In times of insecurity, we grasp at the things we know we’re good at.  I figured I might not know a thing about pregnancy, but I’d have this nutrition bit in the bag.  I’m a cook, a food writer, and a recipe developer and I’m pretty focused on nutritious eating.  Our kid was going to eat right from the start.

If you learn nothing else during pregnancy, you learn that you have practically no control over the way things go down.  It is the most unpredictable time in a girl’s life (and by default, in her husband’s life…).

I quickly discovered that the things I intended to eat, the food I knew I should eat, I absolutely didn’t want to eat.  Though I made it through unscathed by morning sickness (or “all day sickness” or just “sickness” as many friends have amended the phrase), I had bouts of aversions to things.  Some days I would prepare something and when the cooking was finished, I would pack it up in the fridge and pour myself a bowl of cereal to eat instead.  One day, in the middle of summer when the produce was spilling over crates at farm stands, and ice cream was dripping down the sides of cones, and hamburgers were partying on backyard grills up and down the blocks of our neighborhood, I sat on the couch with a white plate of white food: a flour tortilla with melted mozzarella and a scoop of hummus.  No color of the rainbow looked tasty to me.

The night we found out we were going to be parents in 34 weeks, I made this pasta dish out of the things we had around: fresh tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, basil from our patio garden, a couple strips of bacon, and diced fresh mozzarella.  These are all flavors that I love…they’re also flavors I would come to wince at in the upcoming weeks.

I live for tomato season. I love to slice them, sprinkle them with salt and stack them on a piece of toast slathered with mayo or drizzled liberally with olive oil.  I go out of my way to use them up while they are in all their summer glory.  Their pal, Basil, is also always welcome and they get along famously, those two.  I had a falling out with tomato and basil, though, and for the duration of the first trimester and much of the first few weeks of the second, I didn’t want to see or smell either of them.  Totally bizarre.  I could stand the smell of bacon, but didn’t want to eat it.  I even skipped out on a BLT building contest a food writer was hosting because none of it appealed to me at all.

This arbitrary opposition spilled over into various categories of food until it became slim pickins ‘round here.  One day early on I ravenously ate a big, mult-ingredient salad, filled with all the things I was supposed to be eating. The very next day, I couldn’t stand to even remember having eaten it.  There was no rhyme or reason to it.

Things continued this way for weeks. Poor Toph got the short end of the stick.  Dinner is usually cooking, or at least contemplated by the time he’s home from work. But these days he grew used to coming home to no aroma wafting through to the front door, a dark kitchen and me on the couch.

He rallied for us, though, with pancake dinners, grilled cheese sandwiches (he makes the best) and baked potatoes until I could get it together again at the stove and the dinner bell was repaired.

I know people who, upon peeing on the pregnancy test, treat that stick as a cherished artifact forevermore.  A friend’s sister peed on several and then wrapped them up as gifts to announce the news to family members at Christmas.

I understand why a positive pregnancy test becomes a treasured relic.  It’s in essence a really reliable fortune teller that changes your life with a pink plus sign.  It’s the most tangible thing associated with this momentous occasion in life.

But an invisible ink marker isn’t what gets it to work.  It requires urine to detect a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin or hCG.  The magic ingredient turns the handy dandy store-bought fortune teller memento into a science experiment and hazardous waste.  It should not leave the bathroom. Mine did not.

Not everyone emerges in a gleeful whirl after positive test results make themselves known.  I, for example, felt uneasy, shocked, uncertain, terrified, hesitant, unready, apprehensive, guilty for not jigging, and terrible that my instinctive tears dominated the moment.

Through all of that emotional mud, though, I felt honest.  This was my true reaction, and this was no time to fake it.  I needed to be real with myself about this.

Five months ago I was having dinner with eight girlfriends, two of whom announced that they were expecting.  When these proclamations are made (they started a couple years ago and have been like dominos ever since), I just get out of the way.  I feel genuine excitement for my friends and look forward to seeing them becomes moms.  But simultaneously, the few stragglers of us who’ve purposely yet to conceive, reach for wine glasses and drink deep to try to drown out the obnoxious buzz of our own biological clock alarms, for which there seems to be no snooze button.  Our arms extend to the glasses like the Rockets’ legs, in unison, with purpose.  Maybe our smiles look a little rehearsed like those of the ladies on the stage at the Christmas Spectacular.

