So, I was getting through another July 3rd, and ay yi yi, Josh and I were in full-on crisis mode. All inessential spending had screeched to an immediate halt since he’d been laid off the week before. However, Josh’s resourcefulness was impressive, and he had an interview that very afternoon at a local university. Given the state of the economy, it seemed like a good idea to get out of the start-up world and into something a little more stable.

Much to my delight, Josh came home from the interview flying high. He wasn’t usually prone to giddiness, but he was so happy about the interview that he’d stopped on the way home to hit the Surdyk’s wine sale and pick up a couple of steaks. It was a little indulgent since he was technically unemployed, but hell, he was optimistic, and it was good to see. July 3rd was redeeming itself, and I couldn’t complain about an impromptu barbecue for two.

As Josh ran to the gas station for some propane, I took the opportunity to soak in the tub before dinner. It had been a stressful week, and I was so relieved that he might have a job lined up already. I put on the radio, slipped out of my work clothes, and eased myself into the warm water. I’ve always been a bath person. Sure, the shower is great on a quick-and-easy, day-to-day basis, but the bathtub is pure peace.

What happened next is a blur, but within five minutes of leaving the tub, I was standing at the front door, desperate for Josh to return. Everything was moving at an unearthly pace, and he couldn’t get back soon enough. A new emotion swirled through my body, and I was overcome with shock. Josh finally opened the door, and I looked up at him with wide eyes. “Honey,” I said, “we’re going to be parents.” Thanks to one champion sperm and an e.p.t., the 3rd of July made the list: Best Days Ever.

*****

Blog Housekeeping

Dear readers, here marks the end of the wonderful journey that has been my blogoir. I can’t thank you enough for your readership, your comments, and your support! This project has been the first draft of a full-length memoir, and I plan to begin working on the next draft (off-line) immediately. In approximately one week, I’ll be launching a new blog that will be written in the present tense. Stay tuned here for that announcement!

In the mean time, I need your advice. My intention is to write more about what I learned about love and marriage through this experience, and I don’t want to limit my audience to only those who have been through a divorce. There are much more universal themes at play here. So, what do YOU want to see in the book version of Divorced Before 30? Are there specific subjects or characters that you’d like to read more (or less) about? Please leave your suggestions in the comments below. Don’t be shy!

Again, thank you!

“Something’s kind of bugging me,” I started. “What’s that?” he asked, calm as usual. “Well, if we get pregnant before we’re, you know, married, I’d want to have the same last name as the baby. I mean, I don’t know if I’d even change my name again anyway. Actually, I probably would, which is kind of weird, but what do you think?”

We went around about it for a while, and I was firm about what I wanted: We could either give our hypothetical baby my last name, or we could get married and I’d take Josh’s name. It was entirely bizarre to hear myself say that I would change my name. When I’d married John, I had struggled with the name issue. In the end, I had taken his last name but also kept my own–kind of hyphenated, but without the actual hyphen.

When I got divorced, it had been a huge relief to reclaim my maiden name. In fact, I’d seriously considered getting an “S” tattoo as a way of branding myself as my own woman. But, now that having a child was an actual possibility, things felt different. Sure, I loved my last name, but I also thought it would be really cool to share a name with Josh and our future kids. And I wanted to truly move forward—to embrace life with Josh in a love-like-you’ve-never-been-hurt-before kind of way. To say a big fuck you to divorce. It didn’t have a hold on me anymore.

Almost as surprising as my willingness to change my name was Josh’s opinion that if we got pregnant, we should go ahead and get married. With my concerns laid to rest, I relaxed into daily life and enjoyed the anticipation of it all. We were doing things our way, and life was humming along with a pleasant whir. Until—

The last week in June, Josh got laid off. It was 2008, and the recession suddenly seemed quite real. All bets were off. Nothing was certain. What about Napa? To hell with vacation. What about the mortgage? And—Lord, help me—what about our hypothetical baby?

While Josh didn’t give me a green light, he bought a very nice gift for my birthday. I was the proud owner of my first digital camera. He was careful to buy one with just the right specs—he’s good at sorting through models and reading reviews. It was perfect, and we had an action-packed weekend to document.

On Friday night—my actual birthday—we went to dinner at 112 Eatery, the restaurant where we’d lingered late into the evening just hours before our first kiss. Several friends met us for dinner, and it was a laughter-filled evening of small plates and tall pours. And dessert–oh, the dessert! I couldn’t choose a favorite between the tres leches cake and the butterscotch budino.

Perhaps the free-flowing wine was partially to blame, but by the end of dinner, I was standing in the ladies’ room, cursing myself in the mirror as I fought back tears. It wasn’t just that I was, you know, getting older, though Lord knows, that was part of it. I was so tired of feeling emotionally vulnerable. I’d been through so much in the last two years—when did I get to relax and enjoy love?

