Prenatal Manifest Destiny
My wife is a marathon runner.
Marie has run the Chicago Marathon four times. She ran in the Long Beach Marathon with Stella. She ran Toronto and Prague, once each. And she is competitive. In a 2019 marathon, Marie qualified for Boston and finished in the top five for her age group. She has running playlists. She knows running influencers. She reads about running, trains for running and listens to running podcasts. She has a running coach named Utah who writes personalized daily running programs which dictate distance, tempo and . . . that’s basically all I know about this subject. Utah is helping Marie rehabilitate from a series of surgeries and mishaps. Marie would prefer to run through the pain, but Utah monitors her activity through an omniscient app called Strava and occasionally has to scold my wife for exceeding her routine’s mileage allotment. After a flagrantly excessive run, Marie sometimes arrives home and says, “Utah is going to be mad at me.”
What does any of this have to do with pregnancy? Well, Marie has a runner’s body. She works hard to maintain it. No one would call her vain, but she feels like she’s earned her trim physique and that the person growing inside her has unfairly annexed her private property. It’s like Marie’s body is Indian Territory and the baby is Andrew Jackson who keeps claiming more and more acreage. On top of that — literally — are two growing problems. My wife can’t buy new bras fast enough. For the first time in her life, Marie has cleavage. None of her shirts fit. I married a woman with tatas, and over the past five months, she has sprinted through the phases of melons and knockers. She is fast-approaching full-fledged jugs. Whenever she walks outside in a tank top, her chest is drawing a lot more eyes than it used to. Usually mine. And aside from the tectonic shifting that turns molehills into mountains and the baby’s inexorable Manifest Destiny-like seizure of sovereign assets, Marie has a husband who keeps snapping candid side-shots of her in the hope of getting juicy material for his blog.
And I am happy to report success.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are at week #24 and blogpost #39. The baby is the size of an ear of corn or a cantaloupe depending on which app we’re tracking. And though my descriptions are undeniably worth the price that most of you are paying, a picture is undoubtedly worth more. Many of you have been asking for pics. Others have been secretly pining for them. So without further ado, here is what you’ve all been waiting for:
The first belly pic.
In the picture, Marie is reminding us that she’s only doing this one time.
At 24 weeks and two days, we have less than four months to go. Everything is getting realer. Marie is reading more and more about the mechanics of delivery, the potential injuries, the guaranteed injuries and recovery time for each. Apparently, creating and delivering a baby is some kind of big deal.
As part of the “birth plan”, we have decided my position in the room. There are at least two options: head or foot of the delivery bed. As the father, I can hold my wife’s hand and encourage the pushing and the breathing. Or I can participate in the actual delivery and witness the moist and splashy and presumably fragrant miracle of childbirth from the front row. Originally, I told my wife that my position during labor was going to be elsewhere. I repeated the joke in various forms several times since we started this project. I’ll be bowling. I’ll be golfing. I’ll probably be in a sand trap. I’ll be watching Frasier reruns on Hulu. The early responses from Marie and Lucy were rolled eyes and shared sympathetic glances. But once we entered the second trimester, the reactions went from mildly amused to annoyed to icy, silent stares.
I never really intended to be anywhere else. As an enthusiastic, duty-oriented husband and father-to-be who has no clue what he’s doing, I’m actually eager for marching orders. But I’m very glad to be at the head of the bed. I’ll be with Marie every moment and every step, but I do have a preference about the angle and aspect. There should remain some mystery between husband and wife.
On another note, I experienced one of the greatest joys in my entire life several times this week. Our baby boy is punching or kicking me in the face. As soon as Marie lays down for the evening, our boy wakes up. For the past three nights, I’ve been talking to Marie’s belly in bed before we go to sleep. My lips are right beneath her navel when I speak. And after a few seconds, one of our son’s limbs hits me directly in the mouth. I like to think that he recognizes his father’s voice. Although he could just be saying, “Hey, keep it down out there!”