A spin of the wheel

Sitting in the examining room in a paper gown, the obstetrician spun the wheel that would tell my future, and I held my breath.

Making the decision to have a child after a young adulthood filled with dreams of a single life and self fulfillment seemed such a longshot, I wasn’t really sure how I got here.

Five months earlier, I was saying “I do” with such trepidation; even though my mind was clear and I was happy, I worried. Would things change? Would I be different now that my life was going to be joined with another’s?

I balked at every step of the way, from the proposal to the license. I refused to change my name with such a ferocity that I might have become just a little unglued. I feared losing my identity. I feared a change that would make us both different people. I held on to each moment with a white-knuckled grasp, treating the bridal shower and the rehearsal dinner as wake and funeral for my single self.

Every detail became important as I waited for the date when I would walk down the aisle and laugh my way through the vows
we’d crafted together.

Looking back on it now with the distance of just a few years it seems as if it was all just a colossal waste of energy.

The idea that I would be someone’s mother was infinitely more important and powerful, not to mention irreversible. I had planned every detail of the wedding and seem to leave the baby to chance.

Once the stick test confirmed the happy news and I’d made the official appointment, it dawned on me; the wedding hadn’t changed me in any tangible way, but this most certainly would.

A year of planning a wedding and nine months … less by the time the first appointment was made … to get ready for something huge and tiny in one.

As you might imagine, we had a typical reaction to the news: We bought pregnancy books, which my husband lovingly hid from me once I peeked my head up from chapter seven and exclaimed “…OH my GOD. Vericose veins? … hemorrhoids? … WHO on Earth would ever get pregnant if they knew what the side effects were?” during dinner at his mother’s house.

Then the strangest thing happened. I relaxed.

Through 39 weeks of measurements, ultrasounds and blood tests, I meandered toward motherhood happily enduring heartburn, nosebleeds and being awoken in the middle of the night by jabs from tiny little feet.

All of that was still ahead of me, though, as I sat on the examining table swinging my feet, anxiously waiting for irrefutable proof that I would wreck this child’s life somehow with this haphazard planning.

“It looks like you’re due date is Dec. 22,” said the doctor. “We’re looking at a Christmas baby.”

“Nice going, mom!” I chastise myself. “You’ve already robbed the kid of a lifetime of birthday loot.”