Twenty-Five and Telling the Parents

How I envisioned my father's reaction

Being that my significant other was not employed and I was in grad school, to be expecting is the last thing I—or any of my family—expected. After finding out, freaking out, and processing the news myself, I knew that I had to tell my parents and in my family, doing so sooner rather than later is the better option.

My mother has always been of the impression that lying and omissions boil down to essentially the same thing. Pregnancy is also not really something you can keep secret for long. Honestly I’m not sure what I would have done without my parents during these first three months.

The first time I told a member of my family I was pregnant, I told them in those words precisely—except I started crying about it. By the time I was ready to tell my mother and father I’d become a little better at it. In my opinion breaking the news to your parents is all about working as a public relations person for your unborn child.

Instead of saying, “Mom, I’m pregnant!” I said, “Mom, I’m going to have a baby,” which—in my opinion—makes it a little more pleasant. When I spoke with my dad, I think the terminology I used was, “Richard and I are going to have a kid,”—probably not the best delivery on that one since I’m not actually having a goat, but a child. The common thread between both conversations, however, was that I felt as though I was waiting for a response for an eternity. Maybe not with my mother, because her response was, “Excuse me?”—which is usually what my mom says when she has actually heard something, but wants to make sure.

The “Excuse me,” response was probably the worst, because the last thing I wanted to have to do—after two days of building up the courage to speak to my mother about it in the first place—was to have to repeat it.

After I repeated it to my mother, her response was the same as my father’s eventually was—silence. I’m not sure that this needs to be said, but silence was difficult to handle. Honestly, I’d almost rather they’d yelled or said something, because silence allows you to fill in the gaps for them and chances are the things that you will think are way worse than what your parents are and in my case it was definitely not similar to what they said—when they eventually said it.

Being that the pregnancy was unexpected, neither of my parents seemed to think that congratulations were in order—which is somewhat understandable since they were probably more shocked by the news than I was.

My father’s response actually struck me more because I really didn’t know how to interpret it. He said, “Well I guess it was bound to happen eventually.” To this day, I have no idea what he meant by that. My initial thought was, “gee, thanks for the vote of confidence, dad,” but it seems pointless to think this way. In the long run, it seems as if, for some unknown reason, this child was determined to be in this world and no reaction positive or negative is going to change that. So I’d may as well sit back and make the best of it.