In the Chair; Change, Change, Change

surprised doll — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Marcia Aldrich

A friend who I hadn’t seen in about a decade visited last weekend. Pat has been a Change Artist in her professional life, taking on and then shedding many careers, and now in her current job she gives workshops on Change Management, a subject she has mastered and I have flunked.

This week when I learned that two walnut trees, fixtures in my back yard, must be cut down because they’re touching wires, I almost cried. Over breakfast, she quoted Toffler from Future Shock: “The illiterate of the 21^st Century will not be those who cannot read or write. The illiterate of the 21^st Century will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” I nodded along—this assessment sounded like good advice for more than just professional development. But part of me resisted—I’m recalcitrant, someone who instinctually resists guidance and the newest packaged wisdom about what’s good for me. What did it mean to learn, unlearn, and relearn? I seem to be the sort of person who needs to learn again what I already know, not something new as in for the first time, as much as learning something again. Does that qualify as relearning?

I imagine you shaking your head as my friend Pat did and saying, that’s a sad thing. And you might be right, but our discussion made me think about a recent experience in which I needed to learn what I thought I knew.

•••

I had thought at this stage in my life when I’ve made such progress overcoming my unruly impulses that I would never have this experience again. At the very least, I’d make new mistakes, live through fresh disasters, but I wouldn’t repeat the old disasters like a pack donkey who takes one trail and one trail only even though it’s rocky as hell. The disaster I am referring to is none other than a train wreck of a haircut.

Early in life, they were engineered by my mother, and then later, they were self-inflicted and these are the worst kind—don’t you think?—the kind you can’t blame on anyone else but yourself. You can’t point the finger at your mother; you can only point the finger at yourself and wonder what came over you, what secret currents were fermenting in your little brain that erupted when you took your seat in some hairdresser’s chair and instructed them to do something radical to your hair. Perhaps you would dismiss changes in hair as style and not substance, but I would disagree. Hair matters; when a woman wants a change in her life, she often starts with her hair.

And so it was that I found myself in Sunshine’s chair in front of the big mirror that doesn’t reflect back to you who you’d like to be, but who you are. And yes, the woman who cuts my hair is named Sunshine. It isn’t her birth name. She gave herself that name when she came of age and was charting a very different course for her life than the one she had barely survived. She’s been cutting my hair for fifteen years. We’ve been adventurous, we’ve tried out some cuts and colors that weren’t as becoming as we had hoped; sometimes I’ve left feeling a tad deflated but mostly I’ve been struck that Sunshine saw just what I had been wanting to go forward. Until this last time, I’ve never gotten into my car and slumped over the steering wheel wondering if I could go on, wondering whether I had the will to turn the ignition on and ease my car back into the flow of traffic.

How was I going to return to work and face my coworkers and students who are gifted panelists on the runway of life’s mistakes? How, later in the evening, if I survived the afternoon, would I face my neighbors? I saw my day, post haircut, stretched out before me in one long extravaganza of shame.

Until that noon in Sunshine’s chair, I had medium length hair—a long, loose updated shag that tended towards the messy and wild. As a dedicated swimmer, I tend not to comb my hair after my swim and instead tousle it on the run. I don’t want to be one of those women who swim for thirty minutes and then spend sixty minutes fixing their hair and make-up before they emerge from the locker room. As Raymond Carver advised—get in and get out fast. Like him, I don’t like to linger or fuss. In the days running up to my appointment, my hair felt increasingly heavy. By the time the day arrived, the feeling of gravity was killing me.

When I plopped into the barbershop chair, its cracked leather cushion sighed. I found myself grabbing bunches of my hair and saying to Sunshine in a slightly accusatory manner, Look at this unruly mess! And indeed, when I pulled my hair this way and that, scrunching it up and away from my scalp, I did make a wild spectacle of myself. It is one thing to look stylishly disheveled and another to look like a banshee. I was trending towards the banshee. I had entered Studio 107 planning to ask for my usual, a trim. I wasn’t thinking, let’s do a radical, mind-blowing cut. I was going to make a modest proposal. What was unleashed when I settled into the chair? Little did I realize something larger was motivating my agitation and that I was pursuing my own winding path.

