It was July 31st, 2006. I remember it well. I was sitting at my desk at work, chatting with my wife over gmail. My office mate was on vacation, so I had been cleaning out all of his crap that I didn’t like in the hopes that he would not notice/care when he returned, but for this moment I was chatting with my wife. Then, in the middle of the conversation, I get this message: “I’m just distracted.”
This is not unusual, and I knew that she had not been feeling well, so I responded: “cause you are sick?” This seemed like as good a reason as any for her to be distracted at work, and if that wasn’t it, then my bad guessing would probably elicit a response that included the actual answer.
Instead, I got this: “remember that conversation we had on the bed yesterday?”
Uh oh. I did not at all remember the conversation that we had had on the bed yesterday. I remembered that we had had a conversation on the bed, lying there discussing all of our hopes and dreams for the future, and it seemed to me like we had discussed many things, none of which I could remember specifically, so I said the only thing I could say: “yes.”
“I think I really am” she wrote back. Double uh oh. I was clearly supposed to know what she was referring to. Did this have something to do with her being sick? I had just quit my job and was heading off to grad school in three short weeks, and we had just bought a house and moved to Baltimore. So much of our lives was in upheaval that she really could have been anything, as far as my ADHD brain was concerned. Not good. So I responded.
“are you serious?” Perhaps she was not being serious. Probably she was. Either way, this was a stalling tactic, to give me more time to remember what we were both talking about.
“yes” she wrote back.
I quickly replied “hmmmmmm” and called in my other coworkers to see if they could help me solve the mystery. What could my wife be talking about?! Maybe we had discussed finding a friend and having a threesome, and she was telling me that she really did want to do this! Maybe she was really unhappy and she was leaving me! As it turns out, coworkers are not very helpful in these situations. And then I remembered. Hadn’t we made some sort of joke about her being sick because she was pregnant, even though we knew that this was impossible due to the birth control? Could this be it? And then I knew. This was it. So I wrote: “did you take a test?”
“yes”
“wow” Ok, I was now very sure I knew what we were talking about. “are you going to go to the doctor?”
“yes”
Well, it’s definitely medical then. I think I’m on the right track. “how are you feeling?”
“completely freaked out”
That made two of us. But I was excited too. I couldn’t wait to actually see my wife, and hug her, and kiss her, and plan a new life together that we hadn’t previously planned. We chatted a bit more, and she told me not to tell anyone about this until she saw a doctor and we were really, really sure. “Got that guys?” I said to the coworkers huddled around my computer screen. “Don’t tell anyone!”
“We won’t!” they all said.
And that is how I found out that I was going to be a father, thus beginning the greatest adventure of my life. Thanks, Google.