by Patti
When I first found out I was pregnant, I took 7 tests to make sure it was real. Because, you know, the missed period and boulder boobs were not enough proof. Once I was thoroughly convinced, I shared the news with M. And then M had a nervous breakdown. No, literally. As in, he got slurring-and-stumbling-drunk, leapt out of a moving car while we were driving in the middle-of-nowhere and ran/stumbled/ran/fell/ran/stumbled into the night, invaded a stranger’s yard and squatted in his garden, turned on said stranger’s garden hose, and dangled it over his head as he sobbed through the spraying water about how it was all moving too fast.
This was not the way I had pictured it would be.
S was a total surprise party. I was not expecting the 2 red lines that screamed “PREGNANT! OMG YOU ARE SOOOO PREGNANT!” when I took the test. I mean, I wanted a baby, but that was supposed to be “someday”; not right now, not like this. I’ll admit: My first reaction? Tears. Lots and lots of “What the hell am I going to do?” tears. Part of my reaction was my own fear and shock; the other was worry about how M would react. You see, M has never been good at handling stress. He is definitely not a curveball kind of guy. He likes things organized and planned and neatly lined up. I, on the other hand, am not only a curveball catcher, I am a curveball thrower. And this? Was most definitely a curveball.
And just as I suspected, he did not catch that curveball. Instead, it cracked him on the head and knocked him out cold.
At first, before the Big Breakdown, he was mad. And that made ME mad. I mean, we had been together at this point for 11 years! We were married! We loved each other! For crying out loud, grow up! But apparently he was not in the mood for me to be pregnant. This was, after all, in clear violation of The Plan.
Over the next few weeks, this new knowledge tucked deeply in our pockets, we lived our life, but we lived it on the outskirts. We were ever so careful not to make waves, not to get too heavy. I could see that M was trying to act all casual and normal; as if what was happening wasn’t really happening at all. As if we could just sit together in the living room and watch TV, or go out with friends, or eat dinner at our little dining room table, just as we always did, it would all just go away.
And then came that night. We had gone to a party and traded places: He drank, I didn’t. And he drank. And drank. And drank. So much so, that by the time we left, he zigzagged his way to the car. I took the keys from him, jammed his jacked-up self into the car, and started the long drive home. The party had been at somebody’s farm; we were literally driving in the pitch-black of nothingness. He was incoherently yammering on about a kid he had seen at the party – a little boy dressed up like a traditional Argentine gaucho - and how it had reminded him of himself when he was a boy, when suddenly, he started laughing. It was the crazy, shake-your-shoulders silent kind of laugh, and I was happy to see him laughing again, so I laughed, too. Maybe everything would be alright, after all! But then I realized: he wasn’t laughing; he was crying. That’s when he demanded that I pull over, and before I could even navigate to the side of the road, he was opening the door and jumping out and running into the darkness.
Mid-breakdown, as M sat there swaying from side to side in a squatting position with some stranger’s hose spraying water over his head, the porch light of the hose’s owner flicked on. I heard the door creak open, and I braced myself for shotguns in the air and a menacing “Get off my property!” Instead, a man appeared, the porch light framing him like a glowing ring. He came softly toward us; M just sat there, choking on the water that sprayed down his face. “Hey buddy, are you alright?”
The man leaned gently into M and put his hand on M’s soaking wet head; a balm. “You take all the time you need, okay?”
After that night, we didn’t really talk about what had happened; we didn’t need to. I knew him well enough to know that something inside of him had shifted. It was as if that water had washed away the awful beginning, and we were starting clean. A few weeks later, he came home from work with a little bag in his hands. He handed it to me, and inside was a tiny onesie with a cheerful yellow duck on the front. I held it out in front of me, imagining it filled up. I was smiling so big it hurt.
