So, I'm pregnant. I guess I feel comfortable broadcasting it on my blog because the people that I am currently hiding it from- the family, the co-workers, etc- don't know that Under My Thumb exists. I'm barely pregnant. I'll be six weeks on Friday. I have my doctor's appointment the day before Thanksgiving. Maybe the doctor will look at me with a cocked eyebrow and say, "Yeah, what? You're totally not. Get out of my office and stop wasting my time." And I will shamefully close my legs, take off my paper gown, and haphazardly throw on my clothes through a hot blur of tears and nausea.

I know you're not supposed to tell people this early, but I haven't been able to refrain from telling it to a select few. I'm so terrified that I'm jinxing this whole thing by opening my big fat mouth, but then I thought- what if something did happen? Wouldn't I want the support of my friends? Wouldn't I maybe want to write a blog entry about it? So here I am, like a jackass.

I want to remember how this feels- how it alternates between excitement, horror, and nothingness at all. How giving up alcohol and coffee and my few cigarettes here and there has been nothing short of heartbreaking. How I am sometimes fearful because I don't feel like I am "glowing" like I should be. How I can't even believe that I have a person inside of me, at least a speck of a person, who could grow up to be any number of things, equally awesome and awful. The power is ridiculous. It's unfathomable, really.

The funny thing is that my neighbor, Heather, is pregnant, too. She's three weeks ahead of me. It's so wierd, like maybe part of a master plan. That our kids will be the same age and can maybe grow up together. Chris, however, seems to think that her kid is going to pick on our kid, that we are fated to have a shy, nerdy child who gets teased and bullied and picked on to no end. He's probably right. But wouldn't it be something if our child was the bully, the little terror, the monster of the neighborhood? What would we even do, I wonder? We're not equipped to deal with such things. We're non-confrontational, we like to do our teasing behind people's backs, not to their faces.

Who knows. Who knows anything. I will tell you one thing, though. My dad knows. He doesn't actually know, he hasn't actually been told, but we visited my parents on Saturday and he stared at me for a long time before finally saying, "You look different." He wouldn't let it drop. I looked different, prettier somehow. He even said it to my sister after we left. I guess he's got a paternal instinct about these things, a heightened sense due to my mother's lowered sense. My mother, you see, asked me on the same visit how old I am, if I was 31 or 32. I'm 29. The damn woman gave birth to me a very specific number of years ago and has no idea how long ago that was. I don't want to be a mother who can't remember how old her kids are. If there's one thing that I'll ask for now, aside from a safe and healthy pregnancy and child, it'll be that, when I'm a mother, I'm not a moron.