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simple as just being scared, or just being excited. It was everything all at once.
    And sometimes it was even nothing. The fact is, I don’t remember much anxiety during my pregnancy. I don’t remember being consumed by fear or nervousness. Not because I’d managed to achieve nirvana in my early teens, but because the best coping mechanism I could come up with was tunnel vision. Fear and uncertainty were always in the margins of my mind, darting around in my peripheral vision. But I knew that if I paid them any attention, they’d swarm in and take over. If I let those feelings in, I wouldn’t be able to make things happen. In my mind, the only chance I had of getting my shit together was if I made myself bulletproof. I couldn’t let fear get to me, or I’d fall apart.
    So instead of focusing on fear, I focused on finishing the school year. My mom was a lifesaver. She was a big help in figuring out how to deal with the rest of my life. She took charge of my school arrangements, setting me up to graduate early through an accelerated program so I could finish up before my delivery date. And once that path was clear, she started in on preparing for the baby. I had no idea where to start, so she was the engine to my train. She guided me along with the doctors, the nursery, and everything along the way. By the time summer was in swing, my dad and brother had started to get excited, too. Especially once we found out the baby was a boy.
    ***
    Ryan and I were doing fine. He proposed to me, and of course, I said yes. We made plans to move into an apartment together. Somehow my dad refrained from killing Ryan, and we started spending much more time with both of our parents. His family was great, although it was hard to wrap my head around having any kind of in-laws at the age of sixteen. But they stepped up right away to help us get ready for the baby. I spent a lot of time with his mom and my mom, working out all the details.
    It didn’t feel like my relationship with Ryan was in trouble. But it definitely wasn’t the honeymoon phase anymore, either. There was a strange new distance between us as we both separately did what we had to do on the deadline we were on. Ryan got busy working and trying to save money, while I worked part-time for my dad and went to summer school so I could graduate early. Our schedules were suddenly very full, and they didn’t include much time for each other. But that seemed like it was to be expected. If anything bugged me, it was that our attitudes about the whole thing didn’t always seem to line up.
    Sometimes when I brought up something about the baby, I got the feeling Ryan’s brain just went somewhere else. And when it came to making actual plans for after the baby, whether it was work schedules or daycare, he was never in the mood to deal with it. It was all awkward silences, one-word answers, and impatient grunts whenever I tried to work out a vision of how we’d actually live once the baby arrived. And it was a good thing I wasn’t expecting any special treatment while I was pregnant, because that wasn’t happening. Sometimes I got the feeling he wanted to pretend there was no pregnancy, and we could go on acting like nothing had changed at all.
    But there were times, too, when we joined forces like we were probably supposed to. We still met at Sonic whenever we had a chance before his shift started, and that was where we chose the baby’s name. We were sitting in the parking lot with a baby name book, and at the time we didn’t even know if we were having a boy or girl. But when we saw the name Bentley, we immediately knew that was what we wanted.
    During fun moments like that, it felt like we were bonding over the pregnancy. And it was easy to chalk up the rest to how overwhelmed we were. I knew my brain was in overdrive, and I could only imagine he was going through the same thing. I wasn’t in a frame of mind to step back and examine how we were doing as a couple, what we were