Countdown To Baby: Falling In Love Made Me Do It!

It’s October 2024: The month I become a mother has arrived. Even writing it is one of those things you plan all your life - maybe - and when it happens it still feels strange. I know in just a few days I will hold my daughter, and it’s the single most beautiful thing I have ever imagined. My biggest hesitation about becoming a mother throughout the years was that I absolutely loved my life, and it seemed foolish to make changes. I lived it alone, never lonely. It made sense to believe this path I was on would make me happy. And, ironically, I was sitting at lunch by myself in a beautiful restaurant, thinking about how amazing life was even without anyone in it besides myself, that I started to talk to a cute guy who would end up making me never be alone again. 

Our first picture together,
don't think we saw this coming.        

Making the baby wasn’t so hard; retrospectively, it felt strangely predetermined. The “crazy part” is that from the moment I started dating Francois, I strongly suspected he would be the father of my children, not my boyfriend - although I wasn’t dead set on having children at all yet. However, the circumstances of our relationship were fairly challenging by nature, and pursuing a family with someone who could easily break your heart wasn’t the easiest task for someone like me who wasn’t super upset about being single in the first place. We also knew that the road to being together in the same city wouldn’t be the most straightforward, so one had to be sure the other was “worth it” fairly quickly. I was - thankfully - forced to make the conscious decision to abandon my solitary safety and allow this man to introduce something into my life I knew very little about: companionship, the true love kind. 

Getting a man like that to love me and feel confident enough to have a baby with me when he had all the choice in the world is possibly my proudest moment in life. He didn’t accidentally make a baby with me and took responsibility, he took the responsibility first and built our family on that. Being able to love him back with everything I have been through is my biggest achievement: I learned to love by doing, nobody taught me. Francois kept moving towards our mutual future while I questioned if accepting love would be another mistake I make. The only mistake I could have ever made was to stay safe, alone and without him - thankfully he refused me this option. Although it took a lot of work for me to not pursue a life reminiscent of my family’s generational trauma, knowing my daughter will be born into a family free from it, with a father who is able to truly love her is a gift much bigger than I knew as a young person myself. 

One night last week, Francois and I were lying on the couch, candles were lit, and we were listening to music and watching YouTube visuals. We make this space sometimes, not distracting ourselves by anything but sound, scent and each other. A Kid Francescoli song came on that brought me into quite some depth of my emotion. I suddenly felt every second of my life so far: I saw myself sitting on the back of a convertible in motion along the coast of Albania hitchhiking with my friends Olta and Miriam, raving on my friend’s shoulders at the Scooter concert and Conor and I lying at a beach in Ibiza looking at the stars drunk on one Euro shots because we were so broke. And then, finally, I saw myself sitting on a bench in a Grotto Bay, South Africa, with a guy I had really just met, watching the sunset and having a feeling that I had found the person who would make this solitary adventure come to an end. And now that guy was sitting next to me on my couch. 

My life was so full of adventure, with nobody to consider but myself - but mostly happy. And this life - at least this kind of life - is now coming to an end. I always imagined it would be challenging to get older, abandon independence to invite someone into the decisions you make every day. Even last year, as Francois and I sat on the same couch debating if what we were doing was a forever thing, I had a hard time accepting life could actually not be solitary. Of course I wanted love, but I just never had it; it’s hard to imagine something you never knew much about. And as I sat there that night listening to Kid Francescoli with the love of my life, with our baby in my belly, I did not feel nostalgia; I did not miss a single moment I had lived. My heart was solely filled with gratitude, nothing but a deep light in my belly that couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have lived independently and still been able to let go of it to open the door to true love, now on the couch next to me and in my belly. As wonderful as it was, nothing could make me want to trade in what I have now.

As a writer, having a profound experience like becoming a mother which is so, so common, you always ask yourself what hasn’t been said about it. I saw the videos, I read the books (not really, but ya know!) and everything always talks about this “change”. To someone who isn’t in it, I gotta be honest, it must sound so dire - it did to me. I never understood why people would want to alter their lives, their bodies, their brain chemistry for the fleeting moment of happiness when the baby says “Mama”. These thoughts stopped when I fell in love with the right man. Imagining making him a parent is what makes me love the child, looking into her little eyes that are hopefully her dad’s, giving this human that only exists because I love her dad and he loves me a happy life, is the most motivating feeling I ever experienced. She is the culmination of her dad and I choosing each other, and making it work in a God damn rough environment. One cannot find more meaning than that…