On the Occasion of Everyone I Know Being Knocked Up

Holy shit. Everyone I know is pregnant.

This all started in October, when Katy and Matt showed up in Maine.

"So," Katy said, "if we drive by a drug store, we should probably stop in."

"What do you need?" I asked. I am a girl with plenty of sundries, and if she needed anything--deodorant, lotion, tampons, laxatives--I would be able to accommodate those needs without having to pop over to a CVS.

But Katy just grinned. "Well," she said, "I took a pregnancy test last night, and it was positive, so I think I should take another one to get a second opinion."

And then I squealed. I squealed a lot. And then, after we ate a lobster lunch on the rocks of Cape Elizabeth, we drove straight to the drugstore and wandered up the family planning aisle.

Katy couldn't help herself. She stared at the prices--pregnancy tests aren't cheap--and then she reached for the cheapest one on the shelf.

"NO!" Matt and I said, in unison.

Her hand froze in midair. "What?" she said. "Seriously, what's wrong with a cheap pregnancy test?"

"You get what you pay for," I said. I was remembering last October, when I visited Minnesota and Diana threw a party after the Good Thunder reading, and we made Babies-in-the-Cupcakes, and whoever found a baby in his or her cupcake got a present from the grab bag. We'd combed the aisles of the local dollar store for an hour, just looking for good gifts to hand out later. We'd selected some boas, some statues, some tubes of dollar store lube, and, of course, a pregnancy test. One of the boys was lucky enough to choose the pregnancy test, and he strode upstairs with a beer in one hand and the test in another. He did his business while we all gathered outside to talk him through the process, and then he came out of the bathroom beaming. It was good news: He was with child.

So, a year later, standing in the family planning aisle of the Cape Elizabeth CVS with Katy, I felt compelled to remind her of that. "Will we really feel confident about the result from a cheap test?" I asked.

Katy frowned.

"Don't be cheap," Matt said.

Katy frowned even more, but she edged her hand higher, toward the more expensive brands. "Can I at least get this brand?" she asked, poking to a store brand box. "It's a two-pack! It's a deal!"

Matt and I sighed. She plucked the box from the shelf and went off to pay.

A few hours later, there were a tense few moments in my bathroom before Katy came out waving a stick in the air. "Look!" she said. Oh, and we sure did:



And then we celebrated:



Yes, I put the stick Katy peed on very close to my face. In my defense, the gross end was capped.

Matt and I were excited by the results. I think it will please Katy that I've put a very rare picture of me in sweat pants out here for the world to see.



I can't remember what Katy is drinking here. It might be Loganberry. I might've been so pleased that I mixed her a big glass of Loganberry because, well, she earned it.

Not long after Katy and Matt left Maine for Mankato, I got more news. This time I was in my car, and I was driving the two hours down to Boston to pick Josh up from the airport after he ditched France. I had just crossed over into New Hampshire when Rachel, another of my best grad school girls, was having a baby, too. The kicker? She was due only three weeks before Katy. The two of them were going to be having babies at pretty much the exact same time.

At first I felt a stab of jealousy because my brain went fast-forwarding through the next few months, and I could see them pushing their stomachs together and posing for pictures, shopping for cute maternity clothes, comparing aches and pains, secretly swapping name ideas. And then, as quickly as it came, the jealousy disappeared and was replaced by another feeling, and that feeling has been simmering for a while now.

It's hard being away from my old friends. They're spread out from Buffalo to California. They're everywhere in between. They're nowhere near me. And it seems so odd that I was there for their weddings, for their first big steps into adulthood, but now I won't be there for the next. It seems completely bizarre to me that they will be pregnant all that time, and I will not see them. I'll never get to put my hand on their swollen stomachs and wait patiently to feel a kick. The night I first realized that, I was overwhelmed with sadness. I wanted to pack a bag and fly to Minnesota right then, right that second, but I couldn't, and I didn't, and instead I am trying to find comfort in the fact that, yes, this summer I'm driving out, and I'm going to spend time with the new babies in the Midwest, and, yes, Katy is forcing me to change my very first diaper then, and, yes, I will do my part in spoiling the new babies, and that's all great and wonderful and lovely, but it still seems just so quick, like those girls are going to snap their fingers and then, before you know it, before you can even orient yourself, everything is different, and I wasn't even there to see the change.

