Full disclosure

I've been told I get too personal on this blog, and that's probably true. That's the way I've always been in "real life" and it has both hindered and helped me, though since I've been in Italy, I've felt myself close off a bit. It could be the inability to be myself 100 percent in another language (though I'm probably at about 90 percent now, and that makes me happy) or it could be that being myself sometimes makes me too different from everyone else, and I get tired of being different all the time so I just hold my tongue in situations here where I would have spoken my mind before. Unfortunately, that seems to have carried over into my English-speaking personality as well and I'm often told when I go home that I am so much quieter and more subdued. I think it's a combination of only going home for a couple of weeks a year and not being there long enough to get over the jet lag and inevitable culture shock.

So I've had a secret from this blog, which has been difficult to keep, being the open, tell-all kind of person I am, known for my startling frankness about things others would consider highly private or personal (but, I reason, what do I really have to hide?). Something happened shortly after this post (where I was preparing to run a half marathon) that turned my world upside down. There I was preparing for the half marathon (you may have thought I flaked out but in actuality I wrote the post knowing that if I published it, I wouldn't be able to back out so when I wrote it, I had every intention of doing it. I swear!) but just feeling weird. As the preparation runs got longer, I found myself getting tired, light-headed and shaky after each workout. One night I was shaking so hard from some kind of post-run hypoglycemic reaction that I actually ran into a Chinese restaurant and ordered rice and vegetables on the spot. Cristiano thought I was nuts, but my body needed food. I found that strange but thought "Must be all the training I'm doing."

Then one day I realized I, uh, was a week late for my period and again I thought "Wow, I'm running so much, I've turned into a super athlete complete with no menstrual cycle!" Then another day I was on the subway and began to suffer from motion sickness. "That's strange," I thought. "I take public transportation all the time and never suffer from motion sickness." I thought nothing of it and turned back to my magazine, trying to ignore the waves of mild nausea. Did I at any point connect all of the dots and think, "Hmm, these all sound like pregnancy symptoms?" No! It never crossed my mind until one night when I was standing in the kitchen with my hand on my lower back and Cristiano said "You are standing funny. Like a pregnant lady!"

Phone books were whipped out in a frenzy, all-night pharmacies were located and two pregnancy tests were procured. The lines of which, of course, turned bright pink immediately. I sat on the couch in shock fanning myself with my hands for a good thirty minutes. I would not be running a half marathon. I mean, I may have been running a half marathon if within a matter of days my energy level hadn't plummeted to the ground and that mild taste of nausea experienced on the subway hadn't turned into all-day nausea, vomiting and constant stomach cramps. Chinese and other ethnic foods (I am a lover of anything spicy) became a thing of the past, replaced with bland soups and baked potatoes.

I hope to be coming out of this phase as I'm now in my 13th week. All of the books tell me that from next week, I should be feeling more energetic and more glowing. I can't wait. Had I written about this before, my posts would have been pretty repetitive and horrifying ("Today I vomited 7Up and crackers twice. I never want to see Saltines again. I feel so bloated. I'm so tired, I don't want to work....") so I hope to have spared you, dear readers, the worst. I have no intention of posting belly shots - or even TAKING belly shots. Even artsy Annie Liebovitz style ones. It was a shock but it has turned into a pleasant surprise and I hope that now that some of the yuckiest symptoms are (supposedly) behind me, I can come out of this nausea haze, stop complaining all the time about how crappy I feel, get back to normal life a bit and have some time to wrap my head around the fact that I will become a mother (to a boy or "a girl with genitals that are too far forward," as the ultrasound technician said at this latest high-tech scan) sometime between New Year's Eve and the arrival of La Befana.