Elvis is Love!

January 8, 2008 – it’s Elvis’ birthday, which means I got pregnant 9 years ago tonight. We were at the House of Blues: her dad was playing in a few different bands for Elvis’ birthday tribute; then off to home, and a few weeks later the truth was revealed by a stream of urine on a little plastic test strip. He didn’t believe it and wanted to do another one, but both of us were too broke to afford another $15. It of course turned out to be correct. I was pregnant. He wanted it terminated; I refused; he vanished. That’s the simplified version; the reality was a lot more dramatic and really quite sad.

What followed was nine months of fear and worry and a complete lack of support from anyone I knew, except a girl who I looked up to immensely but who eventually turned her back on me 2 months before the birth and then died of an overdose a few years later.

But, what followed that was that clichéd but absolutely amazing and lovely miracle of birth – 16 hours of labor and an emergency c-section and a small little critter who looked so much like my mother before she died that in my morphine-induced haze I was convinced she’d been reincarnated as my daughter. And then years of love, and love, and just a lot of love, and now she’s 8 and how amazing is that?! Again…that’s the simplified version, and the reality has involved a bit more drama, most of it not sad at all.

So Elvis was born and then my daughter was conceived and then I learned about love.

Elvis fucking rules!