And Mike Rowe

I promised him, didn't I? I just have been avoiding this place for a bit. Pretending I didn't start this blog and commit to keeping it up.

So you say you don't know who Mike Rowe is? You crazy, crazy person, you. Here, educate yourself, you Luddite: Mike Rowe is a god.


Mike Rowe, to me, is dreamy. More than McDreamy, more than McClooney. I like Mike because he has sweet laugh lines and the slightly-starting-to-sag body of real personhood. He's still strong, a physically drawing strength, and flippin' gorgeous. And he's funny, in that attractive slightly sexual way. Double entendres are the staple of "Dirty Jobs." Well, that along with the dirty jobs.

So. The point of this, and it does relate, is that after I was left alone in my room that Tuesday night after my baby began to breathe, a nurse came in to hang out with me. Either there wasn't much to do or she just didn't care, because she stayed quite a while. We chatted as she cared for me, about how she was a traveling nurse; she'd take a new job every few months and move to a completely new city. She also cared for her husband, whose disability kept him pretty much confined to bed. She sat down to watch TV with me, just as the 100th episode of "Dirty Jobs" was coming on.

At the exact moment Mike Rowe spoke, the baby gave me the absolute hardest kick I'd felt yet. It was startling and vivid. I can feel it now, and suspect it would have been a preview of the activity that was to come had the pregnancy continued to full term. Whew.

I also understood in that instant that the baby was going to be a girl. Now, in the interest of sexual identity fairness, I know there are men out there who groove to the Mike Rowe tune just as strongly. But it didn't enter my mind at the time.

I just had a gut feeling -- pun intended -- that this little fighter still inside me would be like her mama and find more attractive than anything the essence of real personhood.