Your mom looks pregnant

Your mom came back from Philadelphia today. She's been gone six days.

I don't know whether it's because she changed while she was gone or because I'm seeing her with different eyes, but she looks pregnant.

Not fat. She doesn't look fat at all. But she looks more like... I don't know... a mother-to-be.

Guess we're all growing up, aren't we?

Tamara's about to become a mother. Little Kicky Pants should be coming out any day now. (You probably know him as Smudge, because I named him. He looked like a little smudge on Tamara's first sonogram of him.)

When I was a lot younger, I expected life-changing events to be, well, life-changing. I guess I figured that having a kid or getting married would force some kind of visible alteration in a person. "Things are different now."

The reality that I see now is that people adjust, adapt, and flow into the changes that come along. Tamara is having a kid. She's never had one before, but that's okay. She's having one now and as soon as it's born she'll be Tamara the mother.

Her life will be different, but she won't.

There's something profound in that. That it's a natural progression. And I like what that means about you.

So now your mother is starting to look like a mother. You have no idea what I'm talking about. You can't.

You'll never know your mother and me without you. And we'll never know you without us. That's the way life changes and it's a big deal and no big deal all at the same time.

But every once in a while--when you're in the middle of the change--you can step back and see what you look like as you're changing. That's one of the neat things about life.