So, you see, actually, when you really think about it, this was all Trevor’s fault in a way, since he was the one who suggested that I get the at-home pregnancy test kit in the first place.
If what follows smacks a bit of being something of an apologia, I think it only fair to point out that most people never see their own tragic flaws. For my part, I am fully aware of what my shortcomings are. Does that mean I should be instantly forgiven them? Hardly. But at least I’m willing to be honest about who I am, and if who I am is a fairly small-minded person who wastes most of her days in silly-minded pursuits, nothing about who I am has ever been quite so bad as to add up to Jack the Ripper.
Anyway, I’ve always been what you might call a selfish person, always been fairly free about admitting it, at least to myself. Oh, now mind you, I don’t mean selfish in the grab-for-the-last-slice-of-pizza-when-with-friends way; that would be bad for what little image I have. Nor do I mean selfish in the willing-to-push-old-lady-out-of-way-to-secure-last-seat-on-tube-even-if-it-is-next-to-stark-raving-bonkers-loon sort of way; ditto above. No, I mean selfish in the garden-variety, monkey-see, monkey-do sort of way that’s been the bane of my existence ever since I was three years old. That was when I first saw my sister playing with a doll—a Kewpie doll, mind you, with messy red hair and a tongue that shot out at you like a snake when you poked its stomach, the kind that would normally give me nightmares—and knew I had to have one myself. Even if it meant biding my time until she was asleep and easing it out of her arms, telling her when she woke screaming in tears, “She wasn’t yours anyway, you know. You only dreamt that Mummy and Daddy gave her to you.” Here I cradled my new baby in my arms. “There, there,” I lullabyed her, before looking down once again at my crying sister, Sophie. “Now that you’re awake and not dreaming any longer,” I pointed out sternly, “you can see that the baby isn’t yours at all. It’s mine.”
Ah, Sister Sophie: I guess I sort of think of her as a nun—a golden, beautiful, sort-of-mean nun. One year my senior and perfection itself in nearly every way, it was in fact a rare occurrence indeed for me to get the better of her. She was a real blonde with razor-straight hair, always got good grades, always had dates, always had the lion’s share of anything on offer in life, including our parents’ attention. In fact, as had once been explicitly stated to me by them, the only reason they’d ever conceived me in the first place was as a playmate for her.
It is a matter of public record that I was always the more aesthetically challenged of the Taylor girls. They say she never even drooled as a baby. I, on the other hand, had a steady stream of saliva running from lower lip to chest from the get-go, family legend holding that they had to keep me in bibs pretty much well from birth until grade school. In short, then, being Sophie’s younger sister was about as bad as having the Queen for one’s older sister without one’s older sister being the Queen. You might say that Sophie and I had the biggest case of sibling rivalry in the world since Liz and Maggie, except that Sophie didn’t even appear to know about it. Am I exaggerating when I compare my lot in life to that of the Queen of England’s late sister? Perhaps. But I can honestly say that, based on firsthand knowledge, I can certainly understand why Maggie drank.
But back to the Kewpie doll. It didn’t even phase me when I had raging nightmares about that darting serpentine tongue every night for the next month, until the doll was finally irretrievably lost somewhere—probably into the void behind the big blue couch in the living room, the black hole of our very early childhood—and Sophie acquired the next thing that I simply couldn’t live without.
Now that I’m an adult—in years anyway—working for a London publishing company, not all that much has changed. Oh, I don’t mean that I’m still stealing my sister’s dolls; nothing like that. I’ve moved on to much more mature levels of envy; I’ve taken to coveting on a higher plane: ohm. No, no more childish things for me. Teetering on the cusp of thirty, for the past year the object of my grasping jealousy has been matrimony—much to the chagrin of Trevor Rhys-Davies, the suspenders-snappingly handsome stockbroker I’ve been sharing a place in Knightsbridge with for the past two—a state that sister Soph has been blissfully wedded in for exactly that length of time. To Tony. Who cooks Italian on weekends and who lovingly encourages her to put her feet up whenever she gets tired, which she does much more often now, her being—suck it up and tell it all now, Jane! Tell the worst!—five months’ pregnant.
