Falling in Love: The Back-Story, Part 2

(Didn’t catch what happened first? Read  Falling in Love: The Back-Story Part 1 .)

This is the second part of  the  ‘falling in love, the back-story’ series, but it’s actually the first part of my own single mom story: It’s about when I first found out I was pregnant; dealing with that feeling of absolute fear and then being given hope through a prayer that hindsight reveals was the beginning of a new destiny…

He was the second person to know I was pregnant. His wife was the first.

I was living in Southern California at the time, having moved there after graduation. So Cal life was glamorous but not satisfying. I couldn’t wait to return to New Mexico. When the opportunity came up to attend a week long photography workshop in Santa Fe, I jumped at it, but the increasing awareness of what was going on in my body would make it very difficult to concentrate–or care much about– f-stops and apertures.

I had been sick for a few weeks before the trip, but it was a dream that gave me the inkling  that I may be pregnant. I had no family and no real friends in Ventura, and I was too scared to take a pregnancy test alone. So, I waited.

I told my best friend Margarete (Benson’s, a.k.a. Man in Kentucky’s, then wife) on the phone I thought I might be pregnant, but I needed her to be with me to find out for sure.

She picked me up in Albuquerque. I was so relieved to see her.  We drove immediately to a Walgreens.

I couldn’t believe I was standing in that aisle, deciding not on a box of tampons, but  on which pregnancy test to buy.

You see them all the time, right smack in between the condoms and the Tampax, but you never think what it’s going to feel like to be standing square before them.  Too many choices available.  It pissed me off to have to worry over a brand decision at a time like this.

I chose the test with the little screen that showed  “pregnant” or “not pregnant”. Who can bother with deciphering signs, even one as simple as a + or a -?  I couldn’t; I needed the destiny that had already begun to take shape within me to be literally spelled out.

I didn’t take the test in the Wallgreens bathroom. I could have, but I didn’t.

Both Margarete and I felt that if the intuition I feared was going to be validated, this child’s spirit within me deserved a classier reveal  than a drugstore. We drove to an REI. (Which, if any of you know Man in Kentucky, you know it’s his favorite store. Prophetic? Perhaps.  Just last Christmas I watched my son and my Man tromp hand in hand through an REI in Portland,  happy as could be, mysteriously looking like father and son).

The bathroom stall was nice, very clean. I was pleased with myself for choosing to come here. Before I had even opened the plastic wand to pee on,  I thought, proudly, Look! You are already making good mommy decisions for your unborn child.

Heart in mouth, I peed on the Wand of Destiny and then placed it on the toilet paper dispenser and waited.

I didn’t wait long. The confidence in my capacity for motherhood quickly left me when, 5 seconds later, the digital screen revealed:

p r e g n a n t

Margerete and I stood stunned, in part for how fast and without fanfare the big reveal happened. No shaking the pee-stick, no turning it upside down like an 8 Ball and resetting the answer. It was absolutely clear; not a shadow of doubt could be interpreted on its part.

We walked out of the restrooms, past the drinking fountains and the hanging sleeping bags and tents, and b-lined it out the door, avoiding all eye contact.

I felt like a high school girl who had just done something shameful; a little girl who had just been given a time bomb to hide beneath her belly-bopper tee.

I was 26, a full-grown woman,  but when you aren’t prepared or expecting to become a mom, and you learn that you are, you feel like you are 15, and on your way to half-way house.

Once we were safe inside her car, I began to cry. We cried together, and her tears showed alliance, and genuine concern. She was my best-friend, and I was so grateful to be in her car, to be in her care. Still, I cried hysterically, asking her, asking God, asking myself, what the hell I was going to do.

When the enormity of becoming a mother first hits you, you better have a brace.  And if that event is combined with the knowledge that motherhood would be single motherhood, the brace better be a damn good one, one from God.

We eventually left the parking lot of the REI and drove back to her home in Santa Fe. Benson, her then-husband, my now-fiance, was there waiting for us. He knew the news, she had called him and told him what was going on, to explain why we were so late.  Being the husband of my best friend, he was like a brother to me, and already loved me unconditionally. I didn’t need to hide the unwed mom-to-be status from him, no judgment would be passed.

Arriving there, exhausted by the weight of  soul-crushing self-doubt and worry, all I wanted to do was sleep. Safe inside their small adobe house, they gave me their bed to curl up in, and I rested as they made dinner.

Lost in the unreality of becoming a mother, blinded selfishly by my own  hardship, I had no idea they were going through their own. It would be months later, after I had moved home to family in Oregon and Lucca had been born, that I would find out they were separated and she had filed for divorce. She was my best friend, but there was a lot she didn’t share with me, and eventually she cut all ties with almost everyone in her life, including Benson, including me.

That day, though, Margarete and Benson were united, at least for me. They were  there for me as the dearest friends I had, caring for me as the only two souls in the world that knew I was pregnant.

It was Benson that gave me my first glimpse of hope at the life ahead of me. He told me I was going to be a great mom and he gave me his bible to read, opened up to a chapter that, unbeknown to me, was  giving him a great deal of courage to get through his own hard time.

Reading the passage about strength and faith, perseverance and redemption, I was flooded with a peace that I hadn’t felt before.

At that moment, I didn’t know how it was all  going to work out, but I knew that it was.

When Benson came into the room and gave me his bible, guiding me back to a remembrance of faith, I had no idea just how significant this act or this man would become in my life.

When he asked if he could pray for me and in  his prayers he asked God to give me a good man who was deserving to be both a husband and father, neither of us could have possibly known that man would in fact turn out to be him…But, three years later here we are, and there is a loud and clear response to that prayers unfolding everyday.

Just when you think all hope is lost, it is not. I couldn’t have known it then, but up ahead in my life was a tremendous amount of love, not just for me, but for my son.

Much has happened between now and that beautiful, foreshadowing moment Benson gave me and my unborn son. It’s all part of our love story… and the story will continue.

(Don’t know what’s going on? Read  Falling in Love: The Backstory Part 1 here.)