Say You’re Pregnant

photo by Eric Backman

Say you just found out you’re pregnant, after your second time having sex.

You were raised to be a virgin until marriage, then a wife, then a mother.

When you hear the voicemail from your brother saying, “Mom and dad know,” you climb into your car and decide you will drive far away, change your name maybe, work in a filling station in Wyoming or Montana or South Dakota. But the January mountains stop you. You turn the car around.

You sit on the couch and cry when your mom asks how this happened. You explain what you’ve been up to at college: not Bible studies and church services but drinking your nights away after working doubles at the restaurant.

She asks you what it’s like to be drunk. She’s never had even a sip of alcohol. Tell her it’s like being someone else. But don’t tell her that it’s like being someone closer to yourself, someone you weren’t raised to be.

She says you’re moving back in with her for the duration of your pregnancy. And since you will be living at her house again, you will be going to church each week. You don’t resist, even though you want to. You’ve disobeyed enough already.

You post your apartment on Craigslist, quit your job, fax your résumé to a restaurant close to your parents’ house. It doesn’t take long until you run out of money. You get a job at a café that serves quiche and sandwiches and mochas. You work weekend mornings, so you no longer have to bother with church. Mostly, the clientele is people visiting dying loved ones in hospice next door.

Your mother expects you to keep the baby, to stay living at home, to raise it with her help. The adoption agency gives you a second batch of profiles and there is a couple you know immediately is the right one.

You keep working at the café, your belly growing and growing, your belt dropping lower and lower beneath it. This small thing of making lattes and slicing cakes and delivering quiche to tables of grieving people makes you feel useful. 

You find out your baby is a girl. Tears slip from your cheeks on the examination table while the ultrasound technician talks excitedly about your baby as if you’ll keep her.

The adoption agency throws you a shower. Your college roommate, writing professor, a waitress you work with, and your daughter’s mother show up and give you gifts.

It’s getting hot; it’s summer, and you’re huge with child and bloat.

You show up to the hospital on time. After a workday of labor, she is born. A nurse brings her to you, swaddled, only her face peeking out. Her red blotchy cheeks look like yours.

You try not to cry.

You cry, even though you tried so hard not to.

When you watch your daughter’s mother hold her, you look away.

You count down the hours, no the minutes, until it’s over: the torturous 48 hours you have to change your mind and keep the baby.

You tell your daughter’s parents they can name her.

They pick Grace.

You call her Gracie instead. Like she’s yours. Like you have any say in who she becomes.

Ten days after she is born, you move away. On your way out of the state, you stop at her house over the Cascade Mountains. She’s so much bigger already, her cheeks are full, she has reddish skin and blond hair and blue eyes, just like you. And you love her.

Say you will live without each other.

Say you climb into your Saturn loaded down with your belongings and back down the drive.

Say you wave.

Say you leave.

Say you leave.

Say you leave.

Say you’ve left your daughter.

Clutching the wheel, you convince yourself you’ll try to go on.

You don’t know what the hell that means.

But say you try.