So I guess that, technically, you’d have to say that matrimony was last year’s rivalry problem. After all, it was last year that I won the Bad Sportsmanship Award for Inability to Throw Rice Nicely; last year that I used to sob uncontrollably at all of the weddings of friends and acquaintances, not out of happiness for them but out of sheer misery for myself; last year that I’d sniffled onto Trevor’s shoulder as he led me around the dance floor after the bride had cut the cake, had a garter put on her in a salacious manner and thrown the bouquet to some other guest whom I’d tried to tackle. “It’s not fair,” I sobbed. “Why isn’t it ever me?” To which Trevor would caress my fashionably spiky dark hair as best he could, sigh heavily and say, “Oh, Jane.”
Technically, then, this year’s problem is no longer matrimony. Technically, the green-eyed-monster dilemma for this year is pregnancy.
Pregnancy envy, for those of you who have never heard of it, is something akin to penis envy in that the appeal lies in what is represented by the physical shape of the thing itself. It’s sort of like wanting to wear a cross around your neck without ever being at all sure that you’d want to set foot in any kind of church.
Notice that I don’t say a thing about babies. This is very specific, so pay attention.
It was only April, and I had already been invited to, and guiltily felt compelled to attend, seven baby showers that year: three for people at work, only one of whom I knew in a more than passing way; two for people whose weddings Trevor and I had attended the year before (eager little rabbits, weren’t they?); one for a woman whose name I hadn’t recognized at all but whose invitation said that the shower was being catered by Food by Gloria (I love catered food); and one for a woman that I had grown up with. My mother always remembers her as being my best friend as a child and had wrangled a spare invitation for me out of the girl’s mother under this pretext. I, on the other hand, remember myself as having despised the girl intensely for her Tory views—perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration of my political precocity, but she was an annoying girl. Still, I went anyway, in the hopes of more catered food, and with what I thought of as a generous gift certificate to A Mothers Work: The Breastfeeding Emporium tucked inside my purse, fighting with my mother the whole way to Brighton: “She was your best friend!”—“I hated the twit!” And, even if no more showers loomed in my immediate future, I still had Sophie’s to look forward to in about three months’ time.
Yes, with me teetering on the cusp of thirty, you could say that technically my lust had turned toward pregnancy, except that there was really nothing technical about it and it had in fact become a fact:
I was determined, in a big way, to join the pack and fast. But how?
Well, we all know now about the first failed pregnancy and me telling Trevor that I was pregnant and him telling me to pick up a kit. Before I did that, though, I figured I’d better do some preliminary research.
First off, I bought a copy of that book that every woman who’s gotten pregnant in the last eighteen years always buys: What to Expect When You’re Expecting. In light of the book’s ubiquitous popularity, one really had to hope that Eisenberg, Murkoff, and Hathaway—the book’s three authors—knew what the hell they were talking about. If not, we were all up a creek.
I placed the copy in the bottom drawer of my desk at work, so that whenever I wasn’t terribly busy doing anything on behalf of Churchill & Stewart, the publishing firm at which I was titularly an assistant editor ever since I’d graduated with a first in English Literature from the University of Essex, I could read up on what I could expect to expect. I was just reading about what I was most interested in at the time, The Home Pregnancy Test, on page 4, when…
“Taylor!” I heard the sound of my immediate boss, Lana Lane, calling my name.
Lana Lane was the kind of woman for whom misogynists like Chandler and Hemingway first designed sentences that began with the portentous writing-school words: “Madame X was the kind of woman…”
In Lana Lane’s case, Lana Lane was the kind of woman other women hated, strolling around in the kind of clingy sweater dresses that made her look like a cartoon knockout come to life, and all men feared. In fact, it was a good thing that my physical appearance was one of the few things I felt secure about, since Lana was the impossibly drop-dead-gorgeous kind of woman who could make Cindy Crawford start looking for zits. And, as far as men went, they feared her not only because she was far more beautiful than anything they could ever hope to be worthy of in their wormy little lives, but because she was also more successful than any of them in what had once upon a time been a man’s game. For all of her sins, then, the men had christened her Dodo, and the women in the office all went along with them. Since she was a gorgeous blonde and since all gorgeous blondes were historically stupid but she was not, they guffawed about it as if it were some kind of flatteringly ironic pet name. I, for one, am not sure that I get the joke.
