Growing up I idolized my sister. I would eagerly count down the days until she visited and then hover outside her closed bedroom door in the morning, waiting impatiently for her to wake up. When I was little I would savor the sticks of gum she casually handed me, eating them a third at a time, reveling in the way they made me feel so grown up, so sophisticated. Eventually the gum became coffee, and the coffee became wine, but whatever it was, she knew all about the adult things in life, and I wanted to be just like her. It took me well into my adult life to realize I didn’t like make-up, because she would always send me the latest make-up or face cream that she was into, and I would store it away, saving it long past the expiration date because I couldn’t bear to part with something that came from her, or using it in teensy tiny little bits so that I could be just like her. 

So, imagine my surprise when Lucy was born and I realized that the primary task of Lucy and Logan’s early siblinghood was going to be Helping Her Survive It.  Sure, granted, there are some critical differences. My sister and I never lived in the same state because she lived in Georgia with her mother, so time together was a scarcer resource than it is for most siblings. Also, she is 12 years older which means that by the time I came along her impulse control was pretty well developed. Plus, she and I both avoid conflict of any kind like the plague, so I don’t think we’ve ever actually had a fight, or even an open disagreement.

Needless to say, nothing about my own experience as a sibling prepared me for raising siblings 2 1/2 years apart. When I was pregnant with Lucy, Logan was over the moon with excitement. Every day he would ask to take out the doppler and listen to her heartbeat. He would lay his hands on my belly and say: “Come out, Lucy, we are ready to meet you!” We bought him all the books we could find on adjusting to a new sibling, and told him over and over again the story of what the expect when it was time for her come. He picked out a special present for her to bring him when she got here, and he would gently remind her in my belly not to forget his truck, his Jeep, and his hair clip. Everybody kept asking us if he was ready, and I would say “He’s excited, but I’m sure he has no idea what is coming.” How could he? We didn’t either, and he was only two.

When he came to the hospital to meet her for the first time it was all very anticlimactic. He took one curious glance at her, lying there in my arms, and then he spotted the juice box on my tray, noticed that it clearly had a lot more to offer, and started in begging us for that. Once we brought her home though, Logan’s excitement returned full force. Every time he saw her he would exclaim: “Lucy! We are so glad you are here!” and run to crush her with his chubby little body, or forcefully turn her head so she could see him better, or “hand” her a big, hard toy right on top of her face. Thus began a vicious cycle where he would accidentally hurt her with his exuberance and then he would feel so bad for doing so that he would lash out and intentionally hurt her again. I am pretty sure this is a cycle we all go through at some point as humans, accidentally hurting one another and then doing it again because their tears or yelling are too hard to hear and anger is easier to feel than guilt or shame. Plus, underneath his excitement there were likely some big and very justified feelings about being displaced and having to share his moms’ previously undivided attention. Still, I was totally unprepared both for the intensive monitoring that would be required to keep a little sister alive, and for the rage I would feel watching him hurt her.

It was hard to have compassion for Logan and remember that he himself was a tiny human being just trying to figure out his new world and his place it in, when compared to his even tinier new sister, he suddenly seemed so very big and dangerous. I wanted so badly to protect her, and struggled to reconcile the soft, safe, cuddly newborn world we had been able to raise Logan in with the chaotic, whirlwind of a world our daughter had entered into. Instead of lullabies and tummy time, she spent most of her infancy strapped to our back to keep her out of harm’s way, listening to the sound track of all the negotiating, limit setting, and let’s be honest- yelling- that comes along with raising a 2-3 year old. At 10 months old, not only can Lucy say “No, no, no,” while emphatically shaking her head back and forth, but she’s heard us use 1,2,3 magic to get Logan to comply with a direction so many times that when she hears someone say “one” she will helpfully offer up “do!” (aka, “two”) right after.

Cari, whose sister is only 18 months younger, assures me that all of this is a normal, healthy part of sibling hood. The older one puts the little one in their place and pushes them around a bit, while the little one learns both to fight back and to tattle with the best of them. And boy oh boy, did Lucy learn these little sister moves quickly. At seven weeks old, not yet even able to roll over,  when Logan started to lay on top of her, Lucy took both arms and shoved him right off of her. Shortly thereafter, she learned to look directly at us and shriek or cry emphatically if he so much as came near her in a manner she didn’t care for.

If we ever left them alone in a room together, inevitably we would hear Lucy’s loud siren wail and come back to find Logan standing over her looking guilty but steadfastly maintaining his innocence. “What happened, Logan?” we would ask. “I didn’t do anything!” he insisted.

