9 Years Ago Today, I Met the Shogun

Nine years ago today, I met the Shogun. I kept trying to stand near him, and he kept moving away from me, afraid, he’d tell me later, that I was going to try to make him speak English.

Two weeks later, he said, “Lub you,” to which I responded “What?” He had to repeat it a few more times before I realized his “ub” was “ove.”

As I’ve written before, seven months ago, the Shogun and I gave up expecting I’d ever be able to sustain a pregnancy, after almost five years of trying: my body somehow too full of slip for those tiny sparks of life to take hold for long. “But you know,” he told me, as our deadline to stop trying neared, “if we can have baby, that would be like miracle. But it will still only be like dessert, because you will always be main course.”

So today, with nine years of days together and Mother’s Day approaching with the promise of a holiday we’ll both ignore, I won’t forget how lucky I am that, although he kept moving away from me that first day we met, I kept moving towards him, and eventually we both stood still, together.

I can’t help but add a postscript to this now, years after I first wrote and posted this. It was either on the day I wrote this post or around this time that I did end up conceiving our child, a healthy baby girl to whom I gave birth at 4 months past my 46th birthday. And it’s true that on the day I wrote this post, we had stopped expecting that I’d ever be able to carry a pregnancy to term. But we hadn’t stopped trying. The story of this, and of how I ended up getting pregnant naturally at 45 and giving birth at 46, is on this blog here, with a longer version in my book, from which the above post was excerpted.