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| Life is good, right? |
We had already decided that we didn’t want to have kids. We’d been married for a few years and were enjoying life as a young married couple with three cats in a cute one bedroom apartment. Why mess things up? I had little confidence in my ability to be a parent, we were living on not much, my husband was a full-time student, and we had a lot of parties. There were many good reasons not to mess with the status quo. Many. Can’t remember now what they were, but we had our reasons.
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| What the hell?? Suddenly, I wanted a baby! |
And then the strangest thing happened.The minute I turned twenty-five, it was all I could think about.
BABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABY…
It became topic A, B, and C.
I mean, I was almost ready to graduate from Cal, and clearly I wasn’t cut out to be a firefighter. My job at the law school was kind of a dead end. My husband was in law school (a different law school– not the one where I worked), and…I don’t know. I just wanted to have a baby. And suddenly, those good reasons not to didn’t seem to matter anymore. To me. And, eventually, to us. Everything became: What if?… What if?…What if?
I felt like I was going a little crazy. And that was before I got pregnant.
My body quickly kicked into production mode and there was no mistake about it: I ate tuna on sourdough (extra pickles) with such consistency that the lunch place I went to most days started making my sandwich when I walked in the door. I slept like Rip Van Winkle. I hated foods I used to love and vice versa. There were some mornings when I hit the Saltines pretty hard.Couldn’t stand the thought of crab or asparagus, for some reason. But couldn’t get enough of pasta oozing with cheese and drowning in sauce; I could have lived on manicotti and canneloni. Zoned out sitting up at work on more than one afternoon.
But otherwise, I felt really good.
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| All you can eat! |
And what an exciting time! I finally finished my B.A. at Berkeley a mere nine years after I started as a student there– walked across the stage to get my diploma wearing a maternity dress instead of a cap and gown. My husband graduated from law school that spring and began job hunting. Our lives were going to change in a lot of ways.
We had no idea…