On The Way

Posted July 7th, 2006 by Sean Williams

Late last night, five minutes after I thought Jordana had gone to sleep, she said, in a quiet voice “I think I might have felt something.” People have described it as popcorn popping, or a butterfly fluttering in your stomach, but the hardest part is that first time pregnancies have, as part of the process, feelings you’ve never felt before. If we do this again, and I hope we do, she’ll recognize better when the first time is, but last night very well may have been the quickening.

This is the most recent scan we have of what we are calling Esteban House MD Williams, or rather “BABY” which is what I shout into Jordana’s stomach. In the last week, Jordana has gone from looking cute and a little fat to looking adorable and actually pregnant. It’s almost like the bump moved up her body to locate on her actual stomach.

I know that this is supposed to be terrifying. Ian actually said to me, when Tessa was pregnant, that they were both approaching the whole thing with a healthy dose of ambiguity. I am incapable of such maturity. After Jordana said she might have felt the baby, I woke her up an hour and half later to ask her if she felt it again. She said “I don’t even *know* these people” and went back to sleep. Or rather, continued to sleep.

There was a surprise party and a pregnancy, neither of which I could discuss, and now that I can talk about both, I find I have little to say. Jordana had a horrible, horrible cold, made worse by the fact that she could take nothing to help with the symptoms, and for a while it was impossible to distinguish between nausea brought on by hormones and nausea brought on by post-nasal drip.

People are suggesting I take this time to get out and have some fun, but instead we’re taking this time to be deliberate and calm. I might be wrong, it could be that the day will present itself when I’ll need to get the fuck out and drink some scotch, but the great thing is that Jordana will probably try to make that possible if I need it. In 1998, I was trying to get Ian to come out drinking with us and he said, “I’m not going out. There’s nothing to celebrate.” and he was right. So, I figure I did a lot of celebrating then, now is the time I get to make the thing I’ve already celebrated. A cart in front of a horse is still a cart and a horse.

The strangest thing is that this latest step from the liminal to the actual coincides with auditions for Air Guitar. We’re currently cautiously optimistic about everything, the script, the music, the musicians, the director, the staff. Everything seems great now, and if we weren’t many-times-over burned we’d be jumping up and down crowing to the moon about how everything is awesome and seems to be falling in to place.

I’m personally excited about the music and the musicians. These are a group of guys that I would never get the chance to work with under normal circumstances. I don’t know yet if we have a mutual admiration society, an African King meeting a Hungarian Prince and marvelling at the differences culturally but still respecting the titles, or if we will have a hard time finding common ground. They are METAL and I am THEATER and the two don’t really meet. But if they did…

I also feel like we have options for almost every role at this point, just from the first day of auditions. Tonight we’re bringing in the guys who could play “Drew” the character that everyone will misunderstand as being “Sean”. What is strange, and in a way awful, is that this is basically a play that features, at its center, what a relationship would be like if one of my siblings was married to a person with the personality of another one of my siblings. I’m not saying who, but one of the characters is a hard-nosed workaholic who used to be a performer but now runs a non-profit, and the other one is a charming grouch who tackles his problems with a healthy dose of ambiguity.

In any case, Jordana’s pregnant, the baby looks like it has really long legs, so that’s a good start, and we both think it’s a boy, although we’ve still got no idea. We think it’ll be great, but we’re cautiously optimistic at this point.