Nineteen weeks

---

“It’s a little early, I know, but the midwife said we should come in for our twenty-week scan now and I’m so glad you’re coming,” I tell Declan as we make our way through the parking garage into the office at the hospital. I’ve come to the office twice alone, once at eight weeks, once at fourteen weeks, but this is our first regular ultrasound. My vital signs are all strong, I’m not spilling protein into my urine, and my pregnancy so far is what the midwife calls “low risk.”

If this is a normal pregnancy, a hat tip to every woman who has it worse. I can’t imagine.

“I wish I could have been here for the other visits,” Dec says, genuinely contrite.

“It’s fine. You’re here for the important parts.” The main door to the building is decorated for Christmas, greenery in abundance. Soft, warm white lights dot the gutters and the windows at the building’s front, on even in daylight. It’s festive. Inviting.

And a reminder that next year, our Christmas will involve a baby.

Our baby.

“Definitely. I’ll do everything but deliver the baby.” His hand goes to my belly, which is now ripe and full, maternity clothes an absolute must. Maternity bras, too. You take big breasts and then add growing milk ducts and fifty percent increased blood volume to them and try stuffing them into a regular bra. Nope. It’s about as futile as trying to get Chuckles to cuddle in my lap.

“Ha! You’re the last person on earth I’d want to deliver her.”

“Her? Him,” he says firmly.

“Her.”

“Him.”

“We’ll find out soon,” I say with glee, my happiness tempered only by having a bladder so full, it feels like a cinder block inside me. Wincing, I move slowly as we reach the elevator. Soft Christmas music fills the air, the sound of male crooners a perennial memory trigger. A few notes and I’m instantly sent back through a time wormhole, all my Christmases coalescing into a roller coaster ride of flash images.

All wonderful.

I frown. Except for one.

“What’s wrong?”

“Bladder. They made me drink a ton of water before the ultrasound, and I’m not allowed to pee.” I’m not going to mention my sudden, visceral memory of wearing an elf costume at the mall a few years ago, Chuckles climbing into the water fountain and causing a scene.

Declan played Santa for the kids that day. Earned the nickname Hot Santa. Took out a Russian thief. Had a blazing quickie with me in the employee break room at the mall. My mystery shopping days are long over, but man, was that one of the best.

Knocking me out of my reverie, Dec says, “You pee twenty times a day, seventeen of them between eleven p.m. and five a.m.”

“How would you know?”

“Because I’m not getting any sleep, either.”

“Oh, poor Declan. I’m so sorry for all your suffering. It must be so haaaaaaard.”

He plants his hands on my shoulders, bends down and whispers, “It could be, after this. I blocked the rest of the day off my schedule.”

“Don’t talk to me about sex when I have a bladder the size of Greenland.”

“Let’s see the pictures of him and then we’ll talk.”

“Her! Her!” I say, laughing, as we walk into the waiting room, where I check in and try to sit down without leaking.

Which means I don’t sit down.

The practice has a mix of obstetricians and certified nurse-midwives, in an office attached to the hospital where I’ll give birth. Everything smells like sanitizer, that rubbing alcohol scent hospitals have, a searing experience that anyone who’s ever been in an ER or admitted for surgery knows.

I’ve spent very little time in hospitals, so the odor is overwhelming but archetypal. I’m here. My nose knows.

“You know what to do, Shannon,” the front reception clerk, Annie, tells me. Declan gives me a puzzled look as I take my folder and walk down the hallway to the bathroom. He stays outside. I wave him in.

Now he’s really confused.

“You need help in the bathroom?”

“No, not help. But do you want to see what I go through?”

“Okay.” In the bathroom, which is nice and big and a single-use room, there is a doctor’s scale, a basket full of urine strips, and a small table where I put down my folder.

“What’s all this?”

“There’s a check-in ritual. I have to pee, test my urine, then weigh myself, and note it all in my file.”

“You do this? The patient? Not a medical assistant?”

“Yes.”

Declan steps on the scale, adjusting the sliders. He announces a number.

I grit my teeth. It’s now lower than mine.

Significantly.

“For that part, you have to avert your eyes,” I inform him.

“You’ll pee in front of me but you won’t let me see your weight?”

“Yes.”

