To this day, I know that I owe so much of my convictions about Mark to that moment. It was the first in a pair of aha moments that led us to where we are today. That confirmation that there was a reason we had our eyes on each other since we met. Since the day we met. God, I adore that man.
So we let it be for that night. We went to Gelson’s deli and bought some comfort food. Ate it all at his place, watching When Harry Met Sally. The good food and good girly movie wrapped their arms around me just like he did, keeping me safe and held for the night.
In the two weeks following, we talked. We talked and talked and thought and thought and when we couldn’t think of anything new to say or think, we ran through it all again. Countless times.
Now. This is a serious situation for anyone. An unplanned pregnancy, with a man you’ve only been dating for two months. When your immediate life plans are to move across the country. Regardless of how madly in love with him you are, this is a predicament to sort out. The lovely, delicate and fresh emotions and feelings of a long awaited new relationship that are being newly unwrapped and discovered have to be held up to the light so soon. Weighed and examined for their long term potentialities, compatibilities.
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And let’s pause for a moment to explain who I was. Well, who I (and am, and will be) is so much more than the things I am about to explain, obviously, but for the sake of story continuity, and to illustrate the dramatic 360 the direction of my life was facing, “Who I was”:
I worked four days a week, Thursday-Sunday, as a massage therapist (which I still do) and a waitress at a gloriously sexy place called the Blue Agave. My shifts ended at 2am, but my nights often ended well past that and there several nights where the sunrise served as a gentle reminder that I did need to sleep at some point. My schedule had been carefully crafted over the past 2-3 years until I had arrived where I was. Few shifts, on a few optimal income days in two fun and contrasting jobs, which provided so much flexibility for living life outside of work.
I was learning, practicing and sometimes teaching ballroom dancing 2-5 hours a day. Just for fun, just because I loved it, just because I could.
I was, as I said, quickly falling in love, but trying to drink it all in slowly. Before Mark I had been a chronic relationship-avoider. My last relationship a year before him and lasting two months, and my longest being a year and a half, taking place 8 years earlier!
I had always proclaimed myself to selfish to have children. Unashamedly so. I was 25, living in the years that are ideal for unabashed self-discovery, reflection, experimentation and ah, the years of the readily disposable income. I had only just decided that yes… I did want to have kids, someday. ((Literally, the conclusion hit me on a trip to Italy four months prior. Fairly spontaneous travel being another thing my work schedule allowed me to do.))
Apparently, the universe took that inkling and ran full force with it. And my newly discovered inkling that kids might be nice, let me repeat, someday, again, being held up to the potentiality of nearly immediate parenthood.
I live in a world of polarized friends. I have a group of friends from Westmont, the small Santa Barbara christian college I went to, and groups of friends from my massage and restaurant/bar life. Let me tell you those are two vastly different minded groups of people. So this next statement is on a subject that’s touchy to some, cut and dry to others, but I had always been in full support of abortion. I had close friends who had unwittingly found themselves in a similar situation before and that’s the route they went. Quite rightly so for their circumstances and place in life. The women in my family had a history of much younger, inopportune pregnancies, and while I ADORED my nieces and nephew, and cringe to think that there was even a potential at their absence in my life… I always figured that if I found myself in a “delicate” situation in an disadvantageous time of my life… there was no question in my mind. I wouldn’t hesitate to pull the plug.
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So why was I hesitating?
That’s what I kept asking myself.
Why was the obvious answer… feeling less than obvious…
It was because of Mark. It was because of his instinctive response of support. It was because the fact that we had been dating for only two months was nearly immaterial in comparison to the way he had already etched out a permanent home inside my heart. In that short amount of time, his heart was transparent. His character was clear and I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now how it’s possible to have all these amazing and genuine, intelligent, contemplative, fun-loving, dedicated, quick to laugh, grounded, soul-touching qualities all wrapped up and packaged in such a gorgeous and true-hearted man. It continues to blow my mind every day.
So there we were. Wrestling with what we were feeling instinctively, versus what seemed from the outside to be an insufficient amount of time to enter this overwhelming stage of life together.
We probably thought more than we talked for the majority of that week. Although we kept touching base to ask each other various what if’s.
It was on a camping trip, in the San Padres National forest, that we finally each admitted to the other that we were leaning towards wanting to have this baby. Shyly, carefully… testing out the words as they left our mouths, lying on a pile of blankets outside by the firepit as the sky darkened. Words flowing more freely the more each of us talked.
No decision was made that night. But the atmosphere had been set. The confessions had left their protected houses inside us and we gave each other permission to consider. A future.
Conversations 