I’m almost done complaining.

Did you know that if you attempt to type the word mocktail into an iPhone, as I did when I was sending a picture text to The Sis the other night to show her my Trader Joe’s sparkling pomegranate juice with a twist of club soda in a martini glass, the iPhone will autocorrect that word into cocktail?

It’s called a smart phone for a reason. Even an electronic device knows there’s something unnatural about teetotaling.

I went to a friend’s wedding last weekend in Fairhope, and guess what? Turns out parties are not as fun without drinks. And it turns out that some people are really annoying with them.

There are people who tell me this is all good preparation for child-rearing, then there are people who tell me (and I need to hang out with these people more) that they need their evening cocktail more than ever with two kids under their belts.

Look, this is not just about drinking. I got up three times last night to pee. I miss my hot baths, from which I emerged with lobster-hued skin and dripping sweat. I miss club sandwiches and sushi. I miss craving food other than Fritos and grilled cheese. I miss not throwing up every time I brush my teeth.

There will be plenty of time for sap, but here’s some truth: the last time I felt maudlin about having children was when I was one myself. As I grew older, I became steeped in routine and began to wonder if I was cut out for the brand of self-sacrifice that raising children requires: accompanying them to nasty public bathrooms and wiping their butts, cutting off their crusts, carrying all their gear. Boogers. Whining. Lame television shows. I watched it from the outside and thought I might be just fine sans…all that. Then I moved to New York and worked on the teeth of Upper East Side hellions every day and knew I would be fine sans all that.

Then I had to go and meet TH.

I know many people for whom motherhood is the dream they’ve unwaveringly maintained their entire lives. But you know what? I think there’s something to be said for a couple who choose (and then, are blessed with) children over childlessness after weighing both options carefully. I think there’s something to be said for two people who like each other so much that they don’t think their lives would be empty if it were just the two of them for the long haul. And I think couples who make the choice, counter-culturally I might add, to not reproduce for good reasons are brave.

It just turns out that I’m not one of them. Because once I met TH and we began our life together, I knew I would be shortchanging the world if I didn’t pass him down to future generations. On our drive back from the wedding, I got a burst of energy and started up an awesome car-dance routine, singing at the top of my lungs, and TH looked at me, called me crazy, and shortly joined in. The car was shaking from side to side, rain was pouring outside, and we were in our own little world, which will soon include a kid who looks like both of us and has our sense of humor. (And hopefully more of his/her father’s good nature, though you can be damn sure he/she will pick up his/her socks off the floor.) Now, how can I deprive the world of that? And more importantly, how can I not want to embark on this crazy trip with my best friend and do it our own way (ie, better than everyone else so that we can judge them)?

I can’t. Which makes it all worthwhile: the nausea, the sobriety, the message from one person today that my pregnancy is a huge inconvenience for her. Because when it’s all said and done, it’s not an inconvenience for me. It’s the next step on a path designed by perfect, unpredictable love.

Remind me of that in six months. Now, I have to go pee.

This might tell you everything you need to know: I took a pregnancy test because I was sure I wasn’t knocked up, but not 100% sure, and I didn’t want to needlessly skip my nightly glass of red for any length of time as I waited to find out if I was just late or with child. So TH and I hopped into the car and headed to CVS, where I scoured the pregnancy aisle as he hit the Kitsch aisle and hid a garden gnome under his arm. We were laughing. (Well, I was until I saw the gnome.) We were not expecting two pink lines.

We got two pink lines. The next day, I bought a digital test (there was still an open bottle of red on the counter, and I had to be sure I shouldn’t drink it.) Pregnant popped up in the window. I called TH, then I called the OB. Then I sat down.

Don’t get me wrong here–we were excited. Just a little shocked at how fertile our mid-thirties selves were, in particular my eggs, which I had imagined belonging in the Clearance section of the dairy department. My glass-half-empty tendencies had left me envisioning months of waiting, ribbons of red in the toilet, single pink lines and questions of whether it was meant to be. All the brokenness I’ve seen around me, and this time I remained unscathed. I began to feel my credibility as a confidant for the hurting dwindle. A rainbow-filled wedding, a husband I love, and a baby, months later? Was I becoming one of those people who, sickeningly, Has It All? I could hardly bear the thought–I’ve always hated those people. I prided myself on remaining defiantly outside their ranks. I was running out of things to complain about.

