Apparently, I’m Seven Months Pregnant

The books, as we will collectively refer to them, all claim as a symptom or side-effect of the seventh month of pregnancy a heightened propensity toward clumsiness, as I can attest to, given the accumulation of debris I have left in my wake this past week.

This mass destruction, which by Wednesday had me hyperbolically declaring I had broken half of our wedding gifts, was foreshadowed the previous month with my thorough shattering of a pair of martini glasses with one can of kidney beans.  I had begun drinking martinis (vodka martinis) earlier that week, mostly because we now, after the wedding, possessed martini glasses, and having washed and dried the two glasses I set them side-by-side on the counter, directly below a well-stocked cupboard from which—in the process of searching for a snack, probably macaroni and cheese or cookies or peanut butter—I nudged and dropped the aforementioned beans, the can pulverizing both glasses simultaneously.  Now sits atop the baker’s rack a lonely and forsaken bottle of vermouth—because what fun is drinking a martini from a milk glass?—the vodka having been reallocated to my customary pre-martini-glass-owning white russians.

I had forgotten this incident by the time the true devastation began this week, innocently enough with my dropping and shattering of a juice glass but followed ominously an afternoon later with my annihilation—during the process of washing—of a lovely trifle dish (also a wedding present) inside which Liz had created an equally lovely Fourth of July dessert.  My feelings of mourning over this loss mixed with those of frustration and fatalism when, an hour later, upon attempting to turn on a light (by the pull of a cord) the glass cover which I had earlier and apparently faultily reinstalled after the changing of a bulb came crashing to its demise. 

The sound of shattering glass from the other room had become so frequent Liz took to responding only with silence.

Silence that harbored frustration of its own, I found, when my spilling water all over the dinner table—and dinner—resulted in a bit of a fight.

We made up though, and the following night, when I spread pesto across the kitchen floor from a dropped bowl, it was chalked up as comical.

Liz—whose own seventh month clumsiness is seemingly more muted—was gracious and kind, too, while body-blocking the crystal vase (also from the wedding) that would house the flowers I brought home the following afternoon, gently stating, “Oh, I’ll do it,” and later when unassumingly offering to herself wash and dry the two pitchers waiting on the counter, an offer that seemed to implicitly include everything else, ever.