Little People Can Have Babies Too!

Little People Can Have Babies Too!

My husband and I were sitting on the couch, having our morning coffee, when I paused in the magazine I was flipping through and showed him the picture.

“Do you think our daughter’ll look like that?” I asked.

Taking a sip from his mug, my husband squinted at the image of the rosy-cheeked little girl with flaxen pigtails and a gap-toothed smile.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. She looks like her parents are both normal sized.”

“Normal sized?!” I screeched, slapping the magazine closed and slinging it across the coffee table. “Whatdaya think I am, an elf?”

“Well, no,” my husband replied. I could see the wheels in his mind quickly spinning backwards. “You’re just–just a little person.”

• 

Exactly one month ago I went in to my hairdresser’s because I had forgotten her phone number and needed to have my hair cut before my pregnancy hormones caused me to hack it off with a dull butcher knife.

“Why hey!” she cried. “Haven’t seen you in a while!”

I apologized for this and asked if she had anything available next week.

She said, “Just a haircut?”

“I’d like some highlights, too, but . . .” I glanced over at the man seated on the stool with a plastic cape draping his shoulders. “Well, I’m expecting. In my second trimester. My midwife said it was fine–”

My hairdresser waved her hand. “Believe you me, Honey, it is fine, or I wouldn’t’ve been allowed to do highlights when I was pregnant myself.”

The next week I was seated in the very stool that customer had occupied, with the same plastic cape draping my shoulders, while my hairdresser jerked my hair through a cap in a way that made me think her former occupation was with the KGB.

“You liking being pregnant?” she asked, ripping out a chunk of my scalp.

“It’s been great,” I said although my expression in the mirror was a mask of pain. “No morning sickness, tons — ouch! — tons of energy. The only problem is, people think I’m a pregnant teenager.”

My hairdresser paused in her torture. “Ya know,” she said, waving the metal hook at me, “funny you should say that. Last week after you left, that guy I was working on was quiet for a while, then said, ‘It’s sad about that girl.’ I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘’Bout her being pregnant and all. She really had a lot going for her.’”

• 

For three months after I discovered those two pink lines on a home pregnancy test, I pestered my family with one question: “Can you see it now?”

This query was always accompanied with me arching my spine and sticking out my stomach while my hands supported my lower back. If we were in a portion of a grocery store/department store/restaurant/sidewalk that wasn’t too congested, I would even whip up my shirt and point to a little bump on my lower abdomen that could’ve been a full bladder.

“Right there,” I’d ask. “Can’t you see that?”

Then I went up to Pennsylvania to visit my husband’s family. For three solid days I lived on pig stomach (which is actually far tastier than it sounds), cheese curds brought in from Wisconsin, Good’s potato chips fried in lard, scrapple, and peanut-butter rice crispy treats slathered in chocolate. By the time we started back to Tennessee on Sunday, my belly could barely fit in the car.

On Tuesday, after the ultrasound which confirmed we were having a baby girl, I was sitting in our front yard typing when I heard a sound like a woman’s scream. I thought it was a mountain lion or bobcat and heaved my pregnant self up from the camping chair and took off into the woods. I crawled under barbed-wire fences, hacked through brambles while using my stomach as a battering ram (sorry, Baby Girl), climbed over logs and rocks. I was very Sacajawea meets GI Jane, but no mountain lion or bobcat was sighted.

I came down out of the mountain and collapsed into my camping chair once again. I was happily typing when I felt something crawling across my arm. A seed tick. Lifting up my shirt, I discovered another. I practically sprinted into the shower and scrubbed until my skin was tickled pink. By the next day, though, I realized my intervention had been too late.

My kneecap to my ankle on my left leg alone was polka-dotted with twenty chiggers. (Tiny mites that burrow under your skin and hibernate until you go wild and scratch them out. Want to move to Tennessee, anyone?) I had chiggers on my shoulder blades, my collar bone, my back, and other sundry places I would rather not describe.

That night I was putting fresh sheets on our bed when the chigger on my stomach started itching. Heaving up my shirt, I started pawing at that sucker like an old bear scratching his back on a tree. I looked down. I gasped. In addition to being able to play Connect-The-Dots with the red bumps spattering my skin, I also had an outy belly button at five months pregnant.

I blame it all on that pig stomach and scrapple.

• 

This week my husband and I watched a National Geographic video I rented from the library called In the Womb. The first hour was great. My husband and I sat with our heads tilted together like two love birds, and I held one of his hands and affectionately rubbed my stomach with my other. As the narrator would describe what our child was doing right then — how she was stretching and yawning and learning the sound of her mother’s voice (sorry again, Baby Girl) — we would look at each other all googley-eyed and smile.

Thirty minutes later we were led into the fortieth week, and the hearts and flowers narration took an ominous turn. The camera panned in on a woman squatting next to a hospital bed, the hands wrapping her husband’s shaking, while she screamed like she was being ripped in two. And it was no slow birth, either, let me tell you. That camera got all up close and personal with the mom, and I dropped my husband’s hand like a hot potato. I shied away from my laptop screen as if the pain of her labor could somehow radiate through it.

“Is that–is that the umbilical cord?” I asked, pointing at a twisted, purple protrusion that looked twenty feet long.

My husband nodded.

“Is that–” I started to ask and my husband just patted my hand. I thought I was going to be sick.

On camera, the Irish midwife called to the mother in a soft, lilting voice, “You’re almost there, deary. Just one more push.” That midwife then grasped the baby’s head and tugged out the rest of her mottled body like she was just a turnip being plucked from a field.

My husband shut down the computer while I continued staring at the screen, my mouth hanging wide.

Ten minutes later, long after we’d kissed and said goodnight, I tossed back the covers and cried, “But she looked like a cow!”

Putting his hand on my hip, my husband sighed. “I guess we’ll just have to remember that little people can have babies, too.”