Dear Eloise,
On our 4th date Darby told me he wanted his first child before he turned 30. He was 27 at the time. I thought 1) this guy is adorable but 2) incredibly unrealistic. Turns out we missed Darby’s goal by only 6 days.
“We weren’t trying to get pregnant; We were just being lazy about trying to not get pregnant,” I would later say to my friends and coworkers. I was a bit embarrassed to get pregnant so soon after marriage. We had been married for less than a year. Our first date was exactly 2 years ago on this day (I just noticed that!). Everyone stressed “wait for children and give yourselves time alone together”. The standard order of life events goes: get married; buy a house; get pregnant. We were years away from being able to afford a home. Secretly, however, we both wanted to get pregnant.
I plunged ahead quickly into life with Darby - jumping eagerly to commitments others pondered deliberately for years: marrying the year after we met, conceiving you the following year. I’ve often wondered at my eagerness to make these huge steps with Darby, wondered at my complete and total confidence in him. In the end, I think my love for your father swept me up, sending me blithely and full of joy always on to the next thing. It’s one of the reasons we were only engaged for 3 months... My love for Darby fills me with a sense of urgency to share everything and experience everything with him.
Other aspects of my life threatened to get in the way though. At work I was up for a promotion to become a people manager, and I worried pregnancy might jeopardize my eligibility in the eyes of my slightly misogynistic manager. The promotion had been in the works for 6 months; at the beginning my manager told me I was a candidate because I “wasn’t a mom” unlike some others on my team. All highly illegal, but it pressured me nonetheless into saying “Oh, Darby and I won’t be having children for at least a couple of years!”
I had never been pregnant. Your father had never knocked anyone up. We both joked that chances were at least one of us was sterile. I guess not.
Love,
Your Future Mom
p.s. I had to calculate this date based on our expected due date, since you were a sorta-surprise. Apologies if it’s creepy to backdate your first letter to the date of your conception (EWWW, Mom and Dad have sex. shudder.)