We quickly learned a trick for uncovering the truth. Although he would maintain he had no idea why she was crying if we asked him what happened, if we asked him to apologize to his sister, he would turn to her and say “Sorry!” in an accusing tone of voice. “For what?” we would ask. “For hitting/kicking/biting/”snatching”/”bopping”/sitting on you,” he would reply, a hint of remorse in his voice.

And then, just when I started to fear that this might be the extent of their relationship,; that we had had a second child only to spend our days constantly making our oldest feel bad for hurting his sister and our youngest feel the world was not a safe place, light broke through. Gradually, slowly, yet somehow all at once, the magic happened. And it’s parenting magic, which is to say that it’s eight parts exasperation and exhaustion to two parts the purest, deepest joy you’ve ever known.Somehow, no matter what the laws of mathematics might say, the two will always be greater than the eight. Lucy learned to crawl, and all of a sudden just as often as we were putting Logan on time out for pushing her over or “bopping” her on the head, we were as likely to find them both giggling in a game of hide and seek or peek-a-boo. He would crawl ahead of her, hiding behind walls and then popping out and surprising her as she crawled happily along behind him. Lucy reaches her arms out for him when she sees him now, and when he brushes his teeth she insists on having her own toothbrush and mimicking the “ahhh” sound he makes while he opens wide.

Just last night, while we were getting the kids ready for their bath, I was changing Lucy’s diaper and Logan walked up, saw that she had a diaper rash, and said: “Poor, poor Lucy, that looks like it hurts!” Then, he ran and brought me some diaper cream and insisted I put it on so her bum-bum didn’t hurt. Next, I put her down and he ran into the bathroom while she crawled happily along behind him. Logan slammed the door to keep her out, accidentally slamming it  against her forehead, and she started screaming, which caused him to cover his ears and yell: “Stop it Goo!” (his pet name for her) loudly right in her face. Then, while I picked her up to comfort her she peed all over me. Logan dissolved in giggles, delighted at this turn of events, which quickly turned her tears to giggles, but then he slipped in her puddle of pee and he became the one who was sobbing. A few minutes later I finally got both of them and my pee-soaked self into the tub, only to find her shrieking again in the split second I turned my back to grab the soap, and Logan was insisting: “I didn’t bite her, my teeth just accidentally bumped into her face!”

This action packed five minutes sums up just about every five minutes around here these days. It is what it means to have siblings two years apart, I suppose. They will protect each other and hurt each other and love each other and frustrate each other, in an endless cycle, most likely for the rest of their lives. It amazes me to watch them, to see this early relationship grow and imagine all the lessons it will teach them about how to say you are sorry and how to make up; how to fight and forgive and stand up for yourself and move on. All of these are things it took me well into adulthood to figure out how to do well, and I am glad they will have each other to practice with.

After I closed the door to the kid’s room, having tucked them safely in, Lucy began to cry. Logan’s little voice floated under the door: “What’s wrong, Goo? You miss Mama? It’s ok, don’t worry.” I assumed he was going to barge out and come get us, brotherly protection in it’s own right, but instead he began to softly sing: “Goodnight, sleep tight, tomorrow day… Sweet dreams, good night!” As I stood at there door, my ear pressed against it, he hummed softly while they drifted off to sleep and it was rare, glorious perfection.

This whole politics thing is really not my jam. It’s not that I like to bury my head in the sand while the fate of our country, and by extension the world, gets decided for me…but ok, yeah, it’s pretty much exactly like that. I mean, I vote, at least in the major elections, but getting into a political debate, dialogue, conversation, crazy-making-holiday-ruining-I-can’t-believe-we-all-share-blood-and-disagree-this-much-fight, or whatever else you might like to call it, is always at the bottom of my list. It doesn’t matter what the list is. Things That Will Ruin Thanksgiving, list. Reasons I Hate Watching the News, list. Things That Make Me Feel Hopeless, Powerless and Grumpy, list.

Basically, staying out of a political conversation is one of my superpowers. I know, I know, the personal is political, we have to use our voice, we have to pay attention. But I’m a pragmatist, and the one thing I remember from my college social psychology course is that the more you argue the opposite perspective with someone, the more they leave convinced that their original view was correct. So, then, you might reasonably argue that I am doing my part by keeping my mouth shut. At least, I’ve tried to argue that before. Of course, by trying to convince you of that, I’m probably just convincing you that the opposite is true. That it is my responsibility to speak. But hear me out, I have my reasons.

