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We made a decision not to tell anyone the sex of the baby until we go to Mom and Dad’s house for Sunday dinner again, and today’s the day. It’s a simple gesture, one we don’t have to make, but revealing our special news in person feels more powerful. More connected.

Mom invited Andrew and Amanda over. Pam couldn’t make it, and I know James was invited.

“How did you get that fat tree into the house?” Declan marvels as we work on decorating it. Dad got a spruce from Nova Scotia from the same Christmas tree stand where we’ve been buying our trees forever. This one is particularly bottom heavy, wide as can be, but tall.

That sounds like a description of me these days.

“Took some man power. Jeffrey helped.” Dad’s proud of that. You can tell. He’s the closest person Jeffrey and Tyler have to a father. Raising them isn’t Mom and Dad’s job – that’s Carol’s – but they take their role seriously as helpers.

All of the plastic storage containers with Mom’s extensive holiday decoration system litter the living room as we take our stations and coordinate our attack on the house. A detailed schematic is taped to the underside of each lid. Declan insisted on being late on purpose, knowing how elaborate Mom’s Christmas decorating tradition can be.

“Oh, honey?” Mom calls out to me. “Don’t forget to take the bag marked ‘Chuckles costumes.’ You know how cute he looks when we dress him up like a candy cane. Just think – next year we can get candy cane costumes for Chuffy, Chuckles and all the grandkids and make the most adorable pictures!”

“I am not dressing up like a candy cane,” Jeffrey announces, emphatic. “Men don’t do that.”

“Men don’t do dat,” Tyler says, darting out of the room as if Chuffy were —

Oh. Here’s the dog. Mom scoops him up, then turns to Jeffrey.

“You’re still a little boy,” Mom says to him, trying to kiss his cheek. “Stop trying to grow up so fast.”

Twisting away, he gives her a stare that Carol passed down through her DNA. “I am not a little boy, and even if I were, you can’t just make people and animals wear stupid costumes. Animals have rights, too!”

“Chuckles loves being a reindeer. Or a candy cane. Or a -- ”

“Grandma, did you get their consent?”

“Their what?”

“Their consent! We’re learning about the importance of consent at school. You can’t just make someone do something they don’t want to do.”

“Good to know you’re being taught about consent while forced to attend compulsory education classes,” Declan says.

I elbow him. “Whose side are you on?”

“Mine.”

Dinner’s over, ice cream bowls are being scraped, and Declan skipped dessert and went straight for a third beer. Jeffrey gives up and finds a plate of cookies to devour, Tyler on his heels. We’re getting ready to tell everyone when Mom looks around the room and pounces.

Scheming looks abound in my mother’s eyes, but this one takes the cake as she asks us, “You’re coming to my first Unicoga class, right?”

Declan frowns and looks to Amy for confirmation. “Uni-co-what?” Andrew starts shaking his head behind Amanda. Is he mouthing the f word?

“Unicoga,” Mom says slowly. “Unicorn yoga.”

Amy points at Mom. “Yeah. That.”

“How do unicorns do yoga?” I ask as Declan takes one careful step back, trying to escape the conversation. I grab his elbow and squeeze hard.

That squeeze says: If I’m stuck hearing this, so are you, buddy. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, in Unicoga and hoo-haw cams.

His nostrils flare, mouth tightening, but he doesn’t pull away.

Yet.

“How does a unicorn do yoga?” I ask again, then give Mom the palm of my hand to talk to. “And don’t you dare say ‘very carefully.’”

Her mouth snaps shut, like a compact. Then she sighs and says, “It’s a gimmick.”

“I never would have guessed,” Declan replies, picking imaginary lint off his tie with the hand I’m not turning into a pancake.

“Attendance is down at the yoga studio,” she explains, giving Declan an undeserved glare, as if it’s his fault.

“Why?” I ask.

Another glare for Dec, only this time he catches her eye and starts, looking at me with questions in those green, glimmering eyes.

“Because someone can’t be bothered to come to my classes. A certain someone who will stand naked in a sculpting class at a certain Westside Center for the Arts won’t take time out of his precious schedule to visit his poor mother-in-law, the future grandma to his baby.”

