From the Beginning

Now, it probably wouldn't be fair to start my blog without starting from the very beginning. I was at work, working in a three-year-old classroom in a preschool up in Charleston, SC. A coworker stopped me on the playground and quietly asked me if I was expecting. Oh hell no. This bitch is calling me fat. No I'm not pregnant thanks for ruining my day. Well, after work that day we had a training class so instead of driving home and back before the class I went and got a margarita from a Chilis close by my work. But on my drive home from work, at about 9 PM, I was thinking, well shoot, maybe I should take a pregnancy test, I knew, I was 100% sure, I wasn't pregnant but I'll just double check. You might ask, why was I so sure I wasn't pregnant. Well, I had a surgery when I was 14 which left me with only one very scarred up fallopian tube, which doctors claimed probably would not work. They told me I would have to do invitro and all that if I ever wanted kids. And also I was on birth control (since without birth control I was having a period every two weeks - no thank you). So I get home and go to the bathroom and take a pregnancy test (I kept them around the house because I only got periods every few months on the birth control I was on and, you know, even with doctors telling me I can't get pregnant I was still paranoid about it). Now, at this point in the blog most moms might be like, "When I saw the test was positive and I was pregnant, I was so happy, it was a miracle!" Welllll, it didn't quite go like that for me. I was an unmarried, 23 year-old working a low paying job, living with my boyfriend in a crappy apartment in a city where we didn't know anybody (we moved there for his job after he graduated college). I fell to the ground and began to cry. My first thought was not to tell my boyfriend and just break-up with him, move away, change my name so he couldn't find me, so that it wouldn't ruin his life as well as mine. I knew I couldn't give it up for adoption, I knew I wouldn't be strong enough to do that. I knew I couldn't have an abortion, I couldn't live with myself if I killed my baby.

All this is going through my head as I'm sitting on the bathroom floor bawling. Cade (my hunky boyfriend of 3 years at the time) starts banging on the door telling me to open up. I unlocked the door and he stood over me asking what was wrong. It was all I could do to point at the pregnancy test sitting on the bathroom sink. He tried to calm me down and tell me it couldn't be right, it had to be a faulty test, I couldn't get pregnant. So I took another one a little while later. Positive again. We couldn't believe it. I knew he was mad. He was trying to be calm but he was mad.

The next day on my lunch break I went to the clinic by my work to get a real pregnancy test done. Cade waited outside in his car. He couldn't bear to go inside. Well it was positive, obviously. I went outside, after crying my eyes out yet again in the doctors office and told Cade. We both left and went back to work, calling our parents and telling them on the way. I went back later that day, after work and had an ultrasound done to see how far along I was. I was already 16 weeks! Into the second trimester and I didn't even know it. I really though my parents would be mad, that his parents would be even more mad. But nobody was mad. They all thought it was a miracle. Cade was mad, all he kept saying was how could I not know for 16 weeks. Eventually he stopped being mad and embraced being a father but those first few weeks were awful for us both. Neither one of us was ready for a kid. It seemed impossible that I was even pregnant. But we were going to stick together and do the best we could.