I felt the need to write about having my first son. To get things out of the way, so to speak. I'm expecting his brother any day now, and I have nightmares that I'll end up the same way. I know it's not possible, but still, it scares the piss out of me.



To begin, I have to go back to 1998, before I met TJ's father. I was with someone much older than myself, and by the way of a failed condom, I got pregnant in January. I had a miscarriage, but that wasn't entirely unexpected. The women of my family have a tendency to have multiple miscarriages, and I had been warned about this by my mother. "The first one never sticks, so don't get excited", were her words. And it proved to be true for me as well. But, we had been excited about it. We decided it had to be a girl, and we had named her Serrah Rose. After the miscarriage, our relationship fell apart, and we called it quits. The would-have-been-father still has difficulty being in the same room with me, over 11 years later.



Later that year, I met the guy who would be TJ's father. Because of subsequent events, I shall dub him D-Bag. I was 16, he was 18. He was a vigin. I was not. I felt an 18 year old virgin was a crime against humanity, so I fixed that, on September 12, 1998. I didn't intend on staying with him, just fixing that cosmic boo-boo, and moving on.



About a week or so later, I had my traditional birthday cake that my Grandma always made for me, gingerbread with lemon sauce. It was... slimy. I can't describe how it felt in my mouth any better than that, but I didn't want to eat it. I knew something was very, very, wrong with me. It dawned on me that I was late for my period. Hmmm... I took a test. Negative.

A week after, another test.

Negative.

Another week, another test.

Still negatory, and no period.



I went to Planned Parenthood finally, to figure out if I was pregnant, or if there was something more seriously wrong with me that was causing me to miss my cycle. I had never been late before, not even when my "womanly times" began. They must have had a super-duper-test-of-awesomeness. It came back positive. The woman explained that, being 17, I had a number of options. Option one: abortion. Option two: abortion. And then option three: abortion. I did not like these options. She seemed rather shocked when I asked if she could recommend a good OB/GYN, or a midwife. She said she could not, they rarely had any knowledge of who was "good" and who wasn't. She did say she'd heard some good things about the local Catholic hospital.

Although I had long moved away from my Irish Catholic upbringing, my own personal feelings about abortion without a clear medical reason are very firm. You make the mistake, you deal with it. Without killing. I have always believed adoption to be the best answer when you think you can't care for a child on your own. There are so many people that struggle for years with infertility that it's just not fair to throw a life away. Anyway...



My mother was livid. She tried to change my mind, and insisted I have an abortion. My father was adamant about me not giving it up for adoption. Since I planned to keep the baby, neither of these things made much of an impression on me. My Mom wanted me to be able to use my scholarship to Johns Hopkins, and go on to law school. I didn't want the same thing she did. I would much rather have gone to a fine arts college, but, I digress. I hadn't been planning on taking advantage of the free ride to law school anyway. Her dream. Not mine.

And I had this nagging little voice in my head that asked me: What if you never get another chance? This little voice- unknown to me at the time- was almost right.