Her passive-aggressive guilt trip is more aggressive than passive. She stares Declan down, a pleading anger making her eyes glow.

Most men would unravel in the presence of Mom’s Yankee version of “Bless your heart.”

I didn’t marry most men.

“That would explain it,” he replies evenly, ignoring all traces of emotion in my mother. Andrew smothers a smirk and makes up a reason to leave the table. Amanda tries to grab his arm but misses by an inch.

Amateur.

Mom’s eyes widen, impossibly round, as if letting all the light and air in will create a wedge that gives her more leverage to use on my husband.

Amy sees it all, but does what we Jacoby women have learned from the master–our dad.

Ignore Mom.

“Mom has everyone dress in rainbow colors and she makes them wear a unicorn horn,” Amy starts to explain, her voice bored but her eyes pleading, as if she’s being held hostage by terrorists who require her to perform for the camera.

Which pretty much describes half our childhood.

“A soft one,” Mom protests. “It really helps with balance,” she adds in a surprised voice. “I have targets on the floor, and as they bend and open their pelvis, they have to touch the pink spot with the tip.”

I squeeze Declan’s elbow so hard. I’m half convinced his forearm just snapped clean off. If this continues, I’m going to turn him into a human Mr. Potato Head with interchangeable parts. His snicker is going to make me start laughing, and if we laugh, we just encourage her.

“Just the tip?” Dec asks, unable to help himself. I pinch his ass, hard. He stifles a yelp. I know I’ll pay for that later.

I hope I pay for that later.

“The tip’s the most important part!” Mom chirps.

Andrew’s laughter carries all the way back through the hallway.

Operant conditioning principles state that you reinforce the behavior you want to see more of and ignore the behavior you want to extinguish. Declan and I have gone around and around on this. I refuse to cut off all contact with my mother, which is Declan’s solution. Short of that, we need to ignore her crazy, which is damn hard to do when she’s talking about unicorn yoga.

“What’s next?” Declan asks in an overly friendly voice. Even Amy frowns, because Declan’s never, ever this interested in anything Mom does. “Centaureiki?”

Son of a–

Mom lights up. “Do you think I could sell that? Really?”

“Or Dragonpole. Pole dancing for dragons.”

Mom gives him a really weird look. “Declan, that is a terrible idea.”

“Why?”

She scoffs. “Everyone knows dragons don’t pole dance.” Eyebrows high, eyeballs rolling like a cue ball at break, Mom makes it clear that Declan’s a wee bit off for even suggesting such a thing.

“But unicorns doing yoga is believable?” he counters.

“Of course!”

“This sounds like something you’d read about on Goop,” Declan mutters.

“REALLY?” Mom gasps, clasping her hands together over her heart. “You think so? That’s amazing!”

“That wasn’t a compliment,” Declan says to me out of the corner of his mouth.

“Just go with it,” I hiss.

“Does this mean I can weasel my way out of Unicoga?” His words are phrased like a question, but it’s all a declaration.

“Fat chance.”

I look at Declan and as he catches my eye, he knows what I’m about to say. The unspoken language between us, said with the skin around our eyes, the muscles in our cheeks, the way his fingers linger against my wrist, the pulse that beats strong at his jaw and quickens–it all adds up to this being the moment.

The big reveal. We’re having a boy.

“So, Mom, there is a yoga class you could hold that I’d happily attend,” I say, the words coming out of me like bubbles, fragile and light, rising high but so, so at risk of being destroyed by the innocuous. “Prenatal yoga for baby boys” are the next words on the tip of my tongue, ready for me and my baby to receive the joy of discovery as Declan and I make that leap over from private truth to public scrutiny. Our identities are about to change.

This is it.

“You should happily attend any of my classes, Shannon,” she responds, her tone just negative enough to make me swallow hard in retreat. No longer safe, the moment feels tainted. Not toxic. Not awful.

Just out of the zone where being vulnerable is worth the effort.

Declan can tell. Reading my face, he’s trying to find an answer I can’t give him.

He leans in and holds me tight, as if his presence can shield me from my own emotional reaction. All laughter is gone. All joking is set aside.

“Not now,” I murmur into his shoulder. “Later.”

