Dear Jordan,
Orders for Iraq. I heard the words your father spoke that winter day in 2004, but my mind would not accept them. He simply could not be sent into battle. It had taken us too long to find each other.
“Oh God, Charles, please don’t tell me that,” I said. And then: “Can’t you get out of it?”
“No, Dana,” he said gently. “I put on the uniform and I take the paycheck, so I have to go where the commander in chief sends me.”
I knew that would be his answer as well as I knew that he was somehow relieved to be joining the war. For months he had felt guilty about preparing soldiers for a battle he was not himself fighting. To him, it was like violating a sacred oath. Nothing I said eased his torment, especially after he began to hear from buddies he had served with during the First Gulf War who were heading back to Iraq.
I could have begged or railed. I could have pleaded with Charles to consider how his elderly parents would react. I did have political views about the war—everyone did, and I could have forced him into debating the issue. But none ofthat seemed right now. What mattered was supporting my man. I certainly did not want to risk saying anything that would hurt his morale or make him question his mission.
“When will you go?” I asked.
“The end of next year,” Charles said, and I thought I heard relief in his tone again. In the last few months, he had begun to reflect more and more on his time serving in Operation Desert Storm. Even knowing the dangers he would face, he felt his orders somehow completed him.
I found myself thinking of the past, too. When I had vowed years earlier never to marry a soldier, it was because I feared replicating painful parts of my childhood and limiting my career choices. I had never considered a far greater risk: that my man might be sent into battle.
It took Charles’s pending deployment to throw everything else into perspective. The personal commitments that I had so long been afraid of I now wanted desperately. I loved being a journalist and as a reporter had considered it a point of pride that my editors knew I kept a packed suitcase in my car and my laptop nearby in case they needed an “unencumbered” reporter in a hurry. I had even achieved the financial security I sought, but I was also approaching forty. Hopping on a plane at a moment’s notice was no longer a thrill. Waking up in a hotel and not remembering what city I was in no longer seemed like an adventure. On some level I must have known this; I had accepted the editing job in New York when I could have become a foreign correspondent or a national bureau chief in another city. Now I stayed in one place and sent other people to unfamiliar cities to cover wildfires and plane crashes. I wanted to experience more of life, not merely report on it.
One evening, when Charles called to tell me about his latest drawing, I was distracted and cut him off.
“I want to have a baby,” I blurted out.
He thought I was joking and laughed.
“I’m serious, Charles. I want to try to get pregnant.”
He was silent for a minute. “Why?”
The question lingered.
Charles knew that I had never particularly wanted children. I liked them well enough and adored my nieces and nephews, but I had seen so many parents struggle financially, including my own. I wanted the freedom to focus on my career without worrying about being a breadwinner and a nursemaid. I never had the baby lust that lots of women feel when they reach their thirties. I was too busy building up my 4<="" p="">
Of course, the issue was not just my feelings; it was about whether Charles and I would be good parents together. So many children, African Americans especially, were growing up without fathers. Charles, I knew, would love me and any child of ours too much to ever leave us. He was the only man who had been patient enough to really try to understand me—and to love me anyway. I knew he would be an equally patient father.
I wanted to be his wife as well as the mother of his child, but I knew him well enough to know that he was too traditional to entertain a proposal from a woman. He needed to do the asking, in his time and in his way.
As I thought about how to answer Charles’s immediate question, it occurred to me that he was not aware of something: the balance of power in our relationship had shifted. The days of him pursuing me and me letting him were over. I had urged him more than once during difficult moments in our relationship to date other people, but I was now thankful he had not found anyone to replace me. I loved him more than he knew, and it was time to make him see.
My answer to his question was definitive. I told him I had never known a man with such amazing character and strength and spirituality. I told him that he was my best friend, but that I had also never experienced such passion with a man.
I did not say that knowing that our baby was growing inside of me might sustain us both during the long year ahead.
“Do you think it’s even possible?” Charles asked.
“All we can do is try,” I said. “If you want to.”
