In which I find out I'm pregnant and fall down in shock.

That's me. About a year pre-pregnancy, a year before the big fat positive sent my life and anxiety and fear and adulthood into overdrive.

I'm 23 years old. I'm a self-proclaimed selfish teenager at heart. And I'm pregnant.

One of the first questions I always get is how I told my fiance of six months and my boyfriend of six years, Jason, that we're pregnant.

See, what happened was, he came home from a long day of work, and I had a lovely meal prepared for us, set out on top of a beautiful, brocade tablecloth with candlelight illuminating my already rosy, glowing baby-making skin. And I'd made him a meal of his favorite foods, all miniaturized, like baby-filet mignon and baby carrots and baby spinach salad and baby chocolate cake with baby rainbow sprinkles. And he took one step inside the door, saw what the meal consisted of, and began instantaneously crying and swept me off my feet and we hugged and cried and danced and hugged.

Except I think that was how Becky told Uncle Jessie on Full House. And if my life were a TV show Full House and its family values and good-heartedness would laugh in my face.

It was more like Jason picked me up from a friend's house, where I had spent my day off from work lounging by the pool, drinking a six-pack of beer (only it was more like a twelve pack and I feel the constant urge to make myself sound more mature than I am), and having contests like who could blow the best smoke ring (cigarettes, mind you).

When we get home, I realize that my period is four days late. The worrier that I am, I make him drive me to the drugstore. We buy a test. We come home, I pee on a stick, prepared to repeat our please-don't-let-it-be-positive routine that we've perfected ohsowell over the years. Except this time, it doesn't go like it usually does. We've always used protection, and thanks to more than a decade of suffering from Crohn's Disease, Ulcerative Colitis and severe anemia, my period has never once been on time.

I glance back at the test moments after it left my pee-speckled fingers, and it's already made up its mind.

Pregnant.

I fall to the floor. Sobs ensue.

Jason rushes to the bathroom, worried by the sudden thud just produced by his normally non-epileptic girlfriend. And then we spend the next fifty years trying to figure out what the hell we're going to do.