Evangelical Baby (Memoir, Fini)
The weeks were passing too swiftly, fall was coming, and my parents wanted me to come home for the holidays. Now, despite pressure from his family to dump me, my boyfriend volunteered to drive me across country to my parent’s house. Even though he still had not told his own parents about the pregnancy, he was willing to face mine. Did this mean he had emerged from the fog to discover, yes, he wanted to marry me and support this child? I still didn’t know.
We couldn’t leave though, until the sugar beets were harvested in late October. I was in my 7th month when my boyfriend finally met my family. He seemed to enjoy them and they, him. He even weathered well the talk with my dad about responsibility and “just give the baby a name ….” Then one early December morning he drove out of our driveway to go back to the farm. I waved to him through a frosty window, tears streaming down my cheeks. He promised to call, but I fully expected to never see him again.
So it was a surprise when the phone rang the next week. My boyfriend told me he’d finally broke the news of my pregnancy to his sobbing mother and disbelieving father. At the top of the eighth inning a wedding was planned, and not long after I found myself reciting my vows in a deep red wedding gown. The color seemed fitting considering my tenure as a Scarlet Woman.
My boyfriend and I have been married for several years now. Sometimes I think back to that time when I was pregnant and afraid of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. How after that worrisome time, I thought a new thought, something totally out of the realm of my evangelical upbringing and almost sacrilegious, but yet I found so comforting: maybe the Bible was a book full of both truth–and myths.
