this post is about pregnancy and includes brief mentions of theoretical abortion and pregnancy loss (spoilerrrr nothing bad happens). if itās hard for you to read about those topics, take care of yourself however you need <3
The story of our baby starts last fall.
Someone brought their chubby finger-sucking baby to the pumpkin carving contest. They carved two baby-thigh-sized holes in the pumpkin and plopped the baby inside. Among rows of intricately designed pumpkins, everyone jeered at the judges to give the baby first place.
We were in the backyard of a friendās family home, where inside, photo albums were stacked next to the couches, kid art on the fridge, evidence of generations in every corner. Alen and I had been dating for six months, we knew we were in love, we were figuring out what our future would be. We carved our warty jack-o-lantern with emoji heart eyes and took a selfie in twin pioneer caps we found in the house.
Iād sucked down a couple coffee mugs of whiskey and cider ladled from the stove and I leaned over to Alen in our double-wide camp chair and whispered Do you wanna hear something disgusting?
Yes of course he did.
If we got pregnant, obviously weād abortāobviously, he agreedābut I would consider keeping it for like two seconds because it would be ours.
He squeezed my hand in the dark. I think thatās so beautiful and hot, he said.
At the end of the night we belted our mottled heart-eyed pumpkin into the backseat and said TIME TO GO HOME, OUR HORRIBLE SON!
After the pumpkin carving contest, Alen and I kept joking about our beautiful kid, our horrible child, our non-binary terror. Where we once sent tiktoks back and forth saying āus,ā we started sending tiktoks back and forth saying āour kid.ā
Our kid, I found myself thinking when I saw babies strapped to their parentsā chests at the park. Our kid, squealing toddlers in restaurants. Our kid, paging through childhood photos of Alen dark-eyed in a tiny sport coat.
One Saturday in winter we split an order of flapjacks at the pancake house and later that morning, on my couch with him nearby, I finished reading a novel and found myself sobbing.
*
We could back up.
The story of my baby also starts much earlier, a decade ago, when I was married and turning 30 and asked for a baby in a marriage where it turned out there was no emotional room to talk about or compromise on a baby. I thought the story of my baby ended there, with shrugging resignation, harvesting what joy and fulfillment was left of my life.
As it turns out, life is very long.
*
When Alen asked what I was sad about as I cried on the couch, at first I held up the novel and said my book. I put my arms around his neck and my damp face into his green sweatshirt.
I was back in the scared small place of my past, afraid to ask for too much, afraid to be too much. Afraid to strangle the life out of a partnership that felt boundless.
But here was this person, asking to hear what I felt, wanting to know what I wanted.
So I quit saying I was sad about the book and squeaked out the word babies instead.
Iām afraid I may really want one, I may have said, or I feel like I want one, or Iāve been feeling like I actually want one and it freaks me out. All my joking had been circling a tender truth.
He held me and let me talk and cry and what he said back included the words joyfully and one hundred percent and beautiful awesome child.
Later that day I walked to Walgreens for ovulation tests, just in case, toying with the idea. On the way I passed a couple trampolines in front yards and I thought no trampolines for our kid. I picked up the box of tests and a ginger kombucha. The cashier mercifully made small talk about my drink.
*
On New Yearsā Eve I took a fraction of m*lly and accosted our male friends about what their INTENTIONS were for their girlfriends in the new year and told them I had a feeling some babies were going to be born into the group, as if I were Nostradamus instead of a little high and secretly trying to get pregnant myself.
Spring and the last months of my thirties passed, ovulation tests blinked smiley faces, pregnancy tests gave us nothing, no one was too surprised by much. At a smiley faceās insistence, we tried to get pregnant in a forest cabin over spring break even though Alen had a bad cold and could barely breathe. After that, we decided to stop paying so much attention. We cradled a stuffed daikon at a drunken game night and told all Alenās friends we loved the name Cigarette* Big Beef āN Cheddar for a girl. I read and reread this Atlantic article and pored over photos of pregnant ChloĆ« Sevigny. The end of Alenās lease crept up and he moved a few boxes every day, slept over every night.
*
The story of our baby starts in June. The girls and I went to Rose Bowl and ignored trivia night to chat for hours at our picnic table with an icy metal bucket of Lone Stars. Alen biked down to join us later, in the humid dark.
Around 9pm I flushed, felt hot and sick, for just a moment. The feeling washed over me fast, gone as soon as it arrived.