Truth to tell and feminism be damned, Dodo was not an entirely inaccurate sobriquet for Lana. For despite the fact that she had the kind of publishing acumen that would have made Bennett Cerf and Monsieur Gallimard tip their respective hats and chapeaux, when it came to real life she was something of a social moron. Never having had a genuine girlfriend in her thirty-five-year-old life, I was the closest she’d managed to come. And, if she was going to have to rely on me, whose boss she’d been for the past seven years, to teach her social skills…
“Taylor!” she screamed again from her office to mine, the receptionist that all of us in Editorial shared having called in sick because it was Friday morning and Dodo being as inept with the new office phone system as she was with social skills. “Do you think you could pick up line two? It’s Colin Smythe. He’s going something fierce about his latest while doing what I think is meant to be some kind of a John Wayne imitation, and I can’t make heads or tails of it. Could you please, please take this one?”
I tucked the Lion Bar wrapper that I was using for a bookmark in between the pages on home testing and lab testing. Intrigued by what I’d read about the former, I stowed the book back in my drawer before picking up on Colin Smythe. He was the respected author of five scrupulously researched historical bestsellers on Regency England, none of which had even a smidgen of romance in them but which had oddly struck a nerve with a book-buying public who clearly felt that they were getting enough sexual stimulation these days from the daily newspapers. He’d also written a sixth book, against all of our best editorial advice, about a California surfer who moves to Chicago and finds love in a spectacularly odd place. Loosely based on a story he’d heard while attending the Windy City wedding of one of his wife’s relatives, it had been published here last year and had not become a bestseller, although the critics had for some reason liked it. Now it was due to come out in paperback here at the same time it was due to come out in the States for the first time in hardcover. It was hoped that sales in the U.S., where Colin had a respectable following among the Maeve Binchy set, would be favorable enough to give the paperback sales here a shot in the arm. After all, the Americans were quite good at persuading the rest of the world into wanting something that it hadn’t occurred to them to want before; just look at what they did for Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“Yes, Colin.” I always felt as though I should be calling him Sir Colin, and he clearly thought so as well. Still, in spite of the fact that his readers thought of him as a male Dame Barbara Cartland minus the kisses and pink robes and cats, the Queen, though she was a fan and had invited him to more than one of her garden parties, had not as yet made him a knight. “Jane Taylor here. What can I do for you today?”
“Have you seen the Times yet?”
“Yes, of course I have. I can’t believe that Blair really said that. Don’t you think sometimes the reporters just make some of this stuff up?”
Each word came out like a bullet. “I’m—not—talking—about—our—Times.” He resumed a more normal speech cadence although one could still detect the strain. “I’m talking about their Times, the New York Times.”
“Oh dear,” I said, consulting my watch as if the minute hand might help. “Have I got my dates mixed up? Did the book come out already?”
He didn’t exactly begin his sentence with “you ninny” but it was definitely in the air. “Yes and yes. And the Times, their Times, has already gotten their hooks into it. Sometimes I swear they assign books to be reviewed by reviewers they know will hate them just so that they can be provocative. Did you see the hatchet job they let the editor-in-chief of Briefcase Woman magazine do on that first mystery where the sleuth was a housewife and former cheerleader?”
“Yes. It was positively cruel.”
“And did you ever notice how if their daily reviewer loves a book it gets trashed in the Sunday edition and vice versa?”
“I believe it has been commented upon in the trade before.” Much fun as this was, I wanted to get back to the crux of why Colin was calling because the sooner I did that, the sooner I could get back to What to Expect. “This really is loads of fun, Colin, as always, but what exactly did the Times say about Surf the Wind?”
I could hear the newspaper rustling over in Duck’s End, Colin’s country weekend estate, and the little throat-clearing cough that I knew always accompanied the donning of his reading half glasses. “Are you ready?”
What could I possibly say? I knew it was going to be awful. “I can’t wait.”
