The first to know

I am a big believer in getting past the primary danger zone of months 1-3 of a pregnancy before going baby crazy and telling everyone you know. Having an early miscarriage (as I did, at about 5 weeks in September 2006) will do that to you - make you a little gunshy, a little cautious, a lot nervous. Why spread the good news only to have to turn around and spread bad news - while your heart is breaking uncontrollably, no less.

And there's definitely something about that particular brand of news that's special in a way that, at first, you want to keep private. Well, at least M and I did. Besides the fact that, even though we semi-planned for getting pregnant at some point, it had always remained just that: "at some point". In the distant, unforeseeable, needn't-be-dealt-with-just-now future. So we ourselves had to spend some time getting used to the idea, figuring out how to get on board, and staring at each other in incredulity for a minimum of 2 hours daily. This is no small amount considering we're home and together for only about 5 waking hours on your average weekday. In the first 10 days, keeping this information to ourselves wasn't the most difficult thing we had ever done.

But when we drove to my second-home-state of North Dakota for Christmas to spend the holidays with my father, half-sister, and other associated family members on his side, the news became much more pressing. There's a whole story about part of the reason we needed to tell my dad about the pregnancy that's neither interesting nor relevant. The other, more interesting reason had to do with the fact that, since my mother had had custody of me growing up, my father was always the second to know everything about me. Not that I wasn't close to him - I was. But when you're a girl, and you live with your mom, she tends to be the mouth of the river. All things flowed downriver from her.

Sharing news of the pregnancy, albeit very early, seemed like a pretty decent opportunity to let my dad in on something first for a change. So we told him. And he was thrilled. When my step-mother (whom my father told, as we expected) started pressuring me to tell the rest of the family (aunts, uncles, cousins, my grandmother, and half-sister) I resisted. Sure, they'd be incredibly happy at the news. But I couldn't shake that feeling of "but how sad will they be if it goes badly?" In the end, I couldn't pass up the one opportunity I'd have inside of three years (which is about as often as I get to North Dakota) to share this news with family members I rarely see in person.