The Shoes that Were Lost and Then Found

Imagine my sheer delight when digging through the closet, hoping to find a sweater I was fairly sure I had given away to charity after years of use, I found the missing Aldo shoes instead!

The ones I thought I had left in the parking lot because of sheer exhaustion that Friday at the mall.

Tears came to my eyes, partly because I knew that my brain, while a strange rabbit warren of a place these days, had not yet betrayed me to that limit.

I don't know if it's nesting, or if the fact that my body is getting larger by the day is prompting me that this is really happening. I am really about to have a baby and bring someone else into the world. I'm reading my fourth or so book about pregnancy - a non-medical, email exchange between two expectant mothers, and convinced that I could write something just as good. It's no accident that as a writer I'm more interested in narratives about motherhood than what doctors want you to do.

When I first announced that I was having a baby over the summer, our management was slightly out of wack - though they said all the right things - about how I could be replaced. My maternity leave and how the work would get done was a constant subject of conversation which didn't really help me come to grips with what was happening to my life. I felt pressure to behave as though everything was fine: more than that, because I hadn't had any complications, I did feel more or less fine (other than getting slightly rotound). But that was six months ago and we've managed to hire three new people (to offset the work I was doing for the last 10 months).

The new people, the fact I saw us all through the launch phase, and have generally been the same have tempered the reactions of but-what-will-we-do-when-you-are-gone that plagued me the second trimester.

Now it's the middle of June and I have two more weeks of 'work'; work outside the home anyway. The idea of two months away from work yawned before me in April/May but now I realize the time is going to fly by. I will have my mother here and the nanny, then my aunt and my brother. Plus: The baby!

So two months will actually be short, as everyone is warning me.

For the first time in my life, I find myself getting up from work voluntarily, coming home and sleeping. Not because I am depressed, as slightly happened to me in 2006 when I made the switch from an American univeristy to a national one. But because my body actually wants that much sleep. The entire drive home, all I could was yawn. Yawn and try to steer the car in the right direction.

The office is going to be different without me. That isn't me having a big ego but a fact because of the ten or so people there, I hired 7 of them, and worked with them as the sole manager for the past 6 months. Art from our home hangs on the walls (that were bare when we set up shop) and most of the policies and procedures that we've established have been because I was the sole offical employee for a long time. I'm proud of what I've been able to accomplish over the last year and a half.

I also think this baby is well timed. While I'm out for two months the team will have a chance to get to know the new people who are coming on board and also the new Managing Director who has just moved to the country.

I am a big personality and with me stepping out for a few months, he will have the change to make his own impression. And quite frankly, because of our space crunch, they need my desk! I'm sure there will a slight tussle over who can use it first.

I'm not at the point where I can say that I want to stay at home forever. But I am looking forward to the break like a first year college student for summer.

And wondering what that moment will be like: when we drive to the hospital.

It would be good to have a bag packed...