20 Years Ago Today

 October 6, 2006 was the day I took a pregnancy test and it came back positive!  8 months later, I held Anna in my arms. 

I was working at the children’s museum. We had walked talkees and a coworker who was pregnant and due at Thanksgiving. That morning on the walkee talkee, our supervisor announced that she had the baby that morning. We were surprised. He was early. He spent quite a bit of time in the NICU, but was ultimately healthy. 

I started realizing I could be pregnant. I didn’t think it was possible, though, because my old church seven years earlier had convinced me that it wasn’t the will of God for me to have a family. Yes I was married, but I felt like I was living against God’s will if I was married. It was complicated. God definitely wouldn’t allow a baby to be conceived if having a family wasn’t his will. 

After work, I went to Walgreens and got a pregnancy test. I decided to test anyway because it had been a long while. However, Walgreens didn’t have a bathroom. I went across the street to Kroger. I used their bathroom, and the positive sign came up immediately!  Not “in three minutes” 

I walked out of Kroger and the alarmS went off. The store manager approached me and asked what I had in my bag. I told him it was a pregnancy test I got at Walgreens across the street. I swore I didn’t get it there. He asked for a receipt, but I’d left it on the passenger seat of my car. He was really tough with me and didn’t believe me. I was embarrassed showing it to him because I had peed on it. 

After that, he begrudgingly let me go. I was 28 years old, but looked young for my age. There was a teenage runaway shelter around the corner from that Kroger- it seemed like he thought I came from there. 

I ran to my car, grabbed the receipt, ran back in and showed it to him. He immediately felt bad and went to the floral department and gave me a yellow carnation. My first husband and I had that carnation on our kitchen counter for two whole weeks. 

Years later, I described him to someone I knew who was a Kroger manager. She knew him and said he was tough on everyone. No one liked him. Someone damaged his car in retaliation for being by tough. His insurance wouldn’t cover it, so he drove around with the damage. I can’t judge him for that, because a deer did that to me and I’m still driving around with the smash door.