When it came time for my 20-week ultrasound, I never thought we’d be arguing about whether or not we’d want the doctor to tell us the baby's sex.  Everybody finds that out, right?  I always knew I’d want to know.  How can you not want to know?  Jim?  He didn’t want to know.  He wanted to be surprised.  He wanted to wait until the baby was almost all the way out of me (God, I can’t even think about that too much) and hear Dr. Tedesco say, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” and be completely surprised.  I thought there’d been enough surprises lately and I wanted to know!  I was dying to know!  Of all the things I thought we might disagree on, I never expected this, and I never expected him to be so stubborn about it, either.

He says, why don’t you have the doctor just tell you?  He says he’ll leave the room.  I tell him he’s lost his mind.  First, I don’t think I’d be able to keep that a secret for nearly 4 more months – I’m sure I’d slip up and say “he” or “she” or something and ruin his surprise, like it’s his birthday or something.  Way too much pressure on me.  Second, I know him.  He thinks he wants me to keep it a secret from him, but he won’t be able to stand it.  He won’t be able to stand it that I know and he doesn’t and he’ll start trying to get me to tell him.  Once I know, it’s going to drive him crazy, which will in turn, drive me crazy, and I am not going to have him driving me crazy with this for four more months.

Kellie thinks it’s adorable that Jim wants to be surprised so she’s no help, and the other Kelly?  She’s already convinced I’m having a girl because she had a very detailed dream about it (that I had to hear about in detail), so she doesn’t need confirmation from some stupid ultrasound.  Kevin, naturally, has started a baby pool and Phyllis, refusing to take sides, is crocheting a yellow receiving blanket for us.  Of all people, Michael is siding with me and is almost as excited as I am to find out.  I guess that makes sense, given Michael’s inability to keep anything secret.  He’s also fascinated with my growing belly and I can’t believe I did this, but I let him touch my belly.  I know!  But he was staring at it when I was trying to show him how to use a new feature on email and I couldn’t get him to focus, so I finally said, “Michael, do you want to touch my belly?” and he just nodded and reached his hand out, barely touching it.  It wasn’t as creepy as I thought it was going to be and it made him so damned happy.  I figured that it was pretty mild compared to the indignities I was going to suffer during labor. 

And let me just say this:  everyone who has ever been pregnant in the history of childbirth- even strangers in the grocery store! - want to tell me their childbirth horror stories.  Why?  Why do other women want to scare the crap out of me with these horrifying tales of 97 hours of labor and babies in backward pretzel positions and episiotomies and blood and the epidural or being too late to get the epidural?  My mom’s been as reassuring as she can be, but when Melinda told me that Jim was 9 pounds 6 ounces at birth, I nearly fainted.  I’ve seen the pictures – he had a great big melon head.  Huge!  So, I think I’m entitled to find out the sex of the baby.  Horror stories, melon heads…I just want to know if it’s a boy or a girl.

I can’t believe it when we’re in the car on the way to the appointment with the whole thing still up in the air.  I don’t know what’s going to happen.  When I’m just about at my breaking point and I want to just scream at him, he says, “I’ll make a deal with you, alright?”

“What’s the deal?”  I’m pretty suspicious.  He’s been holding onto his side of the argument pretty tightly.

“This year, I’m kind of getting gypped out of Father’s Day.  It’s in June, right?  And the baby isn’t coming until August and that means I have to wait almost a whole year to celebrate Father’s Day.  It’s wrong, Pam.  It’s unfair.”

“Mother’s Day is only a month before that, though!  It’s the same for…”

“Not the same, Pam!  No!  Everybody makes a big deal about Mother’s Day and Father’s Day just gets left in the dust.  Totally unfair.”

“Okay, what’s the deal, then?”

“We find out what we’re having today, both of us, but I get to plan a weekend away for us to celebrate Father’s Day and you can’t know anything about it.  You have to get in the car and go along with whatever I have planned, okay?” 

That seemed like a small price to pay.  I mean, I get to find out the sex of the baby and I get whisked away on a mystery weekend? 

“Deal!  Seems like you’re giving in pretty easily, though.  I feel bad.”