“Absolutely,” he said, startling me with his certainty.
“Really, don’t you want to think about it awhile? I’m not asking you for a puppy, you know.”
“No, I don’t need to think about it,” Charles said emphatically.
“Are you sure?”
“Stop asking me that,” he said. “You’re the one who doesn’t sound sure.”
“It’s just that I don’t understand how you can make a decision like this so quickly,” I said.
“I made it a long time ago,” he said.
I reached into a drawer in my nightstand. “I’m about to throw out my birth control pills.”
He said, “Go ahead.”
That night I thought again about how well Charles had come to understand me, and how that helped me to better know myself. Once, when I came home from work furious about a disagreement with my boss, I followed Charles around the apartment, animatedly recounting what had happened. He did not say a word. Finally I turned to him and asked, “Well, don’t you have any advice?” Barely pausing for an answer, I resumed my rant. When I was done, I realized that while I was talking he had drawn me a bubble bath, lit candles, and put on a jazz CD.
Wordlessly, he helped me undress and lowered me into the warm water. Then he handed me a glass of Chardonnay, set a bowl of popcorn beside me, and told me he was going for a walk. I was finally speechless. By the time he returned forty-five minutes later, I was watching a sitcom and laughing out loud. Charles might not have had much to say about office politics or the newspaper business, but he knew what I needed, sometimes better than I did.
Knowing he would rarely ask for anything for himself, I tried to anticipate his needs, too. I could tell from the way he moved when his muscles were sore and he needed a massage. If he got out of bed in the middle of the night to draw, I knew something was troubling him, and that if I sat quietly beside him long enough, he would tell me about it. I knew that he enjoyed long baths nearly as much as I did but would not take one unless I prepared it for him.
It would be two months before Charles’s next break in training, but I could not contain my excitement about our decision. We had agreed not to tell anyone until there was something to say— but I went ahead and told my mother, my sisters, and my closest girlfriends.
“Girl, that’s going to be a beautiful baby,” said my friend Loretta.
“I’m not pregnant yet,” I said.
“Yes, but when you put your mind to something, you usually do it,” she said.
This was different. Charles’s preparations were intensifying and his deployment was just months away. We would have only three or four weekends to try to conceive. I had no idea whether my childbearing years had already passed, and Charles and I decided that if we could not conceive, we would not pursue infertility treatments. If we were meant to create a life together, it would happen naturally. If it did not, we would try again after his tour of duty.
Charles was the only deeply religious man I had dated—a man so intoxicated with love for me that he compromised his traditional values to please me. I realized that he would have preferred that we get married before having a baby, but I also suspected that he somehow still thought asking for more of a commitment might frighten me away. He had grown accustomed to not knowing what to expect fromme, and he did not want to risk losing our relationship—I had become his confessor and “earth angel.” Imagine: an anxious, demanding earth angel. That is who I was, though, and Charles accepted it. He set aside his own desires to satisfy mine. So when he came to New York during a training break the last weekend in June, we clung to each other with an urgency I had never experienced, as though we were trying to will a baby into being.
As I lay there listening to Charles breathe in the dark that first night, I wondered, guiltily, about my own motives. Somewhere, amid the certainty of our love, the faith in Charles’s commitment to fatherhood, and the desperate hope that a pregnancy would make it easier for us to endure our separation, there was a cold calculation: the odds were slim at my age of finding another man to father my child if he did not return alive from the war. Did Charles see that side of me, too?
At dinner the following night, Charles told me he had prayed a long time for us to be a family, and I was suddenly petrified. “But what if I’m not good at being a mother?” I asked him. “I’ve been focused on myself for so long. What if we have a baby and it hates me?”
Charles chuckled. Then he leaned back in his chair, folded his massive arms across his chest, and smiled.
“It’s not funny,” I said.
When he spoke again it was in as soft yet as steady a voice as I had ever heard from him. “You really have no idea how good you’re going to be at this, do you?” he said.
Tears fell from my eyes. I realized then that I did not just want a baby— I wanted his baby. I leaned forward and kissed him.
