“Yes! Good!” He dropped to his knees and whispered something to my belly, then got up and took me by the hand. “Who should we tell?”
It was almost three in the morning by this time, almost four in Miami where Mama was living. He got on the phone with her and said, “What’s up, Grandma?” It took her a minute to catch on, but then she was shrieking and crying. We went home, and I made him come in and look at my boobs in the bathroom mirror. Understand, people—I was never a well-endowed woman in that area, and he was always dead set against the idea of me getting my boobs done, so this was a spectacular development, so to speak.
He nodded appreciatively. “Huge.”
“I know! Right?”
We huddled together in bed, living this perfect moment, knowing we were going to be parents, talking about all the things that needed to be learned and done and prepared. We were in those still, creative hours before dawn. The whole house felt full of love and joy and expectation. In the morning, I woke up wanting orange juice.
“I need to start eating breakfast,” I said. “I need to start research and planning and I don’t know what all.”
He was on the phone conducting business, telling people, “Cancel the tour. Mayte’s pregnant.” I could hear their happy voices on the other end of the line. When we walked into Paisley Park, it had become the joyful place in the song. Just happy, happy, happiness everywhere.
At my first appointment with the obstetrician in Crystal, Minnesota, the receptionist kept sticking her head out the door and calling, “Mrs. Nelson?” I finally jumped up and said, “Oh, shoot! That’s me!” They did all the first appointment things and calculated my due date: November 6. Just a week before my birthday. The best birthday present I could ask for, every birthday for the rest of my life. And this confirmed my suspicion that I may have gotten pregnant on our wedding night. The OB flipped through my chart.
“I see no reasons to worry,” she said. “You’re twenty-two. Healthy. Blood work looks fine. Next time I see you, we might be able to hear a heartbeat.”
I don’t know what compelled me to do it, but on the way home, I impulsively stopped off at a pet store and purchased a puppy: a little female Yorkie. I was trying to decide what to name her and suggested to my husband, “You should put me under and ask me.”
He stroked my face and whispered me into that deep, meditative space. When I woke up, he told me, “You said her name is Mia.”
I smiled and said, “Of course. That means mine.”
At the following appointment, there was the heartbeat, chugging like a little choo-choo. I called my husband at work, hoping he might be able to hear it over the phone, and he said, “I need that machine.”
“What—the heart monitor? It’s like a doctor’s equipment thingy. It’s not for sale.”
“I want to record it,” he said. “Put her on the phone.”
Half an hour later, I walked out of the doctor’s office with the heart monitor and went straight to Studio B. I slathered the goo on my belly, and moved the monitor around while he bounced impatiently on a chair. When I caught the exact right location, and he heard that little choo-choo chugging away, his face lit up like a neon sign. Thrilled. Amazed. Scared, but in a good way. He recorded the sound, and people told me for years that he walked around with that tape, playing it for anyone who would listen. You can hear it blending into the percussion track on “Sex in the Summer.”
Can’t U feel the new day dawning…
We were so elated, so thrilled, but looking back I see this strange undercurrent of—I don’t know. Fate and coincidence have their dark sides. Remember the dear old cat Paisley, who’d been around since Paisley Park was built? When I was just a couple of months along, she died. My husband was so sad about that, but we got a kitten and named her Isis, and that seemed to cheer him up.
We spent a lot of time driving around the lake and arboretum listening to music, just like we did the very first time I visited Paisley Park, and somehow the car always steered itself toward the shore of Lake Riley where the Purple House stood. Back in the ’80s, with the money from his early success, Prince had built the Purple House (not to be confused with the Purple Rain House) in Chanhassen, and he’d had it painted dark purple. Later on, after he built the house where he lived when I met him, his father, John, moved into the Purple House.
Every time we passed by, I’d gently nudge, “So… your dad lives there now, right?”
“Yeah,” he’d say and keep cruising right on by.
He’d been estranged from his father for a long time. They hadn’t really spoken for five or six years. It was unusual for my husband to talk about his childhood, but one day while I was pregnant, he was feeling introspective. A conversation about music led to him reminiscing about his father, and I impulsively said, “I’m gonna go see him.”