Before I was a mom

It has been brought to my attention that a good 29.5 years of my life occurred prior to the birth of my daughter. (I know. It came as a surprise to me too. Hasn’t she always been here?) So, I thought it might be fun to share with you some vignettes from that other, foggy part of my distant past so that you can get to know that part of me too. I don’t know how regular a series it will be, but whenever I think of them I’ll share. I’m beginning in roughly reverse chronological order, mostly because that’s all I can remember.

I.
I started a long term sub job when I was already 10 weeks pregnant. By the end of my 3rd week of teaching, one of the senior girls asked her teacher-mom if I was pregnant.

“Why would you say that?” asked the mom, genuinely confused because I certainly wasn’t showing.

“Because she’s wearing those elastic pants, and her boobs are huge.”

Oh. Well then.

II.
My last year teaching full time, I told my freshmen that my two biggest pet peeves are when people use “literally” and “ironically” incorrectly. For the rest of the year, every single thing I said to them was “literally ironic.” Well done, freshmen. Well done.

III.
I advised the Honor Society. My seniors were sitting around one day talking about torturing their calculus teacher.

“Guys,” I said, “that’s just not okay. You need to learn how to behave like adults. I mean, there are people I don’t like, but I act professional about it.”

“Wait,” they said, “there are people you don’t like??”


IV.
When my husband was writing his dissertation, I proofread it practically constantly. I read the dense engineering text probably 100 times. As such, in his acknowledgements, he thanked me for my careful proofreading.

Except, technically it said “I would like to thank to thank my wife for her endless hours of proofreading.” Oops.