#itsybitsy

ESP32 ItsyBitsy is in final testing zOne!

In early August of 2021, a magic device called a pregnancy test revealed that I was going to be a mom. By the end of October, I had also become a wife. It was my dream to be a mom and a wife someday… I just didn’t think it would be so soon, and at the worst possible time. I’d turned twenty just a week before the positive pregnancy test. I was still living at my mom’s. Three days later I was fired from my job. I wasn’t in college or learning a trade. My boyfriend-now-husband and I were arguing every day. He’d already decided to join the US Navy a few weeks prior. Every night I had the same vision: a single, underaged, uneducated, unemployed woman girl living with her mother and struggling to make ends meet for the rest of her life.

You could say I was a bit of a pessimist back then.

I didn’t tell my mother for two weeks. I was terrified and ashamed. My boyfriend and I argued about what to do as most young adults do when their lives have been changed drastically overnight. After a cooling-down period much needed by both of us, we made a game plan. Appointments were made and family members were told. He would continue with his plan to join the Navy, however heartbroken it made me. We would get married, and our baby would be provided for.

About two weeks before our wedding at the courthouse, I suffered a subchorionic hemorrhage. I was twelve weeks pregnant, and there was blood pouring down my legs. I drove myself to the ER, a Hello Kitty towel folded under me, and I was shoved into a wheelchair and rushed through various testing. I heard the words “bleeding” and “miscarriage”. I was completely alone. My mother was hours away on a business trip. My fiancé was stuck at a plasma center forty minutes away with no car. My sister and her girlfriend offered to come stay with me, but I didn’t want them to see me that way; visibly trembling, sobbing, blood dripping from the wheelchair to the linoleum floor. An older woman–a stranger–sat down next to me and rubbed my back and told me I would be okay, that she was going to sit right there with me so I wasn’t alone. I think about her often.

My fiancé finally made it to me two hours later, and after four more hours of waiting and bleeding and waiting some more, a doctor came in and told us our baby was healthy and safe. We cried, I was put on pelvic rest for a month, and we went home. 

I got married two days before Halloween in a long black dress my mother and I bought at Forever 21. I held a bouquet I’d made myself out of fake flowers and ribbons from Micheal’s, and we had our rings–bought at an antique mall in Arlington, Texas–in two little cardboard boxes that I’d drawn a heart on the tops of. We had seven guests at the ceremony including the judge, and afterward our first meal together as husband and wife was fried chicken from Winco. Later that night we had a wedding party at Dave and Buster’s. We ate cake, drank sugary drinks (nonalcoholic for my fourteen-week pregnant self, of course), and played arcade games all night. My favorite part was sitting with my husband at a coin pusher as we talked for hours.

On December 6th, my new husband left for boot camp. The next day my car broke down on the highway, and when my mother and her boyfriend showed up to rescue me I cried and cried and ate the bag of Doritos and Oreos they bought me. I’d like to blame the pregnancy hormones, but really I was just missing the man who annoyed me the most in the world. 

Okay, maybe it was a little bit of the pregnancy hormones, too.

The holidays were a blur. I was promised a phone call on Christmas Day from my husband that I didn’t get until New Year’s Eve. I cried, he cried, I told him about Betty White and whatever other gossips he needed to be updated on, and an hour and a half later we hung up and I cried for a little while longer.

In early February my mom, my father-in-law, and I flew up to Illinois to watch my husband graduate basics. I was twenty-seven going on twenty-eight weeks pregnant, and I had never been happier. The ceremony was nearly three hours long and my butt was numb by the end of it but that moment of seeing him for the first time in two months was worth it. We met up at the hotel we were staying at later, went to dinner in my father-in-law’s rented orange Mustang, and I changed my flight just to stay two days longer. 

At thirty-two weeks, I went into preterm labor. There were strong drugs involved, a lot of flirting with the nurses by yours truly, and plenty of drug-induced Eminem rapping that could have earned me my own diss track by Slim Shady himself. Seventy-two hours later, my husband caught a flight home just in time for the birth of our baby boy. 

The Bug was born two months before his due date. He stayed in the NICU for eighteen days with lots of visits from Mommy and Daddy. He was a favorite among the NICU nurses; he had his mother’s sassy attitude and his father’s love of dramatics and he wasn’t afraid to show it. He came home dressed in a preemie-sized Winnie-the-Pooh outfit that was still too big on him. Everyone who met him over the next few weeks wore a mask, and everyone fell in love with him. 

A lot has happened since then. 

I turned twenty-one in July of 2022. My husband graduates from submarine school in a few months. We moved to base housing one thousand seven hundred miles away from home and the furthest I’ve ever been from my family. I’m on medication for postpartum depression that makes me feel like the old me. The Bug is crawling and saying made-up words that I have to pretend are real words. I have a plant named Dorothy and I crochet when I’m not writing, drawing, or catching The Bug’s head before it smacks on the hardwood floor. I’ve even thought about taking college classes this next year. 

Join me on this journey of young motherhood, young wifehood, and overall young adulthood. I’m still learning and growing, and hopefully, I can bring some peace, laughter, and connection to others in similar situations while I learn and grow (and teach and nurture my own spawn).