Unsolicited everything

“Did you use a turkey baster or do you know the father?”

Holy shit. I was speechless. I knew Julie could be blunt, but I was unprepared for this. She was actually headed in the right direction, but fertility treatments with donor swimmers are a lot more sophisticated than the do-it-yourself method that she referenced.

I told her I knew the father, and really, I felt like I did. I had a baby picture, a voice-recorded interview. I knew everything from his family medical history to his favorite color, from how tall he was to his SAT scores, from his academic major to his favorite childhood memory.

The next day Julie asked if Ted, a mutual friend, was the father.

“JULIE. YOU. NEED. TO. DROP. IT.” I said. “It’s none of your business.”

She stammered. I’d caught her off guard. I wasn’t usually so bitchy direct. My hide got tougher, and I began practicing comebacks I would never use. Are you always so rude or is today a special occasion? Have you considered suing your brain for non-support? Did your mother drop you on the head when you were a baby?

While Julie’s questions were unsettling, she was not the only one with something to say, and it wasn’t just being single and pregnant, it was being pregnant. Everybody from the old lady standing in line next to me at the grocery store to the plumber who came to my house to clear the drains had comments or advice about my condition. And the bigger I got, the more they came.

“When are you due?”

“Three months.”

“Wow! You look like you’re about to have it right now!”

At the drugstore, the cashier looked at me and said, “You look like you’re about to explode!”

That one actually got an eat-shit-and-die look and a call to management suggesting sensitivity training.

Geez. It was bad enough that I had to make frequent trips to the OB that began with a weigh-in and ended with a lecture on moderation, now everybody I came in contact with had a comment about it. So I was big as a house. I was pregnant. I was going to have a baby. But did that give people license to talk stupid?

At home at night I’d pull up my nightgown and watch my burgeoning stomach moving around on its own. There was a little Bean in there, a little Bean, who, Mimi and I discovered at an ultrasound, had sprouted a penis… A PENIS! That posed a whole new set of problems—trains, cars, actions heroes, peeing standing up—things I knew nothing about.

But I would learn, and if I was doing it wrong, I was certain that some kind soul would be sure to tell me about it.