I don’t think I’ve talked at great lengths about Maybug’s dad before.
I call him my boyfriend but in the strictest sense of the word he isn’t. Being that our only romantic interactions prior to this were the ones that were necessary to create Maybug, perhaps “baby daddy” is more accurate. He’s in love with me in a way that would be creepy and obsessive under different circumstances.
He wants to marry me. We can live in his parents’ basement suite. The TV room can be our room, the storage room the baby’s. I told him that he couldn’t be so idealistic but he is anyway. Maybe I’m a cynical old bitch in the body of a sixteen-year-old. Maybe he’s the smart one. I don’t want Maybug to fall into a hole of living here, never leaving, never wanting anything else, never knowing anything but his or her grandparents’ basement.
“Don’t you want anything else?”
“I want to be with you.”
“I want to finish high school and go to university and get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Can I come with you?”
“Don’t you have your own dreams?”
“I want to be with you.”
He’s not stupid. He’s not like the other people who go to school with us, who think that this is it, it doesn’t get any better than this. But he loves me. He loves us–Maybug and me.
I love him too, of course. And because I love him I want to protect him. I want him to understand that he’s got a life, that you can’t just marry the first girl you accidentally impregnate just because you accidentally impregnate her. You should do everything that teenagers do, like have a girlfriend and dump her for a newer model, like go to prom and speed and not have to worry about anything except your chemistry test. My life, at least for this year, has been upturned, but that doesn’t mean that anybody else’s should be.
Or should it?
I had my first therapy session today. It was after school, and I had to pick my little sister up from school before. Maybug’s dad said he would come with me, and he went to my house at lunch to get my sister’s car seat from my dad’s van so she could ride in his car. People made fun of him all day long for that car seat, but he never said a word.
I told all of this stuff to the therapist, of course, but I’m writing it here now too. She says the same thing all the other adults in my life say–that I’m very brave and intelligent etc. We didn’t talk too seriously about anything. I was nervous to, I guess, despite the fact that I have no problem spilling it on here.
I need him–Maybug’s dad, my boyfriend, whatever you want to call him. It sounds horrible, I know. But we–or I–have begun a sort of hibernation, isolation. People don’t talk to me anymore. Even my best friend, who was with me all this time, has quietly upgraded to new friends who can go out and do stupid teenage things such as sit in cars and drink alcohol in their parents’ basements then go and do stupid things to other teenagers. We tether each other, he and I, quietly. We’ve drifted away from everyone else, but we can’t drift away from each other.
People are always saying that babies don’t make couples closer but maybe they do. Even when Maybug is far away from us with his or her new family we’ll always remember that we were with each other this whole time. We’ll always be a family, always, all three of us.
Always.
