Two blue lines, and a new life begins

Eighteen years ago, I was a 23-year-old copy editor facing the hardest decision I'd ever make.

Happy almost February, readers. Today, I’m sharing a piece I wrote in January 2007, in the weeks before my son was born.

Over the weekend, Julian turned 18. I was thinking about this essay and wanted to remember what I’d written all those years ago.

Reading it, I remembered that this story took every ounce of courage I had to write and offer it to the Statesman editors to publish in our community voices column. But I had to write it. I was 23 years old, freshly out of college and working as a part-time copy editor at the Statesman. I wasn’t even an official writer yet, but I knew I needed to try to describe what it had been like to face such an enormous decision in less-than-ideal circumstances.

But lemons, lemonade, lemonade stand.

Fast forward 18 years, and I’m both the same person who wrote this and a woman transformed by the process. It’s a story as old as time and one that feels incredibly precious because it’s mine. I hope you find something in it that you recognize. Thanks for being along with me on this long, winding road that just keeps on going, even after the milestones like this one.

Back next week with more,

Addie

P.S. For my paid subscribers, look out for your zines over the next few days! They are all in the mail. So, if you don’t get one by Monday, let me know.

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Originally published Feb. 11, 2007

It had been a rough few months. The suffocating heat of the Central Texas summer was the least of my burdens. That Friday afternoon, I couldn't blink fast enough to make the two blue lines of the home pregnancy test fade away. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

I wasn't supposed to be pregnant, not according to the expensive blood tests I'd had the previous fall. My first menstrual cycle hadn't come until I was 15, and sometimes there were intervals of six months or more between them. The doctor confirmed what I had long suspected: Due to an imbalance of hormones, my body would need help if I ever wanted to conceive. So long, birth control pills.

Now, just eight months later, my mind was racing. How was this possible? How far along was I? What would Ian say? How many drinks had I had this week? Was I ready to be a mother?

From that point on, my life would be divided into before blue lines and after blue lines.

Nothing would ever be the same. Much like the moment I got my mom's phone call six weeks before, telling me that my best friend, Troy, had died. Before Troy and after Troy.

For the second time in as many months, I wished what was happening to me was someone else's story.

I covered my face when I told my boyfriend of one year about the pregnancy test. I wanted to disappear.

”I need another cigarette,” he said.

The first hot tears didn't come for a few minutes. But when they started, they flowed. And flowed. I didn't want to have to make this decision. Not now, at least.

If it were another time in my life, the answer would have been clear. Two years earlier, in the middle of getting my degree and without a partner I adored, those two blue lines would have meant an afternoon at Planned Parenthood and two days' recovery. Two years from now, with medical benefits and an extra bedroom, I'd be calling my parents with joyous news of a grandchild we didn't think I'd be able to have without IVF.

As it was, Ian and I had just worked out our kinks. The plan was for me to head back to school in January to get a certificate to teach Spanish. We were thinking about living in Argentina. I was free to do anything I pleased, including abort this fetus I just found out was growing inside me.

The next morning, with our brave faces on, we let the noise of the car radio fill the silence as we drove to Planned Parenthood. I waited for what felt like hours in a tiny room papered with informational posters about the holy triumvirate of choices — adoption, abortion, and keeping the baby — that face each woman who sits on the examining table. I didn't want to think about any of them.

A pleasant woman not much older than I smeared cold gel over my abdomen and tilted the black and white sonogram screen away from my view.

“You're at the end of your 16th week,” I heard her say.

Quickly, I did the math: Four months.

I worked backward on the calendar: July, June, May, April. My faulty reproductive system had kicked into gear around the time my mother was having hers removed in an emergency hysterectomy last April.

My belly cleaned and my mind cloudy, I sat with two staff members who offered me tissues for my tears and explained in clinical, nonjudgmental terms what a second-trimester abortion would involve. At this late stage it would be a complicated, two-day procedure, but they assured me it wouldn't hurt my chances of having children in the future. I had until the 19th week to decide.

It was Ian who wanted my parents involved. His dad, his only real parent, died more than a decade before, and he had just started to feel close to my folks. But no daughter wants to call her mother three states away and have the conversation I did with mine that Sunday afternoon. That's when I felt shame. Not for having sex before marriage (my parents are way too liberal to be shocked by that), but for not being smarter about it.

As children of the '60s and '70s, my parents had eagerly embraced birth control, waiting 10 years before carefully planning me. I equated accidental pregnancy — as I assumed they did — with carelessness and stupidity.

But I heard hints of excitement instead of disappointment in their voices. We talked at length about my mom's surgery and Troy's death. We talked about Ian. We talked about forces greater than ourselves that guide us in ways that don't seem to make sense.

They vouched their eternal support of whatever decision I made. My mom, after whom my extreme sensitivity is modeled, couldn't hold back.

”Addie,” she said through her tears, “just make sure you really think about this.”

After we hung up, I thought about how no matter how smart we are or how much planning we do — with the aid of modern medicine and its doctors, tests, and pills — there's no stopping the natural flow of life and death.

I couldn't stop that car from running over Troy.

And I decided that I wouldn't stop this growing baby that wasn't supposed to be here.

Back in June, grieving over Troy, I wrote that if I ever became a mother, I would tell my child stories of the grand adventures my friend and I used to go on. He and I made a lifetime's worth of memories in the short years we had, traveling through Europe and taking cross-country road trips between semesters. We held each other's hand on the emotional roller coaster ride of leaving home and exploring our newfound adulthood. We didn’t talk about what might become of our friendship.

Would we let ourselves fall in love and start a family of our own?

It was a question that I no longer needed to ask. He was gone. And my own life was just starting a new chapter that he would never get a chance to read.

As I write this, my son's due date has come and gone. Waiting on his arrival is yet another lesson in giving up control.

Before I saw those two blue lines, my life was one thing. Now, it will be another.

Two will soon be three, and life — as my 23 years on this earth have already shown me — will change in ways I can't possibly imagine.

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