“Do you think we should become an official family?” Charles asked.
“Are you asking me to marry you?”
“Yes,” he said, lowering his head in anticipation, or maybe fear, of my answer.
Whatever part of me was still protecting those old wounds fell away. I felt healed. I said yes, and meant it with all my heart.
Charles got up and knelt beside me. He kissed my hands and pulled me into his arms. It was time to go home, he said. We had only two more days together and spent most of the time in bed.
Four days later I suspected I was pregnant and went to my doctor to have the news confirmed. She asked how far along I thought I was.
“About four days/’ I said.
The doctor looked as though she felt sorry for me. I was clearly a desperate woman. But she went along with it and soon I was emptying my bladder into a plastic cup. I waited in an exam room while a nurse checked the results.
“Negative/’ the young woman said and left I sat there for several minutes, agitated and in disbelief. I had been so sure.
Slowly, I made my way out onto the chaotic midtown streets. I needed to get back to work but kept walking instead. Your father was in the desert and would be out of touch for weeks, so I called my sister Lynnette in her office in Los Angeles.
“Hey, are you busy?” I asked, not waiting for a response. “I just left the doctor’s office. I took a pregnancy test and it came back negative. I think it’s wrong.”
She reminded me that I was forty years old and had just started trying. “What are the chances you would get pregnant on the first try?” she said.
“I was just so sure.”
In the days that followed, the test result nagged at me. Three times in as many days I walked into a drugstore, picked up a home pregnancy kit, and put it back on the shelf. I called my sister again to tell her that I was still convinced I was pregnant.
“Go ahead and spend the money on the test, so you’ll have some peace.”
I took her advice and went out immediately to buy a kit. Twenty minutes later I poured myself a vodka tonic to steady my nerves and went into my bathroom. I sipped my drink, then took the stick out of the box with shaking hands. But when I was done I could not bring myself to look at the results. I called Lynnette back.
“Go ahead,” she said, cheering me on.
Two pink lines meant a positive result. And there were two— except the second line was very faint.
“Oh my God!” my sister yelled. “Go get another test!”
Two more kits and the same results, a clearly defined pink line and the hint of a second one. Lynnette told me to call the 800 number on the test box. Within minutes a recorded message gave me my answer.
Even a faint pink line meant the test was positive.
“Oh my God,” I screamed. “I’m pregnant!”
Lynnette squealed and hung up to call my other sisters.
I picked up my drink and put it to my lips, then stopped and poured it down the drain. No more alcohol.
The doctor confirmed the results the next day. I was about two weeks pregnant. She congratulated me and said the first test had been taken too soon after I conceived to detect the pregnancy.
It was official. Hard as it was to believe, Charles and I had conceived on our first attempt
He got back from the field two weeks later and called me at once. The training had not gone particularly well, he said. The nights in the desert were frigid, the days scorching, and he couldn’t get the men to keep the heavy equipment on. “They were passing out and throwing up in the heat,” he said. “But it’s going to be even hotter in Iraq. I finally had to tell them that if I catch them without their gear when we getto Iraq, I’m going to dock their combat pay.”
What he was saying was disturbing. Charles was in great shape, but it bothered me to think of him wearing hot, cumbersome equipment in Iraq. I reminded myself that he had been there before and survived.
“I know that if anybody can get those soldiers ready to go, it’s you. You still have time,” I said. “And by the way, sweetie, we missed you.”
Charles went on talking. I asked whether he had heard what I said.
“No, what?”
“I said, ‘We missed you.’“
“Who missed me?” Charles asked, bewildered.
“Both of us,” I said, “I’m pregnant”
He laughed long and loud.
“Honey, are you sure? How are you feeling?”
“Yes, I’m sure, and I feel fine,” I said. “I saved one of the little test sticks as a souvenir for you.”
He laughed again, then turned serious.
“Dana, thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, Charles. Just be there when this baby is born and come home to help me raise it.”
“I will,” he promised.