APPRECIATION: MOMENTS LIKE THOSE SITCOM PREGNANCY SCARES WHERE YOU REALIZE HOW YOU REALLY FEEL ABOUT SOMETHING

You’ve seen this in a sitcom, or a movie, or both. Girl (usually the boy takes the backseat in the plot here) thinks she’s pregnant, but wasn’t planning it, and so now she’s forced to think through life with or without a kid. Often the connection (or lack of one) to the father is involved in the equation. Usually when the person finds out they are relieved, but often disappointed too. The feelings are usually mixed. Maybe it wouldn’t be that if… You know what I’m talking about.

I heard a story on The Moth once where a girlfriend played a prank on her boyfriend where a supposed old girlfriend of his had a kid, his kid. She contacted him and convinced him it was his. There was a picture. He believed it, and he emotionally embraced it. And then, “April Fools!” (His current girlfriend was playing this prank on him.) And then the takeaway was that he realized he wanted to be a father after all. And for a few moments he had felt what it was like. He said something to the tune of cheating the universe to experience the feeling of fatherhood.

Recently, at my job, the powers that be reviewed contracts and had to decide who would be renewed for the next year. It was mostly a formality, but it got people (and me being one of those people) to thinking about life without their current job.

On the way to school, the morning after the meeting, after not hitting a deer, and then not hitting a skunk, and then realizing that all of my imagined conversations and monologues began with the words “You know what…” I imagined how I would feel if I was called into an office and told that I would not be invited back next year.

And then I realized something that I am not sure I knew before that.

I appreciate moments like these, moments where you are tricked into epiphanies.