I’ve gotten involved in politics precisely once before. It was the fall of 2008. Obama was running for election, Cari and I were students at Fuller Theological Seminary, and we were planning a rushed, top secret wedding. Those are not exactly two adjectives you hope to see used to describe your wedding. Rushed, to take advantage of the brief window of time when we had the right to get legally married before the good people of California voted to take it away from us with Proposition 8. Top secret, because if the administrators at Fuller found out about our relationship, let alone our marriage, they would have kicked us out while we were still full of student loans but devoid of degrees.

We made contributions to the No on Prop 8 campaign out of our teensy tiny grad school budget. We marched in rallies and made signs and t-shirts. We organized protests and massive (to us) distributions of letters of concern to the students at my Alma Matter Azusa Pacific urging them to vote and speak up for us. We even made cold calls to voters (ok, I am not 100% sure we did that last one… maybe I just signed up for it and then chickened out, but you get the idea, we were invested).  

Then we stood up in front of our closest friends and family and vowed to love another until death do us part, while our brave pastor married us without the support of her congregation, but by the power invested in her by the state of California, nine beautiful words. Then, just two days later we watched as some of those very same people who had been at our wedding voted to take away our right to marry. “It’s not personal,” they said. “We support you, just not those people,” they said. But you see, it was very, very personal. We are those people.

Which is why I must now break my eight year vow of silence and speak.

Friends, family, internet readers, we cannot elect Donald Trump as president of this country. We simply cannot stand by and watch as someone whose entire platform is the fear of the “other” runs for or, God forbid, wins, the most powerful position in the world. This has been tried before, and it has not gone well. He is not the first man to mobilize a nation behind the idea that a group of people in the minority are responsible for all the things that are wrong in that country and that all you have to do to make things right for you is to get rid of the people who don’t look like you, act like you, or pray like you. This is the stuff of genocides, the Holocaust, internment camps. This is some scary shit. The fear of the “other” is a tried and true method of united a bunch of people who wouldn’t otherwise agree with each other around the central idea that we would all be better off without “them,” whoever they are. If we had all the power, we’d be richer, safer, happier. Kick them out, keep them quiet, lock them up. When we make someone the “other,” we dehumanize them, and when we dehumanize someone, it is far too easy to justify whatever we might do to them in the name of protecting ourselves. And that, folks, is not just the stuff of nightmares, it is the stuff of history.

You know this, I think you do. By and large it appears, at least from Facebook, as though most of the people I know are at least on some level concerned that this man would not make a terrific leader of the free world. But here’s the piece it took me a little longer to come to: we cannot move to Canada.

I love Canada, don’t get me wrong. We took a trip to Vancouver Island a few years ago with our friends Lisa and Shasta when our son Logan and their daughter Ella were still babies and our second children were still romanticized maybes instead of precisely 1/2 of the chaos in our lives. The kids played on the endless beach out front of our hotel and every hike ended in a waterfall. They had idyllic little towns where goats grazed on thatched roofs, and it was just all around ridiculously perfect. And yes, I saw that article about that island in Canada where they are begging the fleeing Americans to come move there and pointing out that the houses are like a dollar per square foot and the paid family leave actually lets you stay home long enough to get to know your baby before handing them off to a stranger (don’t get me started on this one because it’s really, really close to my heart right now). I know we crashed Canada’s immigration site after super Tuesday because I went to see for myself and sure enough, they had a message up apologizing for the delays due to unexpected volume. I get it, I do. I mean- goats on a roof, paid family leave, cheap houses, kind leaders, say no more. Count me in. Except we can’t leave. We have to stay and fight.

We must use whatever power and privildge we have to be a voice of reason, compassion, mutual respect and humankindness. As a white person, born in this country and raised in the dominant religion of this country, I’ve got plenty of power of privilege. Enough to be able to think about moving to Canada, and enough to know that I have to stay. Because as Martin Luther Kind Jr. once said: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

And I do, I absolutely remember their silence. When my marriage was up for public vote, and all those ads ran about how the homosexuals were ruining the fabric of marriage, family, and this country; when I sat in those classes at Fuller and listened to my professor call being gay an abomination to the Lord that belonged back in the DSM as a psychiatric condition, let me tell you, their silence was deafening.

