Ready or not...

June 15th, 2006

You see it in the movies all the time. A man patiently waits in the kitchen while his wife takes a pregnancy test to the bathroom only to emerge 3 minutes later with tears in her eyes. He sweeps her into his arms and kisses her romantically as they gaze into each other’s eyes and she tearfully exclaims that she’s pregnant. They spend the next few hours flipping through baby names books while holding hands and stopping to wipe tears off of their cheeks. It’s touching. It’s romantic. It’s compelling, and I wanted nothing less from the moment that I found out that I was pregnant.

Unfortunately, reality isn’t always torn from the pages of a movie script. I found out that I was pregnant in the middle of teaching my seventh period class. Instead of a romantic moment with my husband, I was surrounded by fourteen-year-olds who certainly thought that I had gone crazy. I started out the class teaching verbs in a state of blissful oblivion. In fact, I made it through most of the class period without a clue that there was a tiny life growing inside of me. With about ten minutes to go, a girl came up to me and whispered that she had an emergency and needed to use the restroom. As I filled out her hall pass, it dawned on me that I hadn’t had a period in quite a while. My mind raced as I handed the girl her pass and I quickly did some mental calculations.

It had been more than seven weeks since my last period. I was more than three weeks late and I hadn’t even noticed. I sat at my desk for the rest of class in a state of stunned shock. My students occasionally gave me worried glances and rushed out of my room as soon as the bell rang, scared that whatever psychological malady I had would somehow affect them.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be pregnant, it was that my pregnancy completely blindsided me. My husband and I had talked about getting pregnant and we intended to do so soon. We just kept putting it off, figuring that we’d start trying as soon as we had our lives figured out. We wanted more dollars in our checking account. We wanted to feel more ready, more mature. Fortunately, God had a different plan in mind. I sat there after school that day and wondered how I was going to tell my husband. I was twenty-seven, had been married for more than five years, with a great husband and good health insurance. What was there to be scared of?

That night, when I told my husband, his eyes lit up and he started laughing. He was as shocked as I was, but he was also excited. As we told our families and friends and began to prepare to have the baby, we realized that having children is something that you’re just never quite ready to do. We could’ve had a million dollars in the bank and been married for fifteen years and we still would’ve been a little scared when faced with the responsibility of a brand new baby. Still, ready or not, babies come and as parents all we can do is buckle down and do the best job that we can. Being a parent doesn’t mean being perfectly mature, financially stable or mistake-free. It means loving your child from the moment they’re born and every minute thereafter. If you’re ready to do that, then you’re ready to be a parent.