town, and suddenly I feel so tired. I’m a little dizzy, and I just feel weird. And then I know. I’m pregnant. Just like that. Just like that, driving in our little car it hits me: I’m pregnant. I don’t know why I know it, but I do, and it’s the most certain I’ve ever felt about something I have no proof of.
I see a drugstore and pull the car into the parking lot. “What do you need?” he asks, and I tell him. Fifteen minutes later, we are back at his parents’ house, up in the bathroom together with the door locked like two teenagers hiding something. He sits on the edge of the bathtub while I pee on a stick. He reads the instructions fifty times, even though I tell him not to worry, I’m a pro at these tests.
He looks at the stick. He looks at me. I’m pregnant. I’ve just given him the thing he wants most in life. He looks happier holding that positive pregnancy test than I have ever seen him, before or since.
BUILDING
When I’m six months pregnant, we sell our awesome downtown condo and buy an old house in the north end of the city. People will dispute “north end” and they’re right, but to this downtown girl? It feels like we’ve moved to the treeline.
The reason we’re here above the treeline is me. Even though I’ve lived downtown since I was nineteen. Even though I love living within walking distance to everything and being in the centre of it all. Even though I love living in an apartment, I am the one who pushes us to buy a house away from it all. Me. I know. It’s like I’m a totally different person now that I’m pregnant. A person who thinks “the right” thing to do is to live in a house because a baby is coming. Even though we could have made do in our condo, or just bought a two-bedroom. For some reason, I’m stuck on the idea of a house. A baby needs a bedroom! A baby needs a house! And it should be quiet, so a baby needs a detached house! With a backyard! And a driveway. With a garage! Make it a double!
So this is why we’re here, in an eighty-year-old house, with a leafy backyard and a double garage, nowhere near downtown. Nowhere near any of our friends or favourite restaurants or parks. Nowhere.
There are only two things I enjoy about being pregnant — one is that my hair is as shiny and curly and healthy and beautiful as it’s ever been or will be. The other is that I can feel her moving around inside me. And she moves a lot. “What’s she building in there?” I always say, quoting a Tom Waits song and imitating his voice as I do it, which always makes The Husband laugh. I just can’t believe how much activity there is in my own body! Sometimes, I’m lying down and part of my belly just changes shape as she jabs some appendage into the wall of the sack she’s growing in, which just happens to also, miraculously, be part of my body. Beside me is her dad, as silly and adorable as ever. He grabs at the appendage and manages to hold it for a second, and I feel her fight to free herself from his grip. It’s like they’re playing together already, even though my body is between them, and I feel increasingly removed and lonely.
How can I be lonely with another human being inside of me? I mean, you can’t get closer than that can you? I also have a husband who’s wanted to be a father for so long. He’s so jazzed by the whole thing, but my body hurts. It’s uncomfortable, and now I can’t play soccer anymore.
I play in a co-ed league every Thursday; it’s the thing I look forward to most each week. I love my team and the way everything disappears while I’m on the field. Now that I’m pregnant and can’t play anymore, I feel like a huge part of my life is missing. Instead I sit at home on Thursday nights with my uncomfortable new body, eating too much while trying not to think about soccer, or how once the baby comes, it will be my hormones that go wonky, not The Husband’s, so no wonder he is so excited. It will be my body that will have to feed her, and before that, she’ll have to come out of my vagina. I have no idea what any of that will be like. Let alone being a mother for the rest of my life.
I suppose you might be rolling your eyes at me right now. Go ahead. Being pregnant isn’t always this blissed-out Earth Goddess Instagrammable wonder-show that it’s often presented as. For some of us, it hurts and sucks to be pregnant — your body is stretched and pulled and your pelvis is actually tilting and your hormones are all wacky and you can’t sleep. People give you all kinds of unsolicited nutritional advice about nitrates and soft cheese. Strangers touch you, because as a pregnant woman out in the world you are now somehow public property, like a park bench or a new city-approved sculpture. Everyone can just put their hands on your belly and congratulate you or comment on how huge you are. So I am here to say unequivocally: I don’t like being pregnant. And I know I’m not the only one. Why can’t we say that and still be good mothers? We can. I just did.
And yes, being pregnant is a beautiful thing, too. You’re making a life. There’s a body inside of your body! How crazy is that? It’s like you’re a human matryoshka doll. I mean, that’s pretty amazing, even if it’s uncomfortable.
One requisite of being a human matryoshka doll is reading parenting books and magazines. I flip through pages and pages dutifully, although they’re filled with things and people I feel completely disconnected from. I’d rather be reading an article about the latest Radiohead album, not “The Top 5 Pregnancy-Safe Cleaning Products.” But, I do happen upon one article that piques my interest, all about decorating the nursery. It suggests you paint your baby’s room your favourite colour, since you’re going to spend so much of your life in there for the next few years. Don’t paint the room for the baby, paint it for you.
So that’s what I do. I find painting very relaxing, and although I’m uncomfortably pregnant, I paint her entire room over the course of a few days; three walls mandarin orange, and one wall cream-coloured with giant hand-painted circles in mandarin, lime, and brown. When I’m finished, The Husband installs the mobile he bought to go above the crib: a complete solar system that orbits a bright sun. He’s a scientist, what do you expect? It becomes my favourite room in the house.
I may not be in the best headspace while pregnant, but The Husband is really, really happy now. And he’s been growing a beard. Or rather, trying to grow a beard, since he’s one of those men who has zero body hair and not quite any facial hair either. It comes in scraggly and patchy, and the beard and moustache don’t even touch in the places they should. Still, I find him impossibly adorable. I call it his “playoff beard,” since he is determined to keep it until the baby is born. Just like hockey players vying for the Stanley Cup, he will not jinx the proceedings by shaving his face. It’s quite a superstitious thing to do for a scientist, and I love him more for his contradictions. Still, part of me feels him slipping away from me. Everything is about the baby now, and it’s like our relationship has shifted into a business partnership. The business of baby.
Almost every night now, The Husband rests his head on my giant belly and shouts “Hey!” She responds by jumping all around like an excited puppy in my uterus. He pokes my belly hard and says, “Whattaya at?” and she pokes back at him immediately, every time, and hard. They go back and forth like this, already communicating, and I feel more and more removed from things. More and more like a vessel, a host that will usher in his greatest relationship, making me insignificant. Which is exactly what happens.
FULL MOON, FIRST OF JULY
Dear White Shirt,
Tonight, we talked and talked, all the adults, once the kids finally fell asleep. We drank wine around a bonfire and then more wine and we talked about how the moment is life. How isn’t it funny that the things you can’t plan for often turn out to be the best things? If we let them.
We had more wine. We talked about death and fear. We talked about risk and love and gratitude. We talked about how our parents
