The Day We Aced a Pregnancy Test

"Honey," yelled Bridget with a strange, high-pitched shake in her voice that I'd never heard. "Come here! Quick!"

Let me pause for a moment here. As a student of writing, I’ve been told several times that it's a cardinal sin to start an article (or even a blog post) with a quote. There’s no context and it leaves the reader guessing -- a big no-no. One former sports editor put it this way: "Unless Jesus Christ played centerfield, I don’t want to see a quote at the top of your story." One of my favorite professors in grad school: "You can start a piece of writing with a quote only three times in your life, so make them count."

I think he'd be fine with this being one of those times.

I ran toward the bathroom where Bridget waited with a white stick in her hand. Her other hand was over her mouth. It was shaking visibly. "Honey," she said, now in a hushed tone. "Look."  Sure enough, there were two tiny pink lines. Pregnant. Boom. We hugged, she cried (fine, we both did), and we looked at the two pink lines a dozen more times in the next two minutes.

We then started a game of asking "Are you okay? How do you feel?" back and forth. We really couldn’t think of anything else to do. What else do you do when you're that happy?

"Well," I said, "we should still go grocery shopping. We’ll need food."

We walked the short distance from our house and found ourselves at the Star Market around the corner. Together, we wandered aimlessly for several minutes. I picked up some cottage cheese and I hate cottage cheese. She stared at different brands of pretzels for 15 minutes. I got physically lost in the frozen food aisle. It was so real, so scary, and so exciting. Our lives had changed forever within 15 minutes.

Truth be told, we hadn’t been trying for very long. (And we realize how lucky this makes us.) As our friends and family know, we decided to live without much care for six months. We went to Ireland, France, San Francisco, and Mexico. We drank good wine and spent more than a few Saturday afternoons bellying up to our favorite bar (Cambridge, 1) in Harvard Square. We talked about having kids during those six months (we both knew we really wanted them), but like most things that don’t happen tomorrow, the reality seemed far away. We decided winter would be a good time to start.

November came and went, though. We had a glimmer of hope for a moment, but it wasn’t meant to be.

And then halfway through December, the 16th to be exact, those two fateful lines appeared. After the grocery store, we were off to run a 5K in Somerville, a holiday race we’d registered for months before. I don’t remember anything about the actual running of the race, but know that I felt no pain and ran faster than I had in a decade. I'm not sure my feet ever touched the pavement because I was running on air. I crossed the line in 21:31, a 6:56 pace, which, for me, is pretty damn good.

We followed that with brunch with friends. Between bites, we looked incredulously at each other. The look continued for the rest of the day, as we made our way to the New England Patriots game with our friend, Walter. We sat for hours in a misting rain, as we watched what was almost one of the greatest comebacks in regular season history. I cheered loudly, but it was mostly for our news and not the players. When we finally got home that day -- a very, very long day -- and went to bed at 2 in the morning.

"Is it real?" I asked.

"I think so," she said. "I really hope so."

"Me, too."