Then the nausea hit, and the exhaustion, and the hormonal surges that left me writing elaborate death threats in my head to everyone from the guy who cut me off in traffic to TH, who continued to drink his beer while I stood feet away, glaring. You assholes NEVER told me about this, I imagined saying to every pregnant person I had ever known except The Sis, who had told me point-blank that all that stuff about pregnancy being magical is a load of crap unless you like puking, getting fat, farting nonstop, waking up six times a night to pee, and falling asleep at the wheel. Still, I was shocked at the physical toll of whipping up a new life, and then the emotional: it was too early to tell anyone, and I felt very alone. And not at all like I had a cute little baby inside my belly–more like a parasite I had picked up in the jungles of Mexico. Add to that the ever-present fear that the whole endeavor could go south at any moment–I was especially worried about sneezing too hard–and I was, generally, a mess.

It didn’t feel real, but it was. Is. More so every day. And the growing reality has a way of distilling the rest of life into What Matters and What So Does Not. Turns out this is a lesson I sorely needed, and always will. Because what a gift it is for all the world’s, and people’s (mine included) crap to fall away into the ether as TH and I focus on the new family we’re becoming, as I consider yet again how grace has surprised me into the next stage of life, which looked different from what I imagined (shocker) and is full of details I attempt to assign to Good (all the ice cream I want) and Bad (no more hot baths) categories while that same grace weaves it all into beauty. Like when I hesitantly emailed my news to a friend who, despite the fact that she would be an incredible mother, is having the hardest time becoming one. “I’m so happy for you,” she wrote back. “You have no idea how much I needed that good news right now.” Once again, and far from it being the last time, I am humbled by the power love has to surpass the negative and show me the kind of person–now, parent–I want to be.

Love is the only thing that ever changed me.    –Ann Voskamp

Well, it’s happened. The Husband has knocked me up. And one of the hardest things about the last few weeks (besides the nausea, exhaustion, abdominal discomfort, constant urination…don’t worry, I’ll recap later) has been the necessity for temporary silence on the matter as we waited for a series of confirmations from the white-coated ones, and for the slowest period of time in my life to pass by. But here we are, the day after our first trimester screening, with a clean (so far) bill of health and almost thirteen weeks under our belts. Time to breathe…and then, plan madly.

Words are just exploding inside that part of me where they’re kept, the soul/heart depository where they take form before they’re sent to my brain, and I’ll have a lot to write about in the coming months about what has already happened and what’s coming (like I have any idea of that). But for today–this day when I woke up like a kid on Christmas morning and rushed downstairs to look at our kid’s picture again–I’m just basking in the wonder of it all. I’m dwelling in the spot where I was yesterday, lying back on a table with TH beside me and gel on my belly and a video monitor in front of us, and we saw our child’s ten fingers and flailing legs and beating heart and The Moment happened. The Moment you hear about, when it all becomes real; when morning sickness (what a bullshit name–it’s ALL DAY sickness) and alien body invasions and alcohol restrictions fade into the background and the bean is finally a baby and it’s ours and its blood is pumping in tandem with mine and I am overwhelmed by the reality that miracles still happen and nothing will ever be the same and my heart has grown exponentially more than three sizes and it’s all just a little too much for one blog post. That’s where I’ll be hanging out if you need me.

There, and with The Niece for her head-measurement appointment, because all of a sudden it’s not only imperative that I spend time with her for my sake, but so that she can get to know her Future Cousin. And then TH and I will drive south, stopping at The Mom and Dad’s for a night before heading to the coast for a friend’s wedding. And then we’ll come back and I’ll write. I’ll write about the magic of it all, but I won’t shortchange you on the truth–the mixed feelings that come along with this change. Because, let’s face it: I’ve been single most of my life and independent for half of it (minus some loan infusions from The Dad) and our world is about to turn upside down in every way possible. I will have to learn how not to be a monster without eight hours of sleep. I will be sober for six more months. I will have to share TH’s attention (boo!). I will share my news with friends who are still struggling with their own waiting and hoping, and I will be reminded that this world we live in is never devoid of joy or sorrow. I will have a permanent reminder of how much I don’t know or control. And I will, blessedly, need grace more than air for every second of the way. Thank God it never runs out.