So let us be brave, my beautiful ones. Let us have those hard conversations. Let us speak up for our Muslim neighbors, our black neighbors, our neighbors who have immigrated here from places near and far. Let us march, let us vote, let us dream, let us fight. Let us use our voices, both now, to help prevent this terrible fear from winning power over our country, and after, in the event that it does. Now is not the time for silence, because silence is consent. If we do nothing- if we say nothing- our neighbors will have no choice but to assume we agree that they do not matter, or belong, or deserve. And they do, and we do, and you do. And now is the time.

When we were pregnant with Lucy, we had a couple of people tell us “two is ten” as a somewhat ominous warning about what we were getting ourselves into by adding a second child to the mix. Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I do tend to be a pessimist, but this seemed somewhat melodramatic even to me. I mean, I’m no math major, but two is two and ten is ten, and there are a lot of differences between them.

It took me about five days into the plural version of parenthood to see their point. We were doing fine, really, as long as both Cari and I stayed 100% focused on the task at hand at all times. When we kept a one to one defense on the kids and kept the demands low, as in, getting Logan dressed for preschool was the apex of our day, low, we were unstoppable. Then we did something crazy like Leave the House with Both of Them, and Cari did something crazy like Go Outside to Talk to Our Neighbors right before we reached that critical moment of making it out the door.

Logan decided to start potty training the day after we brought Lucy home from the hospital, because that’s how good he is at coming up with creative ways of refocusing our attention on him when it seems to be drifting, so we had the little portable potty packed up by the front door, ready to take with us. I was changing Lucy’s poopy diaper on the couch, because when you have a second child, that changing table is so not going to get any more use. So, there I am, right in the middle of cleaning up baby poop that Lucy had squirmed and gotten everywhere, when Logan announces: “I have to go pee pee!” and starts to pull down his pants. Before I can even make it over to him, he’s got his pants down and is standing over the teensy tiny little potty spraying a stream of pee around the living room, very little of which is even making it near the potty. I rush over to help him with his still novice aim, and then turn back to find that not only has Lucy smeared poop all over herself and the couch by now, but our dog Elliot is also eating it.

“Cari!!!!!!!” I bellow at the top of my lungs, loud enough to bring her running back in from the front yard where she was having the audacity to have an adult conversation. She returns to find both kids naked and crying, the house covered in pee and poop, and me, furious at her for having the audacity to leave me outnumbered. A few minutes later, Cari pulled her coffee out of the microwave, cold again after it’s third of fourth time being reheated, and went to take a drink anyway only to find a toddler sock in it.

This poop on your couch and pee on your floor and sock in your coffee moment is, in a nutshell, the difference between one kid and two. One of my clearest memories that captures the exhaustion and chaos of adjusting to life with a newborn when Logan was a baby was this time I sat down to drink a warm cup of tea after finally getting him off to bed, and looked down to realize I was so tired I’d gotten the cup and the tea bag, but hadn’t remembered to put the hot water in it. That’s one. With two, for starters, it’s going to be coffee and not tea, because let’s face it, you are going to need all the caffeine you can get. You are going to heat it up at least five times because let’s face it, parenthood is never having a hot cup of coffee again, and you are going to find a sock in it and have no idea how it got there and frankly, you are not even going to care, because you are covered in pee and poop anyway and it’s going to be a while before you even find time to wash your hands, so what’s the harm in a few sock germs anyway?

When we finally made it out the door that morning we waved feebly at the neighbors, lounging on their back porch with their newspaper and hot cup of coffee, chatting about who knows what but probably not poop, and hollered: “Sorry about earlier, two is ten!”

They looked at us with confusion, and I explained, waving a hand at the mewling newborn and the two year old running circles around us, “The children, they had me outnumbered.”

I mean no disrespect to those of you who actually have ten children, or anything in between. In fact, I mean nothing but total and complete respect. I honestly have no idea how you do it. Sometimes I see you out in public, managing three of more children like obedient little ducklings trailing along behind you and I am that creepy woman who stops and stares. You might be thinking I am placing judgement on your decision to have three of more kids, because that kind of stigma is real around here, where the houses are small and the mortgages are big, and people seem to think that two kids is reasonable but three is a little excessive. But I promise I’m not judging, I’m thinking: I have no idea how she does it. 

People will ask me if we are thinking about another baby and I will say, only half joking: “We thought we wanted three until we met two.”

Our margin for error is already so slim, I just can’t imagine fitting another child into it. Part of it was Lucy’s colic and the fact that she screamed non-stop for her first four months, and part of it is Logan is an incredibly exuberant, energetic, related little guy who was used to having both of our undivided attention whenever we weren’t working, but I think most of it is just that this is hard, hard work.