Here’s the thing about the relationship between hairdresser and hair possessor: the power between them is unequal. And the chair, even if you are sitting in it, belongs to the hairdresser. It is hers; she just allows you to sit in it temporarily. I know all this and usually I proceed with caution, if not trepidation. Yesterday, if I had paused and collected myself, I would have realized that my comments coupled with my gestures gave Sunshine a clear opening to interpret what she thought were my real desires. And that’s what she did. She believed my antics were saying I don’t just want my usual trim; I want you to hack the hair from my head like a mother fucker. And Sunshine, being the bold person that she is, did just that. It was quick and dirty and I hardly knew what happened. Did I mention that most of Sunshine’s skin, except for her face, is covered with a tattoo of many colors? Her hair is never the same color or style from appointment to appointment. It doesn’t resemble hair you see on the street or in the work place. It is elaborately constructed of a design that can’t be repeated. Therefore, I do not look to Sunshine for a restrained approach to hair.

Still the question remains—why didn’t I stop her? Having unleashed the fury in her, why didn’t I reach up and grab her arm, the one with the sensational scissors, or open my mouth and say, Wait! Why did I sit passively and mutely in the chair, chunks of my hair drifting down over my face and arms and floating onto the parquet floor? Did I want Sunshine to think I still had risky behavior running in my veins? Did I secretly want Sunshine to do what I lacked the nerve to do myself? Sometimes we forget and must be reminded of this fact: hairdressers are powerful. They are among the most powerful women in the world and other women live in fear of them and place their happiness in their hands. Yesterday I cared more about what Sunshine thought of me than I cared about my hair. A challenge had been laid down, and I’d better see it through.

When the hacking was over, we both looked in the mirror at my head. It was something to behold. Even Sunshine seemed taken aback by her handiwork. My hair, what there was of it, was now remarkably close to my very angular head, and it seemed at cross purposes, some sections twisting up, some twisting down. It made a statement that I was a woman who wasn’t afraid to have my face come before others directly with little formulation, like a short poem without any adornment. At the time I didn’t know whether I wanted to make that statement or not. It seemed not. Weakly she pronounced it a success: “I like it,” she said. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

Back in the car, after I managed to lift my head off the steering wheel, I thought about wigs. I wanted one. But then it didn’t seem like me to cover up my mistakes. Following up a mistake with another mistake was not a good practice. Better to live with the results—isn’t that what I had learned from past mistakes?

I got through the afternoon’s work related events without comment and that was a bad sign. I obviously had something radical done to my hair and if it had turned out well, people would have mentioned it, wouldn’t they? I had two meetings with female graduate students and I did not attend to what they were saying because I was so preoccupied by their not saying anything about my hair. I was sure they were thinking, who does she think she is? Jean Seberg in Breathless or Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby? Though both these students were too young to know that Jean Seberg in Breathless was iconic of a certain kind of female waif popular during my era—the role Michelle Williams is now playing. When I was in high school I wore my hair as short as Mia Farrow. These were the days of a female counter-revolution in style when Twiggy and Mia and Jean were all the rage and symbolized a breezy and sexy independence with their boy cuts. Like them, back then, I was a stem of a girl with long legs and long neck, and the short hair worked. Now it would appear that I needed reminding Jean Seberg is dead and we study Breathless in film classes. Even Mia Farrow and Twiggy are no longer waif-like and neither keep their hair short, and if they did, we’d think they were foolishly reclaiming their long gone youth. We’d only be reminded of what they once were and aren’t now. But here I am with my cropped hair.

I slunk out of the Wanderer’s Tea House where I had met my students and felt myself lucky that I didn’t run into anyone I knew on my way to the car. But that evening on an unusually warm spring-like day, I knew that my neighbors would emerge from their winter lairs with their dogs and flock to the street. After dinner on the walk with the dogs, it was as I had feared—many neighbors were out and about. On the curve before our house, we ran into John Beck and the first words out of his mouth were, “I like what you’ve done to your hair.”

I almost blurted out—“You mean my removal of it?” Trying but failing to make light of my chagrin, I told him the sad saga of how I had made a mistake.

“Nonsense,” he said, “It makes you look perky.” Which he considered a good thing, something uttered to cheer me up. Unfortunately I could only think of the bitter irony that now after my mother had died and could no longer see me, I had finally realized her ideal vision of me. She had always wished for me to be bouncy and perky like a ball that you can throw against the wall and it comes back to you.

