I was seventeen when I got pregnant. The first semester of my senior year. It wasn’t all that unusual, a girl my age getting pregnant. None of my girlfriends thought much about it. We laughed and giggled and designed imaginary nurseries, drawings and all. In home ec, we looked up layette patterns and asked what babies ate. We pictured a tiny, pink-faced girl with my black hair and Ryan’s blue eyes.
Now, of course, I see the sadness in all of it, the tarnished truth that we were girls who’d grown up in the rain shadow of the women’s movement and still thought Mrs. Cleaver was the ideal woman. We asked so little of ourselves—and most of us got exactly what we asked for. Funny how that works.
The boys weren’t any better. The football team rallied around Ryan, slapping the “stud” on the back. As if knocking up a teenaged girl was tantamount to throwing a touchdown pass.
The first time I really thought about what it meant to be pregnant was when I told my mother. I remember so clearly how I felt that night, all filled with pride and fear. When I squeezed Ryan’s hand, I could feel his slick nervousness, too.
“Mrs. Palmer?” Ryan said softly, after the dinner dishes were cleared. He stood alongside the fireplace, his hands jammed in his jeans pockets. He shifted from foot to foot, rocking on the linoleum floor like a tiny wooden boat in a rough sea.
My mom came out of the kitchen and looked at us. I wonder now, all these years later, if she missed my father in that moment, if she’d wanted a hand to reach for, but it had been years since my dad had visited any of us.
I went to stand beside Ryan. “We have something to tell you.” I didn’t realize that my hand had moved to my stomach, that I was gently caressing the worn flannel of my shirt.
But Mom noticed. It hurt me, those silent silver tears streaking down her cheeks. “Oh, April…” She sighed, staring down at her work-stained hands. “I wanted so much for you.”
They were words I’d heard many times. My mother was always talking about what she wanted for me. She always told me I could be anything—an astronaut, a cardiac surgeon, a ballet dancer.
I always wondered where my mother collected her big dreams. She had grown up in Mocipsee, the third daughter of five children. She’d gotten pregnant at sixteen, dropped out of school, and gotten married. By twenty, she was a divorced woman raising two small children on a cleaning woman’s wages. We used to drive by Grandpa Joe’s sometimes when I was a kid, and Mom would always point to the tiny white clapboard house and say, “That’s why you go to college, April, so you don’t end up renting a place like that for thirty years and then die without a penny to show for it.”
Now that I’m a parent, I understand. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I wake up in a cold sweat. In the quiet moments before I reach Ryan’s hand beneath the covers, I wonder if I’ve planted dreams in my children’s hearts and souls. I wonder if they believe they can be anything.
“I’ll provide for her, Mrs. Palmer,” Ryan had said with a thick catch in his voice, and I knew that my mother’s tears were scaring him, too.
My mother looked away for a long, long time; then at last, when my anxiety was a living, breathing presence that skittered up and down my skin, she stopped crying. “Well,” she said, valiantly attempting to smile, “I guess we’ve got plenty to do. Let’s get started.”
We didn’t know then that the wedding she was already planning would never come to pass, that I wouldn’t have eight girlfriends beside me in pink taffeta dresses and a church full of flowers. We didn’t know then that my mother had less than two months to live.
After the diagnosis, the wedding didn’t matter. Ryan and I got married in the small Episcopal church on Front Street, a hurried affair with only immediate family in attendance. Already my mother was getting weaker. Already my brother and I were donning the somber black look of orphaned children.
We learned quickly that life was different than we’d thought. The best quarterback in Mocipsee history was a long way from good enough for the big leagues. There was no professional sports contract—had we ever really been that na?ve?—but there was an offer of college tuition from a small, nearby community college. Ryan got a degree in business and is now the district appliance manager for Wal-Mart. We have built a good life, Ryan and I. Not perhaps what we expected, but what can grow in the shallow ground of so many disappointments?
I see it in his eyes sometimes, the regret over lost boyhood dreams. He shows it quietly, in flashes of reflection on a Sunday afternoon, with the Seahawks playing on television. But I see. I know. And I ache for him.
Oh, he loves me and I love him, but still, on rare occasions, we allow ourselves to peek into the dark rooms of what might have been. We try to look away, but it can’t be done quickly enough. Ryan sees himself in Joe Montana, and he wonders secretly if he should have tried harder.