I’m doing the dishes, passively gazing out the window at the dusty driveway and the heavy clouds ready to rupture with the April rain, and quietly singing a song I don’t quite know, “Paddy’s Lamentation”. But this story doesn’t start here. It starts a few weeks ago, when I reached my 24^th birthday. While I was musing over martinis with the couple of friends I cornered at my birthday party as I entered the stage of inebriation that my husband comically refers to as ‘Professor Hanna’, I discovered that I had reached a milestone. As I elucidated at the party – less eloquently then, than I am remembering now, I’m sure – “now that I am 24, if I get pregnant, everyone will assume it was intentional.” The combination of this revelation, this comic and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women got me thinking about the perceptions of life, love and pregnancy in my own small hometown. Continue reading →