When Logan was a baby both of us gave him a bath together each night while gazing adoringly into his eyes and teaching him new words or songs, right up until Lucy was born. Lucy was about six months old the first time we even put her in the bath because she was finally sturdy enough for Logan not to drown her out of exuberance or jealousy, it’s a little tough to tell the difference with him.

Lucy splashed and smiled and looked generally amazed at the properties of water, and I was wracked with guilt because surely we could have managed to get her in the bath a few month sooner if we’d known she’d like it that much, instead of all those times we quickly passed her under the water in the middle of someone else’s shower and called it a day (ok, ok, I’ll be honest, there weren’t even that many showers…).

But that’s the thing with the second child, instead of brain enrichment exercises and motor development activities and baby massage classes, you are worried about things like Keeping the Baby Alive, because your three year old is always either trying to carry her around by the neck, or knocking her over to see what will happen, or leaving his sharp, glittery metallic stickers places where she can eat them and possibly cut open her intestines. Truthfully, you don’t really want to push those motor milestones anyway because now you know that sitting leads to crawling, and crawling leads to walking, and it all goes down hill from there. A non-mobile baby is a baby that you can a) find, and b) stand a better chance of keeping alive, and that’s more than half the battle right there.

Despite all of my non-encouragement, Lucy’s crawling now anyway, which means she’s doing things like finding the tissue box and eating several before Logan’s tattling skills come in handy and he lets me know. She’s talking now too, and of course one of her first words is “no,” because that’s a very helpful word when you’re constantly being kissed by the poor attention-starved dog, or being knocked over by your brother, and also because instead of lullabies and baby flash cards, that’s one of the words she probably hears the most around here. Even when you’re doing your very best at positive parenting and praise and you teach people how to do this for a living, there are still a heck of a lot of things to tell a three year old “no” about. Things like no, don’t feed your sister dog food, and no, I don’t believe that Dinosaur is the one who scratched her, and no, you can’t didn’t earn your special treat because you woke up us and your sister up eighteen thousand times last night, and no, you can’t have chicken nuggets for dinner every single night even though, yes, I know you love them and you don’t love lentil and spinach pasta but I am doing my best here to keep all of you alive and well-fed and well-cared for and it is no easy task while trying to hold down a job and a marriage and some semblance of my sanity. Ok, I haven’t said that last bit, but I might one of these days, I really might.

And still, the obvious take away here is that two kids is sometimes ten times the work and stress and chaos, but it’s also ten times the love and amazement and wonder. You will not believe how different two kids raised by the same two people can be, and you will start to realize that instead of busying yourself taking credit for this and blame for that, you can just sit back now again and soak up how incredible it is to be a part of growing and loving and knowing these incredible human beings. Just when you think you’ve reached your breaking point your three year old will say something like: “I like how you made dinner Mommy, you did a great job” (even though he’ll still refuse to eat it a few minutes later), and your baby will light up when she sees you and wrap her chubby little arms around you and burrow her face into your neck, and you will know that being a mother brings out the best in your even more often than it brings out the worst. Even if you’re exhausted all the time, at the very least you’re living, actually living. You’re feeling all the extreme emotions life has to offer because you can’t just drift along comfortably when one minute you are seething with frustration that your three year old turns getting dressed into a 30 minute battle every. single. day. Then, the next minute you are bursting with pride to watch him crawling next to his sister, cheering her on.

But the other take away is this: that it is hard, hard work. I have absolutely every privilege and advantage a person could hope for when it comes to parenting, or at least a good number of them. An education in child development, a loving and supportive wife who is a fully present and participatory co-parent, the back-up of our extended family, and incredible community of friends and fellow parents. We have a house, jobs, the good health of our children and ourselves.

Still, there are moments and days, and weeks, and even months when raising these two tiny human beings takes absolutely every thing I have to give and pushes me to the edge of my sanity and doesn’t always show me a clear path back again. So let’s all try to be a little kinder to each other, those of us who are fellow parents and those of us who have parents, and those of us who might one day be parents or know someone who is.

I mean this both on a personal and a policy level. There are absolutely things this nation can do on a policy level, like, you know, pay parents to stay home with their teeny, tiny babies for a few months so you can actually get to know them and learn how to feed them and love them before throwing the demands of work and the incredible cost of child care back in the mix. Or, figuring out some kind of living wage that means a single parent doesn’t have to work three jobs and might actually get to see their child now and again. But there are things we can do on a personal level too, and that’s always been the level where I’m most comfortable anyway. We can stop all this ridiculous judgement and pressure over things like how you choose to feed your baby, or carry your baby, or raise your baby, and do our best to offer some compassion and understanding or a helping hand instead. Also, as two kind, elderly gentlemen taught Cari and I this week, we can tell each other “good job,” now and again, because your own kids might do it once in a great while, but it’s actually incredibly unlikely, and parents need some praise just as much as their kids do.

