I never wanted to be anything as much as I wanted to be a mother. From my earliest recollections, even before a four-year-old me was saddled with the responsibility of parenting an infant sibling, I suppose I just knew that motherhood was my niche.
When I went for my very first visit to the health department hoo-ha doctors at the age of fifteen, to get birth control, they told me I had endometriosis, and probably wouldn’t ever be able to conceive. If I did conceive, they said, I wouldn’t be very likely to be able to carry a baby to term. Thus began my self-destructive years. Alcohol, pills, more alcohol, and a miserable, damaging quest to find love, and a sense of worth (in other people’s eyes, if not my own) via sex. My life, for a while, ceased to mean anything at all.
The story of all those terrifying risks, the times I got lucky and the times I didn’t, is harrowing, in hindsight, but it’s not the tale I want to tell, today.
When I was twenty, living with my douchey, narcissistic, redneck boyfriend, in an olive green 1970-ish mobile home with brown shag carpet that had once belonged to my great grandparents, I discovered that I was pregnant. I was working at a newspaper, the next town over, with (probably baseless) aspirations towards becoming a reporter, instead of just working in the advertising department, floating happily in whatever area of my brain was responsible for delusions of… I don’t know… higher mediocrity?
I’d just gone for my first tattoo, three weeks before. A kneeling, blonde fairy, in an array of cool colors (and I had to explain the difference between cool colors and warm colors to the tattoo artist, who, presumably, thought I was speaking some Southern version of Valley girl), perched on my left breast. It was just completely healed.
I drove over the mountain to Asheville, on this sweltering Saturday in late July, to do some shopping in a store that wasn’t Wal-Mart. I was walking around some scratch-and-dent place, when I saw a box of tampons, and realized I should probably have needed some of those, a couple of weeks before. No big deal, really. My cycle was always really irregular, anyway. I went on about my shopping, wandering happily in and out of little consignment shops and head shops and bookstores, while the calculations were, apparently, still going on in my subconscious. I was standing on the sidewalk, organizing money and receipts in the various pouches and zippered pockets on my purse, when my subconscious came up with some startling numbers. I froze, there, for a moment, like some strange piece of modern art, a statement, perhaps, on the effects of hipster consumerism on the mental acuity of young adults. My jaw dropped, and I clumsily navigated my way to the nearest bench. I’d like to say that I sat down gracefully, collected myself quickly, and moved on. Considering the endless loop of excitement, terror, joy, anxiety, and denial, all wrapped up in a fragile lacework of hope, that was impossible. I wasn’t just a couple of days late. I was a couple of weeks late.
I dug, frantically through my oversized bag, to find my little planner, and my Marlboro lights. Had to dig a little harder for the lighter, and turn my back against the wind, to get a stable flame from my yellow bic, I smoked half of the cigarette, just sitting there on a bench, downtown. I looked up the red dots in my planner, connected by red lines.
I was three weeks and two days late.
I could barely breathe. I was so very excited, I couldn’t catch my breath.
When I did, I laughed out loud, there on that downtown bench, all by myself. I didn’t even think about how that may have looked to passers-by. I was on some other plane, where I couldn’t even see them, and couldn’t have cared any less what they might think of me.
I might be… *pregnant.*
But then, nah. I couldn’t be, right? I puffed rather furiously on my cigarette, soothed by the tobacco flavor, the familiar, habitual motions.
Then, I went to Wal-mart, after all.
I bought pregnancy tests. A two-pack. Don’t really know why I bought two, but it seemed like the thing to do, at the time.
I took the test next door, to an office supply store, and asked to use their bathroom (I suppose I was too embarrassed to pay for the thing in Wal-mart, then go immediately into their restroom). Where I peed on a stick. And waited. I’d never taken a pregnancy test, before. I looked at the two lines, and thought that the second one was supposed to get darker, if I was pregnant. It was very pale, and it didn’t get any darker or more visible, so I thought I wasn’t pregnant.
A week later, when I still hadn’t started, I decided to take the test again. I called my cousin, and asked her to come over, because I didn’t want to be alone when I found out, and my boyfriend, as usual, was gone. My impatience (and the juice, I suppose), got the better of me, and I was just drying my hands, little plastic stick sitting on the bathroom counter, when she came barreling through the back door. I looked at my watch.
Ninety seconds to go, I told her.
This time, the second line was quite obvious. I squealed. No. Seriously. Squealed. Like a ten year old girl at a Justin Bieber concert. We hugged, and hop-danced in a circle.
The douchey boyfriend was, predictably, much less excited. It didn’t matter. I was going to have a baby!
Momming along 