Before I could move on, another neighbor, Lyle, came by with his dog and again immediately launched into comments about my hair, as if there was no other subject. He really liked the change or alternatively he had quickly ascertained that I was feeling low about it and decided it was his job to buoy up my spirits.

Either way, it was interesting that two unaccompanied men sailed forth into the breach of my hair disaster with spirit and bravado. My own husband joined their ranks to form a trio of positive appraisal. I didn’t trust them one little bit. I thought the earlier female silence was much more likely to be an honest assessment. Still it gave me pause—they seemed unlikely cheerleaders. Or perhaps their cheerfulness reflects the relative lack of importance they place in hair. After all, my husband spends not one iota of his time thinking about his hair. And John Beck doesn’t have any. Only women can be counted on to understand the complications of hair, I thought.

A few days have passed since what I call the epic cut, and I’m coming to realize that the trio of men may have seen something I couldn’t. Maybe my new hair suits me or suits something I wanted but was struggling to articulate. Maybe this is what I wanted and it’s taken a few days to catch up with my hair as has so often been the case in the past. I’ve found to my surprise that I don’t shriek when I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I’m getting to like my new old self—she seems less armored, less covered, and reminds me that being alive is not a well-behaved kind of affair. When I run my fingers along the back of my neck I’m not entirely surprised to find that my hair is growing back just as Sunshine said it would.

•••

MARCIA ALDRICH is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton and part of the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Series. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in The Best American Essays. She has just completed a collection of essays, The Art of Being Born. Her website is marciaaldrich.com.

Inked

By Zsofi McMullin

I could sort of make out the outlines of the tattoo on my husband’s arm on the small photo on my phone. He took it in front of our bathroom mirror, holding up his right forearm in front of his face. I had to turn my head to the side to see that there were sun rays and a sword and a heart—some Masonic symbols that I don’t understand and perhaps I am not even allowed to understand. The tattoo stretched from wrist to elbow and wrapped all the way around his arm.

When we got married thirteen years ago, Drew did not have a single tattoo. I don’t think we ever talked about his desire to have one. Now he has four, with a fifth one in the plans. The first ones were modest, easily covered up by shirts and forgotten. I was away on a business trip this time and I knew that it was “tattoo day,” but the size and scope of this latest ink caught me off guard. I scanned myself for a reaction: how am I supposed to feel when my spouse turns from a baby-faced, soft-haired man into a bald, tattooed dude? I know how his mother feels about his tattoos and, when I think about my own sweet, soft-skinned baby boy getting inked when he is older, I completely sympathize with her. But Drew is not my child—he is my husband. So I should be supportive, right? I want to be—and I am—but I can’t help but stop for a moment to acknowledge the unease in the pit of my stomach. Is it the tattoo itself that makes me pause? Or the change that the tattoo signifies? Does it signify a change? How do I know?

•••

Drew and I met at work a year or two after graduating from college. We were in the same class and, in fact, he is in some of my graduation photos, sitting a couple of rows in front of me. But we never met while in school. When he got a job at the same newspaper where I was working, I was dating one of his good friends. When my heart was broken, Drew was right there, ready to comfort me with late night conversations and trips to the mall and movies. We spent long afternoons in his car, driving around rolling Pennsylvania hills and forgotten small towns. We ate bad food at bad chain restaurants and then over drinks we shared the contents of our wallets. His: foreign currency—just in case—cash, credit cards, EMT certification cards. Mine: Hungarian ID, cash, and a handwritten note from my college roommate: “The map is not the terrain.”

I don’t think it was love at first sight—we even joked about how we weren’t each other’s soul mates—but it was definitely comfort and friendship at first sight. I didn’t want any more friends with privileges or long-distance boyfriends who never called. I wanted someone who was there and who wanted me. Drew was—is—a grounding force: solid, steady, warm. He has a way of simplifying life down to its essential elements: “You love me, I love you. We are a family. What else do you need to know?”

We first kissed on a summer afternoon in my apartment. He brought in a bowl of apricots from the kitchen and told me to close my eyes. He split the fruit in half with his fingers and slowly fed one to me, wiping juice from my chin with his thumb. I heard the clink of his glasses as he put them on the table. The next bite was not an apricot.