“By the way, the reviewer is an American historian, educated at Oxford. His name’s not familiar to me. I think he might have some sort of ax to grind. Anyway, here goes—’It is always a literary crime evincing the highest hubris, when a citizen of one country presumes to set a story in another country of which he has never been a resident. Such a circumstance is certainly egregious enough when the author is content to confine himself to a strict narrative form; however, when he commits the further, grosser, offense of assuming to understand the nuances of speech patterns native to the country he is purloining, he makes it impossible for any serious reader to take his efforts seriously. Such is the case with Colin Smythe’s most recent effort, Surf the Wind, a preposterous romance so seasoned with the word reckoned that one can only assume that Mr. Smythe erroneously believes all Americans to be equally at home on the range. If anyone who knows Mr. Smythe happens to read this review, kindly do us all the favor of disabusing him of this notion. Contrary to the beliefs of certain Caribbean countries and, apparently, a small percentage of Englishmen, every American is not from Texas. We do not all walk through life talking around the hay stalks we have jammed in our mouths. Nor does each region of the United States speak in the same idiomatic fashion any more than one would expect, say, a Liverpudlian and a student of Cambridge to make the exact same verbal use of the letter h—’ Do you need me to go on?”
I had to admit that the American reviewer had something of a point there. It seemed to me that the idea of an English person trying to impersonate Americans was potentially just as offensive as if, say, an American were to think that he or she could mimic an English novelist merely by throwing in a handful of “ex-directory” and “off-license” references every now and again. But I couldn’t very well point that out to Colin Smythe, now, could I?
“Was that the daily Times or the Sunday Times?” I asked instead, sympathetically, the implication being that whichever one had trashed him, it surely meant that the other one would canonize him. Hopefully, it was the daily, since the Sunday carried more weight with booksellers.
For once he didn’t sound a bit bombastic; more like deflated, really, as I heard the sigh that accompanied the removal of his glasses. “Both.”
“How is that possible?”
“I spliced the two reviews together and read them to you as though they were one. The Sunday reviewer added something to the effect that ‘it would be a relief to see Mr. Smythe turning his attention to something other than those insipid historicals he usually writes if only one could persuade him to remove the ten-gallon Stetson he is metaphorically wearing while doing so.’ I thought I’d leave that part out because it depresses me so.” Sigh. “I did so like America when I was there, and I had thought that it liked me. Don’t they understand that I wasn’t trying to mock or imitate anybody? Don’t they understand that we all talk like that all the time, and that it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Western drawls, six-guns, or corn in Nebraska when an Englishman says ‘I reckon’?”
“I reckon not.”
Colin sighed. “I wish that either you or Lana had picked up on this during the editorial process. It would have saved me so much bother.”
I neglected to point out to him that he had been the one who had actually traveled to the United States, where he should have had ample opportunity to study the speech patterns of nontourist Americans. I, on the other hand—although I would have dearly loved to go to California or Chicago or even Texas, where the latest governor was reportedly still executing death-row inmates fairly regularly—had never hardly been any farther west than Gloucester. Instead, I promised to do whatever I could in terms of damage control from my end and rang off after only a handful more sighs out of him.
Now it was my turn to sigh, not with dejection, however, but with relief. It was time for me to get back to What to Expect.
There were so many things to worry about, I began to learn as I read on.
Oh, I don’t mean things to worry about as far as the baby’s health; after all, that would go without saying if a person were actually pregnant. No, what I’m getting at here is all the things that could go wrong if, say, a person didn’t quite know what they were doing and weren’t really pregnant, a person like me who had told her boyfriend that she was pregnant but wasn’t quite there yet really. For example, what if someone were to ask a person how they first suspected they were pregnant? A person might take the easy way out and say, “Well, I missed my period, didn’t I?” But if a person didn’t want to just go with the obvious, if they wanted to maybe spice things up with a splash of authenticity, they might want to say, “I’ve been tossing my cookies all day long,” or “I was beginning to think I’d turned into a greyhound, I’ve been peeing that much,” or “My vaginal and cervical tissue’s been changing colors lately.” Of course, the problem with that approach is that a really swift person might come up with alternative medical and nonmedical causes for those signs. They might easily counter with, “Have you considered that it just might be food poisoning?” or “Well, there have been those diuretics you’ve been addicted to for the last year,” or “You know, Jane, you’re not supposed to study yourself down there with a handheld mirror on a daily basis—cut it out!”
No, it definitely seemed to me that the only conclusive proof to offer Nosy Parkers should they ask would be the results of an official test, which was pretty much well what Trevor had indicated already.
On the way home from work, I stopped off at Mr. Singh’s and ordered a take-away curry to appease the cravings that I was sure to be having soon. While waiting for my order, I popped in next door at Boots the Chemist. I studied the display of at-home pregnancy tests available, reading the backs of each until I found one that claimed to be effective anytime during the day; no point waiting for first morning pee when a girl could do it anytime she felt like it. Then I selected a package containing a colorful assortment of fine-point Magic Markers, paid for my purchases, picked up my curry, and completed the journey home.