“That is not logical.”

“It is extremely logical. You survey any woman out there and she’ll tell you the same thing, Dec.”

“Women are so weird.”

“Pregnant women, even more so. Get used to it. We’re only at the halfway point, and from what people are telling me, it was the easy half.”

I start to move toward the toilet and stop myself. “Wait! I can’t pee. Ultrasound first.” My poor bladder is torn. Not literally. It’s in that stage where it expected to pee, and now it can’t, so it’s struggling with unmet expectations.

“What do you test the urine for?” he asks.

“Protein.”

“Why does protein matter?”

“It could mean there’s kidney issues, or preeclampsia.”

“I’m surprised they let pregnant women do all this alone. Couldn’t you lie?”

“Why would I lie about the protein? If it comes up positive, I tell the midwife, and we make sure the baby’s healthy.”

“What about your weight? You could lie about that.” He’s smart enough not to look at my body as he asks that question. Thanksgiving was last week and I am pretty sure I am now growing a butterball of my own, with a side of sweet potatoes with caramelized marshmallows on top and about twelve placentas full of stuffing.

We won’t mention how much pumpkin pie I ate. We really, really won’t.

“Uh, same reason. We’re not supposed to lie. Sudden weight gain or loss could mean something’s wrong. If we’re here, going through all this prenatal care, we’re doing it for an optimal outcome. The midwives trust us.”

“Huh. Interesting. I like it. Less intrusive.”

“It’s just different. I didn’t seek it out.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. Carol told me this practice was the one she went to when she had Tyler, before she moved near Mom and Dad, and she loved them.”

“You mean you didn’t find a midwife on Yelp? Sort through customer reviews to find the highest rated?”

“I’m surprised you didn’t apply your model to prenatal care.”

“What’s ‘my model’?”

“Hire someone to do it all for us.”

“The only way for that to happen would be surrogacy, Shannon. And I’m old-fashioned when it comes to this.”

I wave him off the scale. “My turn. Close your eyes.”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed about your weight, honey. I know you’re gaining.”

“I know I don’t have to be, but...”

He closes his eyes. I weigh myself. I wince.

I write down the true number. I will ask later if I can weigh again after the ultrasound and after I can finally pee. Hey, I’ll take any break I can get. My bladder weighs ninety-two pounds right now, I’ll bet.

We take seats in the inner waiting room, where I know we’ll be for just a few minutes before Paula will appear. Of all the midwives, she’s the one I connect with the most, and I hope she’s on duty when I give birth. I’m squirming in my seat as we wait, when a very tall, dark-haired man in a lab coat walks by. He does a double take just as Dec and I do, too.

“Excuse me–”

“You look familiar–”

The men talk over each other as I try to process who this guy could be. Broad face, strong, big hands, and a familiar, kind face. I look at his name tag.

Dr. Alex Derjian.

His hand goes to his throat as he looks down at me and says, “Engagement ring.”

“Oh. My. God. You’re the doctor from the ER when I swallowed my engagement ring!” I gasp. At least he didn’t say #poopwatch. Whew.

Declan stands, laughing his ass off, reaching out to shake the doctor’s hand. “You turn up in some of the strangest places, Doctor.”

“I could certainly say the same about you two.” As I bow my back to stand up, his eyes widen with happiness. “I see this time, it’s for a wonderful reason. Congratulations!” He glances down at folders in his hands. “You’re not my patient.”

“No, I see the midwives. Low risk.”

His grin broadens. “Glad to hear it. They do a great job. I’m just here as backup, mostly, and to manage the higher risk cases or people who want an OB. When are you due?”

“April 24.”

“Shannon?” Paula appears, her arm extending down a hallway, giving Dr. Derjian a funny look. “The ultrasound tech is ready for you.”

“You get to see your baby for the first time today?”

“Yes,” Declan says.

“Second time for me,” I tell him. “First time was at eight weeks, but a more invasive ultrasound.” I’m being tactful. It was like having the world’s most embarrassing dildo shoved inside me, with a witness.

And a video recording it all from the inside. Whoever invented vaginal ultrasounds did a great service for obstetrics, but...

Dr. Derjian smiles and shrugs. “Pregnancy and childbirth aren’t for the faint of heart.”

