10.1.2024
Weekends where decades happen
On Friday September 27 2024, around 6pm or so, an extremely faint line on a small thermometer-looking object sent Kathy and me into a bit of a panic. The line was almost invisible, but its presence and the shock it caused were undeniable. Kathy had been feeling sick with what we thought was a stomach bug for a few days now, but it was suspicious because she and I had eaten the same things and I felt totally normal. So she had decided to take a pregnancy test since she had one lying around. We had been living in NYC for only about 10 months at this point, after ~6 years in LA, and had been planning to try for kids starting late 2025. Our plan had been to move back to LA at the end of 2025/early 2026, as she wanted to be closer to her family for the first pregnancy. Two parallel lines had upended those plans.
My first reaction was to laugh at the absurdity of the timing. The day that we found out was a Friday and my last day at my job was just 3 days later, which was also coincidentally our second wedding anniversary. It was one of those week(end)s where decades happen and frankly we were not prepared in the slightest.
This was also the start of our hosting-someone-every-weekend 6 week block, so we had a friend coming to visit us later that day, a food tour booked for the following day, and plans for the next 3-4 days. We had to act relatively normal, it was way too early to tell anyone and it could have been a false positive due to how faint the line was.
On Saturday, the following day, Kathy took another two pregnancy tests and the faint line became more and more solid each time. It was official. We set up our first OB-GYN appointment for Oct 3 and things became real. My feelings that weekend, and for the week or so after, were extremely tumultuous.
Honestly, there was some strife that first week, mostly caused by my chaotic feelings about the pregnancy combined with the sudden loss of identity from quitting my job at the same time and the implied change in our LA timeline. Kathy felt like the villain for making us move back after we had already been in LA our whole relationship & it had only been a year of being on the same coast as my family. I won’t lie, I had some intrusive thoughts along those lines for the first day or two. At the same time, I knew that Kathy getting pregnant at all was a small miracle. Kathy is 2 years older than me, and so we had decided to do two rounds of embryo freezing earlier in 2024 to give ourselves time/options for having kids. During that process, we had found out she had a moderate case of endometriosis. I knew all of this, but my feelings remained very volatile.
My routine at that point included going to parks near-daily to read and watch the sunset. Throughout the first half of 2024, I had been pretty interested in meditation as a route to feel & process emotions, and I happened to have an audiobook loan for Focusing by Eugene Gendlin on Libby. The book is only an hour listen, so I started it up on Oct 1 as I was at Gantry Park waiting for the sunset. Focusing is a technique for sitting with emotions in your body and there are exercises in the book, which I tried out that day. It helped me clearly articulate my fear of lack of identity before having kids as I had just left my job, and of not doing something worthwhile / feeling like I was “wasting my potential” more generally. I tried it again on Oct 3 when I was at Astoria Park and sat with how I felt about moving back to LA. I was able to see and articulate how I felt about not having many close friends or family in LA, the negative associations I had with LA due to my relationship with weed during/after Covid (future post…), and think through how I could approach the move more constructively. Another session on Oct 4 helped me sit with my feelings around having “abandoned” family by choosing to live in LA after college (another complex future post…). After each of these sessions, the problems themselves were not resolved but I felt way better physically & there was usually a moment or two of insight. I got dinner with a close friend (huge shoutout Snigdha) on Oct 4 to chat through a bunch of these feelings, which helped tremendously as well.
I had built up this plan in my head for what I was going to do in 2025 in NYC while I wasn’t working. I was planning to explore the city fully, test drive a bunch of different interests, continue spending time with family in VA after over 10 years in LA, spend time with close friends in NYC, and also generally have my career shit together before having kids. Kathy is 2 years older than me, so I knew I would be having kids sooner than most of my friends, but I had thought I still had another year.
I needed a week to really sit with these feelings and properly mourn the death of the person I thought I was going to become.
Those couple weeks at the start of October were a clear break in my thought process and even my personality in some ways. Those feelings I had that first week seem like those of a different person now and obviously silly. Part of me knew that was the case even when I was feeling them, but I still had to acknowledge and face them. I know becoming a parent is a phase transition from young adult to grown-up, and I feel like I front-loaded & compressed at least a little of that transition into those few weeks. My mentality now is very different from before.
During that first week or two, Kathy and I discussed often and got on the same page. We decided that we will live in LA for 2 years & then re-evaluate. We chatted through how we will visit VA to ensure our kid remains close to both sets of grandparents, and plan to FaceTime the grandparents often while we're in LA. We will prioritize building a tight knit community and chose to live in Pasadena for that reason, as Kathy has a couple close friends there & the walkability will help. I plan to get involved in the Caltech Y again by joining their board. I am very grateful for and optimistic about the move now.
Kids are an addition to your life that makes it even more vibrant. My previous feeling of a lack of identity due to not having a career is still there to some extent, but I'm mostly grateful now that I will get to be a house husband for at least a little while (not to mention "father" will become a big part of my identity too). Getting to be fully present with your kids is a blessing.
Kathy is 2 years older than me. I used to think of this age difference as something neutral or sometimes even slightly negative. Her timeline for marriage, kids, etc was (very correctly) a couple years ahead of what I considered my "ideal" at the time, and so there was a light pressure to move a bit quicker. I would settle down and get married before most of my friends (Edward pulling the trigger so quickly helped here tbh), and I would have kids sooner than most of my friends.
Since those couple of weeks, it's become plain how silly that kind of thinking was. Now, I am so so grateful we are ahead of schedule. We get to spend one extra year of our life with our kids.
I am extremely grateful Kathy was able to get pregnant despite her endometriosis and am beyond excited for later this year. And now that we’re ahead of schedule, I kind of want to have 3 kids instead of the 2 we were originally planning. We’ll see about that one.
There are a series of topics that I know I have been avoiding writing about, this being one of them & a couple others mentioned in this post. I’m proud of myself for writing about this & will continue to do so.
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