My procrastination comes from what I think is a legitimate place.  On my 28th birthday, I quit my stable, well-paying corporate American job to go to culinary school and embark on a new career.  Reinvention takes some time, and I couldn’t imagine inventing someone else, while trying to figure myself out.  So Topher and I made the conscious decision to concentrate on getting the new me off the ground before a new us came on the scene.

I spent many nights on the couches of friends while working in New York City as a freelancer, taking trains, buses, boats and cars between home and work for weeks and months at a time.  I dropped everything, including any pay worth calculating, to co-author my first cookbook.  I spent countless hours writing and developing recipes at odd times. I crawled inside my head to find words to pitch to editors at magazines and newspapers. I begged and borrowed to start a blog, go to conferences all over the country, work on other books and projects.  Career-building can be all-consuming. So is parenthood.  It seemed that I couldn’t pull off both at once.

There were other sources of my feelings of iffyness on the baby front.  I read status updates of Facebook friends with kids, lamenting their jam-packed days and how they have to hide in the laundry room for a stolen moment of respite and a gulp of wine out of a sippy cup.  I don’t blame them for venting, I just wasn’t sure I wanted to join them.

Worse, I’ve observed married couples with kids start to regard each other in such a way that makes John and Kate Gosselin look like the model couple of the year.  I’m in a pretty awesome marriage. We have fun together and enjoy the same things in life. We laugh a lot.  We eat dinner together almost every night. We balance our individual quirks on each other’s and we try our best to always be a united front. “We’re a team,”, as we like to say.  I shutter to think of exchanging the looks I see tossed between husbands and wives over the heads of their children. They range from disgust to exhaustion and annoyance to disdain.  They are ugly expressions and they make me want to avoid their source.

I set baby talk on the back burner and found comfort in trends that point to women starting families a little later in the name of work or other aspects of life.  I’d be lying if I said I never wished I was still 26, when there was little to no pressure to move on to mommyhood.  I’d also be lying if I said I never envied friends who have known since age six that their calling in life was to be an exuberant mother of an ever-expanding brood.

But I’m being honest in admitting my reservations about parenthood.

I always figured that when I did get pregnant there would be a small handful of people I’d feel compelled to call immediately, well before the prescribed 12-week safety mark.  I was wrong about that.  Upon learning via the pink plus sign, I was certain that we would wait a while before disseminating that information.  Everything felt too premature. I wanted verification from one of those doctor folks, and I also needed some time to let it all sink in.

Keeping this kind of news under wraps is no small feat, especially when the face-to-face encounters with people who know you very, very well just keep right on coming.

The morning after the big news was verified, Toph and I found ourselves at the shore with several of our closest friends. I felt like we’d slapped the positive pregnancy tests (I took both of them, on account of the self-professed and aforementioned over cautiousness) on Velcro straps on our foreheads.  I didn’t know how we were going to get through the weekend without spilling it, or how I’d get through three days with two of my dear girlfriends free of suspicious glances from either of them when my wine glass wasn’t draining fast enough.

Turns out, a woman in her 9th month of pregnancy (pictured right aside her brand new mini van) is a terrific  decoy for a woman in her 6th week.  Aly delivered their first baby two weeks later, so we were all acutely   focused on her well-being (and her amazing pitting edema    ankles).  Within hours of our arrival, early in the afternoon, a  cooler emerged.  As the beers were doled out to open palms, Aly declared, “Unless you’re knocked up, you should be having a beer!” I faked a migraine and opted out.

The rest of the weekend Toph was on as the designated drinker.  We made sure our wine glasses matched so he could sip and spin between his own and mine to detract  attention from my lack of imbibing or to dupe our friends if they thought they noticed.  It seems ridiculous, but people catch on.

Which is why I was terrified to go for cocktails and dinner the next weekend with our bourbon-loving and wine-admiring pals at their house.  Denise, the hostess, has some sort of a crazy momometer installed in her brain and I have seen her use it many times on other people.  Sure enough, we walked in, the first topic of discussion was cocktails. What did we want?  “I’m good with water for now,” I tried.  Denise visibly balked, eyes-wide, neck jerked back. When I didn’t respond, she recovered her expressions and went to get the water. Not another word spoken, but enough had been said.  She admitted later, when we finally told, that she knew in that very moment.

We made it through several more events with friends, keeping our secret safe with us.  It wasn’t until 13 weeks when we started making calls.