It was easy to explain awayāit was objectively hot, Iād had a couple beers, it was just time to go home and get in the a/c. My period was four days late, but that had happened uhh once before, so it technically wasnāt unprecedented. When I mentioned it all to Alen in the car he gasped and squeezed my leg. I waved him off, refusing to get too hopeful, nervous for it to be true, nervous for it to not be true.
*
The story of our baby starts the next day. Iād worked from my home office all day, trying not to obsess. But Joanna had invited me to go to Chicago after work to see Sarah Sherman and I wanted to know if I could drink at dinner, so before my shower, with the door closed, I dipped a digital test into a red Solo cup of my pee, the only test left from a three-pack.
Digital pregnancy tests are reassuring in their starknessāyes or noābut it turns out they make waiting feel like a year. No traveling pee line to watch, no developing red line(s) to squint at, just an indifferent clock icon š blinking š for š three minutes, an eternity, until they display a result.
Just confirming Iām not pregnant real quick, I told myself when the clock started blinking. Before the first minute was up, Iād let in the smallest light leak of hope that the test could be positive, and I had to sit down on the closed toilet.
The clock blinked for another year and I actually couldnāt watch it anymore, so I set it on the sink, at the edge of my peripheral vision.
As soon as I set it down, I saw the digital display change.
I donāt know what I perceived firstāthe YES, or the +, of the YES+.
After gaping at myself into the bathroom mirror for a few seconds, thinking THIS IS A MOMENT IN MY LIFE. A MOMENT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW, I chastely wrapped myself in a bath green towel and stumbled down the hallway to the kitchen. I was saying Alenās full name with at least ten question marks after it. He was roasting carrots and turned from the baking sheet, alarmed.
I held up the testāTHIS IS A MOMENT IN MY LIFE, as he registered it. He pulled me close and framed my face in his hands and kissed me, looked me in my wild eyes and said congratulations, every syllable resolute.
I was trembling all over, terrified to believe.
Iām turning 40 in two weeks, I could lose it, it could be ectopic, it might not even be real, I rambled, while still clutching an extremely real pregnancy test still extremely blazing YES+.
There are many things that could happen, Alen said, again every word balanced. Weāll get through them.
Back in the bathroom, while floating above my body but also somehow getting ready to see a comedy show???, Soak Up the Sun shuffled through my Bluetooth speaker.
Okay okay okay okay, I thought.
At some point in the 29 summers my brother was alive, he claimed that song as his anthem on family vacationākind of a joke, but belted with his whole chest, too earnest to fully be a joke.
Brandon was always trying to get me to loosen up, eat some shrooms, live a little. He would have loved Alenās irreverance and kindness. He would be so thrilled about the baby. I believe he is, somewhere.
IIIIIIIIIIāM! Sheryl sang, her forty-year-old voice ringing off the bathroom tile.
One simply had to laugh!
Iām pregnant, I thought, meeting my own eyes in the mirror.
*
ok EPILOGUE of sorts at 15 weeks:
Honestly I spent so much of the first trimester refusing to let mine or Alenās joy breathe, needing to control whatever I could. I felt queasy and exhausted and overwhelmed, I was reeling from shock even though weād hoped to get pregnant, I was scared to be pregnant and 40 and could only register the risks as pressure to succeed. I clung to the news and insisted we wait to share until some mythical moment when I could be sure all the danger had passed.
In huge letters, I wrote the date I thought the second trimester would start on a Post-It and stuck it to my computer monitor, and then during our first ultrasound they measured baby and told me I was actually 10 days further along than estimated, and so magically I was done with the first trimester, and my short-waisted belly said ope and started to grow, and all this plus the miracle of seeing our little baby moshing behind my bellybutton all made me a new(ish) woman. I gave my parents the ok to tell their friends, I texted my cousins, I posted the sonogram in Slack, I pull on my bestieās hand-me-down maternity clothes to leave the house.
I suspect pregnancy will keep activating my eldest-daughter need for control, but BLESS UP that our beautiful wondrous kid is actually not a lesson for me to learn nor a metaphor for me to untangle. I wanted adventure, I wanted actual life with all the joy and heartbreak and fullness that comes with being alive, and life is what I got. A baby who knows only the singular truth of growing, making my angst irrelevant, a heart beating within me but outside my own, a whole truth, a YES+.
If youāre new: hi, Iām Lindsey and this is Better Still, a multimedia newsletter about creative growth and staying tender AND NOW for the foreseeable future about being pregnant for the first time at 40.
I write personal essays and share playlists and paper zines.
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So happy for you! Congratulations!
Such a moving poignant post, thank you for your writing & congratulations!