Pregnant pause

A friend of mine is pregnant. To me, it’s the good kind of pregnant, that involving hopeful anticipation and a committed husband and financial stability. It’s not the bad kind of pregnant – or my kind of pregnant, as I imagine it might be – that involving a sobbing mother and my sister throwing me down the Exorcist stairs.

Upon learning the news of her pregnancy and first ultrasound appointment, I followed up my immediate exclamation points and congratulations with a request for the pictures. Shocking, I know. I had no plans to use them as a dartboard or to line the litter box, I assure you. She expressed disbelief at the interest everyone had in seeing the blurry images; why was anyone other than her and her hubby so excited to see their little being?

I really don’t know. When I meet her baby for the first time, I’ll try to talk college football with it, and when someone asks me to hold it, I’ll do so for the cameras to prove to my feline descendants that I am human, and then sit it upright on the couch and return to the cheese dip and my Cabernet. But there’s something about seeing the little tadpole as a part of her, of this woman I have known for years as a friend and a fellow student and as owner of one of the most amazing bodies known to man. It’s her, and therefore, it’s special simply because it is.

It’s also because it defies explanation in its magnitude. Well, there is a very basic explanation, but images of her and her wholesome husband in a series of compromising positions will leave me catatonic, so I’d rather not go there. The very fact that she is nuturing a human no larger than my palm, one who I’ll meet when I’m in Florida and see in Christmas pictures until I’m the oldest resident at the convent, simply boggles the mind. In an instant, everything is different. She is already more than a doctor, a wife, a friend, a counselor, an athlete; suddenly, she is a mother. It’s amazing and thrilling and almost unbelievable. I just want to witness it.

And it’s also because they’re so damn cute. Kittens and puppies are an outrageous kick to the soul, what with their neediness, their incessant howling and prancing at 4 am, their inabilities to learn schedules or that humans do in fact have pain receptors in all of the places they seem to think it’s fun to poke. Raising one certainly isn't for everyone. But they are sweet when they sleep, aren’t they? I remember our Yorkies when we first brought them home, the two of them fitting in the bottom half of a shoe box. Unbelievable. It’s similar for me. You almost can’t comprehend that something so small and perfect exists, a miniature slope of the nose, a forehead the relative size of Texas, a trace of two lips that someday will part - just as their mom's do - with riotous laughter. Almost, pretty, somewhat . . . ridiculously cool.

I swear I don't want one. Back to the cheese dip and Cab.