About a month ago I told you about Mike’s and my latest project. Well here is an update.
It’s a lady.
Years before we were married, I said to Mike, “Hypothetically speaking someday — and you can’t say, ‘I don’t care as long as it’s healthy’ — would you rather have a boy, or a girl?” I figured he’d say a boy because boys want boys, at least that seems to be the general rule. But he didn’t hesitate for a second, and he said, “I would love to have a girl.”
Well obviously I would like to have a girl. You’re talking to the person who had an all-pink birthday party only four years ago and who just might be guilty of thumbing through the American Girl catalog once in a while. So when the ultrasound technician told me several weeks back that she thought our baby was a girl, my response was, “Good answer.”
Now that we’ve since had more ultrasounds confirming that it’s “definitely” a girl, I can say that this news comes as a very welcome milestone in a journey that, to be perfectly honest, has been one of mixed feelings for me. Of course it’s a blessing. Of course it’s going to be great. But when I found out I was pregnant, my shocked reaction was, “You mean that ‘last hurrah’ I’ve been looking forward to… has already happened? As in, finito? As in, my goose is cooked? Stick a fork in me, I’m done? Et tu, Brute?”
My 30th birthday party — for which the invitations had already gone out and for which we were planning to get day-drunk on mint juleps — was only a week and a half away. And while I was still going to clean my house from top to bottom and spend a week cooking and preparing, it would apparently be in order to watch everyone else get day-drunk on mint juleps while I crossed the threshold of 30 sober as a judge. FAIL. (My 31st birthday — usually one of the less significant ones — is going to be a BLOWOUT, let me just tell you.)
Since finding out about The Thing — Miss Thing, I suppose — I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I love my husband and my life, and how drastically it is all going to change. “For the better,” those who have been through it say, but I’m skeptical. I am not going into this expecting bunnies and rainbows and marshmallows.
I love sleeping for a minimum of 8 hours every night, and sitting in a quiet house, and running errands however it suits me, without having to lug a 10-pound weight in a car seat around with me. I have always been grateful for our easy and fun lifestyle, that we can jump up and go to the movies any time the mood strikes us, or sleep till noon if we want, or stay out late with our friends because there is no babysitter to relieve. I am not even moved by the sight of an adorable puppy. Instead, I see a poop machine that chews up your furniture and has to be taken out to pee at inappropriate hours. Too. Much. Responsibility.
But our lives are about to become consumed with and driven by responsibility. And so now the final countdown is on. I am relishing the hell out of every moment of quiet, every minute of uninterrupted sleep, every opportunity to get up and go to the [insert any destination], and I am focusing unapologetically on myself and what I feel like doing. Because once it’s over, it is O-V-E-R. I am enjoying what’s left of my “old” life, because there’s a new life around the corner, and my new life is here to stay. There’s none of that 18-years-ofesponsibility B.S. Once you are a mama, you are a mama forever.
As I was driving the other day I heard it mentioned on NPR that our new poet laureate is W. S. Merwin. Apparently I have been living under a rock, because I didn’t know this, but I immediately thought of my favorite lines from his poem, “Words from a Totem Animal”:
send me out into another life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way
In light of our recent developments, those lines struck me in an entirely new light.
Yep, I thought. Here we go. Out into another life.
And just as I am preemptively mourning the end of my carefree existence, Sister emails me this:
It IS a cute butt.
Bunnies and rainbows and marshmallows and YIPPEEEEE we’re having a girl!!! 😀
