Telling your boss you're pregnant

After a lot of anxiety and worry and unnecessary freak-outs and soul searching, I finally told my boss(es) that I'm pregnant.

I told the first one toward the end of my overnight shift. She's the executive producer of the morning news, so my boss during those hours although not the boss (or the decision-maker) of the entire organization. She's engaged, as well, and every now and then, between the never-ending list of things you have to do in 30 seconds or less to produce a three-hour newscast, we talk about our impending nuptials.

"So how goes the wedding planning?" I ask her, both of us still typing away, our backs to each other.

"It's good," she says. "I realized yesterday I hadn't actually picked flowers or a cake or a DJ yet, and there's only four months to go, so I scheduled all of them at once."

(Oh, the days when my wedding was my main source of worry and planning and not how I'm somehow going to manage to care for an infant that was in no way expected or scheduled.)

"Well, it must be nice to be all done," I respond.

And then, in the clumsy way I've become accustomed to telling people, I blurt it out.

"My wedding's been postponed a month, because I'm pregnant and due in February."

The typing stops, and for a moment the only sound filling the newsroom is the dozen or so police scanners all screaming about a suspect on the loose or a suspicious man in a white T-shirt and jeans roaming the streets.

She turns toward me and puts her hands on my knees.

"Congratulations, Sarah!" she says wholeheartedly. "I can't believe you've been working this shift the whole time; I can't even imagine!"

Her answer's not completely shocking or anything, but this is a woman who is always in work-mode (you really can't be any other way in this business). She's seems nice, but never exceedingly warm or compassionate.

I tell her about my fears of staying at this job, of pushing myself too hard. She tells me what I needed to hear, that my life and health are more important, that it's my right to take time off for a child.

Later, I get up the nerve to tell my other boss, the executive producer over the whole shebang. We go into her office, where I presume she thinks we're going to talk about me taking on some shows by myself as a producer.

The second the door closes, I blurt it out again, this time with arguably even less tact.

"I'm pregnant," I say.

This woman is a mother of three. When she hired me, she told me she'd worked there for eight years and had taken off two when her third was born. I worried the most about telling her, since she was the one who hired me, interviewed me, promoted me, had the authority to fire me or grant me the leave I want or deny it. But I hoped she would be understanding. She'd taken off two years, after all.

But the look on her face is nothing but pure compassion. She knows about my Crohn's and that I've been working frequent 12 hour overnight shifts.

And she tells me the same thing.

"Sarah, when it comes to this job," she says, "your personal life is always more important. When it comes to your life, screw this place."

She says I can leave whenever I want (granted I give plenty of notice). I tell her I plan to leave in November or December, and to (hopefully) come back two months or so after giving birth.

"Whatever you need," she says.

And I'm not even kidding.

From the second I saw the result on my home pregnancy test, I've been convinced the world wouldn't approve. In this age of Bristol Palin and 16 and Pregnant and Britney Spears' public parenting tactics and Judd Apatow's take on procreating and drive-through Plan B pills, being pregnant hardly feels like a good thing.

With my parents, my sister, my friends, the world, even myself, I was terrified each time I admitted it. I sweat and nearly hyperventilate each time I plan to say the words.

"I'm pregnant."

To be pregnant at my age, before I've gotten married, before I obviously planned it, feels like admitting failure. I didn't use condoms and birth control, and I easily could have, so, therefore, I failed.

But each time I've let the secret slip, I've been presently surprised. Everyone's been exceedingly supportive.

I left work that day, for the first time in ages, feeling genuinely okay about my job and what this baby might mean for my career.

I haven't told the number one guy in the office--guy being the operative word. But I don't really care. He's a man, and although he has children of his own, he's never had to push one of them out. I have female support behind me, and that's plenty. Even if he vetoes the whole thing and kicks me to the curb altogether, at least then I'll know it's just because he doesn't--and can't--understand, not because I did something wrong.

It's all gonna be just fine, I think.

Maybe even better than it would've been otherwise, if everything had gone to plan.

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How I quit smoking after I found out I was pregnant

For about two days after I got the big fat positive, I was the East Nashville cigarette fairy.

I smoked just one after that fate-filled trip to the bathroom, in an effort to stop the impending panic attack, and then made a decision right then and there that that was it. Like it or not, I was done, and I just had to be.

I took our last remaining pack in my hand, opened my window, and threw it into the street. It just felt so much more symbolic than calmly placing it in my trash can--not to mention that, in my neighborhood, five minutes wouldn't pass before they'd be gleefully scooped up by a wandering homeless man or drunk hipster walking home from the bar.

My fiance agreed to quit, too, a huge undertaking considering his grandpa gave him his first cigarette when he was 11. He'd smoked at least a pack a day since then.

Freaked out by the fact that I had unknowingly been smoking up a storm while pregnant, and drinking, and riding roller coasters, I took to Google, and waited for the words "you and your baby are dying or you're already dead and just don't know it" to pop up.

And then I found a new study claiming that pregnant women who quit smoking before the 15th week of pregnancy reduce all the risks of blowing carcinogens in a fetus' face to that of women who never did it at all (read more about it here).

Armed with that dangerous knowledge, I got in my car the next morning to make the 30-minute drive to Murfreesboro, one usually made with the trustworthy companionship of tobacco, and I found my car turning left instead of right, turning into the gas station instead of the interstate, and then my car door was swinging open, and I was walking toward the gas station, and I was saying thank you to the nice shirtless man holding the door open for me, and then I was asking for a pack of cigarettes and handing over a ten dollar bill and gripping the tiny box in my fingers and tearing off the plastic cover and pulling out the foil and then I was back in my car, with an easy way out of the panic that was pulling at every inch of my body sitting right at my fingertips.

With just one little puff, it could all be gone, I could be making the drive home just like nothing had happened, like I was myself, a smoker, and all would be normal and okay.

And then my phone rang, and it was Jason. His voice was tense and agitated--the voice of someone who'd just quit smoking. And then it hit me.

This was real. I am pregnant. I always said I'd quit when this happened, but that was always an undefined one-day, and it sure as hell wasn't supposed to happen anytime soon.

But the cigarettes are now just an afterthought, and their relief would be nothing compared to the relief I'll feel if I give birth to a healthy baby, and know that I did everything I could to make it that way.

And so I rolled down my window. I threw the cigarettes on the street, watching as the box broke open and the cancer sticks exploded out, rolling this way and that, yards away from where they'd landed the night before.

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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.

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