Photos by Melissa Bernazzani Photography
I took the test at night, alone in my bathroom. I had anxiously waited all evening, suffering through a 3 hour grad school class with the knowledge that taking this particular test at night wouldn’t yield the best results. There had been so many others that had left me sad and unsure about so much about life, and biology, and how not so easy it is to have a baby sometimes.
But I couldn’t wait.
I took the test and immediately hid it under a hand towel, because I had been disappointed by countless other tests like these. I knew it would say the answer I dreaded the most, had seen for months on end. Yet I needed to know. I needed to know that this hadn’t worked. Again. That we had to try another month, wait another month, for something I had wanted my whole life. I hid the test and got ready for bed, happy that my husband was working overnight and wouldn’t be able to see the result I knew was coming.
Agonizing minutes later I crept into the bathroom, the cold tile against my bare feet, harsh lights showing the trepidation I felt inside. Knew inside. Feeling like a failure, like something was wrong. Like I had failed. Again. So like a band aid ripped off the skin. I tossed the towel off the test, and peeked, steeling myself for the dreaded answer. Except, it said:
Pregnant.
No other word will ever give me the same feeling inside as that one word, flashed in electronic form on drugstore pregnancy test at eleven o’clock at night on June 25, 2007. I shook like I had witnessed an accident, because SURELY, this wasn’t true? Could it have happened, after the waiting and trying and endless negative responses? The knowledge that it had worked, that there was a baby within me that I had dreamed for and hoped for and wished beyond all hope to have, was a reality. This baby, discovered in that cold bathroom in Miami, eight years ago today, was a reality.
That baby, my first, is now seven. She is the light and love of my life, my entire world. Discovering that I was pregnant with her was, and still is, one of my favorite moments of my entire life. It was the night everything changed. The night I found that I wasn’t just me, but an us.
