Time can warm you to new-baby reality

Dear Carolyn: I just found out I’m pregnant. I am only 21 and had been on the pill, so naturally this is a shock.

My longtime boyfriend has a stable job and is being very supportive. But I can’t get over the disappointment I have with his reaction. He showed almost no emotion and then said, “I hope you know we’re not getting married.”

Again, otherwise he’s been great with this situation. I’m just hurt. I’ve always wanted kids. He’s older, and this pregnancy will not affect his life plans as much as it will mine. I also don’t know why he had to bring up marriage like that.

Honestly, the idea of having a child out of wedlock is foreign to me. Where I’m from, it just doesn’t happen. I guess I don’t know how much responsibility it’s fair to give him, and at the same time I don’t know if I can handle any of this myself. Advice? – A.

I think you’ll be surprised by what you can handle by yourself.

But a pregnancy you were actively trying to prevent isn’t your greatest obstacle to seeing that right now. What’s blocking your view is a bunch of (bad pun, sorry) preconceived notions.

The most consequential of these is the notion that the first thing that came to his mind is also the most significant. When you drop a news bomb on people, their reaction is almost guaranteed to be underwhelming, especially when the news is of the good-thing-under- bad-circumstances variety. You want people to leap at the good – and it hurts when they don’t, I get it – but they usually react to the bad first.

So maybe he is emphatically not marrying you, but you don’t know that yet.

In these situations, the kindest course for both of you is to be patient for the full, reasoned response to come out. It may take months for someone to grow into a new reality. And that’s OK. Even if his response remains disappointing, your ability to handle that will have ripened, too.

The next preconceived notion hurting you is that his age and employment status dictate a more graceful response. Creating and being responsible for a life might not be anyone’s idea of a novelty, but to the person new to it and blindsided by it, it’s an earth-shaker. The answer again is to be patient.

Preconceived notion No. 3 is that an out-of-wedlock child “just doesn’t happen.” The 2012 census has households with children under 18 breaking about 60-40, married couples vs. some other arrangement. ( www.census.gov/prod/ 2013pubs/p20-570.pdf) It is happening to you, and it’s time to mom up and treat it as a prepared-for possibility instead of a fled-from crisis.

That can mean, of course, that you choose some reproductive option besides raising the child yourself, though I suspect you’ll follow through because you want to be a mom. I also suspect a man who has “been great with this situation” will be a steady partner in doing the right thing – which is your True North. It’s not about anyone’s expectations.

While feelings are still raw, I suggest you set the big questions aside and concentrate on small steps toward making healthy decisions: Be honest with yourself; listen to him; resist the impulse to react by questioning your assumptions and waiting for all the facts; and work with what you actually have instead of dwelling on what you expected.