His dark eyes seem darker.
“Then I don’t understand why you ghosted me.”
“I don’t know if you remember this, but one night—we’d been dating over two years at that point—we had a conversation about our futures. You were a junior, and you were talking to agents, and we both knew you were going to enter the draft. We both knew you were going to have teams looking at you. Every single thing you did. Every move you made. Your family, your friends.” I take a deep breath. “Me.”
He nods slowly.
“Anyway. During that conversation about our future, kids came up. You were having serious doubts about playing football professionally. It was the first time I’d ever seen you doubt yourself. I asked you, ‘Are you saying you’d rather work a regular job and have a few kids instead?’ and you said—”
Jack interrupts me. “I snorted and said no offense to anyone because I do want kids, but not for a few years.”
“Right.”
“I wasn’t being literal. I was twenty-one years old. Does anyone want kids when they’re twenty-one? No.”
“I know now that you weren’t being literal, but try telling that to twenty-year-old me. I was a baby. I was dating The Skip. I was dating Jack Jennings, the guy everyone wanted to be around. I was insecure, and in my mind, you were the most important person in the relationship because that’s what people were telling me. Showing me. You were the one signing autographs and speaking on television in post-game interviews.”
It was a lot for me back then, a young girl from the Midwest, thrust into some quasi-celebrity because of her boyfriend when all she wanted to do was live a quiet life, have a family, and do some traveling. “I hadn’t realized my self-worth. I was putting it all on you.”
That’s the thing about becoming a parent. It forces you to grow up. And when your child is a daughter? A girl? You instinctually become tougher—more fierce. A big believer in girl power and empowering women and self-worth because that’s how you want your daughter to feel—like the most important person in her world.
You want your daughter to feel as if she can do anything.
Be anything.
“So you’d said, ‘I don’t want kids for a few years,’ and all I heard was, ‘I don’t want kids.’ Period.” At this point, I decide it’s wise to take a drink of my coffee, so I stop talking and gather my thoughts. I’ve said a lot of words, and he has said almost none.
Wonderful listener.
Great communicator.
“That I don’t want kids hit me a few weeks later in the gut. I hadn’t gotten my period, and although I was on the pill, I had missed a day when I’d forgotten my prescription at the pharmacy.”
He nods, remembering.
“And the day I took a test, I was…” Paralyzed. Panicked. Scared. Horrified. Embarrassed. “Ashamed. I wasn’t coming from a place of, ‘this is happening to us.’ I approached it from a place of ‘this is happening to me.’ You had said you hadn’t wanted kids, and I freaked out. I couldn’t study, couldn’t eat, couldn’t focus on anything. I pushed you away because I thought I was doing you a huge favor.”
“What did you think I was going to do?”
“I don’t know. My immature brain thought you would drop out of school or something and get a shitty job just to pay the rent and buy formula. I thought having a baby would crush all your dreams.”
Jack screws up his face. “You didn’t think my talent was going to carry me forward? Like the NFL was suddenly going to decide I was shit because my girlfriend was pregnant?”
“Okay, when you say it like that, it sounds totally idiotic.”
“Well, sorry, but it is. That’s not how that shit works. We’re not living in the 1950s. This is the modern millennium.”
“I’m aware of that.”
Jack is silent then, stirring his coffee aimlessly with a silver spoon.
“I was home when I took the test. My brother had a bye week and was home, and I didn’t want to be alone.” I hear how horrible those words must sound to Jack and wince. I wouldn’t have been alone if I’d gone to him. But I hadn’t. I had fled home, to my brother, afraid to put my trust in my boyfriend. “So I hid away. From you and from him. Like I thought I might be pregnant but to see that positive test was…” Jarring. Emotional. “Surreal.”
I resist the urge to tear open a sugar packet and dump it into my cup for the sake of having something to do with my hands. I’m nervous, obviously, but now that the floodgates are open—and he’s not screaming at me or flipping tables—it’s hardly as difficult as I’ve made it out to be in my head.
Then again, he still does not have all the facts.