Pregnant Pause

The day did not begun auspiciously. One of our roosters, El Diablo, tangled himself in a piece of string overnight and at 5:30 in the morning my husband found him prone, his feet and scaly legs solidly frozen at odd angles in the coop’s shavings. Our daughter Charlotte, who woke when Karl rushed up the stairs with The Chicken Health Handbook, had a scarlet bottom and thrashed through her diaper change. Halfway through my morning cup of (mostly) decaf, NPR reports that even moderate amounts of caffeine can complicate pregnancy at any stage.

We had planned to put the baby to bed early and have a grown-up dinner: shredded roast duck with porcinis and homemade pasta, a nice salad, a little sparkling cava brut and a wedge of creamy, bloomy rinded Spanish goat cheese. But this does not seem like a day to tempt fate.

I am six months pregnant, and there’s so much that’s off-limits, so many restrictions that chafe at reason but are snared by superstition, that on normal occasions a swallow or two of wine, a little nibble of risky cheese, seem a prudent emotional release. In the first six weeks, when it seemed absurd that I could be pregnant again so soon, there were regrettable sins of omission and oblivion. But now, healthy sonograms tacked to the fridge, third trimester countdown begun, I sometimes give myself permission for a calculated, conscious transgression. Today, however, isn’t one for hubris.

Brining my daughter in skin-calming sea salts, debating whether to intervene as she tosses popcorn to the half-dead chicken in our living room, I spend much of the day fantasizing about the forbidden. Cheese and wine, raw oysters, now coffee: they taunt me from our bookshelves, from the covers of magazines I bring in with the mail. Oh, the fizz tingling through your whole body, the creamy center of a wedge of cheese, sweet, against all olfactory odds, warming and melting into your tongue like cream….

The baby pushes off from my ribs, swimming its little dolphin twists in my belly. My daughter pulls up my shirt and jabs her cold little fingers into my navel, “Beebee, beebee.” She snuggles her round cheek into my skin and drapes herself across my swollen middle. Who am I kidding? Would I trade any of this? Could anything give me more tingle, more sweet?

We have takeout burritos and milk for dinner, the three of us, early. Our grown-up night will wait.

Later in the week, Karl arrives home with a new piece of Sarah’s Nevat, a pasteurized goat cheese made by a single farmer near the Portuguese border and named for his daughter. Charlotte helps to roll out the pasta dough, samples a little duck, devours the porcini. We put her to bed and crack open the cheese and a cava brut that’s fittingly named 1 + 1 =3. Karl and I toast our life, our kid, and our crowing Lazarus, too newly risen to risk banishment to the barn. I have just a taste, but that’s more than enough.

-- by Margaret Hathaway

Wine: 1+1=3 Cava Brut, Spain
Cheese: Sarah’s Nevat, Spain