“No you don’t, but that’s okay.  You really want to know, so…I’m just going to be surprised a little early, that’s all.  But come Father’s Day…”

“Okay!  Actually, it sounds really…wait!  What are you planning?”

“Pam…Pam.  You’ll just have to wait and see.  It’s a surprise.”

But the baby had his or her own ideas.  We were watching the monitor, neither of us breathing for what seemed like an hour and we got arms and head and back and feet and that was all great, but we couldn’t see what we needed to see.  Finally, when the baby started to turn and Jim was whispering, ‘wait for it…wait…' and we both gasped and Jim said, ‘Whoa!  That’s my boy!’ the doctor had to crush his ego by telling him that was the umbilical cord.  So we both ended up walking out of the office still not knowing what we were having and I was disappointed and he was a little bit, too, because he’d been caught up in the moment of actually looking at our baby and the whole “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of the ultrasound.  He said he was sorry and hugged me, but on the way home, he was smirking and grinning and trying to hide it because, ultimately, he’d gotten his way and we were still going to go on a Father’s Day mystery trip because “Fair is fair, Pam!”  Then he bent his head down toward my belly and said, “Mommy needs to play by the rules!  Isn’t that right, Mr. Weathersby?”

~~

He has to work late the night of our anniversary and it actually turns out okay, because this feels like a real date…me getting ready alone in the house, waiting for him to come and pick me up and take me to dinner.  I finally broke down and bought a real maternity dress when the safety pins and rubber bands around my skirt buttons just weren’t cutting it anymore.  It’s soft and pink (because he likes me in pink) and I guess it’s pretty, but I kind of feel like a giant Easter egg.  At least I don’t have to worry about my rubber bands snapping open and shooting across the restaurant. 

The traditional first anniversary gift is paper.  Naturally, I thought about drawing or painting something for him and framing it.  I thought about it and sat in my room organizing my pencils and brushes and looking through old paintings and sketches.  He’d be thrilled to get anything, I thought.  Just knowing I was in here thinking about painting would make him happy.  He thinks I don’t know how sad he is about how sad I am about not drawing…but I know.  I know he talked to his folks about it, too, because Melinda called today and asked if I could help her with the Spring Art Fair at her school.  “It’d be fun for you to…be around the kids,” she’d said.  “They get so excited about their projects!”  She really needed the help, too, she’d said. 

Jim’s mother is only a slightly better liar than Jim, which means she’s a complete open book, while Jim’s book is open and has extra large print.  And who am I kidding?  Jim is totally onto me, too, and I’m sure he’s talked to his parents about it. 

“Did Jim talk to you, Mel?”

“About what, Pam?”

“About me.  About my…blockage.”

“Pam, is something wrong with you or the baby?”

“No!  I meant my...Mel, I’m blocked.  I can’t draw anything.”

“Oh, honey!  Yes, Jim talked to us.  He was so worried about you.  Don’t be mad.”

I’ll admit, I was momentarily miffed at him, but now that I’m talking with Mel and my big, dark secret is out, I realize I probably should have talked to her a long time ago.  If anyone would understand, she would.

“I’m not mad.  I just…I feel so…lost, Mel.  Like I’ve lost my best friend.”

“Yes, I know that feeling.”

“It’s like…it used to flow out of me without even thinking about it and now I can’t grab onto it with both hands to pull it out of me.”

“And the harder you try, the worse it seems to get and you’re not satisfied with anything you do.”

“Exactly!  I used to dream in pastels, you know?  I mean, I would dream things that would turn into paintings in my dream.”

She was quiet for a minute and I asked if she was still there.

“Yes…yes, I’m still here, sweetheart.  Listen, I know you don’t want to hear this right now, but you have the gift, Pam, and it doesn’t go away.  You haven’t lost anything.”

“Then what happened, Mel?  Where did it go?  Why can’t I do anything?”

“I wish I could tell you.  What you’re going through?  It’s happened to me more than once in my life and I know.  It feels like a death, like you’ve lost the one person you could always count on.”

“I just want to finish one thing.  Just one!”

“How long has it been, Pam?”

“It’s been four months, Mel!  Four months!”  I started to cry.  I’d been holding this in for so long.

