It wasn't all bad in through the looking glass.

There were moments of joy, but they were sometimes difficult to discern or hold onto among all the fear. But now that we’re on the other side, I want to make sure that I remember.

We were planning on waiting to find out the baby’s sex at the 20-week scan, though I took a blood test for chromosomal anomalies at 10 weeks that included the sex chromosomes. A few weeks after the testing, I was digging into some other test results in my patient portal and accidentally scrolled over the blood test results. Male.

“Oh shit.” “What?” “I accidentally just found out the sex.” David was upset. I was elated. We decided that I would tell him sometime after that weekend’s trip to Dallas to tell our families about the pregnancy; he didn’t think he’d be able to keep it a secret. So I played along with everyone’s speculation that weekend, and did it well enough that David was actually convinced it was a girl.

Then one morning as we were laying in bed, I pulled his hand to my abdomen, to my hard uterus, and said, “Can you feel that?” “Of course.” “Say good morning to your son.”

We told my family like this, with everyone gathered in the living room:

“Hey, do you guys still want to go on a ski trip in December?” “Yeah.” “Well unfortunately we’re not going to be able to make it this year, because that’s when the baby’s due.”

My mom shouted, “December?!?” in a way that intimated we had some serious audacity to have a baby born near Christmas.

My brother said quietly, to no one in particular, “Wow, that’s news.”

My dad texted his family, saying that he was going to be a grandfather, and left them to speculate for several hours on whether it was me or my 19-year-old sister who was pregnant.

My sister said, unhappily, that we were going to be lame now.

Early in my second trimester, I would lay for long periods as still as possible on my back, trying to feel the faintest flutter. I was convinced he liked music, and so we’d bring the portable speaker next to my stomach and wait for him to kick, at first unsure if they were real or imagined sensations.

A couple of weeks later, David began to be able to feel them too. “Kicky kicky!” he’d exclaim, so often that “Kicky kicky” became the baby’s nickname.

It was a well-earned title. At almost every appointment, he’d kick and wriggle away from the doppler or the ultrasound wand. At my 32-week appointment the doctor declared him “wild” and said he had earned the “movement of the month” award. I was delighted.

And that’s how it goes really. You don’t know anything about this little person inside of you and so you grasp onto every little detail you can. Our kicky, wild son. The ultrasound technician, laughing, repeating, “Whose nose is that?” at one appointment, and at another declaring that he had long fingers. The doctor checking my cervix and finding hair. Our boy had hair!

We celebrated after every appointment, often with pastry. Every week felt like a victory. Every new month we read at Shul, in Hebrew, “Grant that this month bring us goodness and blessing,” and read it with fervent, desperate intention. And on the day when they announced the month of Tevet, the month I knew he would be born, I cried.

Toward the end, I would lumber around, muttering to myself, “Big baby, big baby.” It became yet another nickname. But then in moments of fear, the adjective would fail and suddenly it was instead, “Oh, my little baby.”

I kept moving. I walked to work every day. On Thanksgiving I ran the last 0.1 mile of the 5K we run every year along the Mall. I rode bikes well into my second trimester, and once at 40 weeks because my grandmother claimed that’s how she went into labor with my uncle. We walked to synogogue often, and would summit what our friends have affectionately dubbed “Mount Shul,” the large, long hill you have to climb to get there. Every week felt like a triumph, though I kept saying I wanted to pay to have a bench installed halfway up, the “[My Name] Pregnancy Bench.” We did it for the last time the day after my due date.

We travelled too. Over the span of my pregnancy we were in ten different states and four different countries: Hot Springs VA, New York NY, Cacapon WV, Rehoboth DE, Dallas TX, Harbor Springs MI, Minneapolis MN, West Augusta VA, Toronto Canada, Copenhagen Denmark, Malmo Sweden, Dallas TX, Burlington VT, Bretton Woods NH, New York NY.

Jews don’t do baby showers, but both David and my colleagues threw us surprise showers. David was truly surprised, but I figured it out beforehand. On another day, our friends, Mark, Roy, and Elizabeth, insisted on doing something, so they made mac and cheese, decorated with a handmade banner, and we played a couple of silly shower games together. Every time it felt a little like tempting fate, but we let it go, and let ourselves feel the love.

He was due near the end of the year. We tried to stay busy, visits with friends, a local theater production of “Anything Goes,” a Wizards’ game that went into triple overtime. We kept joking about how we’d tried to explain tax law to him (i.e., the importance of being born in 2018 rather than 2019 for tax purposes), but that he didn’t seem to be listening. In the end we did get our 2018 baby.

Last updated April 15, 2019