Friday was a better day than today. Friday, I left work and went to see Midnight in Paris. By myself. Seeing movies by myself, as I’ve previously mentioned, is one of my creepily favorite things to do. The Husband makes fun of me, then plays all offended and hurt that I didn’t wait and see the movie with him. Even though, when The King’s Speech came out on DVD and I threatened to add it to our Netflix queue, he admitted he didn’t care about seeing it. And a flick about a guy who is transported to the 1920’s every night, where he meets the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Eliot? Please. He would have been beside me in the theater, whispering the same things he said aloud when I summarized the plot later: “But that doesn’t even make sense. How did he get there?” Interestingly, he didn’t express that same aversion to disbelief-suspension this weekend when we watched mutants fly and read minds in X-Men: First Class. I had no problem getting lost in either movie, but Midnight in Paris was just…enchanting. Plus, in my ongoing and unintentional one-year-anniversary repeats, I saw it exactly twelve months after TH and I were walking along the Seine (read: drinking along the Seine) ourselves. I love it when mystery and magic show up in a story and don’t bring along heavy-handed explanation with them–amazing things are possible because they just are. Besides, the movie was much more believable than He’s Just Not That Into You. 

Cut to today, which was one of those days when it felt like everything around me turned to shit: garbage disposals, fillings, traffic lights, relationships. My thirty-minute drive home took an hour. The Niece did a face-plant on my watch (good thing she’s wearing a helmet). Days like these, that icky feeling of not being good at anything creeps up and threatens to undermine the truth that has been my life raft for years, except of course when I land in calm waters for awhile and forget I need it: the fact that the most important things about me are not just my accomplishments or the things I’ve done right; I’m made up of a story of strength and weakness, achievement and failure, flying and falling. And if I’m honest, the best parts of the story happened at or around the time of falling. Because that’s when I finally stopped flailing on my own (having lost sight of the shore) and spotted the life raft of grace and realized that perfection is not only unattainable; it’s not the goal. I don’t have to pretend to be that put-together person because (a) I’m clearly not;  and (b) what matters most about me is what’s been done on my behalf. My life raft is not constructed of perfect fillings and conflict-free relationships and green lights and functioning appliances. It is devoid of self-improvement projects. It is composed of forgiveness and grace and functions most readily in the realms of what I perceive to be uncertainty and mystery, those open seas where incidents beyond explanation are commonplace, where water becomes wine and death is a beginning. Where a perfect student becomes what she’s meant to be after utterly failing and finds home by leaving it.

And where an enchanting movie about unexplained time travel doesn’t begin to approach the kingdom of what’s possible. But it helps, doesn’t it, to be reminded (even if it’s by Woody Allen and he would shudder at my interpretation) of how much we really want to believe–in the possibility that there’s a purpose to our path, an end to our seeming lostness–in the hope of the more of mystery?

At church two weeks ago, a man who is likely the oldest member of our community tripped and fell on his way to his seat. He recovered quickly with the help of those around him, but I was scarred. Cynicism and sarcasm usually trump empathy for me–after all, I grew up in a home where the most frequently-used phrase was “take off that gorilla mask!” and I’m conservative–but older men and the disabled (and especially older men with some sort of disability) wreck me. I still hold a grudge against RC for, in the summer of 2000 when she came to visit me in Savannah, making me watch The Green Mile. Whenever I picture Michael Clarke Duncan’s huge brown eyes filling with tears, I feel the urge to watch multiple episodes of Tosh.0 just to even things out.

So of course this week, who should sit right in front of me but the Fall Guy himself, and damned if I wasn’t biting my fingernails with anxiety every time he made a move.

Weakness is tough for me to handle. In so many ways.

The Niece was fitted with an orthotic helmet a few weeks ago, and she’s been wearing the pink globe for almost a month now. I worried that The Sis, of the same psychological makeup as myself, would crumble in the face of this development. That if Baby Chunk pulled at the helmet in frustration, or cried because of it, or if anyone asked about it, that The Sis would retreat into herself quietly until she was in private, then fall apart. But so far, so good. One reason for that could be that The Niece looks kickass in her new gear–how could we have ever doubted?!–and another could be that becoming a mother makes a person stronger. I’ve seen plenty of examples of this strength, like when The Atlanta Fam was over at our house for Memorial Day and The Sis-in-Law fielded questions from The Nephew about the helmet. Middle Nephew has his own obstacle in the form of primary ciliary dyskinesia, and he requires daily treatment with a vibrating vest to help him out. The Sis-in-Law compared The Niece’s helmet to the vest, describing them both as their respective “special things” and saying that everyone has their own.

Of course, The Nephew then asked what our special things were. Which made me thing of all the energy we humans expend trying to hide them, seeing them as weaknesses, when they could be the gateway to identification and empathy. The foundation of relationships. The “swing away, Merrill” sources of our embarrassment that actually save us.

