When we got home, we were right back in the swing of things at Paisley Park. There was a lot going on that winter, which left little time for obsessing over the pregnancy question. We had booked some tour dates and one-off shows and aftershows. was working on music that would become his Emancipation album, celebrating his separation from Warner Bros. The Spike Lee movie Girl 6 was about to come out with a soundtrack album featuring music by Prince with The Family, Vanity 6, and New Power Generation. There was a movie about Selena in development, and I had been asked to screen test for it.
On a day-to-day level, there wasn’t a huge difference in my life. We had worked hard before we were married and kept working hard after. We were still doing what we loved, but now we had a real partnership. Before we had been driving down the same road; now we were on the same bus. He talked to me about finances and asked my opinion about decisions, and I started thinking about things like utility bills and taxes. I was still performing with him, but he was feeling less comfortable with some of my costume options, not loving that his wife was out there in hot pants and bikini tops.
Thinking ahead to what I’d do when I did get pregnant and couldn’t tour with him for a while, I went to the office and said, “You can take me off the payroll since I’m his wife now.”
A year before that, not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined myself saying the words “take me off the payroll,” and looking back now, I just sigh and shake my head. Baby girl, what were you thinking? I wanted to stay involved, stay productive—I was still on my standing mission to always prove my worth—but it seemed odd to me that I would be paid a salary when I could have anything I wanted. We were in this together. A partnership.
We didn’t do much sleeping in those days. I remember a lot of work, but it was the kind of work that breeds joy. I heard the piano a lot, at all hours of the night and into those creative hours before dawn. I wish I’d had a camera phone back then. It was such a luxury to be sleeping and hear his lavender piano being played just on the other side of dreaming, and then slowly wake up to realize it was him, and he was creating something. He spent most of the time recording and jamming, and through the jamming came songs and more songs. I started cooking for us—mostly what I called Love Soup—garbanzo beans and lots of veggies, which we eventually started growing in our own greenhouse. I felt like a wife and wanted to be a mother, so I started rethinking my hot-pants-wearing, stage-diving lifestyle. I knew I wanted to get behind the camera, directing and editing music videos, and my husband was totally on board with that idea.
“You have that eye,” he told me. “You have that sensibility.”
One night we made plans to go to the Philharmonic and then to see Alanis Morissette afterward. During the symphony I suddenly felt this strange surge of sleepiness. I rested my head on my husband’s shoulder and drifted with the music while he breathed against my temple and played with the ends of my hair. During intermission, he made me laugh, doing little sound effects in my ear to illustrate what the people around us were thinking. In the car afterward, I took an Advil, and he asked me if I was all right.
“Just feeling a little off.”
He gave me that Scooby-Doo look, ears perking.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” I said. “I think I’m getting my period. First one since going off the Pill, so it’ll probably be hard core. But it’s good, because then I’ll be on a predictable cycle.”
I hated to bail on the Alanis thing, but I could hardly keep my eyes open, so he suggested we go home and watch TV. I went up to the bathroom and was surprised to find I didn’t have my period. And my boobs looked… bigger? Yes. Definitely bigger. I felt a surge of excitement, but I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, so I called my friend and asked her, speaking in Spanish, if she would pop out to the drugstore and get me a pregnancy test. She came back with four different tests. I did the first one, and didn’t even have to wait. The little doodad showed a bright blue plus sign almost immediately.
I went to the doorway and called out, “Um, hey.”
No response.
“HEY!”
He muted the TV and said, “What is it?”
“Can you come over here?”
“I’m watching this.”
“Come. Here. Now.”
He turned away from the TV, and I held up the stick.
“It’s positive?” he said. “Are you serious?”
I laughed and hugged him, but he wanted to do all the tests, so he set them up like a science experiment on the counter. He looked at the four tests, each with their bright distinctive positives, and said, “We gotta go to the doctor right now.” The limo driver was on call, just in case we changed our minds about going out again, so by midnight we were at Urgent Care. They did blood work, and the doctor offered to do one of those down there ultrasounds with the wand, which we politely declined. The nurse came back with the blood work, and she was smiling ear to ear.
“You’re pregnant,” she said.
He hugged me hard, and we laughed for pure joy.
“I’m gonna get fat!” I said.