“No, they’re not. You have kids?” I ask him.

A shadow crosses his face, just enough for me to realize I’ve put my ever-swelling foot in my mouth. “Ah, no. We’re hoping. Time just hasn’t been right.” As the platitudes come out of his mouth, I can see this is evolving for him, and he’s trying to find his verbal footing.

Declan comes to the rescue. “Good luck.”

“You, too. I hope everything goes well in there.”

“Thanks. Can’t wait to see him.”

“Her!”

“Him.”

And with that, we leave Dr. Derjian laughing, awkwardness dissolving.

“Poor guy,” Dec murmurs in my ear.

“I need to learn to keep my mouth shut.”

“No, honey. It’s just one of those topics we need to think about now.” Interesting that his mind went where mine did. Until I got pregnant, it didn’t occur to me that asking someone around my age whether they have kids was a conversational landmine. I don’t want to put people into a state of discomfort. So much of adult life is about making mistakes and learning from them.

We didn’t have to work hard to make this baby. One month of disappointment is a drop in the bucket compared to so many other couples.

Tears bloom along the lower edges of my eyes. Declan sees it as the ultrasound tech closes the door, facing me. “What’s wrong?”

“I feel like someone is twanging my bladder with a sledgehammer.”

“You haven’t felt him kick yet,” Dec says.

“No. But my bladder’s about to kick her if we don’t get this over with.”

“Shannon, I’m Terri,” the tech says, smiling at me, then at Declan. She gets me up on the exam table, sheet draped in all the right places, goo all over my belly in a couple of minutes. It’s cold in the room, and while Declan’s holding my hand and there’s no speculum or anything else invasive, this feels monumental.

An alien appears in black and white on the screen, lines distorted, my eyes trying to adjust and pattern match to find a baby in there.

“Is that an arm?” Declan asks. “Or a hip, with the thigh and knee over to the lower right?”

“That’s actually a torso,” she says, poking deep into my belly. My bladder screams back.

A dot grows big then small, big then small, and then a sound like horses galloping fills the room.

“There’s your baby’s heartbeat,” she says confidently.

Dec threads his fingers through mine and squeezes hard as he leans forward, completely captivated.

“That’s his heartbeat we hear? And that’s his actual heart on the screen?” he asks, mesmerized.

“Yes.” The room is dark and tiny, the glow of the screen all anyone is focused on. Magic warms the air, as if someone is rubbing two wands together to create heat. In a way, while what’s happening to my body is obviously deeply rooted in science, it’s a variant of magic. No one knows what triggers labor. No one knows why some babies come early and some late.

When it’s a medical problem, sure, but in the tides of “normal” pregnancy and birth, the variations are so enormous as to have a mystical quality. Are babies drawn by the lunar cycle? Held back by mercury in retrograde? Do eclipses make a difference? Sun spots? Beltane? Declan would laugh if I voiced my questions, but they are ancient, timeless musings that aren’t easily solved by a Friedman chart and oxygen monitors.

“That’s our son,” Dec says, voice thick with emotion. He’s close to crying.

“Or daughter.” I can’t help myself.

“Do you want to know the sex? As soon as I’m done taking some measurements, we can zero in and see if we can tell,” Terri says, professional but friendly.

“Yes,” we both say simultaneously.

A few minutes later, she’s digging the wand in, trying to find the answer.

“Here. I have to tell you that ultrasound is never one hundred percent sure.”

“How close is it?” Declan asks.

“Ninety percent or so.”

“Good enough.”

“Well, then... here’s your son.”

I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until it comes out in one long, slow, emotional gasp, the tears filling my head crowding out all thought, my ears burning and bladder an afterthought.

“Son?” Dec chokes out. “We’re having a boy?”

“Yes,” she says. “It appears to be a boy. Here’s the umbilical cord, and...” She continues speaking, but I don’t hear her, caught in the steady drum sound of my own recognition that a little boy is growing inside me.

“It’s a boy,” I say, laughing as fat tears run down my cheeks.

“Are you okay? I know you wanted a girl,” Dec says.

“I don’t care! I want a baby! I just thought it was a girl. I’m happy either way. A little boy. We’re having a little boy.” My hand goes to my mouth, as if I have to hold in all the love to keep it from bursting out of my body. Declan’s hugging me, and I need to pee so bad, but we’re laughing and he’s so warm and good. We made a little boy.

