A Loooong Winter...

Out shopping for my husband’s birthday (11/16), I could no longer deny the necessary, the inevitable and the true.

I needed new clothes.

The old ones just weren’t doing the trick anymore, not because I’d lived in Florida for twelve years before moving to Indiana with only a few items of winter clothing to my name.

No, the problem was fit and comfort and not just because my exercise routine, so finely tuned in Lakeland (a four mile walk/run around Lake Hollingsworth a little after noon almost every day) has simply been disrupted beyond belief.

So I forced my naturally abstemious self to give in and just shell out some bucks.

In the maternity section.

Yup. Forty and pregnant, that’s me.

He or she is due to arrive in the open air in late March or early April.

Sadly, and strangely, too, I might add, there seems to be not one single nurse-midwife in practice in Fort Wayne, Indiana (I had Katie with midwives, and I do believe it’s the best way to birth), so I’m forced, once again, into a doctor’s office.

My doctor seems fine, though – I mean, what can you expect when you pick a name out of the phone book – although I cannot, for the life of me, figure out her ethnicity, which has me curious just because it's so mysterious, and I have, like the elephant's child, that " 'satiable curiousity." It’s sort of like that Seinfeld episode in which Elaine is puzzled by the very same question regarding the guy she’s dating. She drops all kinds of hints, asks all kinds of leading question, but cannot determine whether the guy is of Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic or some sort of mixed ethnicity. It’s very funny, and every time I go to the doctor’s I find myself re-enacting that episode – trying to place my doctor's accent - she has diplomas from an Irish university on her wall, but her tones are certainly not a brogue. I just can’t place it, so I’ve finally decided she must be Creole or from somewhere in the French Caribbean. She has a French first name, at least.

Anyway. The gender of the baby is even more mysterious, and I’ve every intention of keeping it that way. Everything seems fine – my blood pressure is slightly elevated, which is unusual for me – even during pregnancy, I share my mother’s rock-bottom blood pressure that leads doctors and nurses to double check our breathing once they see the numbers.

I was horribly sick during the first trimester, as I usually am. It’s a pretty miserable way to spend the first few months of married life, I tell you. Things got better, though, about two months into it, when my doctor prescribed this miracle vitamin that included a time-released B-complex component. It worked wonders, and I highly recommend it!

So, there you go. I’ll be very busy over the months of this very long winter, trying to get the next two Prove It books and the sidebars for another project done before the baby gets here so I can have a couple of weeks off, at least before the next writing project calls.

No, I never thought I’d be pregnant when I was forty, but I never thought any of the other things that have happened to me be a part of my life, either, and that’s okay. For the fact is, as much as I’ve enjoyed all (okay, most) of my jobs and as much as I appreciate what I’m able to do through my writing, none of it means a thing when put up against the children I’ve helped bring into and up in the world. Here’s part of my November 19 OSV column, if you want to understand why: