Well, okay. Only one of them is physically, but they still needed to cooperate on it. 
I learned just a couple nights ago. I’ve seldom stopped grinning since then. Neither is a Doper, so they won’t be embarassed by this. At least not until I send them a link.
I love them both fiercely and devotedly. Without hyperbole, I wouldn’t hesitate to take a bullet for either. If they needed me to sell off all my belongings down to the shirt on my back and give them the proceeds, they’d have it. I owe them, you see.
From their beginning, they’ve been the best example to me of what romantic love can and should be. They’ve had furious rows, and grown and healed through them. The bonds between them are palpable. They simply fit together. Sharp as tacks. She’s got an odd streak that perfectly balances his own normalcy; he’s got a relaxed, water-off-of-duck’s-back outlook on the minor stressors that fill life that complements her tendency to worry. Witnessing that has made me envious at times, but it’s a good kind of envy, if that makes any sense. Hell, even if it doesn’t. Probably because it is overshadowed by the joy I take in seeing it, and hope with it.
I mentioned oweing them. I was married a short number of years ago (a span of time that seems subjectively much, much longer than it actually was), and it ended abruptly, and totally blindsided me in so doing. I had been through bits of depression before. Pain from a particularly bad year or two surrounding some medical issues with my eyeballs. Some usual human drama. Nothing, nothing, even approached what the end of that did to me. I’ve never been suicidal, but I honestly think that without those two in particular, I might not be typing this today. Or perhaps more likely–and worse–I would have given in to the temptation to retreat into scars inside, slam walls into place too solidly to ever effectively dismantle again, and pretty much sort of wait for rigor mortis. No one’s an island (some of us are pretty decent peninsulas, but still), and as healed and together as I am at present they own a huge chunk of credit for. I owe them; it’s that kind of debt that can’t be repaid, and that’s an honor to bear. I’m a better person for it.
I give them a call a couple nights ago, to let them know my fairly lengthy stint of unpaid vacation (what most of us know as “being unemployed”) had come to a happy end. They sort of trumped that news.
Of all the possible outcomes of the genetic lottery, their child has one hell of a nice starting pool. Intelligence, attractiveness, and just plain goodness, from both sides. An environment of humor and warmth and responsibility. Baby’s going to start out lucky.
Of all my closest friends, they’re the ones I expected to become parents first, or at all, so that’s no surprise. What is surprising to me is just how happy the news made me. This is joy. This is life going on, and this is, despite the spasms of senseless evil that afflict the world, the future.
I’m also really looking forward to meeting the future tyke. I think–scratch that, I know–that they’ll produce a great one.
::wanders away humming::
Now…where the heck was that past thread that blipped past the edges of my radar months ago about good gift ideas for going-to-be-new-parents…