I unloaded on Josh when we got home, and he surprised me. He went berserk, and I have to confess—I enjoyed it in a perverse sort of way. He could be so emotionally reserved that I often wondered what the hell was going on up there. Now I knew, and that was so much better than acting like everything was just fine. I have little regard for fine. Real life is a hot, stinking mess sometimes.

He insisted that all of my questions about marriage and babies were ruining the romance, ruining any element of surprise that he might be planning. But I didn’t care about surprises—I just wanted him to look me in the eyes and tell me, in-person, out loud, that he wanted me. I didn’t need an elaborate proposal or a fancy ring. The idea of marriage had lost its lustre for me somewhere back in Illinois. I wanted more than an idea. I wanted the action of marriage. The real-life highs and lows, and all the banal stuff in between. With him.

We kissed and made up, and I came to terms with the fact that he was going to do this his way. No emotional appeals on my part would make a difference. So I shut up and enjoyed the rest of the weekend. On Saturday, we went to the Twins-Red Sox game with my brothers and their significant others. It was all fun and games until the 2nd or 3rd inning when I dunked my shiny new camera, full immersion, into my beer. I’d only consumed about two ounces of beer, so I couldn’t blame intoxication. The camera was trashed, and there was nothing I could do but finish the beer and shake it off.

On Sunday morning—Mother’s Day—I hosted my whole family for a rather elaborate brunch. It was such a sweet day. I mean, aside from the mimosas, french toast, and fresh fruit, it was genuinely sweet. “Like a Normal Rockwell picture,” as my mom used to say. My younger brothers were all highly participatory in the family quality time. That hadn’t always been the case. But on this fine spring morning, the whole lot of us walked down to the park after brunch to let toddling Ethan play.

As I watched my brothers egging on my mom to try the kiddie zip line, I knew exactly what I’d been waiting for, fighting for. Back when I’d first realized that my marriage was going to fail, I think what crushed me the most was the loss of the would-be family that I’d constructed in my head. I mistakenly thought that by saying “I do,” all of that would fall into place. Sometimes, life is exactly not what you expect. Case in point: a granny—my mother—flying by on a zip line, hollering like a schoolgirl.

Josh spent a good deal of time out in the garage, making his own ruckus with various saws. He insisted on putting a television and an old loveseat out there, basically so he could drink beer in style while taking breaks from his woodworking projects. “Who needs to hang out in the garage when we have two TVs in the house?” I asked. Clearly, that was a stupid question. You’d think that having three brothers would have prepared me to understand men.

Speaking of my brothers, Andy and Hilary recruited a huge group of family and friends to participate in the Brain Injury Association’s Walk for Thought in October. Their son, Ethan, had recovered fully from the Shaken Baby Syndrome injury he’d suffered in the spring. Team Ethan raised more funds than any other team, and we had a great time walking around St. Paul’s Como Park on a crisp Saturday morning. It was one of many days that reinforced my decision to move home to Minnesota.

Yes, moving home had been a good move on many fronts. In November, Josh and I celebrated the first anniversary of our final “pseudo date,” the turning point in our relationship. One year in, our biggest problem was my own discomfort with the fact that we didn’t have quite the same—how shall I put this—heat that we’d had before moving in together. It’s not that I minded the rhythm we’d settled into. I was actually fine with it, and Josh assured me that it was OK—natural, even. I tried to take his word for it, because what did I know about normal?

As Josh and I became increasingly comfortable sharing our lives, I realized something that came as a bit of a surprise to me—I did want to make it more official than a mortgage. Right after my divorce, I’d wondered if marriage would ever feel necessary to me again. After all, what did it really mean? But the more I thought about it, the more I was sure that yes, I still believed in marriage, and I wanted that for us.

One Saturday night around Thanksgiving, I couldn’t help but blurt it out. Josh was cooking up a two-hour culinary masterpiece, and I was drinking a glass of wine and pretending to be willing to help. We were flirting and kissing between veggie chopping and sautéing, and I just had to say something, right then and there. “You know,” I teased, “I wasn’t sure I’d ever want to get married again, but you’re starting to make me sure, especially if you keep cooking like this.”

I told him that I didn’t want to get married right away, but that I would want to eventually. Josh kind of laughed it off like I wasn’t really serious, and—Lord, help me—I  had no idea what to make of it. I let it drop, and we went on to have a wonderful late-night dinner, but the conversation left me feeling insecure. Maybe it had been a mistake to move in together—you know, that whole why-buy-the-cow thing. A dreadful analogy that clashes with my feminist sensibilities, but still. The last thing I needed was to get into a situation where I wanted more than he did, but maybe I already had.

While I was cautiously optimistic that the end was in sight, I didn’t feel like I could take a full breath until I was sitting in my living room with a glass of wine, a good book, and my honey at my side. On some level, I was worried that it was all too good to be true—the house, the man, the stability. It was all so civilized—a far cry from the day I sped away from my ex-husband with little more than my dog and my purse.

