great expectation: a father's diary...excerpts

June 12 | November 4 | November 28 | December 10

June 12

I've been trying to remember the details of when Maura was pregnant with Maeve, just in case anything might come in handy this time around. But it all seems so long ago, as indistinct as if I'm looking at it all through a shower curtain.
     Maura and I complement each other because her short-term memory stinks. And it's worse when she's pregnant. She reminded me this morning of how she was always forgetting her house keys the last time around. We were living in Arkansas at the time, and usually, after the door locked behind her, Maura would sit on the front porch and look longingly through the front window at a stack of magazines on the coffee table, wishing she'd at least remembered to carry one with her. An hour or two later I'd get home and let her in. One day she simply got a crowbar out of the garage and smashed out a window in the back door, then reached in and unlocked it. Our eighty-five-year-old neighbor Mary Lou moseyed over and asked politely if everything was all right. Mary Lou was a wonderful old Arkansas woman who, when Maura first told her she was pregnant, had replied, "I suspicioned as much." She was always suspicioning things, often with good cause, such as looking out her window to see Maura come out of the garage with a crowbar and then hearing glass tinkling against the tile floor. We should have given Mary Lou an extra key during those months, but Maura kept forgetting to do it.
     Maura's first pregnancy was only half a decade ago, but I might as well be trying to remember what happened when my mother was pregnant with me. I suspicion that something of what went on back then I could put to use this time, but it's not coming.