We were heading down the shore the next day with a merry band of some of our closest friends to celebrate the Fourth of July holiday weekend.  I started to become suspicious of my own body a few days earlier.  I finally mentioned it to Toph as he prepared to head out for a run.

“I don’t want to make a big deal about this or anything because it could really be nothing, but I just wanted to say out loud that I’m five days late.”

We hadn’t been trying. We’d sort of just determined, in very casual conversation that may have happened during a commercial break of Must See TV, or between topics over dinner one night, that if it happened, it happened, and if it didn’t, well, then we’d just go right on living our 30-something independent lives and that would be fine for now.

He was filling a water bottle. I think he asked a few questions about the lateness and then we both treated it as a wait and see scenario.  He headed out for a run.

But I’d already decided that I couldn’t handle going to the shore with our friends for three days, wondering the whole time, feeling guilty for sipping beer and wine and pina coladas on the deck. I would run to the CVS to get to the bottom of this. I’d have an answer before his six miles were up.

I managed to endure the discomfort of buying a test and went directly to the upstairs bathroom.

I went about the whole process rather matter-of-factly, but I was shaking a little, and mostly expressionless.  I couldn’t sort through how I felt, or how I was supposed to be feeling.

The instructions say to allow two full minutes before examining the little window where your future is reflected, but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t look right away, and I did, too.  In an instant, that pink plus was seeping through. I set it down, though, and waited the two minutes as instructed, only to reconfirm the premature glimpse.

Suddenly I was just alone in the bathroom, with this knowledge, the rest of the house empty.  I left the test there and went downstairs to wait for Toph.

When he arrived, I let him cool down, stretch, have a drink. He finally headed up to the bathroom to shower and I sort of loitered in the hallway waiting for him to get acquainted with the surroundings.

“Uhhh, what’s going on in here?” he nervously called.  When I appeared, he was hovering over the test with the pink positive sign coming through the window clear as day.

We stood there in the bathroom staring at each other, our collective emotions flying around us like autumn leaves in a burst of breeze.  There were too many to be considered for any one to win out.  Toph couldn’t stop smiling. I almost immediately started crying.

I think I would have felt better about the whole experience if I’d just marched right in there, hopped over the counter, grabbed the public address phone and announced, “Attention CVS employees and fellow shoppers, I’m five days late and I’m here to buy a pregnancy test. Now carry on with your own agendas.”

Instead I scurried in there with my heart pounding, certain I was visibly sweating and agitated.  It was like I was doing something bad, rather than as if I was the 32-year-old married woman that I am, who may or may not be pregnant with my own husband’s child.  I found my way to the aisle, with which I was not already acquainted.  This, after all, was my first foray into pregnancy test-buying. I am, by nature, over cautious.

The shelves of aisle 6A jut out further than 6B, and the boxes of tests are all right there, poking into the waiting area for the pharmacy.  I hedged over toward the B side of the aisle, where all the vitamins are, trying to hide from the pharmacists who had a clear view of me loitering around the pregnancy tests.  I may as well have been standing there naked for all the discomfort I felt.  Teenagers are more definitive and shamelessly conspicuous about such a purchase!

I squatted down, pretending to study glucosamine tablets, while really straining my eyes across the aisle to side A, trying to figure out which of countless brands I should choose.  Who needs that kind of decision-making pressure in a moment like this?

I was certain the pharmacy guy was on to me, and that he had already started a game of operator with his fellow pill pushers. “Ooooh, check out the tall girl in 6. Looks like she’s eyeing up the pee sticks,” I imagined he gossiped.  Either that or he’d pushed a button under his register for security to keep an eye on the woman acting peculiar around the vitamins and/or pregnancy tests.

A handful of minutes earlier, as I was tying my laces to leave the house, the country song Real Love by Phil Vasser was on my digital music station.  These lyrics rang in my ears:

“Then one night you came to me
With tears in your eyes and an EPT and said
“Guess what, yeah, baby ready or not.”

It was how I made the decision to finally grab a box of EPT, which had 2 tests in it (see over cautious declaration above).

On my way to the register, I picked up a bottle of sunscreen and a razor and situated them on either side of the box, so as to not inadvertently announce my business to everyone else in the line.  The girl at the register couldn’t have taken any longer than she did, fumbling with a bag to pack my purchases.  I just wanted to run out of there, I practically did when the sale was finally closed.

Now I was just about three blocks away from the next chapter of my life.