I saw a line, and a lighter line next to it. I read the box again; negative would be just one line. Any second line, light or equally dark, meant yep--with child. Or with embryo, or multiplying cell mass, whatever you want to call it."What's taking you so long?" H-band said, walking into the bathroom. I'd been taking longer than usual to get ready for our Saturday morning stroll for coffee. I handed him the piece of plastic I had been studying."We're pregnant." I said, perhaps too casually. I'd said that one time before, and devastatingly it didn't stay true for long.That was January. I'm now just starting to believe the results. After paranoid judgments that I wasn't feeling sick enough and just didn't look pregnant enough--there couldn't possibly be a baby in there while I could still button my jeans--I'm starting to believe. Perhaps when I went in for the second trimester ultrasound and saw a skull and a spine. "There are the arms," the lab tech said. I had no idea what she was talking about, I couldn't make out any extremities, but those words helped me loosen my grip on H-band's hand. I had no idea I had been holding it so tightly."Two?" I confirmed."Yes."She then confirmed two legs, two lungs, and a four-chamber heart. I was almost back to breathing regularly at this point. "How about the sex?" I asked."The baby's legs are closed," the tech said. I would later learn this is commonly said at second trimester ultrasounds as a CYA mechanism, "I'm pretty sure I can see labia...ninety-five percent sure."I looked at the mass of white on the screen. "If you say so." I turned to H-band. Perhaps it was because a number of our friends were having girls lately that I had been so sure it was a boy. Or perhaps it was the illogical presumption that I had more Y chromosomes to offer up than X--I always felt like I had a lot of boy in me, despite the boobs and other anatomical indices. "You happy?" I asked H-band."Yep," he said, not very convincingly. He'd told me that he didn't care what sex the baby was, but I could tell he felt a twinge of worry, just like I had over the prospect of having a little boy; a question of whether or not he would be able to understand her. I wasn't concerned; though I felt a little guilty. I grew up in a house of women--we take over. I'm in the "honeymoon trimester". I feel like myself, though I find it more difficult to pick up things from the floor. My fitness instructor has to give me different instructions when we get to abdominals. People who don't know me just think I have a gut and am naturally well-endowed in the chest. Oh if they only knew. The first trimester was difficult. I was hardly sick and not nearly as tired as I was warned I would be. But I traveled throughout and felt that the 20-30 percent less that I could bring to things was glaringly obvious; my insistence on a cranberry and soda at cocktail parties an admission. I wanted to say, "Not getting my hopes up too much yet," then I shushed myself. I didn't want to manifest the devastation I encountered last summer. I would do things differently this time, whatever that meant.I came back from business trips and crashed over the weekend, too tired and icky feeling to get up off the couch some days. Still I was only sick-sick one weekend, during a trip to Mendocino. I'd puke and buy myself some hours of reprieve. I called my friend Lissa and my sister-in-law--both doctors--to ensure things were OK. Both said the symptoms sounded indicative of standard morning sickness. It must be something else, I told them. I just didn't feel sick enough. I harbored a bit of a complex over not being "Mommy" enough. Moms get ubersick when they are pregnant. They look abundant. They drip with, I don't know, Momminess. But during the first trimester waiters still asked me if I'd have a glass of wine with dinner; no one insisted on helping me with my bags on airplanes. I wondered if I was fooling myself. The few who knew early on asked me, "How will you do it?" I know people wonder that. I've not exactly been one who has lived with visible boundaries between my work and life. The past five years have been all-in. There was a point where I had to stop asking myself that same question. It had become an excuse to not try for something else. A year or so ago I began practicing creating more space--nothing glaringly obvious. While traveling, I'd stop working before I passed out from exhaustion, taking in a TV show or reading a book before I fell asleep. I came home earlier from work, knowing full-well that I'd get back on email later that night, but at least making it home for dinner. I stopped cramming things into the periphery of my day and letting the things I chose to do stand on their own, without having the less-important accomplishments lean against them like tchotchkes from some garage sale, unnecessary bulk.Yesterday, after a long day working at home--after two weeks of on and off travel--H-band started in,"You need to start talking to the baby," he said. "She can hear you." "I've been on conference calls all day," I said. "She's heard me plenty."He's been insistent on providing stimuli for the baby, just lately playing this game with my gut, poking my side three times and then waiting for the baby to poke back. She isn't exactly a counter yet, but she's responsive."One, two, three."(pause)"(Thud)""One, two, three."(pause)"(Thud)"H-band gets a kick out of this; it's an indication that she'll be responsive to us outside of the womb. We both want that reassurance that the story we're building in our heads--the one we keep repressing--will, in fact, come true. No promises, I keep saying to myself, then saying more quietly, but why the hell not?
I really loved reading this blog.
