I WAS THREE MONTHS PREGNANT AND engaged to be married when I met him. He and I were out for dinner with mutual friends. He made me laugh. He was very cute. And very single. He saw my ring and heard my announcement about the growing bump in my stomach. Nevertheless, he paid for my dinner and walked me home, and a couple of weeks later we made plans to go see an early movie.
After the movie, I invited him into my apartment and made him a vodka and orange juice. I drank water but felt first-date tipsy anyway.
Of course, it wasn’t a date. How could it be, when I had a bump in my stomach and was engaged to the father of the bump? No, the word date was never uttered. I was in bed, alone, by ten. But before he left, this cute single man surveyed my apartment and told me I should have more secure locks on my sliding-glass doors. The next day, he dropped off a broomstick handle with my doorman, which I was to use to secure the sliding door in the back.
Where was my fiancé? He lived in a different city, thousands of miles away. We’d been together this way for years—apart, yes, but together. We saw each other once a month. Our arrangement was fine until I got pregnant, which had forced us to make decisions. We chose to get married (eventually) and live in his western city, but for me to remain for the duration of the pregnancy in my better-for-my-career eastern city, because it was, well, better for my career.
This confused many people. “Yes, I’m pregnant,” I had to explain endlessly. “No, the fiancé is not here. Yes, I go to the obstetrician appointments by myself. Yes, he visits. Yes, I visit. Really, it’s fine.”
But now, inconveniently, I had met this new man who had brought me a broomstick for security. To friends, I started to refer to him as Broomstick. His other name was Cute Single Man.
Cute Single Man and I began to e-mail regularly. We played Scrabble. Soon we had a standing date on Thursday nights watching reality television. He would come to my apartment and bring me ice cream, sliced watermelon, and Big Macs, my craving foods.
When CSM and I went to Mr. Sub (another craving) late one Saturday night and the employee behind the counter asked us when we were due, it was easier to pretend he was the father than to explain that he was just a friend. After all, what kind of woman goes out with a cute single man at eleven on a Saturday night when she’s pregnant with another man’s child?
Also I didn’t have a car, so CSM took me grocery shopping on Sunday afternoons. He carried the cases of bottled water. When we once shared an elevator with another pregnant couple, it was more natural for me to say, “We also can’t wait for this thing to come out,” than, “Well, I’m excited. I’m not sure he is. He’s not the father.”
When we went to the movies, people gazed at us with the warm approval generally bestowed upon pregnant couples. I suppose we looked wholesome and happy. And I couldn’t help but think that he and I would have had a very good-looking baby.
At first, I thought CSM pitied me. Actually, I thought he was attracted to my big pregnant breasts. I was right in both instances.
After all, there I was, two cups larger than my pre-pregnant self, alone in a big city, pregnant, while the father was a four-hour plane ride away. But CSM shouldn’t have pitied me. It was my choice.
CSM was becoming a version of the fill-in boyfriend, which many women in long-distance relationships have. The fill-in boyfriend takes you to the movies or to dinner, or sets up your DVD player. The only difference for us—besides the fact that I was pregnant and engaged—was that he was quickly becoming more than simply a version of the fill-in boyfriend.
“He’s in love with you,” my friend kept telling me. “Why is he attracted to an engaged pregnant woman? What’s wrong with him? It’s like you’re the ultimate challenge.”
Sometimes I did find his attraction odd, but like most women, I like to believe my personality is what attracts men. I didn’t want to believe I was just a challenge or that he had commitment problems (though often I did think that). I also did not, or could not, believe that CSM was physically attracted to the pregnant me—in sweat pants, with cellulite on my arms and pimples on my chin.
Don’t get me wrong. I wanted CSM to be attracted to me. I was pregnant, not dead. And I liked him, too. Very much, then too much, and then, yes, way too much. I would have said we were falling in love, but as it wasn’t an appropriate time for me to be falling in love, I didn’t say it. We certainly acted as if we were falling in love. I spoke to him first thing in the morning and at the end of every day. I missed him five minutes after he dropped me off. A night without seeing him felt like a month. He told me he had never cared for anyone like he cared for me.