We got married in Budapest the following January. We giggled through the ceremony and our vows, and the next morning in our honeymoon suite overlooking the Danube, we drank champagne for breakfast and watched as people on the street below us hurried to work. We felt content and close and didn’t take this whole marriage business too seriously.

•••

What do we promise when we say “I do?” Sure, we promise for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. But life rarely comes down to such stark choices, especially early in a marriage. We never really have to make a conscious choice to stay married when the other person is seriously sick. Or when money runs out. Extremes happen, sure, but rarely.

When they do happen, it’s obvious that it’s one of those big, life-defining moments where one’s job is to stand by and be supportive. Your husband calls to tell you that he is in the emergency room because he burnt off half his arm in a firefighting accident. His father has a brain tumor. His father dies. He gets the job. He doesn’t get the job. These are clear-cut cases. You know what to do about them. You know the right amount of alcohol to pour into your evening cocktails. You know that a rare steak and chocolate cake will bring comfort. You know what words will spur the other person to action or to a different way of looking at the situation. You know when to shut up. Or take your clothes off. Or just get lost for a couple of hours. You know that whatever the thing is, it will pass.

What nobody mentions before marriage is the vast gray area between rich and poor, sick and healthy. That there can be shifts and trembles and almost unnoticeable movements and changes in your life together. When your spouse is going through something personal, a little crisis or journey—one that you are not necessarily invited to. And that’s okay, because you do not want to be invited to everything, but still. This person lives with you and you’d like to know where he is going. Will the tattoos lead to a Harley? To a girlfriend? A sports car? Or are they just tattoos? Does he even know for sure?

Looking at the picture of his new ink, the skin around it still raw and red, made me think about my own scars—the ones on my belly from an exploding gallbladder, the ones around my breasts from my breast reduction surgery, and we are not even going to go into the scars and flab and rolls of fat left behind by pregnancy and childbirth. It’s easy to forget about those, and even easier to forget about the invisible scars left behind from what everyone goes through in life: becoming a mother, losing loved ones, trying to find satisfaction and fulfillment in a career, figuring out friendships, lost loves, family. It’s easy to not look at my own path, to just blindly go on, day-by-day, not glancing back at the big picture. It’s easy to not stop and consider how the shifts in my life made an impact on the person I promised constancy to. The heart and the dagger and the rays of sun on Drew’s arm made me look at all of that, and I realized that I am fooling myself if I think that he is living with the same woman that he married.

I also realized how it’s possible to know someone so well, and yet not at all. How everyone’s life is full of topsy-turvy roads and blind spots and how sometimes the person we think we know best is the one who will surprise us the most. Sometimes the person we love wants lots of tattoos.

•••

Our son is five and has a very vivid imagination and his pretend-play is very complex, detailed. He always wants us to play with him, but usually it’s hard to follow where he wants a particular scenario to go. He just wants us right there, sitting on the floor with him as he lines up his toy soldiers. I am really not playing with him; I just serve as the audience. He leans on me, touches my hair, or gives me a kiss between battles. He sits on my lap for a while, then just holds on to me with one hand while he rattles on and on. It’s obvious that he has a clear picture in his mind about where things are going, who will win the battle, who will capture the castle.

That’s how I’ve been thinking about our marriage lately. Our careers have taken off. We are out of the trenches—or in-between trenches—when it comes to parenting. We have a comfortable life. There are no life of death decisions immediately in our future—hopefully. But on any given day, I remind myself, one of us is on the floor, lining up soldiers. We are off, battle plans in our heads, fighting on, figuring out the next steps. All that we can do for each other is ask questions, listen, and sit there, in case the other one needs a soft, comforting embrace, a hand to hold.

•••

Even before his latest tattoo, Drew’s been gently teasing me about getting one too over a small scar on my right shoulder. The scar has mysterious origins—for a long time I thought that it was from a childhood immunization, but my mother told me that happened on my other arm. It looks like a pink bite mark—two distinct, uneven spheres right next to each other. I know exactly what my tattoo would be: a pink peony, the flower that bloomed every spring in front of our summer cabin when I was a child. They somehow became “my” peonies, and even after I moved far away from home, I would get timely reports from my grandparents and parents about the size of their early buds, their expected bloom date, their dark pink color, their fragrance filling up the garden.