While I was at the grocery store the other day, wearing Lucy in the ergo and loading the groceries into my car, an older gentleman came up to me and said: “Let me help you, I don’t know how you women do it, carrying babies and doing the shopping, and all of that.” He loaded my groceries for me, and actually wound up spilling them everywhere because they were heavy and he was quite elderly, but I was so touched I was moved to tears. At first I was a teensy tiny bit offended at his summary of “women’s work,” and I also felt the urge to tell him that this was just the tip of the iceberg, and I also had another child and a job, and this was actually the highlight of my week because I got to sneak away from work a few minutes early and spend a quiet moment with my baby before entering the chaos. Instead, I just said thank you. Because even though trying to hold a baby while loading groceries is the least of my worries at this point, it was actually really nice to have a complete stranger pause for a moment in their day and say “hey, that looks hard. Nice job, and let me help you.”

Then, the other night while Cari was taking the kids out to have chicken nuggets for dinner because she doesn’t cook and I was working my second job, Logan was a big, big helper. He watched Lucy while Cari got the food, he helped Lucy eat, and he chatted with Mama about his day at school. This was huge because trying to eat dinner in public with the kids and both parents, let alone just one, can really turn into a disaster faster than you can say boo. It was even huger because an older gentleman came up to Cari at the end of dinner and said: “Congratulations, I’ve been watching you with your son and him with his sister, and he is so good with her, and you are so good with him, and you should be proud…you are doing a great job.” And Cari cried too, and she carried that with her just as I carried my moment with me, like a small treasure you can take out and examine when you need to, and then put back in your pocket for next time.

And you are, you are doing a great, great job. It’s not easy but you do your best, and you love your family, and you give them all you have and then you give them more. You make mistakes but you say you are sorry, and then you try again tomorrow, and you have so, so much love. I’m proud of you, for how hard you are trying, and how hard you are working, and if I see you out there in the big, busy world, I hope I have the courage and take the time to tell you so. I hope you do, too.

* Warning: This post contains vivid references to the first trimester and all of the unfortunate bodily functions it may entail. If these things make you queasy or uncomfortable, perhaps this is not the post for you! *

The reassurance offered by our first ultrasound did not last much longer than Nurse Beasley’s brisk goodbye. Shortly thereafter, we found ourselves lost in a sea of vomit, and even the anxiety of our first few weeks of pregnancy seemed like a luxury neither of us had the time or energy for anymore. The morning sickness started in the usual manner, with early morning nausea and things like brushing her teeth or smelling the garbage proving particularly difficult for Cari. We were optimistic at first, as we’d both read that morning sickness was correlated with a reduced risk of miscarriage. Besides, I was confident that I’d prepared for the challenge as well as anyone who wouldn’t actually be physically undergoing it possibly could. Starting in our fourth week of pregnancy, I’d begun to research cures for morning sickness and compiled our morning sickness emergency kit. By the time the first wave of nausea arrived, I’d already filled our cupboards with organic saltines, Preggie Pops, ginger chews, small-batch organic ginger ale, and a special blend of morning sickness prevention tea.

None of them were the least bit helpful. With the exception of the Preggie Pops and the saltines, which worked for about a week each, most of them went entirely untouched and even the smell or the mention of them triggered another bout of vomiting.

I think it’s fair to say that this is around the point where our paths diverged. Previously we’d been two women united in our quest to conceive, and then two women united in our terror that we had done so. Now, I began my fruitless but all-consuming quest to Be Prepared, while Cari embarked upon her own equally fruitless and all-consuming quest to Not Vomit.

And thus began the dark days of our pregnancy. Cari waking me at 5 am to rush to the kitchen and blend a smoothie in a desperate race to beat the vomit. Cari arriving at the front door after her two hour commute home from work with a bag of vomit in her hand. Cari calling to say that she wanted a particular dish for dinner, and then after I shopped for it and prepared it, discovering that even the smell of it triggered another bout of vomiting.  She lost weight and we lost hope. The idea that Cari was pregnant with our future child became a shiny, foreign object we couldn’t quite place. They say the simplest explanation is the easiest to believe, and the simplest explanation for us was the Cari had been afflicted by the Flu of All Flues Forever and Ever Amen. That, or a life-sucking parasite.

