I didn’t find out I was pregnant until I was into my fourth month. When I tell people this, their reaction is almost always one of shock, quickly followed by a look that I know conveys that they’re seriously questioning my intelligence. The raised eyebrow, “are you actually that stupid?” look. Because really, how do you not realize you’re pregnant for over four months?

Well hindsight is indeed 20/20, and looking back on it now, it’s clear that my body knew before my brain did – I was just too stubborn to listen even to myself.

I was one of the “lucky” ones who never experienced morning sickness, and I quickly mastered making up excuses for the missed periods and weight gain. Aunt Flo had never been a very regular visitor, and the weight was mentally explained away as getting healthy again after a summer of heavy partying.

I was too young, I was too single, and I had just lengthened my college career by changing my major the semester before. I knew the last thing in the world I could handle was being pregnant, so I told myself I wasn’t. So I wasn’t.

Except I was.

I finally confided in my best friend about the missed periods, and once another close friend made a comment to her about my sudden weight gain, the two of them decided it was time to force me to take the test. I was content to keep lying to myself, but the two of them were taking none of my evasive crap.

It was a Friday night, my mom and her boyfriend were in town for the weekend and we had dinner reservations. The plan was for my best friend to meet me at my apartment after dinner with test in hand. Before the food arrived, I had to excuse myself to go to the restroom. It was the second time in just over an hour that I’d had to pee, a fact I hoped was coincidence and one that my mother wouldn’t notice.

As I swung open the bathroom door, I was met by the sounds of two women having a loud conversation through adjacent stalls. The one talking was saying something to her companion about being there to celebrate her daughter’s twenty-first birthday, trying to put some carbs in her stomach before the real drinking began. I then realized these two women didn’t know each other. Nothing like talking to strangers through the stall to make a trip to the bathroom more interesting.

Not one to talk to strangers, but definitely one to eavesdrop on them, I slipped into the stall right next to the woman talking about her daughter just as their doors were opening.

“Here’s the really crazy part!” she said, “It’s my birthday too. I found out I was pregnant with her on my twenty-first birthday, can you imagine?”

“Wow, that’s not exactly the gift most twenty-one-year-old’s plan to get on their birthday is it?” replied the other woman. They shared a knowing laugh over one of  life’s many ironic jokes as they left the bathroom.

There I was in my stall; frozen, mid-squat, exactly two weeks away from my twenty-first birthday, with a pregnancy test waiting for me in my best friend’s purse.

I forced myself to calm down enough to pee, then I stumbled out and stood staring into my own brown eyes in the mirror. Desperately, I internally repeated the mantra I’d been using to keep myself sane for the past couple months. I can’t be pregnant. I can’t be pregnant. I CAN NOT be pregnant!  

I sat back down at our table and tried to shake the feeling that the conversation I had just overheard meant something. It was just another coincidence. It definitely wasn’t yet another sign from the universe screaming, “YOU’RE PREGNANT YOU IDIOT!”

A couple hours later those two pink lines showed themselves nice and bright on that little plastic stick, before I’d even had a chance to set it down. I didn’t even have to wait the three minutes to see the result – that’s how pregnant I was.

The next few weeks were a blur of nerve-wracking conversations. With the father, my mom, my brothers, my grandmother, and my friends. All trying to decide what should be done with this, my situation. The phrase “you’re too young for this,” quickly became the most annoying grouping of words in the English language. Adoption was considered and talked about to some lengths, almost entirely, I know, because of our young age and unwillingness to marry.

But the more people who commented on my youth, and subsequently my seemingly-obvious inability to be a good mother, the more I rebelled against such asinine arguments. I wasn’t a child, or even a teenager. I was young, but old enough to do this.

More than anything it was a feeling, one that I couldn’t effectively explain then or since. A feeling that this thing, this tiny miracle growing and moving around inside me, was meant for me, and I it. After denying her existence for the first four months, it took me less than a week to know there would be no adoption.

Becoming a mother did mark a change in my life, but it was not the end to my youth or the crushing of my adolescent dreams. It was just the beginning of new ones.

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