This article was published in the San Jose Mercury News in October 1997:

Unprotected sex. It's against everything I ever stood for.

Yet when my husband and I decided to start our family, my perspective changed. When I
became pregnant a few months later, a lot more things changed. But throughout it all I made a
surprising discovery.

I loved being pregnant.

Normally women indulge themselves in the "Why My Pregnancy Was Worse Than Yours"
competition -- the preliminary round for the "Why My Labor and Delivery Was Worse Than
Yours" gold medal championships. I do not qualify for either contest.

Morning sickness? Didn't have it. In fact, the only time I threw up was when the home preg-
nancy test came out positive. After all, it is one thing to plan to get pregnant, but quite another
to find out you are pregnant. But once I recovered from the initial shock, I actually enjoyed
gestating.

For instance, when I "came out" with my news (both figuratively and literally), everyone con-
gratulated me and gave me big hugs. Pretty neat! I mean, it is not like I had won a Nobel Prize
or written and produced a hit Broadway musical. I had slept with my husband. Never before
had my co-workers been so excited about that. Of course, now that we have the baby, congrat-
ulations would be in order if we had sex. But that is another story.

Shortly after going public, girlfriends began lining up at my door with their tattered copies of
What to Expect When You're Expecting, the 90's alleged bible of pregnancy. I don't blame
them for wanting to get rid of this book. Packed full of possible ailments, it is a hypochon-
driac's dream. I read the whole thing in one sitting, experiencing each problem in turn -- like
running through an entire pregnancy on fast-forward. Headaches, backaches, swollen feet,
swollen hands, varicose veins, nose bleeds, bleeding gums, mood swings, fatigue, constipa-
tion, carpel tunnel, and a manic obsession with the bathroom scale. Then, having worked all
that through my system in one afternoon, I threw the book away and felt great.

And what an appetite! My husband started blockading his dinner plate with assorted condi-
ments to stop my wayward fork from its thievery. Our dinner conversation typically went like
this:

He: "How was your day?"

Me: "Are you going to finish that?"

When invited to a cousin's wedding, I warned the mother of the bride that I would need my
own buffet line. And I knew I had given new meaning to the term "power lunch" when I began
reading the work cafeteria menu days in advance. "Yum! Thursday is tuna noodle casserole
and Friday is liver and onions. I'd better cancel my one o'clock meetings."

Although the technology was available to find out the baby's sex pre-delivery, my husband
and I opted not to know. The resulting speculation by all the pre-natal "experts" I encountered
might have annoyed some women. Not me. I started a pool: a dollar a bet, 25 cent handling for
me, the remaining sum to be divided by the winners. Mama needs new shoes! The shampoo
lady at Cut'n'Curl bet "girl" because I was so "small", but most entrants agreed with the fish
guy at Safeway that it was a boy because I carried "high". In the end, I made $73.25. I won.

Not that I'm trying to malign the fish guy. In fact, he and all the Safeway personnel were espe-
cially nice to me. Up through my seventh month the cashier delivered the usual polite "Would
you like help out to your car today?" In my eighth month, she switched to "Billy will help you
out to your car". The last two weeks became "Billy! Unload that woman's cart so we can check
her out and get her the hell out of here now." Although I know she was just trying to avoid
announcing to the store "Amniotic fluid clean-up on register three", I was nevertheless pleased
with the service.

But nothing made me happier during my pregnancy than my body's changes. My stomach had
never been firmer, and finally I could fill an A -- no, by gosh, a B! -- cup. I took special plea-
sure in knowing my first bra would be my nursing bra. A woman in my water aerobics class
remarked that I had the perfect pregnant woman's body. I agreed. For the first time in my life I
was completely happy with my figure. I believed I looked just like Demi Moore did on the
cover of Vanity Fair. When another friend observed that from the back I did not look pregnant
at all, and that she was sure I would have no problem getting my old body back, I exclaimed "I
don't want my old body back! I want Demi Moore's old body back".

So far that has not happened. Ever since our daughter was two months old, I have looked pretty much like
the old me (except for the B cup. Ha!). On July 25, we had plans to go out to dinner and a play.
We made it to dinner but skipped the play in favor of a trip to the hospital. Casey Hannah was
born at 9:19 P.M. after one hour of hard labor and a day of me whining about a stomach ache.
As the on-call doctor, a ringer for Doogie Howser, said, "Not bad for a forty-year-old's first
delivery."

By the way, the play we missed was called "Once in a Lifetime". It sure was.