The ultrasound photo that inspired the nickname Baby Watermelon Head.

I made sure my phone’s ringer was on, turned the volume up and checked my service bars. Then I opened and shut my email. Three times.

Finally, the phone rang. I jumped.

Dr. C, my OB-GYN, was calling to tell me whether my pregnancy hormones were rising, which would mean the embryo growing inside me might stand a chance at surviving. Otherwise, it could be a sign that I was miscarrying.

Miscarriage happened to be something right in my wheelhouse. In the past two years, I had had four positive pregnancy tests, and still I didn’t have any children.

At my last doctor’s appointment, my pregnancy hormones had measured nearly 200. By the time of the call, the number should have doubled.

“Please let it be 400,” I repeated in my head, every muscle in my face tightening as Dr. C tortured me with pleasantries.

Then finally, he said the number: “432.”

My jaw muscles relaxed just a little bit.

Over the next week, the number continued to climb. After that, a smudge of cells appeared on the ultrasound screen, and a few days later, the rhythmic whoosh of a heartbeat filled the exam room. Soon two gummy bear arms waved to us from inside my uterus.

Still, I refused to celebrate.

After all, while I was growing up in 1990s suburban New Jersey, my mum, a transplant from the Motherland (Queens, New York), had a list of things she claimed us Jews don’t do: We don’t own power tools. We don’t drink milk with dinner. We definitely don’t have baby showers.

As a people who has had a number of things go wrong over the generations, this prohibition against baby showers felt prudent. Our misfortunes had taught us an important lesson: never celebrate an event before it’s happened. It’s begging the universe for something horrible to ensue.

This understanding that the evil spirits were waiting to steal your joy went back generations. I knew it, my mum knew it, my Grandma Mutzie and my Grandma Fannie knew it, my Great-Grandma Dora knew it, and thousands of years of ancestors before them knew it too.

My husband, Andrew, also a Jew, had somehow escaped this shtetl superstition. So after a doctor’s appointment, Andrew gave the baby a name: Watermelon Head, for the giant striped noggin that appeared on the screen at our ultrasound. The name felt so playful, so cheery. I flinched every time he said it.

Then as my stomach started to grow rounder, I had to actually start telling people I was pregnant. I was sure that saying the words out loud would cause an on-the-spot miscarriage, but it didn’t, and Watermelon Head continued to grow.

Then one night, I was lounging on the couch with one hand resting on my rapidly expanding midsection when Andrew walked into the living room holding a whiteboard and grinning. On the board he had drawn a giant watermelon in pink and green marker, and in the neatest version of his scrawly handwriting was “Countdown: 147 days.”

My........

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