From Newlyweds To Parents

To be perfectly honest with you, in my adult life, my priorities were focused in other areas for such a long time, I never took the time to really sit and think about being a mom.  I'm sure I thought about having children a little bit,  but in my 20s and my 30s I spent much of my time and energy cultivating my education and my career; and when I pictured my future, it was always working or creating something and never once was it a person.

To say I waited to do the marriage and family thing is an understatement.  I didn't just wait, I took my SWEET time to do both...but when it happened, it all happened quickly and all at one time.

I met Jason when I was 37, and he was a cool NINE years younger than me.  (Insert "cougar" joke here that we've heard a billion times).  If you think for a second that when I met him I "knew" I'd marry him, you would be wrong.  I met him, thought "he's about seven minutes old, I have ZERO time for that..." and I went about my business.  What I didn't know was that this guy was tenacious; (that's my polite way of saying "pain in the ass"), because he did not leave me alone.  I tried to brush him off multiple times, I even tried being rude to him so he'd leave me alone...nothing worked.  What was it with this dude??

We met while I was producing one of my many burlesque shows then, and he was my "lighting guy"..."Jason The Lighting Guy" was how I put his number in my phone.  One night after a particularly long rehearsal, he walked right up to me and demanded that I go drink whiskey with him at the front bar of Excalibur nightclub in Chicago, IL.  (where we were performing).  I mean, I wasn't going to turn down whiskey...so I happily agreed.

Long story short, we began dating.  I broke up with him during Christmas.  He still kept pestering me. Funny, recently we were talking about this and he said to me "Yeah, you broke up with me but I just really wanted to be your friend if I couldn't date you.  You were fun and cool and I don't know, I just liked you."  He's never told me that before.  What a sweetheart, and here I was being as bitchy as I could be toward him.

One day, my friend Binzi said "Les, just give him a small chance...he really likes you."  (She really rallied behind the "Jason" cause).  I finally listened.  I got over myself and my "I'm too old for him" mentality, and well, the rest is history....and I'll be damned...he's my husband today.

We are a perfect balance for each other.  He hangs in there with me when I'm all over the place, he can calm me down when I need it and don't realize it, he's the most compassionate person I've ever met but you'd never guess that initially with him...(he guards that pretty carefully, if you just meet him you'd swear he was a curmudgeonly old man...he's so not).  He actually listens to my advice and respects my opinion.  He's a sweetheart to my family and loves my brothers, (very important to me). I teach him how to be gracious and patient with life, and he teaches me to not be so worried all the time.  He's wonderful and he's caring and I just love him.  So...I married him.  Lucky me.

About 8 weeks after we got married, I was out to dinner with a friend of mine, and was feeling a weird kind of ill.  The waiter brought our food, set it down in front of me and I immediately felt totally nauseous.  After that dinner, I was sitting in my car to drive home and I hadn't begun to drive away yet, because I was assessing how I was feeling.  I knew what food poisoning nausea felt like, I knew was stomach flu nausea felt like, and I knew what hangover nausea felt like...this was a totally different kind of nausea.  Great.  I probably had stomach cancer or an ulcer or some rare disorder.  Ugh.  Still I knew what I had to do before I jumped on the "do I have cancer" train.

Exactly at the moment of me identifying what type of weird stomach feeling I was having, Jason texted my phone (he knew I had somewhat been feeling strange that day and wanted to check on me). "How are you feeling", was his text.  I wrote back:  "I'm on my way home, but I'm stopping at Walgreen's first for a pregnancy test.  Be home soon."  His reply:  "Okay then!!"

(Mind you, at this point, we had been married just about six weeks.  We were still very much newlyweds, existing in that floaty space of happiness and bliss).

I walked in the door with wide eyes, and a stern mouth and he just laughed at me when he saw me.  I beelined it for the bathroom.  

You know how when you take a pregnancy test, you have an agonizing three minutes to wait before you can actually see the result?  Well, the moment I took mine, the result did not take three minutes, it was immediate, the tiny digital screen said "pregnant" and the second tiny digital letters under that said "3+ weeks", (I had no clue pregnancy tests told you how long you were pregnant!! Technology is so cool).

I ripped open the bathroom door, with the test in my hand, and..."Jason?"  I looked around the corner into our living room.  Where's my husband??  "Hello?" No answer.  I realized our dog was gone too, ah...he took the dog out.  Awesome timing J.

I'm standing in my kitchen, my cat Max was sitting on one of our bar stools looking at me, and so I told our cat, "we're pregnant Maxie!!!"  He wasn't as excited as I wanted him to be.  He just lazily cat-blinked at me and turned away.

Finally, Jason came into the front door, the first thing he sees is me standing in the kitchen with my pregnancy test in my hand, and I blurt out "we are 100%, very pregnant...and it says 3+ weeks!!! Omg!! I'm in grad school Jason!!!  I just started a new job!!!  I'm FORTY-ONE!!!!  Omg, we're pregnant!!"

You know what he did?  He smiled the biggest smile I had ever seen on his face, and walked over to me and just gathered me into his arms and said "this is so awesome!"  I leaned back to look at him and said "why aren't you freaking out??"  He said "because it's really cool Les, we're gonna be awesome parents!!"

Are we??  Aren't we supposed to freak out about this?  I also feel excited.  I think I'm in shock.  

There's this thing that happens to you when as an adult woman you find out you're pregnant for the first time, when after spending most of your adult life trying not to get pregnant and then you are, you feel unsure of how to feel.  It is definitely a shift in mindset.  A truly great one actually.  One that I did not expect to fill me up with happiness in quite the way that it did.

All of a sudden I was giddy with delight, my head was spinning, I was nervous, I was freaked out but smiling from ear to ear, my weird ill feeling was finally explained, thank god I didn't have stomach cancer or an ulcer or some crazy disorder.  Nope.  What I had was a little, tiny baby.

I did what any woman in my position would do..."Hi mom, are you sitting down?"