He nods, just once. Minimizing his reactions is a form of caring for me. Less is better. Like a divining rod, I’ve turned into an object that detects. Instead of water, I detect emotion, my internal state a compass with an extremely sensitive magnetic field. It’s remarkable, really. The minute the pregnancy test came back positive, it was as if alchemy made me more empathic.

More brittle.

Does growing another person with my body mean I have to germinate emotions to give to the baby, too? My blood volume will rise by fifty percent by the time the baby is born. I made a new organ already. Do I need a heightened state to generate love, compassion, worry, fear, irritation, sympathy, joy–all the feelings I want my child to experience?

Is that my role, too? Literally generating more in my role as incubator and nurturer, the power greater than I ever imagined?

And if that’s my role, why is the woman who bore me the one who is bringing me down right now? Isn’t it her job to give me what I’m working so hard to give to my baby? Tears come, big and fat and sudden, but this isn’t the time or place for them.

This really isn’t the time or place for them.

No, says a voice so loud and clear within me. It sounds like the first word spoken, ever.

No.

“Maybe I’d happily attend more of your classes if you were nicer about it,” I announce, chin up, tears there, the response a gavel bang, the hollow echo of a gong, the sound of a gauntlet cracking on hardwood floors.

“What?” Mom just blinks.

“I said, if you were nicer and less judgmental about it, maybe I’d attend more of your classes.”

Declan’s hand is on the small of my back, right over the looped tie-back of my maternity dress. He presses, warm and approving, his silent support so important.

And yet not required.

“Shannon!” she gasps.

I say one word in response: “Boundaries.”

“Not this again-”

“No one has to go to any of your classes. No one. And belittling us isn’t going to make us appear more often. The opposite, in fact.”

“I was just being… well, I was just... I meant it as a...” Mom’s face changes with each false start of a sentence, until she just stops, winding down like a pulled lawnmower that can’t quite catch the starter.

“Oh, my God,” she says softly, before I can say a word, before Declan can use the big breath of air I just heard him take to convert into words that defend me against my own mother.

“Oh, no. I’m doing it,” she says, puzzled by her own self, as if she doesn’t live in her body and see that she is the one who says and does these things that separate people from her. “Shannon. I’m sorry. You’re right.”

You’re right.

Dad walks into the edge of the conversation, hovering, watching Mom with a pensive quiet that signals to me he’s aware of this, whatever this is.

“My mother treated me this way,” Mom whispers. “She judged and chided, cut me down and found a way to turn every conversation into an indictment. Do I do that? Do I really?”

“No,” Dad says, soothing tones focused on diffusing the situation. “No, Marie, you don’t.”

I feel abandoned. Hurt.

“You have your moments, though,” Dad amends, looking at me as if he can feel my pain, reversing the trend. “Marie, you do have your moments when you’re like Celeste.”

“Ouch.” One word out of her says more than a thousand I’ve absorbed before. “It’s not on purpose.”

“I know it’s not,” I say, fighting hard to stand up for myself, knowing that every word out of my mouth could turn against me. “You aren’t doing it intentionally, but that doesn’t make it not hurt.”

“I don’t want to hurt you!” she gasps. “I don’t! I just don’t know what comes over me sometimes.”

“The past,” Dad says. “The past does. It lives inside us, right alongside the present. I don’t think it knows the difference.”

“Well, screw the past!” Mom’s anger charges in like a tide, unyielding and incomparable. “I hate carrying it around with me! My mother’s found a way to invade my own words to my children? My grandchildren?”

Everyone’s blinking, emotions askew, the room so charged, you can’t move without static shock. It’s not bad. Not even unpleasant.

But it is very, very real.

“Mom,” I say, tears open and unhidden. “I want to come to Unicoga. I do.”

“You do?” Declan murmurs in surprise.

“And Declan does, too,” I continue.

“I do?” His voice goes way up.

“But not if you guilt us into it. Not if you’re negative about it, Mom.”

“It’s just a yoga class...” Her voice trails off and she pauses. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not just yoga,” I say, trudging through, just brave enough to not let this go while I have momentum. “When you get like this, it makes me think about the future. About the baby.”