I could see what I wanted on the horizon: a family, which would start with me, Josh, and Tucker, and would hopefully grow to include children in the not-so-distant future. But it was bigger than that, too. I hoped that our little clan would be closely tied to our own roots, and I was excited that Josh and I had started to get to know each others’ families better.

Josh and I were both the oldest of four. Between the two of us, we had six younger siblings, ranging in age from 21 to 29. Josh had two sisters—Jessie and Rachel—and a brother named Andy who was still in college. Jessie had a three-year-old son named Aidan, and Rachel had recently married Brian, a great guy who she’d met while living out west. What made the whole situation downright idyllic was the fact that our parents were all still married to each other. Jeez. And, every one of these people lived within a 45-minute drive of our new house. I could already envision the BBQs and birthday parties.

Josh had met my family during our first year in college, when I’d often invited friends home for Sunday dinner. He’d also spent a fair amount of time at my parents’ house during my recently-divorced-and-living-in-the-basement phase. Still, I was happy that he was able to come along on my family’s summer vacation right before we moved in together. We rented a big lake home in northern Minnesota—a house that would go down in family lore as “Weird Don’s” because the owner was a cranky old dude named Don.

If it was hard for my family to see me so quickly attached to another man after my divorce, they didn’t let on. All three of my brothers and my sister-in-law had stood up in my wedding, so I wondered if they’d felt a certain investment in my marriage, but it felt like they were solidly on my team. I think the general consensus was that my marriage had been a mistake. Josh was welcomed with open arms, and at Weird Don’s, he was even foolish enough to stay out around the campfire with my brothers after I went to bed. This is a sure recipe for a four-Advil hangover.

I didn’t have a chance to vacation with Josh’s family that summer, but I did attend the employee appreciation picnic for the family business. I hadn’t been around his family much yet, so it was a good opportunity to talk to his parents and siblings over BBQ and cold brews. Josh’s dad, Larry, had started his own company several years before, and Rachel and Jessie both worked for him. Josh’s mom, Rose, did a lot to help make the company a great place to work—including providing home-baked goodies every week.

One of the many wonderful things about getting to know Rose was that she asked a lot of questions. She had a good deal of practice, as several of her children—including my boyfriend—were on the quiet side. At the picnic, Rose and Alex, Andy’s girlfriend from college, asked me about my divorce. What a relief! I’d been pretty sure that Josh had mentioned it to his mom, but I’d been wondering whether the rest of the family knew that I’d been married before. I don’t know why, but it really mattered to me. Something about authenticity.

It seemed like Josh and I would fit in nicely with each others’ families, but I knew it would take time to feel entirely comfortable. I couldn’t help but wonder, “At what point are you really part of your significant other’s family?” Did it take a ring? Or was cohabitation sufficient? Having already gained and lost in-laws, I really hoped that this would turn out differently. Still, there was always a risk. But since I was willing to put my heart on the line again for Josh, I figured that I could sure as hell go ahead and love his family.

Josh was standing up for Chris, so we were invited to attend the ceremony, which was being held at the couple’s favorite restaurant in a small town near Stillwater. Josh and I shared their love of all things food, and as I’d gotten to know them better over the past few months, I’d had a blast joining them for elaborate cooking “playdates” and hole-in-the-wall outings involving cheese-filled burgers.

On Thursday, Chris decided to ride with us to the ceremony, and I ended up having a drink with him at my apartment while we waited for Josh. It’s a rare treat to spend time with someone on their wedding day. Nothing could be more monumental than the day you say “I do,” and yet Chris was calmly sipping wine in my living room just a couple hours before the ceremony. We somehow got to talking about my marriage, which was actually a huge relief.

It was the first time I’d talked about my divorce with any of Josh’s friends, and as ugly as it seemed to me, it felt good to share it. We talked about marriage in general—a natural topic, given the occasion—and from where I sat, he and Corri seemed like a natural fit. I told him that the appeal of marriage wasn’t ruined on me entirely, but I did have a lot of questions about what it all meant—the promises, the trust, the inherent risk.

Josh and I delivered the groom on time, and he exchanged vows with lovely Corri in a quiet garden behind the restaurant. The twenty or so wedding guests joined the happy couple for a chartered trolley ride around historic Stillwater to take wedding photos, and the bride actually asked the driver stop at a liquor store so she could buy beer in her wedding dress. Back at the restaurant, we were treated to an amazing rhythm of course after course of food and wine, food and wine, food and wine. Each guest seated around the long table gave a personal toast to the bride and groom—I referenced Stevie Wonder—and Chris and Corri said a few words about each of the guests.

