Baby fever.

Early pregnancy is largely a work of the imagination. I have spent the last nine weeks living in my head much more than in my stomach, willing myself to project downward the images in the stash of pregnancy apps in a secret folder on my phone (cleverly labeled “Folder”) in an effort to produce my own reality. I have to conscientiously narrate what the bare facts don’t indicate, that there is a Very Important Thing happening, that my mildly distended stomach is not just too much sammoon and shawarma, which is what circumstantial evidence would otherwise point to. I am a very modern, educated person (ask anyone; they’ll tell you), and yet if I put on my Cartesian hat and divest myself of all knowledge and context, what do my five senses tell me? I’m a little pudgy and I feel sick and tired all the time, and I don’t seem to get periods anymore, but that could be anything. Without the little colored strips and doctors, how would I ever know what was going on? Primitive humans are to be congratulated for establishing cause and effect, because I surely never would have on my own. I’d probably be keening back and forth in a corner muttering, “But how is babby formed???” over and over until like after the tenth kid.

It’s a lot of work, this work of imagining, and it’s infuriating not to know what’s going on, not to be able to troubleshoot, problem solve, and anticipate potential issues to stem them before they arise, like you usually can when you undertake a large, important project. You just don’t get to do that. There’s not much of anything you can do, except follow every recommendation like it’s ironclad law and then run the numbers in a sick little statistics game (you can find percentages of the risk of miscarriage for every week of pregnancy, and then ask yourself if you feel lucky this week. It’s great fun).

But honestly, have you ever felt as if your very body were, at any moment, ready to erupt into a scene from a bloody horror movie involving tiny body parts? Because that’s the corollary to the feats of imagination you’re thrown into. You suddenly, urgently, desperately realize that any of a great list of horrible things could absolutely happen to you or the little living being you keep pretending is there, and they absolutely have happened to so many women you know and feel like you know because you compulsively read their heartrending blog posts. Because it’s the internet, I will link to the ones I can’t stop thinking about. Empathetic pregnancy hormone cry with me: here’s a series of heartbreaking posts, and then look at the birth announcement and give up on holding it together. Also this one.

I like to think I’m a rational person, whatever that means. And part of being a rational person, my kind of rational person, is taking into account the calculated possibilities of all of the things that can happen, both bad and good, and preparing oneself for all of them. And then, especially, being endlessly grateful if and when many or all of them don’t occur. What this leads into, of course, is an explanation of my theodicy, such as it is, and how that affects the ways in which I conduct my affairs. Let’s take this premise and accept it as true without bothering to prove it: Bad things happen to good people. And bad things happen to bad people. So whether I am a good person or a bad person (without having to define either one), I can conclude that bad things will in all likelihood happen to me. Things I may or may not deserve. Things I may or may not have been able to prevent, through methods known or to be known in the future.

This is getting abstract. Let’s take Mary Wollstonecraft as an example, because she’s been on my mind lately. Wollstonecraft was a writer in the 1700s. She wrote about how women were equal to men, and then she died from childbirth. Many witty people at the time said she disproved her own writing—how could women possibly be equal to men when they were so weak they couldn’t even bear children? Well, guess what. Mary died from a contagious disease that is prevented by doctors washing their hands. I’m not kidding. So did Mary deserve to die because her idiot doctor didn’t follow basic hygiene principles? (I don’t normally cry, especially because of a Wikipedia article, but good grief, think about how incredibly preventable her death was and then look what her husband wrote to a friend right after she died: “I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again.”) Did any of the millions of women who have died from puerperal fever over the centuries deserve it? No, they didn’t. People who get cancer don’t deserve it, people who get ebola don’t deserve it, people whose lives are ravaged by hurricanes or wildfires or earthquakes don’t deserve it. I consider this incontrovertible.

How and why we still believe in God of infinite goodness is a complex topic for another time. I have a lot more thinking to do in that respect anyway. But understand where that leaves us. I can’t believe that if I read my Bible every night and say very selfless prayers and serve at church and think very very positive thoughts, I will be granted cosmic insurance against all evil that might befall me. That’s not how it works. Time and circumstance happeneth to us all.

So how then shall we live? Not with the expectation that everything will go according to my very well-thought-out plans, that’s for sure. I’ve got 21st-century medical knowledge on my side, and that’s comforting, but it’s not everything. And yet good and amazing things do happen. They’ve happened to me before, and I don’t think my ruthless emotional temperance has tempered the joy I’ve taken in them. So can a person be both happy and realistic? Well, why not?

On a vaguely related note, how is it that suddenly the only thing I can drink reliably is sweetened, carbonated beverages? I can barely abide water (and water can increase nausea—I have a pamphlet to back me up). Which is crazy, because I am not a carbonated beverage kind of person. Carbonated beverages tickle my nose and make me burpy. There was a time when a flat, room temperature soft drink sounded just as good to me as any other soft drink. So how it is that my fridge is now filled with club soda and Torani syrups? Because it’s darned expensive to buy Italian sodas at the rate at which I now drink Italian sodas, that’s how. And because I feel guilty drinking the 89-cent cranberry ginger ale from Walmart, even though it is absolutely my drink of choice. Anything for you, little baby.