until there was you.

Kid A’s seven in a few days, and he was born before I was doing this blogging thing. Here, anyway. So. For posterity, or something.

This is how it went. I was 28, miserable in my job, very recently single. And then I was 28, pregnant, and unemployed. My life was everything I never expected it to be.

I looked at all the angles. I didn’t sleep. I told pretty much no one.

I sat in the parking lot of a women’s clinic for two hours one mild May day, stared at the entrance and cried, deep, hiccupping sobs as my fingers clenched and unclenched on the door handle. I gave up, eventually, and drove away. I looked at my dwindling back account, empty of any real cushion like all the financial planners tell you should have because hey, I was bright and ambitious and successful and never, ever going to be stuck unexpectedly without a job, right? Hah.

I feverishly applied for jobs everywhere, anywhere. I had a couple months grace period on my insurance. I had a stomach that was going to start expanding at any moment and legal or not, every day made finding something permanent more difficult. I realized I’d made up my mind. I told my parents then. My dad was great that night, hugged me and told me everything would be okay and I thought maybe it would except that he barely spoke to me for the next six months. My mom was my mom, always there to hold my hand.

No job, no real prospects, enough money for one month’s more rent and I will never forget sitting on the stoop of the apartment I had in Madison watching a storm roll in. It started to rain and I stared up into it, hands over a belly that wasn’t yet swelling, and asked what it was I was supposed to do. I asked for help, screamed back at the thunder and the pouring rain, angry and scared and just done.

A few days later, I had a temp job offer that ended up being permanent in less than a month. I paid off the rest of my lease with my first paycheck and moved home.

I don’t ever remember not being scared. But I would lay there in bed at night and whisper to the creature starting to move under my fingertips, that alien bump, that everything was going to be okay. That I could make it so by force of will alone.

I had preeclampsia, with Kid A, terrible horrible swelling and headaches and a couple of bouts of bed rest and I was terrified that I was going to lose my job, one way or the other, but to their credit they stuck with me. I was just barely 38 weeks when I was induced. It was just my mom and me in the delivery room. Just her, holding my hand and feeding me ice chips. My sister and I were both c-sections – she’d never been through a natural birth and when A finally arrived it was she that cut the cord.

He looked at me with those big dark eyes and nestled in like he’s always belonged there and my heart broke all over again and healed in the next instant. My mom went home that night and it was just he and I, lonely and terrifying and I will never forget the kindness of the nurse who came in and sat with me, spent time teaching me how to nurse, encouraging me when I was uncertain.

I’d been Strep B positive so we had to stay in the hospital longer than I otherwise would have as a precaution and there were no visitors, for Kid A and I. And it sucked, but it was also perfect, in its own way, the two of us curled up together in the hospital bed and he watched me while I talked, those eyes following me even though everyone tells you they don’t really see all that well that young. And when we left, to return to my parents’ home, my father took one look at him and no matter how difficult everything was between us he’d found his new best friend and to this day they are so special to one another and I am grateful for that, too.

Everything changed, with him. All my dreams, all my ambitions, the person that I thought I was. And there have been so many moments, between then and now, that I think about all those little choices that led up to him becoming the center of who I am, and whatever I let go to become his mother pales in comparison to who I am when he looks at me.

In a few days he will be seven, and this is the story of his birth. It is also the story of mine.