Identity Crisis: Max's Birth Story

I originally wrote two paragraphs of disclaimer here. But I just deleted them. Why warn you? No one warned me and I'm okay. Pretty much okay.

Part 1:  "You Must Be Messing With Me" or  "I'll SCRAPBOOK YOU, Honey!"

I loved being pregnant. Sure, I was big like a house. Sure, I had to pee more than a grandpa hopped up on Redbull , but deep down I loved it. 

Attention.  

Great skin (that I haven’t  experienced before or since). 

Frontsies in line at the drug store, bathroom, toll booths, you name it! Well, maybe not toll booths) 

What’s not to love?!

We’d only been married for about nine months when the stick turned pregnant.

To be absolutely accurate, seven sticks (of varying makes and models) returned with a pregnant verdict before I marched myself into the OBGYN’s office demanding some sort of explanation.  The only fifteen minutes I didn’t have to pee in that whole nine months was standing in the Dr’s office lady’s room holding their “superior, Dr's” pregnancy test that looked exactly like the seven others at home in my bathroom trash.  Who am I kidding? Back then, I would have vaccum sealed the things and thrown them in the nearest dumpster rather than let something stained with urine offend my germ-free fortress of a living environment. Who knew a year and a half later I’d let little packets of human diapers sit around for hours breathing the same air as my family and not think twice about it? This lady(the doctor) had some nerve . First, she outfits a young, impressionable girl with a defective diaphragm and then she giggles at me when I tell her this is my eighth test. She mockingly asks me if I need this one for my “scrapbook.” NO LADY, I don’t need your little pee square for my scrapbook. I need you to tell me what happened to my youth! I’m about to go back out into the world a mother! I’m going to have to get a terrible haircut and forget all about my self-centered existence that I LOVE.  I want to just stay in this doctor’s office forever where I walked in a young newlywed full of promise and with many blissful childless years in front of me.  The biggest thing I had planned this week was a pedicure, and you’re suggesting I start filling out pre-school applications, you dream snatcher! Please, don’t make me go out there!

But “out there” I did go. It wasn’t so bad. At first. I don’t remember a lot of what happened in the hours following my departure from that Dr’s office. I think I confirmed with the Mr. that our lives were essentially over and we agreed to hold off telling our friends and families until we could be sure that things were going smoothly and we could tell everyone properly—with lots of pomp and circumstance.

Immediately following that conversation, I stopped by my dad’s office on the drive home from the dr’s office and blurted out the news the same way that one would announce they’d had pot roast the night before—not bad as far as dinners go, but not particularly anything to write home about either. By midnight that night, we’d called everyone else we’d ever met on the phone and told them. I think I told my high school girlfriends over a facebook instant message.  All before we’d even really absorbed the news ourselves.  I have no idea what possessed us. I could claim that we were smoking a lot of crack that day, but it seems terribly  irresponsible to be smoking crack while “with child,” and more importantly, I don’t know enough about exactly what crack is to state our “crack use” in any kind of believable manner. So the best thing I can do here is claim to have had PTSD from that jokester doctor and her “trick diaphragm” to have announced my baby while he was still essentially embryonic and possessed of approximately ten cells. Clearly, I was lucky to have been banking on ten such extraordinary cells. That whole thing, like many of the great things in my life, could have gone very, very badly for me if at all dependent upon the grace with which I handled the situation.

(to be continued)

Leave me a comment letting me know it you like this sort of thing or if you'd rather I dispense with the baby chat and bring back the shoes.


Update: ( you can find part II here--- if you dare)