This time last year, I was working as a barista two blocks from Santa Monica beach, and living in LA again for the third time. I was a full time artist and had just released my first song, New House.
I had also just filmed a campaign for Skullcandy headphones. I regularly served espresso to comedians and actors who made Cielo their go to spot for craft coffee.
I was in the studio, in writing sessions and going to Nightswim at the Hollywood Roosevelt every week. I was living and working in the industry. Networking like a boss, and living mostly out of our Jeep. I loved it. We moved around LA every few weeks. I lived life on the fly, things were totally unpredictable and just a little ( okay, a LOT) crazy.
Fast forward 3 months, and I’m living in Orange County.
Having started and quit my 2nd job in Hollywood at an upscale boutique hotel (hey Mama Shelter!) I was completely broke, homeless and stressed the week of my 23rd birthday. But we were moving to Fullerton for a job, not mine but Darrens. I just closed my eyes, crossed my fingers and prayed that I’d scrape up a coffee job at a place other than Starbucks.
We spent a week at a camp for kids in foster care. We stayed with relatives. We searched for an apartment. I applied for jobs. We were semi- stable. We moved in with senior missionaries, joined a church plant, and I found a job as a hostess.
We were smooth sailing then, employed and cruising in the real OC. Still driving down for Nighswim every now and then, hiding the fact that we now lived in suburbia. Things were good. We talked about life goals.
Stay here? Start a family here? Darren was eager to settle down and build something worthwhile. I declined to shoulder the burdens of a transient lifestyle, and we butted heads for a while.
Sure I wanted a family, but not there. I missed LA and the bigness of it. The adventure of finding new things in undiscovered places. I missed the freedom and carefree-ness of moving around.
I knew I was remembering selectively but I didn’t care. I wanted to think about all the good and easy and forget the hard.
My first and foremost thought about having a kid was “HELL YES!” Kids are super portable.. I’d love to add another human to our adventure, and I wanted to do it while we were still fun and alive.
And so we kept apartment hunting. and slowly started to imagine what life might be like. We decide that we wanted to start a family within 5 years. Before I was 28 and he 30. We decided that we definitely wanted to stay on the west coast and raise a family there.
Now, note this. At this point we’d been married 3 years, and had never used any sort of birth control. We honestly didn’t know if it would be easy to have kids, or if we’d have to work for it. We believed the latter, so we decided to give it a bit of a go.
SO, early October, deep in the throes of some serious OC chilling, we find out that we’ll be expecting a baby come May.
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