"Where are you, Juju Bear?"
Owen's breath tickled the back of my ear as he came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. The sound of his voice brought me back to the parlor from wherever my mind wandered when I lost track of it.
I chuckled at Owen's use of his silliest nickname for me. It usually meant he was in the mood for having a real heart-to-heart conversation. Early on in our relationship, I had made the mistake of drunkenly declaring to him that Juju Bears were, in my opinion, the Most Disgusting Of All Gummy Candies. He had reacted to my opinion by pointing out that "Juju Bear" worked perfectly as a nickname for "Julie." The nickname had annoyed me at first, but only in the performative way that flirtatious gestures affect people when they first start dating. Really, the fact that Owen Porter had invented a special name for me made my heart swell with pride and I hoped that he'd never stop calling me that. He hadn't, but over the years it had morphed from a teasing name to one that signaled he had something big on his mind.
I already knew what he wanted to talk about as I turned away from the front window to face him, burying my face in the crook of his shoulder and breathing in the comforting scent of Men's Deodorant. After a moment, I pulled away and looked up at his honest, amber eyes to confirm my suspicion.
Yup.
From the way he looked down at me, I could tell that he wanted to discuss the same thing he'd been bringing up consistently for months now, without any change in the outcome: having a kid.
More precisely, he wanted to discuss me having a kid. I was the one who was going to have to be pregnant for almost a year and then push a watermelon-sized living thing from the most sensitive part of my body. And he was going to try to talk me into it. Again.
It's not that I didn't want to have kids ever. It's just that I really liked the way things were between Owen and me already. Throwing another person into the mix just seemed like inviting an unnecessary obstacle to overcome at a time when we were sailing along fairly smoothly. We both had careers into which we'd invested a lot of time and positive energy, I as a writer and he as an accountant.
Being an accountant was, admittedly, about the least sexy job imaginable, but that's all it was to Owen: a job. He took it seriously and worked hard, but he had never been the type to concentrate on advancing up the corporate ladder or establishing a career legacy for himself. I had always admired his homemaking tendencies and loved our lifestyle of being at home together most of the time when he wasn't at the office.
As a freelance writer, I usually sat out on our back porch to work during the day when the weather allowed, and when the seasons shifted I moved inside to the large oak desk in the front parlor. Even when I was working on boring copy for some cookie-cutter corporation's website, I enjoyed writing in a way Owen clearly did not expect to enjoy accounting. For him, a job was just a way to pay the bills and support what really mattered to him, which was his family.
Or at least, that was his vision for his life. In order for it all to come together, he needed me to play along.
"There you are," he chuckled, holding my gaze as I focused back on the room. "Are you thinking of getting some work done?"
"Nah," I shook out my long, tangled curls and scooped them up between my hands, gathering the mass of hair in a pile on top of my head. "Just about to start getting ready to head over to the Dolan's."
That evening, our neighbors were hosting the first holiday party we'd been invited to so far that year. It was likely the only one we'd be invited to, besides Owen's company party, and that morning I had woken up with a familiar social anxiety creeping along the back of my neck. I had spent the day trying to ignore it.
"Then what are you doing all the way in the parlor?" Owen did his best impression of the haughty, blue-blooded New Englander who he imagined went around using the word "parlor" seriously in casual conversation. I'd always used that word to describe this room, ever since the first time we'd walked through the house. Despite its location looking out to the front yard, the room somehow felt private, a special nook for conspiring or creating art. I felt inspired when I sat in the davenport we'd set up across from the fireplace, which was shared with the kitchen in the back of the house.
It was as if all the hundreds of different stories attached to all the people who had passed through that room were still living in the slightly warped floorboards and the simple molding that ran along the crease where the wall met the ceiling. It was a magical place to write, and since of the two of us, I was the one who spent the most time in the parlor, it seemed fair that I should get to decide what we called it.
I spun away from Owen and plopped down on the davenport, motioning for him to join me. "I dunno, I just kind of wandered in here thinking about what I'm going to wear tonight. What are you wearing?"
He gestured at the outfit he already had on: a fitted, forest green sweater over a patterned button-down shirt and dark jeans. "I thought I'd go as a gracefully aging L.L. Bean model," he answered, sitting down beside me and hoisting my slippered feet onto his lap.
"That's what you were for Halloween, and besides, tonight is not a costume party," I laughed, scooting down and kicking off my slippers so that he could more easily rub my feet between his hands. "Mmmm, thanks." He was excellent at foot rubs, which was about Reason #452,039 why I loved him. "So. What's up."