It wasn’t as though I’d gone out of my way, per se, when Trevor and I had first moved in together, to select a paint color for the majority of the apartment that would clash so with his beige personality. It was more, I told myself, that I genuinely enjoyed salmon pink and, anyway, it’s always good early on in a new relationship to push the envelope so hard that you know just exactly how far a man is willing to go in terms of concessions to keep you happily in his bed. I’d heard girls at the office tell about pressuring the men in their lives to buy them gemstones as big as their heads, to take them vacationing on Necker, to let a second man play in their beds. By contrast, having your beige man paint the walls pink seemed like comparatively small potatoes to me.
And it wasn’t as though Trevor hadn’t been doing his own share of envelope pushing which, in his case, came in the form of a horrible orange beast he loved that went by the name of Punch the Cat. I don’t know why I hated Punch the Cat so much, whom I always wanted to kick every time I entered a room as he slinked out at me from around some corner, because I’ve always adored cats in general. I guess it could be because he came across as some kind of smugly malevolent Puss in Boots or maybe it was just the color orange.
Anyway, on that particular evening, my knee-jerk reaction upon entering the apartment and seeing Punch the Cat slithering toward me, moving like the Grinch when he’s going after the Christmas decorations and appears to not even touch the ground, was no different than any other: I wanted to swing out with one of my two-inch chunky-heeled burgundy suede Joan & Davids and send him flying into the fireplace. But I couldn’t do that tonight. Not if what I was hoping to do was launch the campaign to get Trevor to start looking at me as the future mother of his child.
“Hello, Punch.” I juggled chemist and curry bags so that I could reach down and pet my enemy. “Is Daddy home yet?”
Well, of course I already knew that Trevor was around here somewhere; his car was parked out front. Why else would I be sucking up to the cat?
“Hello, there,” Trevor said, using a towel to wipe his wet ears, wearing blue jeans and nothing else as he strolled toward me from the direction of the bathroom.
Trevor was a two-shower-a-day man and whenever I saw him walking around suspenderless, in addition to wanting to swat him on his perfect behind, I always found myself marveling at the fact that I’d somehow managed to wind up with a man with light-blond hair and dark-blue eyes, the color combination I’d have least pegged myself to settle down with.
“Darling!” I gushed. Perhaps I was overdoing it? Tossing my packages on the table, I threw my arms around him, slightly damp chest and all. “Lucky me to come home to you.” Well, at least I had the grace not to guffaw at my own inanities. “Tough day at work?” Could I get any more situation-comedy wife? “Hope you didn’t have to deal with any Nick Leesons.”
“Nah, it wasn’t too bad,” Trevor said, disengaging, but in a gentle way. He peeked in the bag from Mr. Singh’s. “Hey, curry! Great!” He looked up at me. “You don’t know how many times today I thought to ring you to see if you’d like to split one, but I kept getting interrupted, and then I thought to stop on the way home, but I also thought, that if you’d already stopped someplace first, it’d create a food conflict, so I ended up not doing anything.” He smiled. “You’re the greatest.”
God. Sometimes it was just so damned easy.
“I’m glad you’re happy. Tell you what. Why don’t you lay out the plates and things while I just pop into the bathroom to wash my hands and—” I patted the chemist bag I’d retrieved “—attend to some girl stuff.”
Trevor was so instantly preoccupied with the curry bag that he didn’t even remark on the chemist’s bag. What an odd man. He’d as much as told me to pick up what amounted to a ticking bomb at the chemist’s. I now had it in my possession and was about to detonate it, and rather than showing any outward signs of anxiety, he had his nose buried in the chicken tikka masala. Oh, well.
Once I’d safely managed to lock behind me the door we usually never bothered to lock, I tore into the bag, pulled out the pregnancy kit, and reread the directions. Well, I thought, I could just dismantle the plastic wand thing and use the pink Magic Marker to make my pink line right away. But then I figured that I should at least pee onto the thing first so that it would have that authentic urine aroma.