A boy.

“I guess it’s time to look at trucks and dinosaurs,” I say. “Carol will be sad. She wanted a niece so she could finally buy pink clothes.”

I expect Dec to join in, but he cocks his head and says, “He can wear whatever he wants. Pink, purple, a tutu, a batcape–I don’t care. As long as he is who he is.”

“But everyone will buy blue.”

“That’s fine.” Our eyes meet, even in the dark. His glitter with happiness. “You’re growing a little boy inside you. For me.”

“You keep saying that.”

“A boy.”

“Yes, a boy.”

“Wow.”

The moment really is magic, but reality kicks in, and when in conflict, reality always wins. “I need to pee,” I tell him. “I want to celebrate and be with you but right now, Dec, you’re an obstacle to my getting out that door and racing to the bathroom.”

Terri wipes the goop off my stomach like the pro that she is. “Go!”

As I leave the room, every clerk or midwife in the hallway parts, my trajectory obvious. I get to the bathroom, sit on the toilet, and two things happen:

1. I don’t pee. My muscles can’t relax.

2. I start to cry.

The crying makes me tense up, which only makes my bladder hurt more, and then I’m crying harder because I can’t even get my body to do the most basic of functions. I am failing at peeing.

How can I succeed at mothering?

Dangerously close to sobbing in the loud and gut-wrenching ways that bring concerned crowds, I think about the hypnosis app I’ve started listening to, remembering the soothing waves, and just like that, I relax.

I flow.

I overflow.

The agony of an overstretched bladder is no match for the ecstasy of the moment you can relieve it. Within seconds, my mood shifts to elation, my crying a happy, joyful feeling as I process it all.

On the toilet.

Why do so many important parts of my life take place in bathrooms?

Tap tap tap.

“Shannon? Honey?”

“I’m fine,” I call back. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

“Okay,” Declan says, his voice receding. I imagine him out there in the hall, hands in his pants pockets, a silly grin on his face, emotions like balloons on the wind. Someone walking past him would think he was a concerned husband waiting for a pregnant wife, and they’d be right.

But they’d miss his inner elation.

I’m missing his elation.

I finish, wash up, and come out to find him, arms wide, my entrance into his space unspoken, like gravity. Dec becomes a force in and of himself, and soon he’s mumbling happy words into my neck, followed by a long, sweet hug.

“A boy,” he says, pulling back and staring at me.

“Time to start picking names,” I note.

“Anything but Declan, Jr.” He bristles as he says it. “Or James.”

“Not Jason,” I add.

“I want him to have his own identity.”

“Agreed.” I sigh. “Now we need to do the rest of the appointment with Paula.”

He looks around. “Oh. Right. While you were in the bathroom, she got called to a birth. The receptionist said we can go home and you can just come for your next appointment. The scans looked fine.”

“They did?”

He reaches into his breast coat pocket. “Here.”

“We made an alien baby,” I say, looking at the printout.

As we walk to the main doors, he hugs me. “We made an entire human being out of nothing but love.”

“And semen. And an egg. And a lot of orange food.”

“I’m so glad you’re over that orange food phase.”

“I’m so glad I can drink coffee again!”

“Let’s go get some, and call everyone while we’re there.”

“I really just want to go home, Dec.”

“Are you okay? Tired?”

“I just want to be with you.”

“Be with me, or... be with me?”

“How about both?”

“I like both.”

---

---

“That’s it?” After we got home from the ultrasound where I learned I was going to have a son, we walked through the front door, Shannon stripped my lower half to nothing, removed her underwear, climbed on top of me in her dress and rode me until she orgasmed two minutes later.

Now she’s putting her panties back on and smoothing her hair like she winded herself catching a stray piece of paper on a busy road.

“What’s it?” she asks, genuinely confused.

“No... cuddling?”

“Why would I want to cuddle?”

“Shannon. Every time we have sex, you’re the one who turns into an octopus and wraps herself around me. You once told me that it was a rule: for every ten minutes of sex, thirty minutes of cuddling. Something about the same one-to-three ratio college professors require for class time versus homework.”

