He isn’t home today. My unborn baby and I are alone. I sip from my tea and wonder when he’ll get home, when he’ll be next to me and this baby, this living thing that I’m so afraid to have. I try not to think about my big belly, but it’s always in front of me, and I can’t hide it. I can’t forget that soon I will be a mother who has to feed this baby, nourish it, and take care of it. Soon I will have to teach this child the alphabet, the colors of the rainbow and numbers. I will have to hold it. I will have to love this unborn baby, and I will, I hope. Sometimes I hate my husband because I feel like he fooled me, like he promised me a false life, a big lie. But in the end he left it up to me. He said if you really don’t want a child, we won’t have one. But I didn’t want to feel guilty for the rest of my life; I didn’t want to carry the burden of knowing I deprived my husband of a child. I couldn’t do that to him. And most of all, I couldn’t do that to myself because deep down, I was dying to know what it would feel like to be a mother. I was a curious writer, in need of a story of a mother and her baby.