When I was pregnant for the first time, there was a Shipley Donuts on my way into work. I tried really hard to eat well when I was pregnant but some mornings it was too much to resist. I would always order the same thing: a sausage and cheese kolache and a bottle of chocolate milk. (The same drink, coincidentally, that I drank in a parking lot and almost wept when it was finished the afternoon I found out I was pregnant.)
I gave in more times than I didn’t, and I became enough of a regular that the women behind the counter started to beam at me when I came in. People love pregnant women, especially when they’re eating. One day the cashier, a woman in her forties, asked me if I was having a boy or a girl. Between her broken English and my broken Spanish I said a boy. She asked what number child it was. I said it was my first and she burst out laughing, a knowing laugh.
Logan is fond of saying that the first night Bear was on earth, he screamed the whole way through. Multiple people had pressed on my belly to get him out of me, like they were trying to pop one of those theatrically large pimples on the set of Dr. Oz. Just five months earlier, we’d decided not to have children, to just sleep in on the weekends and eat blueberry pancakes. I was unknowingly nineteen weeks pregnant. The first night we were home from the hospital I was changing the first diaper of my life. “How do you get the poop off your balls?” I asked Logan, struggling with my second or third wipe, mildly high on pain medicine, sleep deprivation, and the whole concept that we’d made a new human.
I still think of that woman sometimes, and I can still hear her laugh. I feel great affection for her even though I don’t know her name and I stopped going to that donut shop when we moved apartments a few months later. Sometimes I can feel her laugh bubbling up from inside me when I see pictures of myself as a new mother. So young! I think. So clueless! Who let her have a baby? It’s such a thrill to realize that no one did, that we’re all just making it up as we go along. I hope wherever she is, she had a happy Mother’s Day.