surprise !

I got a positive pregnancy test on the eve of Mother’s Day.

The “Covid Years” have felt like everyone has been waiting for the right time to scream. So I did.

The intent was for Scott to get his vasectomy in March. A birthday present to us both. But it got rescheduled the day before; pushed back a month. Then we went to Mexico for spring break. The kids barfed, we slept with spiders and I felt convinced we had enough on our plates. But intent alone is not a protector.

If my other pregnancies were like two years, the first few weeks of this one felt like a lifetime- but someone else’s. I was scooped out; hollow, from feeling so much. I went through the grief cycle: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally: acceptance. I felt at mercy to the darkness inside of me. Ironically, I’ve been through this before when I’ve had miscarriages.

Everything was raging in America between pro-choice and pro-life. Laws, morals and whose body was whose. I’ve been pro-choice through my adult life, but I’ve never been in the position where I actually had to choose. I grew up Catholic. I bought into the school assembly on “waiting” (I was never ready, anyways). And yet, here I found myself wondering who was going to live: me or her? It didn’t feel like it could be both.

I made the decision to keep going with the pregnancy after calling Planned Parenthood. It was because I had both choices that I could see what was right for us. I wouldn’t have kept this baby if I didn’t know, deep (deep) down that I could do it. That in every version of my life, there would be things I didn’t plan.

I think about what I have to carry now. Not only physically a baby, but a child, an adolescent and eventually an adult. Four of them. I think about my friend and how she had five miscarriages. How she has one beautiful boy. I think about how, in the end, we both got something other than what we expected and how we both found peace. I think about what Kate Baer told me: “Peace doesn’t mean it’s easy”.