Two years ago yesterday

I had a break between the morning class I taught and my Teaching College English pedagogy course, an hour window during which I walked up Court Street to the CVS pharmacy. It took me awhile to find the aisle I needed ("Eight, next to the contraceptives," the pharmacist replied when I asked, apparently not getting the irony). I bought the two-pack, because even in times of potential crisis I try to be the frugal Nederlander my husband wants me to be. The brand was First Response.

I walked back to Ellis Hall, went straight to the roomy handicapped stall in the ground-floor restroom, opened the package and awkwardly peed on one of the tiny sticks. There were people in the other stalls when I went in, but by the time I had counted to 180-mississippi, I was alone in the bathroom. Or, I thought I was alone. When I picked the test up from the top of the toilet paper dispenser where I had laid it down three minutes previously, I saw that I wasn't alone, and wouldn't be for the next nine months.

My life didn't change when I saw those two pink lines in the window of the pregnancy test. It didn't change when I got the small sheet of paper back from my blood test at Hudson Health just a few hours later, a sheet containing some medical gibberish I didn't understand, but one word, "positive," scrawled on the center of the sheet, that I immediately understood. It didn't change when I told Jeff that night on a bench overlooking the Hocking River that I was pregnant, that he was going to be a father.

The change happened gradually, coming on slowly over the following weeks and months. It's still happening now. I'm becoming someone new with every day I spend in the presence of this amazing little person, every day I get to spend with the man I married who became her father. This new person I'm becoming is like a better version of myself, closer to the me God sees when he looks at me.

Charlotte, thank you for being that little pink line, that unexpected news, that life-changing gift.