beginner’s luck

The bib that I bought before I even got pregnant. Photo by Aisha Mitchell.

My no-longer-a-baby girl turned two yesterday. We celebrated her birthday at the Old Spaghetti Factory with family, just like the year before. Unlike the year before, she was completely obsessed with the Peppa Pig balloon her dad snagged at Fred Meyer and would throw a fit if it was not near enough for her to squeeze, bite or punch it. Part of me missed the calm one-year-old from a year ago, while the other part of me felt proud about how far we’d come.

Before I even started trying for a baby, I instinctively knew that I would get pregnant at the age of 40. It was the type of “knowing” that feels more like a recurrent daydream that you feel deep down in your gut. I even had the title of my future memoir picked out: “40, Pregnant and Divorced: My Journey to Motherhood.” My future success as a writer hinged on the slimmest of probabilities.

So, when the faintest of pink lines appeared on the pregnancy test I decided to take for practice (I wasn’t planning on TTC until the following month), I could hardly believe it. Especially since it was three days before my 41st birthday. The odds of a 40-year-old getting pregnant, on a whim, three days before her birthday…unfortunately, I’m no longer good enough at math to calculate the probability accurately, so my very rough estimate is like 1 in 2,500.

For a long time after this unplanned blessing, I thought I was the one who was lucky, that I’d saved up all the luck of my lifetime for this very moment. But when my baby girl was born on St. Patrick’s Day, I knew she was the one with all the luck. And, on the rare days when I feel like I’m actually doing a good job at this parenting thing, I like to think that luck includes having me as her mom.