“I know.  I know, Pam.  It’s so hard.”

“Mel, I feel…pathetic.  I feel like maybe this whole thing was just a passing fancy of mine that’s run its course and I should move on to the next thing…whatever that is.

 “Like Jim playing the trumpet?”

“What?”

“He never told you?  Oh, when he was in eighth grade he wanted to play the trumpet and drove us crazy until we got him a trumpet and he played that thing like mad for two years and then put it away and never touched it again.”

“I never knew that, but yes!  Do you still have his trumpet?  Maybe I should give that a whirl.”

“No, I gave it away before he could find it again.  Anyway, that was a passing fancy...not the same as what you're going through at all.  The boy had absolutely no talent for the trumpet whatsoever...but he tried hard and we...loved him."

I burst out laughing and told her I couldn’t wait to call him Louis Armstrong.

“You didn’t hear it from me, okay?  He’s so sensitive!  Pam, what you have…that’s different.  You have a real gift and you don’t put that down.  It doesn’t go away.”

“Please tell me it will come back, Mel.”  I felt so desperate, begging for her reassurance.

“It will.  I can’t tell you when or how or why.  I don’t want to scare you, but I went nearly a whole year after Jon was born without doing a thing and I was miserable.”

“A year?”

“Yes, but it came back all at once.  One morning, I woke up and took him to the park in the stroller.  We came up on the little playground there and there were ducks on the pond and the whole scene was so lovely.  I tore my purse and the diaper bag apart, looking for something to draw on and poor Jon!  I wheeled his stroller around so fast, he nearly fell out the side and I just about ran home.  The urge to capture that scene, to feel that first brushstroke on the canvas was so strong…the strongest I’d ever felt.”

“That’s the picture that’s hanging in your kitchen.”

“Yes, it is.  You told me how much you liked it the first time you came to dinner.  That painting holds so much meaning for me.”

I sighed into the phone.  Just talking with her had relieved a lot of the guilt and anxiety I’d been trying to hide away. 

“Sweetheart...Pam…it’ll come back.  Please try to believe me, have some faith in yourself, and be patient.  It’ll come.”

~~

We’d decided to plant a tree in the backyard to commemorate our first anniversary instead of buying each other gifts.  Plus, paper comes from trees, so it was kind of like a paper gift, we’d decided.  A white flowering dogwood, we’d agreed, because the flowers were so pretty in the spring and the foliage turns deep red in the fall.  “A beautiful sight in all seasons” the tag promised.  Last weekend, while Jim was digging the hole, it started to rain that slow, gentle rain you get in the spring.  We continued on because the tree needed to get in the ground.  We were both kneeling on the wet grass, refilling the hole with dirt as fast as we could, when it really started to pour.  It was warm for April and we weren’t wearing coats or hats and our sweatshirts were nearly soaked through.  We laughed and gave up trying to rush.  When we finished and stood back to look at our tree in the pouring rain, I looked at my husband with his hair plastered to his head, rain dripping down off his hair,clinging to his eyelashes and rolling down his cheeks and into the corners of his big, open grin.  He looked so handsome, he took my breath away. 

“You look good in the rain,” I told him.

“’Into every life, a little rain must fall,’” he joked.

“A beautiful sight in all seasons,” I said.

~~

When the doorbell rang, I actually felt butterflies in my stomach!  He was ringing the doorbell and not using his key…like it was a real date!  I grabbed my sweater and went to the door and there he stood with a bouquet of pink Gerbera daisies, the same flowers I’d carried last year.  And we just stood there for a minute, looking at each other and I don’t know why, but something happened in that moment for me.  It wasn’t the way he looked, though he looked wonderful and so happy to see me.  It wasn’t the flowers or my new dress or even the significance of the occasion.  It was us.  It was how much we loved each other and how much we were loved by our families and how much everyone was already loving this baby, and it was our house and our tree, and in that moment I was struck by how big it had all become.  All of my worries, all of my fears seemed so small right then. 

“Happy anniversary, Mrs. Halpert,” he said.

“Happy anniversary, Mr. Armstrong,” I said.

“Mr. Armstrong?”

“I’ll tell you in the car, Louis.  Let’s go.”