Let me tell you about the look on his face. Seated at his computer desk with his back to me, I contemplated the slope of his shoulders and the weight of the news I carried, literally. More than wand-thin plastic and the slimmest of fruit seeds, this was big news, belly-big, big as our little life increased by some mathematical factor he wouldn't have time to explain anymore to me.

So I said what I didn't think I'd be saying so soon after I kicked the habit, and let me tell you, the look on his face. Let me tell you about it.

"Really?"

My husband is a man of secret giddiness, but this expression had no secrets. Full and open as a book, no, a drawing of a book so fat-full of pages you could never close it again. He took me on his lap, he repeated himself. I repeated myself. Our grins fell together like lovers in bed when we kissed.

For less than a week we were having a baby. And then, all of a sudden, we weren't.

There wasn't any pain, only the heart-choking sobs that hiccuped out of me when I thought too hard about it, which I tried not to do. I reasoned crying and writing about it in private, and have resisted for months even talking about it with the few who knew by necessity of when I got the news, and how. All of my adult life I haven't wanted to talk about being a girl. The paranoia that accompanied any mention of my wedding when we were getting married carried over quite naturally into any mention of wanting to start a family, for fear of seeming like someone I wasn't, or worse, wanting to be someone who mightn't be respected. It doesn't make sense. Most things I think don't.

But this happened, and my heart is a telling heart, a showing heart, a sharing one. I wanted you to know.