So I would have this pink peony over my scar on my shoulder. I think about it every now and then, talk to Drew about it, but deep down I know that I am never going to do it. Whatever Drew is expressing through the pictures on his body is his alone and I know that eventually we’ll both understand their meaning in his life—what they are covering up, what they are exposing. I help him apply lotion on his arm in the evenings and make sure that he can be free to go for his next appointment with the tattoo artist to finish the work. That is all I can do.

In return, I know he will tuck our son in bed and bring me tea—or wine, depending on the night—so that I can write these words, perched in bed, listening to the two of them laugh and read. I know that later he will come to bed, smooth his hands over the scar on my shoulder, over my breasts, belly. The skin on his forearm will be still rough under my fingers as it heals. We’ll hold on tight to each other so we can battle on. “I love you. You love me. What else do you need to know?”

•••

ZSOFI MCMULLIN is a writer with recent essays in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Role Reboot, and Kveller. She has a son, a husband, and, as of press time, still no tattoos. She blogs at http://zsofiwrites.com and she is on Twitter as @hunglishgirl. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People.

Fertilizer

pregnant — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Susan Rebecca White
(not pictured above)

Back when I was still shell-shocked from having separated from my husband of nearly seven years, when we still had a massive amount of financial untangling to do before we could truly own our own lives, when I was still kept awake at night by waves of panic about not having enough money to support myself, a friend told me, rather matter-of-factly, that I had a pile of shit in front of me that I had to eat. Not only that, but all I could use to do so was a tiny spoon. The good news, she said, was that one day I would reach the end of the pile, and then much lovelier things would be placed before me.

Her prediction turned out to be correct. I met Sam just as my divorce finalized. I like to say that he was my prize at the end of all of that shit, like the toy buried at the bottom of a box of Cracker Jacks—except of course, that’s not fair to the Cracker Jacks or to Sam.

When Sam and I first started dating, I was subletting a small carriage house in my native Atlanta. The carriage house was built in the 1920s, had hardwood floors and French doors, and the walls were painted a cheerful yellow. Sam lived about a mile away, and since we both worked from home, sometimes I would fix pimento cheese sandwiches and invite him over for lunch. He would bring sweet tea. After we ate, we would take a walk around the neighborhood before we both returned to the more practical details of our day. One sunny spring afternoon, after our walk, Sam and I tumbled into bed—work be damned.

We were thirty-six and forty-one years old, and we were in bed together on a Wednesday afternoon, sunlight streaming through the blinds and making stripes on the quilt. It was hard not to feel as if we were getting away with something. This was not what most of my friends—in the middle of marriages, careers, and parenthood—were doing. Yet Sam and I were not cheating on anyone, were not making up excuses to our bosses, were not neglecting our children. Both divorced without kids—his divorce more graceful than mine—we had each eaten our fair share of shit to get to where we were, in the giddy stages of early love. It was heaven.

After dating for nearly a year, Sam and I took a trip to Panama, snorkeled over undulating jellyfish, kayaked in the middle of the blue, blue ocean, gripped each other’s hand as our cab driver weaved recklessly in and out of Panama City traffic. Back in Atlanta we celebrated our one-year anniversary by having spaetzle at the same Alsatian restaurant where we had our first date, and it was there that Sam proposed.

By the time we married in a tiny ceremony in our home with a homemade cake and a bouquet picked from my friend’s garden, I was thirty-seven, Sam forty-two, and we wanted to have a child. Given our ages and our level of commitment to each other, it was tempting to start trying on our honeymoon, but I had a novel coming out the next month, and a tour to go on, and I didn’t want to be distracted by the “am I/ am I not” game one inevitably plays while trying to conceive. And so Sam and I waited until my book tour was over in July. At the end of that same month, seven days before my period was due, I took a pregnancy test and was rewarded with a faint blue plus sign.

