Knocked Up
After reading the title of this entry, some of you (namely, Art “You are so going to have a baby, you woman, you” Charles, and my mother if she remembers how to find my website) may be flipping out.
Luckily, my husband already knows what I’m going to be writing about and so has (probably) not had a heart attack.
Yesterday I visited a friend. When she opened the door to me, my eye immediately fell upon her hot pink t-shirt. Because I read a lot and love to read, I can’t help but read any text that shows up around me. In moments of dire emergency, I even read the back of the toilet paper package If I’m caught unawares in the bathroom without my regular reading material.
So naturally, I automatically read what was on her shirt.
“Knocked up,” it proclaimed.
Now, with anyone else, this message may seem fairly clear. But I’ve known my friend for some time and she had never expressed any interest in having a child. In fact, she had expressed quite strongly that she was not going to have children. So when I read those words and looked at the picture on the shirt, I came to the same conclusion that any reasonable person would have, given the circumstances.
I decided the shirt must have something to do with golfing.
In my own defense, I had been distracted by the round circles on the shirt. They looked so symmetrical, and I’d gotten so used to seeing one of my bosses practice golf swings with an imaginary club at work that golf balls, in this situation, came more readily to mind than the more obvious interpretation.
So I stepped in the house and didn’t comment on the shirt. I figured that “knocked up,” in the golf context, was just another slang term I didn’t fully comprehend, like “hoochie” and “nookie” and “tossed salad.” With these kinds of terms, I often had to ask Chris to explain them to me, and when he jokingly gave me an incorrect definition, I would later attempt to use these same terms in polite conversation to my detriment.
I stayed the entire afternoon with my friend, and didn’t think about the shirt any further. When her husband came home though, he spoke with his wife briefly, and then walked up to me.
He handed me a photo, with something stuck behind it. “Just wanted to show you this picture of my wife with some dogs,” he said.
“Oh, cute!” I said, admiring the picture. It showed her hugging two dogs, so I assumed he wanted to show me the picture because I liked dogs.
I casually flipped over the picture and looked at the second picture behind it.
It was a small print-out of a large, cavernous area shaded in black, with a little white kidney bean in the center.
Even I knew that this was an ultrasound picture.
I stared disbelievingly for a while, then looked up at the beaming parents-to-be.
“What - ” I began.
“Who - ” I started again.
“Is this yours?” I finally blurted out. Even now, I was more willing to believe that for whatever reason, they were showing me ultrasound pictures of an unknown person’s child rather than that this was their own forthcoming child.
They nodded.
“But how?” I cried out.
The husband nodded knowledgeably. “Well, you see, Jane, this how it works. First the man - ”
“No, not that! I meant - when? How? What happened? I thought you didn’t want kids!” I said. “Was this planned?”
Now that I think of it, that was an incredibly rude thing for me to say. My only excuse is that I was so thunderstruck by the news that all sense of propriety (of which I had very little to begin with) had deserted me.
My friend nodded. “Yep, I got on prenatal vitamins and everything. My biological clock kicked in, big-time,” she explained. “And we discussed it and decided we wanted to have kids, and here we are!”
I sat back in my chair. They were going to be parents. There was going to be a miniature version of them in less than a year.
As is the way of all people, my first consideration was for how this news was going to affect me.
The future didn’t look pretty. Chris and I were going to be old and alone if we stayed childless, while all around us our friends romped in SUVs and minivans with children’s toys taking over their houses. Chris would be forty-five and haunting the local card tournaments like a perv, and I would be an old crone walking my seven chihuahuas around the neighborhood and admonishing children to “stay off my lawn, damnit.”
Even Art would probably procreate, although whether he would find out about his children in person or not until he was served with the paternity suit was questionable.
Though this news meant the end of our list of Fun Childless Couples To Hang Out With, I was happy for our friends. I knew they would be great parents.
Back in their house, I studied the ultrasound picture again. The kidney bean was still there.
“So your shirt really does mean knocked up,” I marveled.
“Yeah,” she said. “I saw you looking at it a few times, but you didn’t say anything.”
“I didn’t know it was serious,” I said. I went into the golfing explanation, but as I looked more carefully at her t-shirt, I suddenly realized that the two spheres that I had mistaken for golf balls were actually -
“Hey!” I exclaimed. “That’s a pregnant lady on your shirt!”
Posted by: ssjane | March 30, 2006 | 3:07 pm
Posted in: This Life