The Husband called me off the couch last night while he was working in the front yard, and I wondered if he was enlisting my help with the sprinklers (yardwork is so my forte). Instead, when I walked onto our porch, he pointed and said, “We have fireflies!” This is the same man who, knowing my love of hydrangeas, cut a couple from our inherited garden and put them in a vase above the kitchen sink so I could see them every day. And here he is, not even reading books on gratitude and practicing it effortlessly. I stared where he was pointing and watched the tiny neon lights appear, and I wondered if the first firefly who noticed her own luminescence tried to cover it up, fearing it made her butt look big. Not seeing the beauty of being exactly the way she was designed.

I never thought much about flowers before I planned my wedding. So I didn’t find out until last year that hydrangeas are one of my favorites, specifically the blue and purple variety that graced our bridesmaids’ bouquets and reception tabletops. And when we moved into our new house six months ago, in the dead of winter, I had no idea of all the greenery that waited underground, waiting until spring to burst onto the scene. The dogwoods (though I called them cherry blossoms at the time…just look how far I’ve come!) showed up first, followed by knockout roses. Various blooms have popped up since, as I and my non-green thumb have witnessed in non-working wonder, marveling over these gifts attained not through effort but open eyes.

And a few weeks ago, I gazed toward the corner of the backyard, at the garden formerly tended by the teenage girl who lived here, behind the picket-fence gate, and considered googling hydrangea planting and care. They were popping up all over the neighborhood and wouldn’t I love to have some in our own little patch of property to stare at from the sunroom?

I’ll let you guess what I’m staring out right now from the sunroom.

Radiant blue and deep purple globes of blooms stare back, a year after they became my favorite flower, a year after so many hopes were fulfilled, so many promises kept.

All I’m saying is, sometimes? The things for which you were designed, the gifts you never knew you wanted? Are what you were always heading toward.

The Husband and I were discussing television parents the other night. The subject came up after yet another episode of Friday Night Lights in which Eric and Tami Taylor delivered some mad parenting skillz, and TH pondered aloud whether we should begin to write down some of their dialogue in the event that we become parents and need some back-up.

The Taylors remind me of some other TV parents I admire, chief among them Burt Hummel from Glee and, well, any of the Modern Family crew (although I most identify with the Pritchetts in their impulse to laugh at others and in the resemblance of hard-candy-shell Jay to my own father). If anything, the unifying characteristic of these authority figures lies in their flawed natures, their willingness to admit mistakes and imperfection and keep parenting anyway. And laughing at themselves. But then I guess that’s becoming one of my favorite qualities in general as I walk my own similar path: not pretending to be people we aren’t.

The other day I was on the phone with The Dad and he brought up a story from my childhood, a favorite pastime of his second only to bringing up stories from his own childhood (alongside his two brothers–avid storytellers all). He described, in detail (townspeople and villagers included), the time my younger self threatened to push The Sis into the fireplace, telling her, “And when I do, you’re going to hit your head on the brick so hard that you’ll die.” Um, yikes? I don’t remember this event–my mind is more fluent in memories of protectiveness toward my younger half–but The Dad stood by his story, saying that when he asked me back then why I would even think of such a thing, I replied that “I saw it once in a movie.”

Wounds. I could describe to you the raised scar on my arm, where The Sis got her fireplace-comeuppance by drilling a key into my skin, or the indented scar on my forehead, when she accidentally dropped (purposely hurled?) a stainless steel bowl full of water on my noggin. But beyond the physical, those we care about can deliver the deepest wounds. Whether yours was a family that you longed to escape or in which you found constant refuge, I doubt any of us survived childhood (or adulthood) unscathed. And I’m not just talking about the controllable hurts. Yesterday at church a new dad sat beside us, fresh hospital bracelet encircling his wrist, a sign of the baby who came into the world too soon and therefore won’t be coming home for awhile. Loving hurts.

Which is why we need a love that goes deeper than our deepest wounds, that is more true and real than the pain we sometimes feel could do us in. Anyone who hasn’t gone through worse than we have is at best a source of empathy, at worst a trove of supportive cliches–neither of which deliver healing as strong as the wounds themselves. Knowing glances and murmurings of “I’ve been there”–this will not do. We need “I’ve been there, and past there, and everywhere in between. For you.” Hmm…now where would we find such a love? And once we found it, would we have the balls to believe it? Because that just might change everything.