My grandfather on my mother’s side used to get angry when letters home started with “Dear Mother and Father.” He insisted that they start with “Dear Father and Mother” instead.

My grandfather on my father’s side used to get angry when letters home started with “Dear Father and Mother.” He insisted that they start with “Dear Mother and Father.”

Grandpa #1 died when I was 5 but Grandpa #2 lived until I was 30.

Another touch of weirdness is that I obsessively started making enormous quantities of iced tea. I maybe made it twice in my entire life but now I’m making it every day. And it comes out looking quite orange, too.

It’s not nearly as easy as all of these humorous posts I’m publishing are making it sound. I feel like I’ve become a different person, a person I don’t really know. Today, for instance, I discovered that I’m irresistibly drawn to orange things. Why orange things? It’s a mystery. I never liked the color before but today I bought this orange nightgown:

 

And then I also bought an orange notebook and. . . prepare for the real weirdness now. . . I bought an issue of New Republic because it had huge orange letters on the cover:

 

I’m going to read the orange magazine while wearing my orange nightgown and eating oranges from a big bag.

I don’t think it makes sense to expend energy on resisting the weirdness right now so I will embrace it. I’m going to color my hair soon, and if the orange obsession doesn’t abate by that time, you know what to prepare for.

At the hospital, N was washing me in the shower because I was pretty helpless after the operation. As you can imagine, my body doesn’t look its best at this moment. The pregnancy, the surgery, the old PUPPPS scars, the new PUPPPS eruptions that look only slightly better than Bubonic plague (I checked), the feet and hands that are swollen to twice their natural size, the face that is puffed up like a pillow from crying, the hair that has been absolutely crazy – in short, I have to brace myself before undressing to avoid traumatizing myself with the ugliness.

So as N was washing my ravaged, battered, miserable body, I turned around and caught him staring at it with such overwhelming adoration that I don’t think many movie stars and top models get from people who look at their perfect bodies.