“What about the baby?”

“When he’s around you, I don’t want him to–”

“HE? HIM?” Her face changes, the tears instantaneous. “It’s a boy?”

Declan starts laughing as Mom jumps up and down, completely breaking the tension between us as she practically knocks me over with a great big hug. The room turns into pure chaos as Amanda’s next to me, chattering on about how I should have told her, Andrew’s hugging Declan, Dad’s trying to get someone to include him in the big celebration, and Jeffrey steals more dessert.

“Way to bury the lede, Shannon!” Andrew says as Mom peels off to attach herself to Declan, blubbering about how boys are wonderful, the mood completely turned into a mish-mash of everything without boundaries.

Like my mother.

“Thanks,” I say as he tries to hug me, awkward around my growing belly. Gingerly, he withdraws from my space, staring down at the ever-growing lump.

“My brother is about to become a father.”

“He sure is.”

“Whuff,” he says, the word half sound. “This is intense.”

“It sure is.”

“Are you okay? That got a little dicey with your mom. Good for you.” He nods with approval. “You stood your ground.”

“I did.”

“It’s hard to do with our parents.”

“No kidding.”

“Someday,” he says, pointing to my belly, “that one’s going to do it to you.”

“Ouch!”

He shrugs. “No matter how careful we are, we always screw up our kids in one way or another.”

“Sage advice from a guy who hasn’t even had a kid yet!” In my anger, I turn to a plate of mint shortbread cookies Mom made. Anger eating is a timeless coping strategy. Besides, I’m eating for two now, right? That means I’m angry for two, as well.

Amanda and Declan migrate over, drawn by our conversation. Declan’s hand goes around my waist.

What’s left of it, at least.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

“Andrew’s telling me all about how I’m going to be a crappy mother,” I joke.

Kind of.

“Excuse me?” Declan’s face goes dark.

“I didn’t say that,” Andrew replies. “I was praising Shannon for taking on her mother and told her someday your baby will do the same.”

“That’s right,” Dec says. “We’ll form an alliance with our son and take Marie down.”

“That’s, uh, not what Andrew said.” I look at my husband like he’s turned into Poe from the new Star Wars movie. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing a good mint shortbread cookie can’t fix,” Dec says, reaching for the plate and holding them out to me.

Amanda catches my eye and telepathically says, Here be dragons.

“It’s hard enough living with an entire human being feeding off my vascular and digestive system,” I tell Andrew between bites of crumbly goodness. “I don’t need to be told that one day he’ll be chewing me out for being a bad mother.”

“I didn’t–”

“Pregnancy is hard enough! Women have to go through forty weeks of being an incubator, and then we have to pitch into labor without any say in the timing!”

“But Shannon, I–”

Amanda sets her hand on his forearm and whispers, “Just... don’t, honey. Go into Amanda PMS Protocol.”

He shuts his mouth. Fast.

And picks up a tray of chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies, offering them to me like he’s Declan’s twin.

“Something this big–” I pretend to hold a newborn baby in my hands “ –shouldn’t come out of such a small hole! It’s cruel! There was a glitch in the evolutionary program and I am the one who has to bear the brunt of it!” I rant as Dec and Andrew share a look that makes me want to hurt them both.

“That’s just how it works,” Amanda says with kind eyes. Wait. That’s not kindness.

That’s pity.

“Biology is wrong! My vagina is not designed to have large things in it,” I retort.

Declan whips around. “Hey!”

“What?”

“That’s… that’s just not true. It’s used to having large things in it.”

Andrew smirks.

“Very large things,” Declan adds.

“Why does every conversation about my vagina have to involve your penis?”

Both Andrew and Declan frown.

Dec meets my eyes with a strangely suspicious scorn in his expression. “I… I don’t understand the question, Shannon.”

“My vagina is separate from your penis,” I say slowly, over-enunciating. Perhaps I should bend down and speak to his language processing centers, which appear to have relocated to his crotch.

“Yes,” Declan says as Andrew raises his eyebrows, sets down the plate of cookies, and crosses his arms. Amanda’s watching her husband the way I watch ice cream these days, like those kids in Flowers in the Attic tracking mice.