“Oh, that? No. Rule dismissed.”

“Dismissed?”

She kisses me on the cheek and says, “Thanks! That was exactly what I needed.”

I’m staring at the light fixture, slightly catatonic, the thick leather of the couch cold and unfeeling against my bare ass.

Did my wife just use me for sex?

A door closes, clicking with clarity. Water starts to run as she takes a shower.

Yeah. She did. Huh.

I thread my fingers together, hands clasped behind my head, pants brushing against my foot as I take a few breaths and intently study the ceiling patterns. My phone buzzes in my pile of pants, but I ignore it.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Chuckles walks in from the kitchen, sniffing the air with disapproval at such primal carnality. How dare we do that in his home?

My lower extremities are practically vibrating, like my phone, as my heart rate finds normal again. That was super-quick sex. Less than a quickie. I think we need to just call that a Qui. So fast, it doesn’t even get the last few letters.

She just pulled my pants down and went at it with me. Used me like a piece of meat to get off.

I grin.

I love the second trimester.

I figured we’d have sex after the emotionality of the ultrasound. What I didn’t expect was how unemotional sex has become. For a woman who is usually all about the love via touch, she’s become exceptionally transactional about sex lately.

It’s not bad. Not at all. Just different.

I like different. Don’t get me wrong. We’re having sex up to five times a day, all of them fast and furious like a car chase, only instead of four tons of steel, Shannon’s chasing her orgasms. They come swiftly: a thunderstorm, a fireball of need turning into a hurricane, a water bomb, a flash of power that builds and fades with a whiplash change that leaves me breathless.

And naked.

Plenty of sex has been like this for the last month, but I guess I expected more this time. Coming home from the ultrasound appointment feels fragile. Unreal.

Come to think of it, so does our sex life.

“Shannon?” I can hear the shower running. I walk into the bedroom and follow the steam. She’s in there, eyes closed, head tipped up to the shower head, water running down her forehead and hair. One knee is bent, her swollen belly on display, her profile the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.

I stop dead in my tracks and just watch.

The shower spray makes the light come through the glass door in broken fragments, crooked and gleaming, her body a series of angles that turn soft curves into an abstract work of art. Steam billows up, touching me, letting me breathe it in as if the invitation isn’t enough. It has to offer itself to me as a ritual, my lungs inhaling water that just kissed my wife’s skin. We’re connected by air, by water, by elements that we combine in our own right to share in our own, rich world.

Ours.

And only ours.

She’s relaxed and soapy, her head a white cloud of shampoo and focus, arms up as she washes her hair. In the daylight, I catch covert–and sometimes overt–glimpses of Shannon, marveling at how the soul inside is wrapped up in a full, complete package of gorgeous flesh. We’re given the same organs, the same bones, all the sinew and tendons and hair the same, same, same.

And yet she is so unique.

Infinite combinations of finite elements make her. Make me. Make the baby that she nurtures inside that lush belly.

I can’t help myself.

Watching her isn’t enough.

I need to touch her.

Heat radiates off her wet skin as I step in with her, the wide-open shower with a four-jet spray that the designer insisted I needed when I bought this place now a sanctuary of skin. Keeping her eyes closed, Shannon grins as I slide my open palms against the sides of her belly, her slick ass a hot ride against my quads, the stinging water making me close my eyes, too.

“Mmmm,” she says, the purr low and pleasure-filled. I rest my chin in the crook of her shoulder and breathe, letting the water soak my hair, brushing onto my forehead, the drip drip drip a methodical mantra that takes me into my body and damn near into her. Not in a sexual way.

Sensual.

I don’t want to be in her right now. I want to be with her, holding our baby so close with hands that can’t quite believe my life is this full. When I met Shannon four years ago in that damn store bathroom, I knew. I didn’t know I knew, but I knew.

She leans back against me, shoulders relaxing, skin on skin lighting my soul. We’re two, about to become three, and as my throat tightens with emotion, she lets out a long sigh, a letting go that signals my work is done.

If the atom is the building block of matter, then trust is the building block of love.

She trusts me.

I trust her.

And as we breathe together, her belly rising and falling under my hands that press into her skin with a gentle respect for the divine, the water washing away our doubts, I find even more.

I trust myself.