Most disappointing of all, for me at least, was how angry I was. I like to imagine myself as a graceful, giving sort of person in most circumstances, and the circumstance of my dearly beloved being pregnant with our long-desired child seemed like the sort of circumstance to bring out the best in a person. Wrong. I slammed down her cups of perfectly proportioned cranberry juice and water and sighed dramatically while fixing endless plates of bland potatoes and pasta. I scowled while scrubbing the toilet, and grumbled irritably about the little mouse noises coming from our bed at night as Cari worked her way down an unbelievable loud package of saltines. We’d gone from a well-balanced partnership to the roles of caretaker, and someone who relies almost exclusively upon the caretaker for sustenance. This, of course, was exactly what terrified me about the unimaginable responsibility of being a parent, and I didn’t adapt well to it’s early arrival.

Cari’s disappointment was equally palpable. The only thing she’d ever wanted, from her earliest memory of lovingly carting around a baby doll, was to be pregnant. Now, here it was—the penultimate experience of her life, the culmination or her greatest hopes and dreams—and she was spending it looking at the inner rim of our toilet bowl, which I just never quite manage to get clean enough. There was no maternal glow, no loving caress of our baby-to-be tucked safely in her womb. Just misery, exhaustion, and an endless sea of vomit.

With what little optimism we had left, we counted down the weeks and finally the days until the magical Week 12. This, rumor had it, was the week where things began to fall into place. Your risk of miscarriage dropped, your nausea passed, and the troublesome first trimester said it’s goodbyes. But, as I flipped ahead eagerly in our array of week-by-week baby books, I began to have the sneaking suspicion that Week 12 might not have fully earned it’s fame. It seemed that the end of the first trimester was actually a debatable dateline—some books slipped it back to the end of the thirteenth or even fourteen week. Others cautioned that morning sickness improved only for some moms, while others might continue to receive daily visits from Vomit-land for some months to come. I cautiously asked my sister when she’d began to feel better, and she cheerfully replied: “You know, I felt better the very moment Hanna was born, it was amazing!”

Well then.

Despite this news, we forged valiantly ahead with our Week 12 celebration plans. Or rather, I did. Cari’s planning at this point consisted primarily of planning the closest route to the toilet. I organized a day in the nearby Walnut Creek, where everything is shiny and clean, and shopping is the past time of choice. I planned to begin with our first maternity clothes shopping at the two-story Pea in the Pod/Motherhood Maternity super-store, followed by lunch at Cari’s favorite California Pizza Kitchen, and Push Present window shopping at Tiffany’s. An hour later we found ourselves stuck in an endless traffic jam in a completely full parking garage, Cari carrying a full ziplock bag of vomit, and me desperately searching for either a parking spot or a garbage can. The line at California Pizza Kitchen was over an hour, far too long for even a non-pregnant stomach to wait by the time we finally managed to find a parking spot, the rings at Tiffany’s cost more than a year of child care, and the clothes at Pea in the Pod were designed for an anorexic model wearing a fake pregnancy belly. The sales-clerk offered half-heartedly to run upstairs and bring down some “relaxed fit” items from the Motherhood Maternity selection, but it was clear from her wrinkled nose that we’d gotten off on the wrong foot the moment we walked in and asked if they had any plastic vomit bags handy.

Defeated, we make our way to McDonalds, choosing a winding path that left Cari with the most available options for trashcans and bushes to duck behind if need be.

We ate our French fries in silence, me seething that our baby was growing exclusively on the nutrients available in potatoes, while Cari, I’m sure, was furious that I’d insensitively dragged her on this poorly timed outing in the first place.

We floundered along like this for several more weeks, as the true end of our first trimester passed us by largely unnoticed, and entirely uncelebrated.

The turning point came in the form of a crescendo; the first melodic hits of laughter, rising up to greet one final soaring aria of anger.

In our seventeenth week of pregnancy, Cari declared all weekend plans were cancelled in favor of dedicating our full attention to the matter of her sluggish bowels, whom she had not heard from in over two weeks. Armed with several bottles of magnesium citrate at our doctor’s recommendation, and the determination that has been the defining characteristic of our four years of marriage, we tackled the matter head on. Cari valiantly consumed the foul-tasting bottle of artificial lime liquid over an hour of concerted effort. Just as she reached the final few ounces, she got the look. That familiar vomity look you hope you never know your partner well enough to recognize. There’s a down-turning of the corners of her mouth, and a glassiness to her eyes.

