This Time Around

By Caitlin Buhr

My best friend is pregnant with her second child. Her first child was born 15 years ago, when we were juniors in high school.

That day the summer before junior year that she told me the news, we were standing in my driveway. It was a rare day off from my babysitting gig, and Leah had shown up without calling first.

“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

A month or two before this day, I drove Leah to Walgreens to buy a pregnancy test. On the way, I asked her what she would do if it were positive. “I’ll keep it. I don’t want to have an abortion,” she said. Her response surprised me–how was she so sure of anything?–but I never asked her that question again. The test was negative that night, and I assumed our outing–crowding into one bathroom stall, leaving drops of pee on the floor–would be a wake-up call.

Leah wouldn’t meet my eyes. I’d first admired her rootbeer-colored eyes when we met three years earlier at eighth grade orientation. Leah’s eyes are very round, almost too big for her face. She often looks surprised, like Karen from Mean Girls. Except Leah is wildly wise. A few weeks into eighth grade she asked me if I supported capital punishment.

“Leah, are you okay?”

She finally looked up. “Yeah. I just wanted to tell you that I’m pregnant.”

I smiled as warmly as I could and hugged her. She sank into my hug.

A few months later, she found out it was a girl. 

When I told my mom, her face crinkled up like a raisin. “I don’t care. That’s not exciting,” she said. My mom had always liked Leah because whenever she came over, she cuddled with our dog and asked for seconds of whatever my mom cooked. My mom couldn’t reconcile that earnest girl with one who had, as evidently as possible, had unprotected sex.

In the winter, Leah’s dad kicked her out of the house. She moved 30 minutes away to live with her mom and stepdad and finish high school in Madison. But before she left Mt. Horeb, she was visibly pregnant at school. One day, our assistant principal, a bulky woman who monitored lunch, laughed while she watched Leah pile her tray with spaghetti.

“You know, you’re only supposed to gain 20 pounds when you’re pregnant!” Ms. Dixon said. “I haven’t even seen football players eat that much!” (Yeah, school staff said stuff like that in 2008.) 

Perhaps another teenaged girl would have told Ms. Dixon to fuck off. I probably would have cried.

But Leah laughed. And she didn’t laugh uncomfortably. She was sincerely amused. She cackled and threw her head back. Then she glanced across the table at me and shoveled a forkful of cafeteria bolognese into her mouth.  

When her daughter was born in April, my dad drove me to the hospital in Madison after school. Isabella, five hours old, was fast asleep when I held her for the first time. What I remember most was her lightness, and thinking, This is a person.

Bella has a mess of curly blonde hair, soft like a princess’s, and shiny blue eyes that always look focused. Once she could talk, it was nonstop in her fast, hyper voice, so that every time I visited on trips home from college, I had to wait until she was going potty to catch up with Leah. 

When Leah asked me to be Bella’s godmother, I said I needed a few days to think about it. I don’t remember that part, probably because it’s a bitchy thing to say. But Leah tells me she appreciates that when I did say yes, it wasn’t casually.

I was anxious when my boyfriend came with me to visit them for the first time. What if he didn’t understand that Leah and Bella were as much my family as my parents, whom he’d also just met, were?  I began to relax when Bella handed Matt a Sesame Street book to read to her. Her laughter at Matt’s exaggerated Grover voice was loud and fitful. 

At our wedding seven years later, Bella followed me to the bathroom to hold up my dress whenever I needed to pee.

Leah’s mother Faith died during lockdown, in April 2020, one day after Bella’s 12th birthday. Balloons floated around Bella’s bedroom when I skyped with her that day she lost her grandma. Leah’s mom had a heart condition that couldn’t be treated that spring because the hospitals were too saturated with COVID patients.

During that godforsaken spring, which happened to be exquisitely beautiful in Seattle, I thought a lot about Leah’s mom. Her reliability was fickle, her sobriety unsustainable, and throughout our twenties it often felt as though Leah had two kids. But Faith was a rock during Bella’s infancy, giving Leah a home and childcare so she could finish high school. When she died, I felt a pull back to Wisconsin, back home.

When Matt and I arrived in October 2020, Leah, her husband Chris, and Bella helped us unload our boxes from the U-Box. We couldn’t hug, but the five of us played Frisbee at Garner Park. Leah and I replaced our long phone calls with long, masked walks. When we were vaccinated and Bella was still enduring virtual school, she spent every Friday afternoon with me. We’d do homework and then watch videos about how gumballs and crayons and other colorful things are made. 

Leah is having a boy this time, and it’s been a jolly pregnancy. “What’s there to be upset about?” she said on Memorial Day. We were at Stewart Lake sitting on lawn chairs.

Maybe to most people, in our news media-saturated existence, that question is baffling. But not to me, not coming from her. 

This time around, Leah’s not a kid herself. This time around, my mom is excited and proud and always asking for updates. This time around, it was on purpose, and her partner is her husband, not a teenaged boy who cheats on her with a coworker at Cold Stone Creamery.

I’ve been thinking about the first time. I think about how Leah laughed at Ms. Dixon, how she finished high school the same month I did. I think about our phone calls when I was in college, how she never once put me in my place when I complained about how much harder college was than high school.

I think about her attitude, and her resilience, and What is there to be upset about?

Motherhood is the bravest thing in the world. Leah was brave when she was seventeen, staying up late to study for Geometry once her baby was finally asleep, wondering why her boyfriend wasn’t home at midnight when his shift ended at ten. And Leah is brave at 32, staying up late, pregnant and on her feet, to bake cake pops with her teenaged daughter after a long day of work.

And that’s what’s changed for me, this time around. I’m self aware enough–I’m old enough–to be inspired, daily, by her courage.

Caitlin Buhr is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. She is revising her second novel, speculative fiction, about the United States splitting into two sovereign nations following a disputed election. Her first novel, A Sister Ago, was published in 2024.