My Thirty-Something Teenage Pregnancy

Late-night dancing was all I craved as a single thirty-eight-year-old…until an unexpected pregnancy set my life to a different beat.

Illustrations by Gabrielle Gamboa

We'd only been dating a few months on the night we threw caution (and condoms) to the wind. It was the kind of frigid winter night where you want to be in love and singing "Baby, It's Cold Outside" to one another. We preferred hip-hop to Christmas carols. Somewhere in the middle of a Notorious B.I.G. song, we unintentionally conceived the little life I came to call Baby X.

I got a positive on the home pregnancy test on Christmas Day. Really, at thirty-eight, getting pregnant from one careless night? I had scores of friends in my age range who tried for months with no luck, even when resorting to elaborate fertility interventions.

Why had it been me the fertility gods smiled upon, the one who was the least prepared? I had chosen a freelance journalism life instead of a stable job in large part because the late-night music and dance scene in Los Angeles, where I've lived for fifteen years, had been more vital to me than a 401k. Most of the significant rela…