Any Other Way

At eleven years old I thought my family was complete. There was me, my 9 year old
brother, and my 8 year old stepsister. My mom had just gotten remarried to my step-dad that
May and we were all adjusting to that. So you can imagine all of our surprise when that June my
mom announced she was pregnant. We all had mixed emotions at the time, but now I realize the
baby made our family complete.
For the first couple of months, it seemed like nothing was different. You couldn’t look at
my mom and tell she was pregnant so reality really hadn’t sunk in yet. Once she started to show,
the excitement set in. I remember feeling the baby kick, watching him have the hiccups and
picking out names.
When my mom was five months pregnant, the whole family packed into the tiny sonogram
room to find out the sex of the baby. For months we had all been going back and forth, but the
time was finally here to find out “who” was inside her belly. As the doctor ran the instru...