“Go to the bathroom!” I cried.

“I can’t, if I vomit I’ll have to drink it all again!”

I eyed her cautiously, the look passed, and then there it was: a sea of vomit, filling my favorite blanket that was strewn across her lap, a quilt my mother made me years ago from my high school cross-country t-shirts. In it’s midst sat my I-Phone, drowning slowly.

Having now completely exhausted all other options, what choice did we have but to laugh?

So laugh we did, breaking a dry spell unrivaled during the course of our relationship. There have been a dozen times when we’ve found ourselves up against a wall, uncertain of where to turn to next, but there are rarely times when we find ourselves unable to laugh about the unexpected curveballs that life has thrown our way. After weeks of talking almost exclusively about some variation of the functions of Cari’s digestive system, the sound of our own laughter grounded us, and we tackled the clean-up readily.

Miraculously, my I-Phone emerged unscathed. But by that evening Cari’s designated task of the day remained unaccomplished, and the total number of ounces of food or fluid she’d managed to successfully consume was nill.

We packed up and headed for the Kaiser hospital in Walnut Creek, a dry run of sorts for the trip we ultimately planned to make there to give birth. I eyed the clock as we left our house and again as we arrived, trying to imagine how those elapsed minutes would feel the day our baby was arriving. It seemed like some sort of imaginative play or wishful thinking, as we still struggled mightily to connect Cari’s current affliction to the eventual arrival of a baby.

The doctor there was stern and disapproving, and made no secret of the fact that he thought pregnancy was a condition women ought to bear more quietly than Cari currently was. He seemed equally confident that he himself would be able to handle it much better, and smug that he would never have to discover whether or not this was true.

Although his inclination was to give Cari a bag of fluids and then release her and hope for the best, she finally managed to convince him to order an enema. We expected this to be a horrific affair, but it was actually a rather tidy little procedure, the results of which were nearly immediate. Elated, Cari declared that we would name the baby after the nurse who had administered it. This seemed to irk the doctor a bit, for no matter how reluctant he had been to offer treatment, he now seemed eager to take credit for the cure. As a parting gift, he advised Cari that if her pre-natal vitamins stopped her up, she might consider stopping taking them.

The following morning it became clear that while I had interpreted this to mean stop taking them for a day or two, Cari had interpreted it to mean for a good long while, perhaps indefinitely. I was blind to her desperation, to the havoc that had been wreaked upon her body over the past seventeen weeks. Instead, all I could see was my rage over the fact that I could research the very best pre-natal vitamins to provide our baby with the nutrients it was lacking from Cari’s limited diet of Cheerios, potatoes and chicken nuggets; I could order a nine month’s supply and put them out in a prominent location that blocked her view of the TV at night, but if she decided not to take them, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

Suddenly I was face to face with every fear I’d ever had that this baby might be ours in name and theory, but hers in actuality. Her genes, her flesh and blood, her body giving birth. Her features on it’s face, her milk nourishing and sustaining its growth. The choices that impacted our baby’s future were entirely in her hands now, and who’s to say that would shift into equal balance later?

“Do whatever you want,” I said coldly, “you’re going to anyway. It’s your body, after all, isn’t that what you want to say?”

“I’m doing my best,” she replied, “you have to see that. You have no idea what it’s like for me.”

She left for work without another word, our usual morning ritual of me handing her her lunch, walking her to the door, and sending her off with a kiss hung in the air like an unanswered question.

Terror, inadequacy, a fierce protectiveness, and a complete sense of helplessness; over the course of the day my isolating anger slowly gave way to the sneaking suspicion that these were things that Cari was feeling too, even though it was her body where our baby was making it’s home. Perhaps even, these were things that every parent felt, no matter how their child came to be in their lives.

Cari came home from work that night and took her pre-natal vitamins, a peace offering of sorts. We sat face to face on the couch, turned towards each other for the first time after months of standing side-by-side, fighting off the next challenge. I shared with her my fears about being the other mother, about loving a baby that might never fully be my own.

“This baby is yours,” Cari said, rising to meet the question with the full determination, confidence and assurance that I so loved about her. “This is our baby.”

Moment’s later she was back in the bathroom, vomiting, and I was back in the kitchen, rushing to make a dinner that would cater to all of her food aversions while still giving our baby some nutrition. But still, we’d had it, that brief reprieve. That reminder of why we’d fallen in love in the first place, and why we’d ever begun to dream that out of our love, we’d dare to grow a child.