My Defining Days of the Decade: #5

We’re in the home stretch with Brendan’s Defining Days of the Decade…

#12: May 15, 2003: Becky and I Graduate From College
#11: November 7, 2000: The Election of a Lifetime
#10: August 14, 2003: The Great Northeast Blackout
#9: September 15, 2008: The Economy Implodes — And I Get A Job
#8: July 3, 2004: Becky and I Get Engaged
#7: July 2, 2000: The Day I Fell In Love
#6: August 26, 2005: “Get The Hell Out”

Number Five…

April 30, 2007: Holy Crap, I’m Gonna Be A Daddy

On Thursday, April 26, 2007, I had my last law-school class ever. (It was ConLaw II, if you’re curious.) That night, I celebrated by going to a Flogging Molly concert at Legends. The weekend came next. I basically took Friday and Saturday off, to relax before the end-of-semester push. Then I pulled an all-nighter Sunday into Monday, finishing up two lengthy papers before starting to study for my four final exams.

Oh yeah, and one other thing happened in there. At the tail end of my all-nighter, around 12:30 PM on Monday the 30th, I found out that Becky and I were going to have a baby.

We’d had suspicions, for the better part of a week, that Becky might be pregnant. But, I mean, c’mon, those were just suspicions. She now claims she was pretty sure; I, however, was anything but. Sure, I had crunched our budget numbers, trying to figure out what a hypothetical baby would mean for our bottom line, but I was by no means convinced it was really gonna happen. This was just a pregnancy “scare.” Surely the test would come back negative.

Mind you, I put “scare” in quotes because it’s not like we regarded pregnancy as a bad thing, per se. Yeah, it’d throw a monkey wrench into our finances. But we’d been married since 2005, and while we weren’t actively trying to have a baby, we weren’t actively trying not to have one, either. (Which, ahem, basically means we were trying to have one, biologically speaking, I guess.) So, whatever was going to happen, was going to happen, and that was okay.

Did I feel “ready” to be a daddy? Hell no. Was I ever going to feel “ready,” until it happened? Probably not. And I think I knew that, sort of.

In any case, around 12:30 PM on Monday, April 30, 2007, Becky took a home pregnancy test. We were in our Clover Ridge apartment at the time. I don’t remember exactly what I was doing when she headed off to the bathroom to take the test; I’m not even sure if she told me that that’s what she was doing. I think I was sitting on the couch, toodling around on my computer. My memory is probably fuzzy in part because I had gone approximately 29 consecutive hours without sleep.

All I know is that she came back with the sort of utterly mind-blowing, life-altering news that’ll jar anyone out of sleepiness for at least an hour or two, and eliminate any thought of an imminent nap: the test thingy had a “plus” sign on it. She was pregnant. We had a baby on the way.

In an instant, my attitude shifted from conflicted and ambivalent, which is how I’d felt about the hypothetical prospect of possibly having a baby, to unabashedly and uncomplicatedly overjoyed the moment that possibility became a reality. A baby! We were going to have a baby! I wanted to dance for joy, throw a party, shout it from the rooftops. I was thrilled. Now that I knew it was going to happen, hell yes, I was ready for it to happen. Woohoo! A baby!

Of course, this changed everything. Instead of going to East Tennessee, for my clerkship in Judge Susano’s chambers, with the intention of living it up and emulating a friend’s “bar tour” of the best 100 bars in her city, we’d be shopping for baby clothes and decorating the nursery. Instead of saving up money for post-bar-exam travel adventures, we’d be saving that same money for diapers and whatnot. Instead of being just another stop on our decade-long journey as a couple, Knoxville would be the birthplace of our firstborn child. Our whole outlook for the next year of our lives and beyond, and all of our plans, changed in an instant. Suddenly, we knew we’d spend the next eight months preparing for our new arrival, and then after that, welcoming him or her into the world. And it was going to be great. I suddenly couldn’t wait for something that, five minutes earlier, I hadn’t even been actively hoping for.

But while the news of Becky’s pregnancy felt like it changed every aspect of my life in an instant, it didn’t alter my immediate schedule. I still had a massive Electoral College paper due the next day, Tuesday the 1st. After that, I still had four finals to study for. I still had 16 credits to earn, in order to graduate three weeks hence. So after taking a few hours to talk with Becky, process the amazing news, and make our initial phone calls, I went to bed around 4:00 PM — concluding my 33-hour all-nighter — before waking up at 1:30 AM Tuesday and resuming my labors.

Specifically, Tuesday was my day to put the finishing touches on the Electoral College paper. I sequestered myself in the law library, and buried myself deeply in research, writing, revising and proofreading. This had the remarkable result that, periodically throughout the day, I’d emerge from this self-induced academic reverie, return for a moment to reality, and re-remember the still brand-new discovery that, oh my goodness, I’m going to be a Daddy! It was like learning the news anew a couple dozen times.

In the days that followed, I continued my exam preparations with the weight of this stunning, incredible news on my shoulders. It was such a strange experience, finishing up my law-school career — in typically procrastinating fashion — while still absorbing the realization that my life was about to utterly change in ways I couldn’t yet really begin to understand. And to further complicate matters, I couldn’t tell anyone!

It was, of course, very early, so I certainly couldn’t blog about the news — that didn’t happen until June 23 — and we weren’t even telling most of our friends and family. We did tell each of both sets of parents (soon-to-be grandparents), and our friends Shannon and P.J. (Specifically, Becky told Shannon, who shouted the news to P.J., who demanded to grab the phone from Shannon and have Becky hand it over to me, so that he could give me the following timeless congratulatory message, from one father to another: “Dude!!! Your boys can swim!!!”) But that was it.

I did make a few additional, er, unintentional exceptions, though, on the evening of May 11, or rather the wee hours of the 12th. Bursting with joy, and booze, after my very last exam and our ’70s-themed “10 Days Party,” I, ahem, may have made a few statements along the lines of “I’M GONNA BE A DADDY!!!!” to the assembled masses at The Backer, sometime between 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM that morning. Heh.

When I started this Defining Days list with my college graduation, Becky asked if my law-school graduation — May 20, 2007 — would be on it. I answered that it wouldn’t. (It’ll be on the honorable-mention list.) There are a few different reasons for this, some related to my overall attitude toward graduations, as mentioned in the college-graduation post.

But one big reason is what had happened three weeks earlier. May 20 really felt like something of an afterthought, given the enormity of April 30. More than the culmination of the previous three years, commencement felt like the starting point for the next eight months and beyond. As I celebrated my graduation with my lovely wife and our parents, the life-changing realities ahead were never far from my mind.

I was a law-school graduate, yes, and that was awesome. But, holy crap, pretty soon I was gonna be a Daddy. And that was really awesome.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Again, the top photo was not taken on the actual day in question. It was taken three days later, May 3, at a state park on the shores of Lake Michigan, where Becky and I went for me to study — and for us to hang out together and contemplate the future. (See also the picture of Becky at right.) The photos of us there are the first pictures taken after we knew we were going to be parents.

Up next: Number Four. Getting close to the finish line now! I may not get these all done in 2009, but I should be finished by the end of the first weekend of the next decade. 🙂