And we fought like we were in a passionate relationship. One night I asked him to bring me chocolate ice cream. He brought me toffee-flavored instead. It was, I felt, the end of the world.
“Try it,” he said. “You’ll like it.”
“I will not like it,” I screamed. “I wanted chocolate ice cream. You never listen to me. It’s always all about you!” I kicked him out of my house, like a madwoman. It was the pregnancy hormones.
I thought I had lost him forever that night, and I waited for hours by my perfectly functioning phone, wondering if it had been disconnected, hoping for him to call, and knowing it would be better if he didn’t.
He did. I apologized. We made up.
Another time we went to a large party. I shouldn’t have gone. I was six months pregnant by then, felt ugly and out of place, and needed a bathroom every five minutes. He refused to accompany me to the bathroom, asking why didn’t I just find him afterward. He flirted with other women, or at least that’s the way I saw it. And why shouldn’t he have? We were at a party. It’s not as if he were the father of my child.
I left the party without telling him, angry, jealous. He called me at 3:00 a.m., drunk and apologetic. I had to keep reminding myself he was not my fiancé, not the person I was going to marry and grow old with.
But when I had an obstetrician appointment, he would say, “Call me right after.”
And I would. (Immediately after I called the fiancé.) I couldn’t stop myself. My head was screaming, Stop! But my heart…
“It’s a girl!” I told him. “I wanted a girl!”
“Fantastic!” he said.
Like the model expectant father, he loved placing his hand on my stomach when the baby kicked. “Wow,” he’d say. “That’s amazing.”
He worried about me and about this baby that wasn’t his. I worried what people would say about me if they knew about our relationship. He worried what people would say about him. I worried about my fiancé, whom I loved and didn’t want to hurt and didn’t want to lose. I worried about what the right thing was for my baby.
To the extent that we could, we kept “us” a secret. CSM did not tell his friends about me, and I told mine—those who knew—simply that I liked him and that he made me laugh.
But I knew we were crossing some line. If my fiancé were hanging out in his city with a cute single woman, I would have killed him. CSM never spoke of the fiancé, and I never spoke of CSM to the fiancé. If the fiancé suspected, he turned a blind eye. The denial! We were all swept up in it.
When I was very pregnant and it was time to leave CSM to be with the fiancé, my heart cracked. I cried on the plane. I no longer had any idea what I wanted. But I was having a baby in a few weeks. My life was about to change completely, and I was mostly wrapped up with the facts: I had gained forty-seven pounds, I could barely walk, and I was going to have an actual human thing to look after.
My baby is now no longer a baby. She is seventeen months old. Around the time my daughter was learning to walk, the supermodel Heidi Klum became engaged to Seal, after she met and dated him while pregnant with another man’s child. No one, it seems, was bothered by this. Likewise, in the movie The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the very pregnant journalist character ends up in bed with another man, not the father of her baby. Yet we all want her to be happy, and we’re happy she hooks up with another man.
But I’m not sure anyone is happy about me and CSM. It’s been more than two years since that fateful dinner and a year and a half since I moved away, yet he and I are still in touch. I take frequent trips to my eastern city, and we see each other. We struggle to figure out what, if anything, we are. We talk, we fight, we don’t talk. He misses me. I miss him. He hates me. I hate him. On and on it goes.
The fiancé and I have struggled, too. We have not married. We have not regained that clarity. We ask ourselves, “Are we happy together?” “Are we meant to be?” Those are, and perhaps forever will be, our questions. Maybe they are everyone’s questions.
And finally, of course, there are the “if onlys.” If only I’d moved west to be with my fiancé at the start. If only I hadn’t gone to that dinner. If only CSM and I hadn’t met at such an inopportune time. If only we could plan falling in love like a scheduled C-section.
Rebecca Eckler lives in Toronto with her two children. Her latest book is Blissfully Blended Bullshit. She is the executive editor of SavvyMom. This essay appeared in March 2005.