Stay Gold

six

chapter twenty eight ~ the one with the maid of honour
Heather's POV

I still couldn't wrap my head around the fact that I was pregnant, it didn't seem real. When the doctor had told me, I didn't believe him and he let me take another pregnancy test so that I could see for myself. It was unbelievable and I probably freaked him out a little with my reaction as my emotions got the better of me. One minute I was in denial, then I was shocked, then excited and then terrified about the prospect of becoming a mother, not only was I scared about my own changes but I was worried about what Joey would say when I told him. All kinds of thoughts came into my head, as I contemplated never telling him and running away so that he wouldn't hate me, but luckily the doctor calmed me down and reminded me that I was married. That my husband wouldn't hate me for being pregnant, and that he would probably be excited about this big step because secretly all men want their own family, something to do with their pride or something.

Thankfully, the doctor was right and when I told Joey, he was ecstatic to find out that we were having a baby. Sure, once we had got over the shock we had to sit down and think about this seriously but we knew that we were ready for this next step and there was no one in the world that I'd rather become a parent with. The apartment was big enough for us and a baby, we could financially support our family but we did decide that the boat would need to be sold so that we had extra savings in case something went wrong and we knew that we had a great support system around us as our friends would be overjoyed to find out that we were having a baby. A part of me had wondered if this happened too soon, because we had only been married just short of a year and Joey had never expressed his want for a family this soon. Whenever we talked about kids, it was sometime in the future, but now it was nine months away and that was scary.

Still, I blocked out my negative thoughts when seeing how excited Joey was to become a father, he had so many things to gush about and we hadn't even had our first appointment yet. Already, he had name suggestions and was talking about taking our child fishing like he used to go with his father and he was sure that they were going to be obsessed with sports because he would force them to watch it with him. Reminding him that the baby wasn't even as big as my hand yet, he calmed down but wanted to tell everyone as soon as possible about our big news. That's when I disagreed with him, of course, I wanted to celebrate with my friends and tell them the good news but I was worried about jinxing something. When I got engaged to Carl, I jinxed the engagement by preparing straight away and then found out that he had been unfaithful the entire time we had lived in New York. I didn't want something bad to happen to our baby, by telling everyone about it when it was too early on in the pregnancy. So, Joey respected my wishes and agreed to keep it our secret until I was ready to announce it.

Besides, there were more thrilling things to focus on because as our little baby was hidden in my relatively flat stomach, Monica was planning her wedding and everyone had to focus on her big day. The biggest thing that the girls were waiting to hear about was who was going to be her Maid of Honour, everyone had assumed that it would be me because I was Chandler's sister and she had been mine but now that I knew that I would potentially be heavily pregnant on the day of the wedding; I didn't really feel like being stressed for the next few months of my life, planning Monica's dream wedding. When she had invited us out to brunch, I had an idea of what the conversation was going to turn to and knowing how competitive Rachel and Phoebe were about this role, I was glad that I had already made my decision. Without telling the girls the real reason that I didn't want to be the Maid of Honour, I already had an excuse that I had been the Maid of Honour at Melissa's wedding and wanted them to have the chance to have that role.