I felt incredulous that this—pregnancy—was happening to me. I had always felt on the outside of things, a consummate observer. For a long time, this was my preferred mode of being—it gave me an illusion of control that I desperately needed. Agonizing over choices was infinitely preferable to actually making them. Which is why I spent much of my first marriage trying to figure out whether or not to have a child. It was far easier to wrestle with that question than to face the truth of my situation: that I was in a marriage that no amount of therapy would fix, and that I had willingly put myself into this untenable position in order to avoid fully committing to life, with all of its vulnerabilities and uncertainties.

I am now nearly nine months pregnant, my belly big and tight, my energy low, my body taking on a life of its own, and subsequently doing all sorts of embarrassing things. When I sneeze, I pee! When I walk ten feet, I get winded! If I don’t eat a bowl of prunes every morning, I’m constipated! Despite the all too earthy side effects, I love being pregnant, love that I get to experience the bizarre and amazing process of reproduction. I love feeling our son roll and kick inside me. The sheer physicality of the late stages of pregnancy makes what began as something abstract (revealed only by mild nausea and a plus sign on a pee stick) into something much more real. And the realness of the pregnancy has brought me closer to the astounding prospect that we will soon have an infant to care for. That once I deliver the baby he will be in our charge, and I will somehow learn to breastfeed, and get by on little sleep, and grow more patient as small tasks become mighty endeavors. Soon there will be a human manifestation of our love—living, crying, and pooping among us—and we will love him in a way we have never loved before and will consequently be more vulnerable than ever.

Still, I am not yet a mother. I am intellectually aware that a mighty and miraculous wrecking ball is about to smash up the life we know, but I do not understand this on an emotional level. How could I before our son arrives? And so I find myself suspended between the life I knew and the life I am entering, much as I was when I boarded the airplane that took me away from my first husband and our home together and into a future yet known.

This means I am acutely aware of what I am losing: right now Sam and I are still a two-person unit with a host of inside jokes and allusions. We are newlyweds and we are playful. Hopefully we will remain playful as parents, but there is a weight that will come with our new responsibility that we cannot ignore. Post-baby, we probably won’t spend many Sunday afternoons playing Ping-Pong at the local sandwich place. Most likely I won’t cook as elaborately as I do now. Cheese soufflé will no longer be on the rotating menu, nor will I make homemade soda syrups and granola bars. We will have to watch ourselves and not act horribly toward one another when sleep-deprived and overwhelmed with the stresses of new parenthood. Chances are, we will not always succeed at doing so, and our own warts and shortcomings will be more fully revealed.

We are trading one reality for a more intense, harder one—one that for us will be richer, and deeper as well—and we are both ready and excited for the change. And yet the other day, I found myself weeping over what we are losing, our sweet courtship of pimento cheese sandwiches and afternoons in bed. I found this unsettling: it felt like my old, non-committal self coming back into play, the woman terrified of getting herself into something she couldn’t get out of. My tears also felt disloyal toward my unborn son, whom I already love with a startling ferocity. But then I tried to be gentle with myself, the way a mother might be, to allow myself to be sad about the ending of this time when we know each other only as a couple, this time of burgeoning love among people who are not new to life, who weathered some hard things before meeting (and who will surely continue to weather hard things as life goes on). I imagine that twenty years from now, I will think of our early, heady days as a couple with sweet nostalgia. And probably also with a touch of condescension, as in: We thought we were close back then, but look at what we’ve been through now, look at how the roots of our lives have entwined.

It seems that in life there is no gain that comes without loss. Surely one day I will think back on our son’s infanthood with nostalgia, as well as his days as a young child, a boy, and then a young man. To live fully is to commit to things we are terrified to lose, all while knowing loss will come. It occurs to me that life is a series of deaths we must endure, and even somehow embrace, in order to let new life in. Maybe the same is true of our corporeal death, when our bodies will grow cold and lifeless. Maybe instead of fearing that day, I will try to take comfort in the model life has presented so far: New life sprouts in the spaces made by the losses we learn to endure.

•••

SUSAN REBECCA WHITE is the author of three novels: A Place at the Table, A Soft Place to Land, and Bound South. A Place at the Table was recently released in paperback. It is a Target “club pick” and a finalist for the Townsend Prize, Georgia’s oldest literary award. White has also published several essays in places such as Salon, Tin House, The Huffington Post and The Bitter Southerner. She lives in Atlanta with her husband Sam Reid and their (very) soon-to-be-born son.