"Look," he began, without even pausing to take a breath, "I don't want to stress you out by bringing this up." Owen tried to be careful not to upset me when it came to the topic of becoming parents. We'd always agreed that we would have kids eventually, but after my thirtieth birthday he seemed to bring it up daily.
He started looking for excuses to turn our everyday experiences into conversations about having a baby: "Oooh, I think I'll order the steak with potatoes and baby carrots. Speaking of babies..."
It was, to be fair, a perfectly legitimate topic for a husband to want to discuss with his wife as we entered our thirties. But it just wasn't something I wanted to think about seriously yet; I found it difficult to imagine my life with a child in it, and most of the time I didn't want to. So I'd started to tire of Owen's repeated attempts to engage me in conversations about when we might want to upgrade to a bigger house to fit our "growing family," or whether he should stop by the pharmacy to pick up some family planning "supplies."
The latter question was in a voice message he'd left for me during his commute home one afternoon about a month earlier. I'd been in the parlor on a writing kick and my phone had rung unanswered up in our bedroom, so it took me by surprise when he arrived home toting a pink cardboard box filled with little paper strips for testing my pee. Half of them were to test my level of luteinizing hormone, or LH, to see when I was ovulating, he'd told me. When the little strip appeared, we'd know when to start having what would probably have to be absurd amounts of sex.
Fine.
The other half of the strips were pregnancy tests, which would reveal one control line when dipped in regular pee and two purple lines when dipped in pregnant pee. Owen had also, helpfully, picked up some of those 3-ounce paper cups that people keep on their bathroom vanities. For me to pee in, he'd explained.
I had been furious with him for pressuring me like that. He'd expressed himself repeatedly and I'd heard him: he wanted me to get pregnant! I got it. But he needed to trust me to decide when I was ready. When he kept forcing the issue, it started to feel like I was his parent and he was a child kicking the back of my car seat and whining, "Are we there yet are we there yet are we there yet...?"
That analogy had not gone over well. After a big, raw fight that had lasted an entire night, we had come to the solution that we'd keep the issue of starting a family on the forefront of our minds, and that we'd only talk about it once per week. That way, I'd be able to continually evaluate how I felt about it without resenting Owen for pestering me. And he'd be assured that since we would be talking about it weekly, I wasn't going to forget about having kids until it was too late and all my eggs had dried up, or whatever the hell he was afraid of.
He'd been really good about sticking to that arrangement. I tried to remember the last time he'd brought it up, and realized it probably had been exactly a week earlier.
Now, as he held the arch of my left foot between his hands, I reassured him, "It won't stress me out. Let's talk about kids. Okay? Let's do it."
He dragged his fingers backward through his wavy hair, slightly tugging the ends thoughtfully. It was a careless habit that made him look sexy in a professorial way but was definitely contributing to the gradual recession of his hairline. I thought he looked even handsomer as he aged, but he was becoming self-conscious about looming baldness and had been trying to cut out the habit of pulling on his hair. He saw me watching him and stopped his hand in mid-tug, bringing it back down to my foot.
Then he laid out, for what felt like the hundredth time, all the reasons he felt we were ready, all the things we could do, all the plans he wanted to make, all the reasons it was time. Hiseyes softened as he described the fun we'd had on Christmas with Sadie, his sister's four-year-old daughter who seemed to be developing along the autism spectrum. We had enjoyed our time with that sweet little girl.
As Owen spoke, the light changed suddenly, and I saw him as the rest of the world must see him. For just a moment, he was not the person whose sweaty, sleepy scent mingled with my own every morning, but a stranger, or an acquaintance maybe; someone about whom I was curious to know more. He really did look like a catalog model: Undeniably attractive in an agreeable, dad-next-door-who-barbeques-and-is-saving-up-for-a-boat kind of way.
And that was the thing. Even when I tried to look at him objectively, I saw "dad" as part of his identity.
He wanted it so badly.
Owen knew I'd started using the LH tests he'd brought home from the pharmacy to test my pee every morning, and he wrapped up his pitch by asking if I happened to be fertile right then.
I did. "The little strip showed up this morning, so I'm about to ovulate or I guess I already might be. But I don't think we should have sex, Babe. This is just not the month."
I kissed him, told him that I took seriously what he had expressed to me, and then repeated what I'd lovingly explained the week before and the week before that: It was a decision I still needed time to make.
Between the hours of eight o'clock that night and three o'clock the next morning, someone else would make that decision for me.