By Megan Elizabeth Miller-Oteri

When this photo was taken I was pregnant. I did not have a clue. Little did I know how much my life would change in nine months.
I finally got Ben to sleep. It is 11:03 P.M. I have sung to him, danced with him, rocked him on my shoulder, walked around the house, swung in the porch swing, bathed him, and nursed him – all of these for hours. Through all these verbs and nouns, there lives the pronoun of her. Her seems to be a past tense presence of me. I remember who her was. I am now trying to get to know she. She is the mother now. Not the her I used to know. Not the her who could hop in her car and grab her camera, journal and pen, jot down notes and numbers of contacts to call to set up interviews for articles. Not the her in the picture above, who had no idea she was pregnant with a tiny, microscopic organism called an embryo. She, my body knew. She swelled with reason. I just thought something was wrong with my right ankle. It was swollen and I had no idea. I could barely fit my cowboy boot over it and it didn’t hurt at all. I had a swollen right ankle throughout my whole pregnancy.
It didn’t hurt; it just swelled.
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