my mom or because she’s a doctor or because she’s made a lot of money.

Those are such small parts of who she really is.

I care what she thinks because she deserves that from me.

My mother at the apex of her career made more than a lot of CEOs of smaller corporations.

All that time, she drove a used Toyota Camry and shopped at JC Penney.

Why?  So that when I went to college, I could graduate completely debt free.  She did the same for other members of my family, who were not her children, as well.

Once, my mom paid the tuition of a friend of mine for a semester.  She said that the girl was a good student and shouldn’t have to miss a single semester because the people in the student loan office couldn’t get their act together.

It was not a loan.  It was a gift.

A gift from a woman who has never bought make up from a department store, a designer purse or even perfume for herself.  (Luckily, she has me.)

I also haven’t mentioned on this blog that my mother tells me she’s proud of me all the time.

She tells me that she wishes that she could have been the kind of mother to me that I am to my child.  And she says these words without knowing that if I could inspire my daughter to a tenth of the greatness I see in her, I would consider myself successful.

She tells me that she loves me all the time.

If I tell her that she looks nice, she says, “Not as pretty as you, you are the most gorgeous.”

See, what I don’t tell you on this blog is that if I think I’m a disappointment to my parents it’s not their fault.

It’s because I see them.

I see them for who they are.

I know a lot of people thinks their parents are wonderful.

But mine really are.

They didn’t just build an entire life in a brand new country out of nothing.

They did that, preserved the life they had in the country they came from, and improved the lives of hundreds of people in the process.

I don’t like to think about their passing, but this I know, there will be hundreds of people who will cry for them.  Who will think it’s unfair.  Who will wish it didn’t have to be them.

I will be just one.

I would care what they thought even if they weren’t my parents.  In fact, I would probably care more because I wouldn’t be encumbered by the feeling that I was somehow selling out by caring too much.

At any rate, please don’t misunderstand why I care.

A lot of people care what my parents think of them.  And for good reason.

Because they deserve it.