On how life completely changed with one trip to the bathroom, and coming to grips with what it will mean to be a mother.

Something I've done millions of times, so much that I can, and have, done it in my sleep. Getting up to pee. Sitting down on the toilet. Relieving my bladder. Pushing the handle. Listening for the swoosh of water that means I won't have to get out the plunger. The minutae of life that is neither examined or celebrated, just something done every day without deliberation.

Except for the one tiny difference two weeks ago-- the $20 piece of technology, bought hastily at Walgreens, soaked with that minutae, blinking its tiny screen and its earth-shattering results in my face.

It shook me to my core. Took every thought, every ounce of my being, and rammed it into a different direction. Two weeks later, and I have a picture of the beginnings of a human life on my fridge. Two weeks later, and I'm not looking at clothes or news online, I'm reading about colic and C-sections and crowning and epidurals and incessantly googling every possible thing I could be doing to hurt this person I haven't met and whom I'm realizing more and more is going to consume every part of me.

All I know about mothers is that I love my own. I know that I gave up smoking in an instant, drinking in a heartbeat, and have let my allergies become so severe I've rubbed my nose raw all so I can avoid popping a pill that could do any harm. I'm already making sacrifices, already so much about my day-to-day life, and I didn't even know, or want, or expect this to happen any time soon. But the sacrifices just feel natural.

The impending journey is by far the scariest I will probably ever embark on.

And yet it is the most ancient one of all, and the reason I'm here to begin with.