Yours, Mine, and Ours

My mom and stepfather had been trying to have a child together, but they were having no luck. My mom only had one ovary, and they had been trying for eleven years, so they decided that it wasn’t going to happen. Mom was starting to go through the change of life, and my stepfather was eleven years older than my mom, so they decided to stop trying.

You know what was about to happen. It was 1978, and we were starting to get ready for my wedding day in August of 1979. My mom wasn’t feeling well, so she went to the doctor’s, and he told her she might be pregnant. They would do a test to see, and if she wasn’t, then it was just the change of life making her feel so bad. When she came home, we were talking, and I told her that she was pregnant. She said, “No, I can’t be. It is just the change of life.”

I said, “No, I really think you are.”

We were sitting in the kitchen when the phone rang, and it was the doctor’s office. She was talking to the doctor, and then she said, “Oh, I am.” I started to laugh; I knew she was. When she got off the phone, I said to her, “Well, you are pregnant, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I will have to have a blood test when I’m four months along to make sure that everything is okay with the baby since you are the last child I had and it has been twenty-one years.”

I told her that everything was going to be okay. This is when I realized that I definitely had a sixth sense, for I just knew the baby was okay. I felt this was true. After she reached four months, she had the test; and when the results came in, everything was okay with the baby. She hadn’t told the family yet; she wanted to make sure everything was okay first.

That afternoon, my mom called her parents and told them to come over to the house, for she had something to tell them. Later that afternoon, they came over. I was in the living room with Mom and Dad when they walked in. My grandfather said, “Well, I know why we are here.”

That’s when I said, “Okay, I will be leaving, for this doesn’t involve me.”

My grandfather said, “Okay, now I don’t know why I’m here.”

I laughed and walked out of the room. That’s when I knew they thought I was going to tell them I was pregnant. They were on the right track but the wrong person.

I went into the kitchen, and suddenly I heard my grandfather say, “What? Really? You? I thought it was Debbie.”

My mom told them that she waited to tell them, for she wanted to make sure the baby was okay. Then she knew she was going to have the child. She then told them that the baby was due in May. They were happy for my parents, for they knew that they had been trying for some time.

My parents were at a friend’s house, and there was a TV actor there from a half-hour sitcom. He thought that he could use this in his TV show. He said it would be “Yours, Mine, and Ours,” a complete family. The TV show, I think, was Growing Pains, so he told us he would let us know when it was going to be on. After a few months, we got a phone call to watch the next week’s show. The title of the episode was “Yours, Mine, and Ours.” It was neat to watch this show, being it was based on our family. I wish that I had taped the show, but we hadn’t thought of that until the show was over.