“Bette. Baby, come here.”

There was something about the tone of Tina’s voice, something unfamiliar and urgent, that made Bette immediately stand up from the work she was doing at the dining room table to go to her wife.

“Coming,” Bette replied, striding back through the house toward their bedroom.

She found Tina standing as if frozen in front of the closet, her eyes focused on a mid-point in space, her expression somewhere between complete wonder and total shock. Adrenaline flooded Bette’s body in an instant.

“Tina, what’s wrong?” Bette asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice as she looked into her wife’s eyes.

Wordlessly, Tina reached for Bette’s hand, pressing it firmly against the side of her pregnant belly. Bette stared at her uncomprehendingly. And then she felt it. The faint but distinct flutter of movement beneath her palm.

“Oh,” Bette sighed, biting her lip to keep it from trembling. “Oh my God.”

Tina squeezed Bette’s hand and smiled up at her, whispering,

“Yeah.”

Bette hadn’t been prepared for the overwhelming tenderness she felt for this unborn child. She wasn’t around for the baby’s conception, she’d missed out on its earliest months of prenatal development, and she didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl. But none of that mattered. There was just something positively primal about the connection Bette had to this little person. Something bigger than the narrow definitions of genetics and the legal system. This was her child as surely as Tina was her wife. And no one else’s opinions or approval would change that.

“What are we going to do about your father?” Tina had asked one night as they held each other in bed.

Bette exhaled slowly, and shook her head. “Mail him a birth announcement, just like everyone else. And hope he doesn’t mark it return to sender.”

“I’m sorry, Baby. I’m sorry this isn’t easier with him.”

“I am, too. I always thought that things would get better over time, you know? That he’d somehow bedifferent. But that’s probably the same thing he hoped for me. That I would wake up one day and be different,” Bette said softly.

“You don’t need to be any different. You’re a wonderful woman and you’re going to make an incredible mother. He has every reason to be proud of you.”

“He is proud, in his own strange, compartmentalized way. But what he doesn’t realize is that my love for you is the best part of me. And our relationship, our family, is the most important thing I’ll ever do. The rest of it?  None of that means anything to me without you,” Bette said, swallowing hard.

It broke Bette’s heart to think that her father would refuse to acknowledge their child. But she had no reason to believe that it would be otherwise. Even after seven years, Melvin remained awkward and cool with Tina, and Bette was determined not to subject her family to one more punishing rejection. As far as Bette was concerned, the last time, that horrible dinner that Tina had walked away from, had truly been the last time. Her father’s limitations as a parent were not going to limit her ability to be a loving spouse and mother.

Bette felt the baby move again under her hand, and she wrapped herself a little more tightly around Tina, cradling her wife and child protectively, wishing she could somehow keep them both safe forever from the world’s judgments and disappointments. If Bette had been able to speak without crying, she would have told Tina that she had never been happier or felt more complete in her entire life. But no words would come. Only a sweet, gentle kiss that Bette placed with loving care on her beautiful wife’s waiting lips, and the hope that in her heart, Tina knew all the rest.