I’m a little sad today. Not that overwhelming, gut-wrenching, down-to-the-core sadness that can paralyze you, but just a general build-up of tears that is usually released with an all new episode of ER. As I’ve watched the Pistons fight in the series against Cleveland, I’ve been missing my dad a lot, so that’s part of it. After Tuesday night’s game I wanted to call him up and ask him what he thought of Chauncey’s decision to go for three, and I wanted to tell Dad how much I’ve come to dislike Gooden. I’m sure we’d also talk about how Kobe Bryant is a big whiner and trade him to any place but Detroit. :)
As I approach the end of the first trimester and start to feel more and more secure about this pregnancy, it’s sinking in that I’m going to be a parent. And I’m going to be a single parent. I thought through all of this ahead of time and I definitely know it’s what I want, that it’s the right thing for me. But as with most expectant moms, I’m starting to realize the enormity of what that’s going to mean.
During my commute down the river valley this morning, I listened to NPR, and as always they had a lot of coverage of the war…. military officials saying this summer is going to be particularly bloody, academics saying that what is ultimately going to dictate how this war turns out is the lack of forces (we’re simply stretched too thin), soft pieces about the funerals of local hometown heroes. This morning they broadcast a recording of a phone call between two parents whose sons had recently been killed by an IED near Baghdad. A mother who laid her son to rest this past Memorial Day weekend spoke with a father whose son’s body arrived Tuesday. They had barely said hello to each other when I started bawling. They talked for several minutes about how they understood how the other felt, how they were proud of their children, how the pain of losing their children was the same as it would be whether he died while fighting in a war or while painting the house. And I continued to bawl long after the story finished and Kathy Wurzer started talking about Northwest Airlines coming out of bankruptcy.
Yesterday my friend Sarah was telling me about a nightmare she had in which her little boy was drowning and she was unable to reach him, to save him. I remembered when Mom called me early in the morning ten years ago to make sure I was alright. “I dreamt that we found your dead, naked body in the garden,” she said. “It was so awful and so real, that I had to make sure you were okay.”
Tuesday night I had a dream that I was driving home from a night out with friends and I started swerving. I suddenly realized that I had had too much to drink, that I shouldn’t be driving. And a second later I thought, “What the hell am I doing drinking? I’m pregnant.” I woke up in a panic that something was wrong, that my baby was hurt.
From what everyone tells me, this is the beginning of a lifetime of these kinds of fears… balancing your desire to protect your child with your desire to see them grow in to secure, responsible adults.
And of course, this makes me miss my dad. He would be as excited as I am that the Pistons are headed back to The Palace to set things right in the NBA.
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