A Woman Knows

I’m pretty positive I’m not pregnant. The being hungry all the time thing passed—a momentary state of affairs perhaps born out of the fact that I generally don’t eat enough protein. Or vegetables. Or whole grains—whatever they are. (I like my bread the way I like my vodka-and-kahlua drinks and the way I like my wedding cake: white).

I’ve always figured that I’ll be the sort of woman who knows when she’s pregnant. How does she know? She just knows.

This is how I knew I’d broken my toe, how I knew each time I've had a UTI, how I knew it was the sausage in the spaghetti sauce that make me barf all night, not the zucchini.

Of course, sometimes I’m wrong.

Before Dr. Fiancé, there were any number of men I just knew I was going to marry—the Brazilian/Spanish geneticist, the Crow Indian poet, the guy from Idaho with whom I shared an amalgamated French-English language that his girlfriend could not understand, the creative writer I met on the first day of grad school who clarified to our peers that though I was in a relationship with a woman, I was definitely not a lesbian.

How did he know? He just knew.