“I’m not an extension of you. I–it,” I clarify, waving down in the area of my vagina. Not that I’m exactly certain where it is. I haven’t been able to look down and see anything past my belly for months. For all I know, pregnancy has transformed me into a mermaid and I have no body below my hips.

Which would be the only benefit to this biological monstrosity called gestation, other than the actual baby I get at the end.

“It has an entire life independent of your penis.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Declan balks.

“It means your penis isn’t involved in my waxing efforts, is it?”

“No.”

“And it’s not involved when my vagina has a period.”

“I–well–I thought we didn’t talk about that in public,” he mutters.

“And your penis was certainly involved in the conception.”

He puffs up with pride. Bet his penis does, too. “Yes.”

“But it will be useless at the birth.”

“Shannon,” Andrew interrupts, his voice a strange blend of condescension and panic, “penises are never ‘useless.’”

Declan sets down his plate of cookies, crosses his arms, leans back, and shakes his head slowly, all while giving Andrew a sad look.

It’s the look you give a death row inmate on execution day.

Carol discreetly hands me a cup of coffee. Andrew’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Coffee? Dec said you couldn’t stand the smell of it.”

“Nice deflection. But I’m back to drinking it now. First trimester is over and morning sickness is gone. And penises are still useless,” I mutter as he rolls his eyes.

“You’re drinking decaf?” Dec asks. They’re both obviously trying to paper over the fact that they’re being offensive with their talk about biology. It’s not like I’m being oversensitive, or that I haven’t processed my feelings about motherhood or my relationship with my own mom. Of course not.

It’s that they are wrong.

I pause, the cup almost to my lips. “Stop it with your coffee bigotry!”

“Coffee bigotry?”

“You’re engaging in caffism. I reject it.”

“Caffism?”

“It’s prejudice against someone based on their caffeine consumption.”

“But decaf is such a waste,” he says casually.

“See? Judgment. Nothing but judgment from you, you caffist.”

“‘Caffist’ is easily the weirdest name you’ve called me, Shannon.”

“Only out loud, Declan.”

“You’re right,” Andrew says to Amanda. “We can wait as long as you want before having babies.” He claps Dec on the shoulder. “Congratulations, bro. You go right on ahead and have that first grandchild. Victory is yours.” He gives me a skeptical glance. “I think we’ll wait until Amanda’s forty if it makes women this moody.”

“MOODY?” I scream.

“Cookie?” Dec asks, holding the plate to me again.

I burst into tears.

And then I gasp, bending over slightly, my crying interrupted by a fierce, strange sensation.

Instantly, Dec’s arms are on me, holding me, his worried voice in my ear. “What’s wrong?”

I grab his hands and slide them to my belly, slung low.

“Wait. Shhhhh,” I tell him.

We stand in holy silence.

It happens. “Can you feel it?” I ask him, the fizzy feeling inside taking on shape. Edges.

Boundaries.

“The baby!” he calls out. “He moved!”

A rush of stampeding rhinoceroses surround me.

Oh. Hold on. That’s just my family.

I’m cry-laughing as the baby does a little kick. A push, and then goes still.

“You didn’t tell me you were feeling movement,” Dec says, his face filled with delight.

“I just felt little bubbles inside. Like flutters. This is the first time the baby moved enough to really tell.”

“That’s my boy.” Dec drops to his knees and puts his lips on my navel. “Hi baby. This is your daddy speaking.”

I close my eyes. Nothing.

“He’s not a circus performer. You’re not getting a show on command,” Carol says, her arms crossed as she leans against the buffet. “Have fun over the next couple weeks. Take a half-full bowl of water and put it on your belly in bed. Watch the waves.”

“Just thinking about that makes me need to pee. Thanks,” I say, starting to walk to the bathroom, stopping, grabbing two more mint cookies, then hoofing it.

Mouth full of sweet pastry, I finish emptying my bladder, and as I wash my hands, I feel it again.

I look down.

“Hi, baby. This is your mommy speaking,” I say. The woman I face in the mirror looks more and more like a mother, less and less like Shannon, coming into a self uncharted, a person I’ve had inside me all along and am finally getting to know.

And you know what?

She’s beautiful.