Obama Mama

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Bun in the Blog! Today is the first day of the Obama Administration. It’s also the first day of Week 20 for The Kid I’m cooking up in this growing belly. I’m officially an Obama Mama.

Launching the Bun in the Blog on January 21, 2009 feels right. A new era and all that. And that’s the goal of BIB [question: annoying?]: to explore this new era, what happens during it, and what it all means. Candid adventures in pregnancy with a larger context. As this country begins an inexorable but gradual shift to a new identity—a new way of going about who it is, what it stands for, and how it will behave—so too am I.

Last night, HusbandMan (yes, he does wear a cape—and often nothing else) pointed at my growing belly and said, once again, “Someone tell me how that is in any way practical.” Then he poked it as if he were testing the ripeness of a melon.

“Press, don’t poke,” I told him for the 947th time. “I hate being poked. Nobody likes to be poked anywhere in the world, ever.”

He snickered. “Poking is what got us into this situation.”

HusbandMan is right: there’s a lot of poking going on in the world. In this whole pregnancy thing, I’m far from alone. At this very moment, there are millions of women in various stages of Knocked Up. I’m not exactly breaking new ground here.

And that’s exactly the point. Pregnancy is something one half of the human race experiences to create the whole of the human race. Think about that. It involves every last one of us. From the biology to the anthropology, it’s both mind-blowingly profound and utterly mundane.

The one thing it ain’t is small potatoes.

Yesterday I felt The Kid move for the first time. Butterflies in my stomach. No—more like sleepy bumblebees in my stomach. It felt like nervousness, like excitement. And I guess it was. Just not my own.

Dear lord. I poked my belly. There’s actually another person in there.

And that’s why—as the next installment will cover—I’m Drinkin’ for Two!