My husband and I recently flew back to the East Coast for a wedding, and we stopped off at my parents' place to spend a day at the beach before heading off to the rehearsal dinner.
Delighted to find ourselves on the shores of the Long Island Sound without children to supervise, we basked in the simple joys of all this opportunity had to offer. We engaged in inappropriate cocktail consumption (or at least David, being the least pregnant of the two of us, did), we read multiple novel pages without interruption, and we reveled in the simple luxury of having to remove sand only from our own nether regions.
It was heavenly.
At some point I spotted the rafts that my siblings and I used to swim to as kids. They sit about 200 yards out in the water and, for reasons I still cannot really grasp or explain, they filled me with a sense of nostalgia. Before I knew it, I was on my feet attempting to convince my husband that we should make the swim ourselves.
David was rightfully dubious. But living as he does by the overarching life rule of, "Never disagree with the pregnant," he reluctantly opted to come along.
Off we swam. The water was lovely! The day was sublime! But we, unfortunately, were both semi-drunk (David), semi-large with child (Me) and pathetically out of shape (Both).
Two-thirds of the way out to the raft it began to occur to me that I might be in a bit of trouble. At fourteen-weeks pregnant and forty years of age, I was unable to remove myself from a chair without getting winded, so perhaps it should have occurred to me that taking on a multi-football-field-length swim was a POOR CHOICE.
I called towards my husband who was a few feet in front of me.
"Honey, I might need some help over here!"
Now, to be fair, I can't remember David's exact response to my cry of distress, but I think it would be accurate to sum it up thusly:
"Too [expletive deleted] bad lady! You made me to do this knowing full well I had a just ingested a large lunch and multiple Piña Coladas! And now I'm about to drown so keep it down over there, would ya?"
It was every man for himself out on the high seas.
Glancing back towards the disaffected looking 12-year-old lifeguard, I decided that my only choice was to power through. Flipping over onto my back, I feebly kicked my way towards the raft at a glacial pace. I arrived, climbed up and flopped down next to my prone husband, who was panting copiously and, no doubt, scanning the beach for potential divorce attorneys.
"Wow" he said after a few minutes, "We kind of got in over our heads there, didn't we?"
I smiled, thinking about it.
I thought of our house, which requires us to stretch each month to make mortgage payments, of the dozens of cross-country trips we've undertaken with babies in tow, and of the third child we are expecting in February that we can hardly afford and have no idea where to put in our four-room abode.
"Honey," I said, "Getting in over our heads is just how you and I roll."
David laughed and took my hand. We lay there for a while bobbing in the peaceful sea.
