Now your mom really looks pregnant.

I know, I said it before. When your mom got back from Philadelphia. When I saw her then, I thought she looked pregnant.

Now she really does.

Not with a big ol' belly or anything. But there's something... I don't know. Womanly, maybe?

There's a Flemish baroque painter from the late 1500s named Peter Paul Rubens who was famous for painting women who were voluptuous. Rubenesque. You'll learn all this in art history. Your mom isn't Rubenesque, but she has a quality like some of the women in the paintings. It's, I don't know, womanly. Fertile, maybe.

Suddenly I understand the appeal of the guy's paintings. The women aren't beautiful in the clasical sense--and certainly not in the Hollywood sense--but now that I see what your mother is becoming, I understand the beauty he managed to capture. These women represent life, which sounds a lot heavier than I mean it to. Ripeness. That's more like what it is.

I know, think of it this way.

The beautiful women that you see all over television and in movies and magazines are the equivalent of flowers; the women that Rubens painted--and the woman that your mother has become--are fruits.

Stop laughing. I'm serious.

When flowers have become fertilized, they create fruits. Fruits carry the seeds of future generations. It's actually a really good analogy.

Let's push the metaphor a little further. When I met your mom, she was just a bud. A wide-eyed kid fresh off the plane from Nova Scotia, out to take on Hollywood. All potential and optimism.

She bloomed into something more spectacular than I could have ever imagined.

And now she's a fruit.

That doesn't sound as nice as I mean it. I love your mom. I love what she's becoming.