"I can't really explain to you how much I love this story. Your experience hits so close to home for me. And I truly didn't want the story to end. I want to hear more about your time in the hospital, how you decided the adoptive parents, how you felt when you signed those papers. But I love what you wrote. Thank you for sharing your story with me. I love it!"
I am so relieved that this assignment got such a good score, I hope you like it.
I Dub Thee Sir William
I sat hunched over
with my eyes covered. If I couldn’t see, then all my problems would magically
dissolve. The toilet seat was unforgiving,
and the black grout, dirt on the walls, and filthy sink matched how I felt. I couldn’t hear my boyfriend, but I knew he
was in the next room, distressed. That
evil bright pink plus sign glared at me from the stick I had just peed all
over. I trembled, what was my future, was
that boy going to be in it?
I liked
William. He was a great guy, nice,
smart, funny, and he seemed like he cared.
Would he stay that way after I told him? I knew what happened to teen couples when they
got pregnant. They broke up. Really I was okay with that because William
was not who I imagined spending my life with.
My nineteen year old mind imagined marrying a knight. He should be tall dark and handsome, maybe a
rich doctor. William was a blonde, stocky,
strong, quiet, 17 year old, pubescent teen, and he was pale. He wasn’t doctor material; he was a blue
collar guy. Our first date was spent in
the belly of a rusty blue pickup truck while he rebuilt a carburetor. What was I thinking, playing with fire and
messing around with a boy that didn’t fit my profile? I didn’t see a way out of this mess, at all!
I
slowly walked out of the bathroom and walked down the narrow, pebble crusted
hallway. In a dank little kitchen, William
sat at a table that was bought sometime in the 1960’s. I hated his mother’s mobile home, however it
seemed fitting for the news I was about to deliver. He looked up from his soda waiting to hear
what the horrid little pee stick told me.
I timidly told him, “I’m pregnant.”
He just stared at me. He didn’t
look angry, scared, or anything. He just
stared. It felt like hours that he sat
watching me. I wondered what he was waiting for. Maybe he felt like I should be
throwing a temper tantrum, or start screaming.
I went ahead and indulged him, I fell apart and I ran out of the trailer
heading straight for a jagged cliff at the edge of his property. I wasn’t really going to jump, I didn’t have
the guts. I wanted him to chase me but I
wasn’t sure if he would.
William didn’t
disappoint me, he caught up. That bulldog
stature of his allowed him to be much faster than I was, and his strong arms
wrapped around me preventing me from moving.
It felt good to be held, unable to budge, I was terrified that he would
let go and leave me. At that moment,
between my sobs, I heard William say, “I’m not going anywhere. I will be right
here with you the whole time. We are
going to do this together.” I quietly
sniffed, “Okay.” I knew that it couldn’t
be true but I wished it anyway. He may
not have been the man of my dreams, but maybe, just maybe, he could be a knight
on a white horse and rescue me from my bad decisions. Time would tell.
Telling
our parents was the next hurdle we faced together. His mother was overjoyed, my parents reacted
the way normal parents would. My heartbroken
mother cried for months, and my father shot insults and dirty looks every time
he saw the boy who took his daughter’s virtue.
The entire time, William was by my side.
He just took it, silently.
William would say, “I’m going to take care of her.” Of course my parents
didn’t believe the seventeen year old fornicator, but I started to believe him.
A
few months into the pregnancy, my mother was able to speak to me again and
suggested that we should give the baby up for adoption. Was this the answer to our mistake? I knew
for sure William would evaporate if we gave the baby away. We decided to go ahead with the adoption
process, and strangely the prince stayed on his horse. He came to every doctor appointment and every
single social service appointment. He
prayed with me about the baby and the adoptive parents. We spent time talking about religion and
repentance. We spoke about our futures
and what we wanted out of life. We unpredictably
wanted the same things.
About
six months into the pregnancy, William told me that he still wanted to marry
me. I was shocked. That’s not how he was supposed to feel about
me. I was going to be giving his child
up for adoption, we were terribly young and he was supposed to be thinking of
his future and his life without me. I
was even warned of this by my social worker, my doctor, and my parents. William was supposed to want to venture off
on some unknown quest, without me. The
story was becoming irregular and my knight was becoming even nobler than I
could ever have imagined.
Nine
months of uncertainty landed us in a hospital room that seemed too small for
planet-sized problems. I breathed, and
panted, passed out and struggled. The whole time William was a silent guard,
watching. He slept in an under-stuffed pink chair that was designed to make
people go home while I cried and wished that I had never gotten into this mess
in the first place. The labor was beyond
exhausting, William never left my side.
When
it was all over, sound seemed to withdraw from the world. We spent the next
three days in the hospital marveling over this baby, cuddling with him,
laughing at our lack of experience, but mostly crying. William and I were
sending what was our moral blunder, wrapped in God’s perfect packaging, to
another family. We would never see our
little buddy again. We knew we had done
the right thing, but the pain of what we were doing welded us to each other. No one on earth knew how I felt, how
difficult this was, except him. William
and I were the same, raw, mortally wounded and torn open by a lance we pierced
into each other.
While
William and I thought that we were going through the most horrible event we
ever could face, we gained something invaluable. We underwent an unplanned birth of a child
and the giving up of that baby to a far more deserving couple. We learned to depend on each other. I learned that William’s love for me
stretched farther than I believed possible and it carried me through the most
challenging event in my life.
William and I were
married a year later. After some growing
up, we had three children. Twenty-one
years later, through all of our highs and lows William has been strong, stocky,
loving, funny, unfailing, and pale. I know
that Prince Charming isn’t who we always dream of, sometimes he’s even better.
