Gideon Faints

Probably the people who would be interested already know that my dearest and only sibling, an older-by-three-years sister named Morgan, is expecting her first child in March. If you didn't know and you are interested and you feel you are someone who really should have already known but didn't until now, please do not be mad at me; you probably also know that there were a couple false starts that became real losses in the last few years, involving the kinds of emotions nobody wants to relive and lots of morphine and washing blood out of clothes in the wee hours while thinking, "now we will never meet him/her," and it's a shame two miscarriages might have made us wary and hesitant to get loudly celebratory even after the issue that caused them was taken care of. But that's how it is.

Anyway we're out of the woods now, third time's a charm, little bugger's kickin' her black and blue in there (I know because I SAW HIM), and OMG I'M GOING TO BE AN AUNT.

Technically I already am; she has a good and goofy and gracious stepson who is now 17 and whom we would not trade for all the world, and for all intents and purposes I am his Aunt, Aunt A (and also to two Labrador retrievers). Which was great practice; thanks, Cordale. (He can lift me. Which doesn't mean I can't still lift him, DOUBLE NEGATIVES ROCK.)

It blows my mind that without making a purchase or creating a pattern or deciding on size and color and fabric, my sister is making something -- make that someone -- out of nothing. Not really nothing, per se, but you know what I mean. We will have a new family member. We will have another person. A WHOLE, ACTUAL PERSON, sort of uninteresting at first, but wait 'til he starts walking and talking. He's going to argue with me someday. I can tell.

Yeah, it's a boy. The first two were, too. And she's not sure they want to use the name she had picked out when they started down this road. And that's okay. She can name him after the 14th king of Judah for all I care, even if it freaks out the Grandmas.

When we were little girls in our polyester and cable knits and moon boots in the Wyoming of 19-- when the snow actually drifted so deep you could walk up it to the roof (or make tunnels in it big enough to walk through), we didn't play with baby dolls. We played with Breyer horses and Legos and cardboard refrigerator boxes. I remember a vague sense of unease when one day towards teendom she announced that she wanted a baby doll with a porcelain face and hands that looked like a real baby's, and she got it and put it in our christening dress. And when she would cradle it in her arms she looked like a mother. And I felt uneasy and left behind, because I didn't have that gene, the mother gene. (Or I did, but it was dormant.) And in California when Mr. Sixtus praised her very brain and insisted she go into chemistry or physics, or medicine even and cure cancer, she was like, "No, I just want to be a mom."

And she will be. In March.