It took me about four months of being pregnant to be okay with it. To come to terms with what my life would be like once the baby arrived. But once I did, I was excited. I didn’t think I would react this way, but I spent my lunchtimes at the office looking at baby clothes and nursery furniture. I read articles about breastfeeding and water births and when the ideal time was to introduce peanut butter into your child’s diet. I became baby obsessed.
I even started wondering if having a successful career really was all that important to me, or if being a mom trumped that. I wondered if I’d come back after maternity leave. I know, after everything I told you about not wanting to be defined by my role as a wife or a mother and hoping to make a difference in the world with my work—how my main complaint about Darren was that he didn’t understand that part of me—the fact that I was considering quitting might seem crazy. It felt crazy to me—like I was turning into someone else, an alternate Lucy whose priorities morphed and changed. But it was truly how I felt. Being pregnant did that to me. And Darren really wanted me to stay home too. He said that no one would take care of our baby better than I would, and I was starting to think he was right.
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DARREN WAS DOING incredibly well at work. The deals he closed had impressed his bosses so much that they made him a director, and his new salary blew my mind. He was earning more than five times what I was, and I wasn’t doing all that badly myself. With all the extra income, he wanted to buy a big apartment in a great neighborhood.
“Let’s move to Manhattan,” he said, one morning, with the New York Times spread across his legs and Annie at his feet. “Maybe the Upper East Side.”
But Manhattan was our borough. Yours and mine. And ever since your phone call five months before, I’d felt more aware of that. Even though Darren and I had gotten married in Manhattan, we’d never really claimed it. Brooklyn was our place.
“I like Brooklyn,” I told him. “How about Park Slope? Or Brooklyn Heights?”
Even married with a baby on the way, I was thinking about you. I was making life decisions based on us. But I truly thought it would stop—that you’d fade from my mind again, the way you had before. And that turned out to be more or less true. But at that point, you were still there, front of brain, guiding my thoughts.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “P.S. 6 is a great elementary school.” Then he shrugged. “I guess we could always send the baby to private school.”
“So Brooklyn?” I asked him.
He was already looking at the Brooklyn Heights listings.
“I found one!” he said a few minutes later. “Listen to this: four bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, two floors of a brownstone on Love Lane. How could we not live on Love Lane?”
Then he pulled me over and kissed my stomach before he kissed my lips. I kissed him back. “Do we need four bedrooms?” I asked him.
“We might one day,” he said with a smile.
I knew he wanted a big family, like his. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that, but I wasn’t ruling it out either. “How about we check it out?” I said.
We went to the open house. I’d never seen an apartment that big in the city before. There was a formal dining room, an eat-in kitchen—what am I saying, you know all these things. Obviously. You’ve been there.
Once we bought the apartment, once we moved in, once we started decorating the nursery, once all of that happened, I felt like a mom for real. I couldn’t wait to meet my baby.
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I’m not sure why fives and tens are big deals: thirtieth birthdays, twenty-fifth wedding anniversaries, five-year reunions—ours was the summer I was pregnant for the first time, a week after Darren and I had moved to our new Brooklyn Heights apartment. Darren couldn’t stop talking about filling all the bedrooms with babies, but I was too busy concentrating on the one growing inside me.
You’d come to town but hadn’t let me know. You hadn’t contacted me at all since I’d gotten married. That was probably the right choice. I thought about you enough without the real you making appearances in my world.
But I guess you didn’t want to catch me off guard at the reunion, or maybe you wanted to prepare yourself, to see what kind of reaction I’d give before we saw each other in person. You texted me that afternoon.
See you tonight? you wrote.
I stared at the message on my phone for a good two minutes. You didn’t know I was pregnant. I thought I should tell you before you saw me.
I’ll be the pregnant one in the blue dress, I wrote back, half an hour later.
Probably not the most elegant way to give you the news. You didn’t write back.
And, of course, for the entire rest of the day I wondered what you were thinking. If you were upset or happy for me. If you were going to avoid me at the reunion, or specifically look for me.
“What’s going on with you today?” Darren asked, touching my shoulder. “I just called your name four times, it’s like you’re in a different world. Do you want me to zip your dress?”
“Sorry,” I said, “just thinking about college. And yes, thank you.”
Darren has a thing about zipping up my dresses. He thinks there’s something especially intimate about the act of dressing someone. More so than undressing. He says it showed love, not just lust.
“Want me to tie your tie?” I asked.
He smiled and said yes.