When Corri got to me, she hinted that Josh and I might not be far behind them, and it was the first time it occurred to me that anyone would wish that for me, for us. I’d spent so much time beating myself up about my divorce that I assumed everyone shared my belief that I might not deserve a second shot. Clearly, I was probably the only one who’d been thinking that, but hearing Corri’s sincere words spoken aloud was the best gift I’d received in a long time. I was, of course, a sniffling mess by the end of the toasts, but I was in good company. All in all, it was an amazing evening and as perfect a wedding as I’d ever seen.

Ethan was being examined one last time before being released, and his doctors thought he would make a full recovery. He would need ongoing follow-up appointments, and he still had some minor issues with his eyes, but he would be okay. And the best part was that Andy and Hilary had been cleared in the case, so Ethan would be able to go home with them.

Ethan would obviously not be going back to daycare. In fact, the home daycare was shut down because of the investigation. So, Andy and Hilary had to scramble to find childcare, and the grandparents really stepped to the plate. Hilary’s mom, also known as Nancy or Grandma Nana, would come from Louisville to care for Ethan for a few weeks. Then, each of my parents would take a month off of work to be full-time grandparents. My mom had the summer off anyway, so she’d be with him until August. In total, that bought Andy and Hilary four months before they’d need to come up with a new childcare arrangement.

My brother and sister-in-law had been through so much in the last year: bed rest, pre-term labor, the NICU, and now, this. I felt terrible for them. And my poor parents. They’d been through the wringer, too. Not only had they experienced the scare of Ethan’s injury, but they’d also worried an awful lot about me during the end of my marriage and my divorce. Loving people is damn hard work. Sometimes, there’s very little we can do to protect the people we love. And yet, most of us are quite willing—eager, even—to go on loving.

It was April 2007, and while my family was still recovering from Ethan’s injury, my life was in an upward spiral in many respects. I started my new job the day after Ethan got out of the hospital, and the next weekend, Tucker and I moved in with Megan. Josh and I hadn’t talked much about living together again since his lease would go through August, but he’d recently brought it up in front of my girlfriends. A few days later, I’d received this e-mail:

…speaking of how important you are to me, I also wanted to make sure you weren’t too freaked out by what I said about your/my/our living situation when we were over at Daniela’s. We haven’t really talked a ton about it, but I really could see us living together quite happily in the not-too-distant future and just wanted it to be on the table. Bringing it up like that in front of the girls was maybe not the best way to put it out there again, but my brain was not functioning correctly due to all the beer. Yeah, yeah—that’s the ticket. Since we haven’t discussed it at length, I’m not sure what your feelings are on the whole issue. From my perspective, I’ve always thought it was a pretty huge thing (i.e., kind of a test run for being married—I mean, what’s the difference after that?), but at this stage in my life it seems less huge and just more of a natural next step. That probably has a LOT to do with how comfortable and happy I am with you, so hopefully you take that as a compliment.

What?! He always thought it was a pretty huge thing, but now it seemed less huge? I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but I tried to take his word that it was meant as a compliment. Whatever he was trying to say, I did like the idea of a “test run.” I hadn’t lived with John until we’d already set our wedding date, and Lord knows that didn’t play out very well.

Now, I’m not saying that cohabitating before marriage or engagement is right for everyone. Hell, some people still call it living (say it in your best Dana-Carvey-as-the-Church-Lady voice) in sin. But as a recently divorced woman, it made a ridiculous amount of sense to me. In the past year, I’d learned a lot about love, about marriage, and about myself, and I knew that if I ever got married again, it would be different. If I ever got married again, it would be because I already felt married, he already felt married, and—what do you know?—it worked.

About five months after my divorce was final, I returned once again to the chapel where I got married. This time, it was for my nephew Ethan’s baptism. I adored the baby, and I wouldn’t have missed his special day for the world. But it wasn’t any easy day for me.

I gave myself hell during the service and the reception: Your little brother, the former keg-stand champion, has found stability, marriage, and parenthood, whereas you are divorced and living with Mom and Dad. Oh, and look at your nephew’s godparents. They’re young, engaged, and in love—right on track for happily ever after. Will anyone ever see you as the stable godparent type? Etcetera.

I was so flooded with feelings of worthlessness that the irony of the situation was lost on me entirely. I had just witnessed a sacrament of cleansing and new birth, one where the forgiveness of sins is central, yet my mind was awash in guilt and negativity. When life’s plans go terribly awry, it’s so easy to focus on what you don’t have or what you’ve failed to do.

In retrospect, it’s clear to me what I could have seen that day: That we are all inherently worthy. Other people, society at large, and our own brains try their damnedest to tell us we aren’t good enough. It’s our job to fight back, to fight for each other, and to give the little ones in our lives the tools they’ll need to fight the good fight. At the end of the baptism, the pastor lifted Ethan in the air for all to see: Ethan Donald, child of God. A tiny human being. A squeaky-clean slate. Hope in a diaper.