I Wanted to Keep Them Around Just to Hear Them Say Their Vowels

Rachel and Dan were here for a few days last week, and those were some mighty fine days. I hadn't seen the dynamic Wisconsin duo for over a year, and it was refreshing to wake up every morning and have them puttering around my apartment. In fact, over the course of their stay, they proved themselves to be excellent house guests. It seemed like every time I turned around they were doing my dishes, taking out my trash, picking up my wet towels. I would've married them, if that type of thing was allowed.

I first met the pair when I was in grad school. Rachel was in my two-week crash course on How to Be a Instructor of College Composition before the fall 2003 semester began. On the first day of that training, we went around the room and introduced ourselves. Rachel said she was from Wisconsin (and thus believed you pronounced the word "bag" as "bayyg") and that she was engaged. This was good news for me. After all, I had a major crush on one of the grad student mentors in that course, and I had been assessing every girl in that room since the moment I walked in. And now that I knew a lot of the cute girls were either married or engaged or supposed lesbians, I felt better about my chances. Rachel put my mind at ease.

Rachel had a hellish first semester at grad school. She had a lot of work, a lot of stressful classes, and a lot of things to get done. She was in a different program than I was--she was an English education girl--and when we would badger her to go out with us, she would always turn us down. She finally came out at the end of our first semester, and she was kind of shocked by the whole group of us. We were a little wild, a little crazy, a little too familiar with each other, and we scared the crap out of her. I kept looking across the bar table and seeing her stricken face. I could tell she was thinking, Oh Jesus. What the hell have I gotten myself into?

But once we rolled her into the group, there was no stopping her. One of my fondest memories of Rachel was a night we were all at a friend's house, just sitting around a kitchen table, drinking, gossiping. Rachel had a few too many glasses of wine and then decided she was too drunk to handle a delicate wine stem anymore, so she got up, got herself a straw, and plopped it down into the glass and guzzled her Merlot that way. Resourceful. Half an hour later, she suggested we try on each others' clothes, so all the drunk and giggling girls clambered up the stairs and tore off their clothes and started pawing through our hostess's closet and trying on things like a T-shirt that had the words SQUEEZE ME painted across the chest. That night and the conversations and all the girly nonsense is not one I will ever, ever forget.

Of course, you don't get a Rachel without a Dan, and what a delightful little perk that is. Cute, funny, sweet (he learned one of Rachel's favorite David Gray songs and played it and sang it for her right before he proposed), and a pilot, this boy is a keeper. One of my favorite Dan memories is this: he took me flying. He took me flying more than once--Rachel refuses to fly with him anymore because she had the unlucky pleasure of being in the plane when Dan was simulating a impending crash and a subsequent recovery--but my first time was my favorite.

The flight was my birthday present. He and Rachel kidnapped me the morning after my big birthday celebration. They told me to get in the car. They told me not to ask any questions because I was getting a surprise. And then we showed up at the small town airport, and Dan took me out to his plane. It was fabulous. It was fabulous even though I'd woken up in a foul mood--the Wily Republican and I had gotten into it the night before--and it was fabulous even though I was hungover. My stomach might have turned over on itself once or twice, but it was worth it. It was one of the most glorious birthday presents I've ever gotten.

And it's been hard to live so far away from Rachel and Dan. I don't like being separated from them. Not one bit. So you can imagine how happy I was for the few days they were here. I tried to show them some of my favorite places, tried to convince them to move to Maine and take up residence in my spare bedroom. I don't think I was quite successful in that last effort--especially considering they definitely aren't in this apartment right now--but at least we were able to saturate ourselves with Maine-y goodness for a few days. Here are a few of the highlights:


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