I Forgot About Conner.

Yesterday I finally used a gift certificate for a mani/pedi I'd been sitting on-- I've been stockpiling cuticle for about seven months and I figured it'd be an easy way to lose a quarter-pound before the holiday push. So I'm sitting there in the chair, apologizing about the hangnail situation and lamenting Christmas preparation when the manicurist looked me dead in the eye and asked, "Do you have kids?"

And without so much as a rogue blink I answered, "Yes."

"Oh, well, you have to pull out all the Christmas stops, then."

This was strange for two reasons:

1) I do not, in point of fact, have any children.

2) I do, in other point of other fact, have the maternal instinct of a twenty-two year old frat boy. Seriously. A friend told me she was pregnant last week and my gut impulse was to put an arm around her shoulders and ask if she needed a ride home from the clinic. And it's not that I don't like children, it's just that my uterus is a barren minefield full of quicksand and lice. That's all.

And yet I spent the subsequent few minutes sputtering painfully about my two kids, Matthew and Annie. Interesting to note that I used the names of Sean and Julia McNamara's kids on Nip/Tuck, and while I'm not exactly sure how that sordid detail breaks down, for the sake of argument let's go ahead and assume the absolute worst.

In the car on the way home I started thinking about how I'd answered the kid question in the affirmative almost without thinking, and I wondered whether my unconscious was trying to tell me that I wanted to have children of my own after all. Maybe my uterus was sweeping the broken glass shards under the mat; maybe my eggs were no longer gagged and duct taped in the ovary trunk but were hanging out in the tubes again.

When I got home I forced Randy through my suspicions. I mean, could it be that I really wanted a baby and just didn't know it?

"Naaaah, Sweetie," he admonished, trying to scarf down the last of the Crunch n' Munch before I could figure out the box was almost empty. "You're just a sociopathic liar."

I slapped myself in the forehead. "That makes so much sense!" I said. "For starters, it completely explains why I spoke with a French accent the whole time."

"And why you're wearing a S.W.A.T. Team uniform," he added stickily.

Get back in that trunk, you eggs.