Dropping my drawers and squatting over the toilet bowl, I did so, only to discover, after getting pee all over my hand as well, that when I finally dismantled the thing and applied the pink Magic Marker to the damp surface, the line came out all smudged-looking and not at all like the “you are pregnant” diagram depicted on the back of the box. It didn’t help matters any that, not ever having been what one might term “good” at art class, my line had come out on a very strong diagonal and thus not like anything pictured on the box, not even like the “you are not pregnant” diagram. Good thing I’d purchased one of the few brands containing two tests. Perhaps its manufacturer had anticipated that some women might be overly cautious or that some, like me, might do something truly bizarre with the first test.
I hastily shoved the botched test into the cabinet beneath the sink for now, dropping it behind a package of sanitary napkins—after all, it wouldn’t do to have Trevor see the odd-looking botched test sticking out of the refuse basket by the toilet, would it?—and removed the second test, deciding not to take any chances by peeing on it this time. If I blew this one too, then I’d have to wait until the following evening to try again, and I was getting anxious.
“Jane?” I heard Trevor’s voice calling. “Are you all right in there? The curry’s getting cold.”
Trevor might not have been the kind of knight in shining armor that I’d wanted him to be that last year, the kind that would have asked me to marry him so that I’d at least have one less thing to envy everyone else for, but he did have the most uncommonly gracious table manners; I knew that even if he’d decided to turn Muslim all of a sudden and began observing Ramadan, that even if he’d been fasting all day long he’d never sneak one forkful past his lips until I was also seated at the table.
“Coming!” I shouted. “I’ll just be one more tick in here.”
Again not to take any chances this time, having already most emphatically not peed on the plastic wand, I dismantled it, lined the box up perpendicularly over the top of the wand to function as a ruler and made my mark less than a finger’s distance apart from the control line that was already in the test window for women to compare the color of their own results. Then I shoved the marker back loosely in the bag that my purchases had come in, shoved the whole thing to the back of the cabinet where the botched test had already taken up residence behind the sanitary napkins that I would, theoretically, not be needing for the next nine months, and shouted, “Trevor! I think you’d better come in here! There’s something you’re going to want to see!”
I heard the sound of his chair scraping back from the table, accompanied by the kind of sigh that clearly said, “But I’m hungry!” Still, Trevor was too well mannered to say anything direct about it.
I heard him jiggle the handle of the locked door. “I’m afraid that you’re going to have to unlock this door, Jane, if you have something you desperately want me to see.”
“Look!” I enthused, having opened the door to allow him to join me in a bathroom that was really only fit for one. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Punch the Cat sneak in behind Trevor, the sly feline obviously not spotting out of the corner of her eye that I had spied her out of the corner of mine. “Look!” I shouted again, holding the test with its dual “yes, you are pregnant” stripes up across my chest as if I were some sort of quiz show hostess displaying a much-desired prize. “Look! We’ve created the matching pink line!”
“Good God, Jane.” He involuntarily grabbed onto the doorpost for support. “Does that mean what I think it does?”
“If what you think it means is that you’re going to have to be nicer to me for the next nine months because I happen to be bearing your child, then yes.”
He swallowed hard. “Oh, God, Janey.” He looked slightly horrified but determined to eat his Brussels sprouts like a good Gordonstoun boy would as he hugged me to him. “Of course I’ll stand by you.”
For my part, as I allowed him to hold me, my face positively wreathed in the beatific smile of one Madonna or another, I used my toe to give Punch the Cat a healthy shove out the door. There just wasn’t room in that bathroom for three beings.
According to the calculations that I would be giving out to family and friends as the next few weeks and months wore on, at the time of the bathroom hugging I was a scant two weeks late. For his part, Trevor was as good as his word. He did stand by me. What he hadn’t specified, unfortunately—although, to be fair to him, he didn’t have all the facts—was just how long a period of time that standing would last for. In fact, it lasted for exactly two months and thirteen days, leading me right up to the threshold of my second trimester, at which point we were planning a small wedding and at which point events conspired to give Trevor the rest of the facts.
But that’s getting ahead of my story.
My story was still in its first month; my baby was still smaller than a grain of rice, a little tadpolish embryo, getting ready to sprout arms and legs from things called buds in about two weeks’ time, along with the neural tube—later to become the brain and spinal cord—and the heart, digestive tract and sensory organs; Trevor was treating me like I was either made of glass or plutonium; and I was about to embark on the next exciting phase in my pro-creative journey.