march madness: or, why newly pregnant infertile women should not watch the NCAA tournament.

It's ALL about basketball at our house. My husband is a huge college basketball fan, so these few weeks in March are his idea of paradise. Fortunately, I enjoy basketball too, which is good, because otherwise this would be a very long month for me.

At this point, our various just-for-fun brackets are in shambles (thanks, Kansas) and we've only got one local team left to cheer for, but you can be sure that any game available will be on our television, whether we really care about the team or not. It's not a bad distraction for me. My day is largely spent either a.) feeling nauseous or b.) being hungry, which means I will be nauseous momentarily, interrupted only slightly by c.) realizing I am not nauseous at the moment, which makes me happy until I panic that it means I have had a miscarriage in the last twenty minutes.

And this is where basketball is doing me no good.

Because here's the thing about basketball: it ain't over till it's over, as they say. You can almost never count on a win until the last buzzer sounds; and this is so often true that even a 20-point lead with 2 minutes to go is hard to trust. My home team won yesterday by a handy amount. It really wasn't much of a close game after the first ten minutes. But because we were the underdogs, I could not bring myself to accept the win until it was completely done. Hell, we were up by 25 points at one stage of the game, with not nearly enough time left to lose the lead, and I still couldn't believe it was happening.

Not coincidentally, this is exactly (so far) how I am spending this pregnancy. I know the statistics: I know that seeing a heartbeat, as we have, greatly increases our chances of a successful outcome. We're ahead of the game. If the fat lady is not singing, she's warming up.

But she has to warm up for another seven damn months, and this is my problem. Plus, I watched Parenthood the other day (the movie, not the show; love the movie, am afraid the show will ruin it), and I could have cried when Jason Robards, in the midst of trying to decide what to do about his gambling, lying son, says, "you never cross the finish line. You never dunk the ball. It isn't over when they're eighteen, or twenty-eight, or forty. It's never over. You're never done."

Dude, that was profoundly unhelpful for me.

So I have changed the channel to the latest rerun of a Harr.y P.otter movie. And I am watching a lot of Ho.use Hun.ters. Sometimes denial is the best way to go.

Also, I cannot eat enough hot dogs. This is disgusting to me. However, it might work out well once baseball season starts. Now that's a game for a pregnant woman: it crawls by with interminable slowness, you can eat the whole time, and it's all about coming home so you can go back to the dugout and sit down. I'll be pregnant (she says, with crazed confidence) during the whole of baseball season, after all. Should be good.