“Nina, do you want to have this baby with me?” Leo asks directly, unencumbered by the fact we’re at a table for three in the middle of one of the busiest breakfast spots in all of Pasadena. Roan looks shocked, which is saying something for a guy I’ve never seen flinch.
I knew it. Newbie parents have zero sense of humor when it comes to their first offspring, but sitting here next to Leo again feels so right.
So, I might.
SECOND TRIMESTER
FOURTEEN
It’s been nearly a month since Leo arrived home, and I haven’t laid eyes on Marisol once. Between the exhaustion of leading Royal-Hawkins, when all I want to do is crawl under my mahogany desk and nap, and Leo tracking my every move and morsel, my BFF and I have fallen down on the job of propping each other up. Just this week, I feel like I’ve hit my second trimester stride and am game for an escape from the pregnancy police, but I suspect Marisol may not want to waste a family hall pass on a sober outing. I agree to sneak out of school early, and we move our December nail care date up to 3:00 p.m. at the West Hollywood shop.
Marisol 2:52 PM
Don’t be late. Curious if the Moncler Mamas have been parading this season’s winter wear around Royal-Hawkins like they’re hoping for a freak snowstorm.
Nina 2:52 PM
I can’t stand clothing with poultry for a logo. I’m not late, I’m already here.
“Nice tented cashmere blend,” Marisol says, feeling up my sweater. “Hides that bump while keeping you CEO sharp for winter. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to tell Winn Hawkins you have an applicant baking.”
“I know, but I want to hold out until the end of January before I tell the board. I don’t want all the memories of my first year as head of school to be of me pregnant. Give me six months to be me before us.”
“Hey, look at it this way, you nailed your legacy just by getting busy. And now that you’re for sure having this baby, I’m out,” Marisol declares, raising her hand to wave the bartender over. He doesn’t come immediately. He must be new, and clueless, and about to get an earful on customer service from the Clean Queen herself.
“I thought you were going to stay sober with me until this baby is born,” I say, incredulous.
“Please, that was only until you got over yourself and decided to push this kid out. I was being supportive in your time of need. Your time is over, and I need a drink.”
Even if Marisol’s patience with me had run dry, I still needed her ear as the first week Leo was home proved tricky. Too often I felt compelled to assure Leo that his responsibility for my situation was minimal and that if what he really wanted was to sling himself back to Singapore, I totally understood, no hard feelings, we could each go our own way. Initially, he listened to my protestations and assured me he was going nowhere. Here, he claimed, was exactly where he wanted to be.
As the days wore on, his patience for my martyrdom grew thin. Walking along Santa Monica Beach, wrapped in sweaters, enjoying a chilly November sunset, I was revving up my I can figure out what to do by myself mantra when Leo shot me down once and for all. “Why don’t you leave me with the baby, and you ride off into the sunset? Or better yet, leave me with summer Nina and spring baby, so whoever this fall woman is who won’t accept I’m all in, she can take a hike.” Leo does love a hike.
“You better be ready to deal with all my seasons,” I insisted, knowing the discomforts that pregnancy and infancy were about to rain down on us.
When Leo was done responding to my list of concerns, I turned to complaining late at night to Marisol. I told her Leo was not taking seriously my feelings of wariness about having a baby with him when we barely knew each other. Marisol also grew tired of my hand-wringing and finally told me don’t believe everything you feel and then called it quits on her late-night support hotline.
After the evening on the beach and Marisol’s tough-love therapy, I started to notice Leo’s baby fever seeping into my skin. The more time I spent with him, watching eagle-eyed for signs of I don’t know what, the more I could imagine a mini-us. We’d get coffee, and I would watch Leo gaze and smile at a dad wrestling with the release button on a stroller. The dad’s real struggle prompted me to imagine Leo smoothly popping the contraption open with one hand while balancing our kid and my cappuccino in the other. Evenings I would catch Leo hiding his online reading of the stages of embryo development like he was watching porn. Before I knew it, we were reading the same saccharine sites together nestled in bed with a bag of Ruffles, my chip repertoire recently expanded.
Walking Pasadena’s streets as carefree as we had all summer, I reminded Leo this is what it could be like going forward without a kid begging to swing from our arms. Leo would reminisce about his storybook childhood in Omaha with his parents at his games, at his school concerts, at the helm of every large, rowdy family holiday that often started with Nerf gun wars with his sister, Julia, and cousins in the backyard. His favorite memories, though, were being with his dad when his mom traveled with her sister. His father never made the West brood shower, eat broccoli, or go to bed on time. Leo so much as insisted Marisol and I travel out of state and out of cell range at least twice a year so Leo could father wholly uninterrupted. In Leo’s mind, a hovering mother was no good for anyone. The child, the father, and most certainly not the mother.
It was during the late-night pillow talk when Leo marveled at his sheer luck that the mother of his child is the queen of childhood development. When he promised he would do everything possible to support me staying in the professional world, it slowly came to me that perhaps I really wouldn’t be going round two of the parenting game feeling alone like I had with Graham, who had spent Xandra’s childhood raising a start-up rather than a daughter. My opposition to becoming a mom again turned to optimism when Leo claimed he would happily be the one to hold down the fort with our baby when I had evening events at school. He even suggested we have a second set of hands around to help like Marisol has, since we would be dual working parents and we also needed our own adult time together. I allowed myself to consider that perhaps this surprise baby could be a blessing after our birth control blunder.
As I began to see the bits and pieces of how the two of us could raise a baby together, it did start to sound more feasible than terrifying, especially the nights Leo would come over after I had an evening committee meeting. While sipping a robust red to my Pellegrino, Leo would cook for us from his wide Italian repertoire. No one had cooked for me since Marisol and I lived together and she would whip up late-night quesadillas after a Friday night bar crawl.
“So, what are we up to, two proposals or three?” Marisol asks before popping a second gin-and-vermouth-soaked olive in her mouth.
“No Chardonnay today?” I ask, avoiding Marisol’s question.
“I’m gonna need something stronger than Chardonnay to get me through your pregnancy. And your diversions never work, Nina, my drinking habits are not the topic here. What’s the latest from Leo?”
“One rushed marriage proposal, but I think Leo was delirious from seeing his baby on ultrasound. Uh . . . let’s see, three conversations about living together and one request to spend New Year’s in Omaha with the entire West clan. Apparently, cousin Karl is dying to meet me.”