A Hunting I Will Go

As promised, my father booked a flight and came to Kansas.  He got a hotel room for the night in Manhattan, a city just outside of Ft. Riley.  I met him there and he took me out to dinner.  Afterwards we went up to his room for privacy, to discuss the situation.

My father discussed with me options that were before me, as he felt; abortion, adoption, being a single Mother, marrying the father of my baby.  As he laid out the options and discussed the pros and cons of each one, I respectfully listened and I understood everything he was saying was coming from a genuine concern for me, his daughter.  I know he wanted what was best for me and ultimately, what he thought was best for the baby too.  In the end, we agreed to disagree.

I appreciated my father coming all the way to Kansas to see me.  In some ways though it seemed to complicate matters.  There were just so many voices and opinions that were being thrown at me. 

The one voice I really wanted to hear was Jerry's.  I had written him letter after letter after letter --sometimes I'd sit and write him 3 or 4 letters a day.  I was pleading with him to please contact me soon.  I realized how much time it took to get a letter to/from a military post overseas but I was so impatient and so desperate to hear from him.

In the meantime, no one at Ft. Riley knew I was pregnant and I intended to keep it that way for as long as I could.

One Saturday morning I got up and went to take a shower.  Though the Ft. Riley, Kansas barracks certainly were a huge improvement from the WWII barracks I had lived in in Germany, it was still an Army barracks.  At least the showers were somewhat private --unlike the showers we had in Germany were there were just shower heads in a huge room --no partitions or curtains or privacy . . . .

So I wasn't hating the fact that the bathrooms in this barracks were much like a gym.  Each stall had a curtain you could close and though it wasn't complete and total privacy (the curtain didn't even reach all the way across), it was still something.  You had a small changing area with a bench and then you could step into the shower stall.  The bathrooms weren't far from my room but you had to walk past the CQ desk and through a hall to get to the bathrooms.  I had a shower caddy for my toiletries and would put on a robe and shower shoes and parade myself through the barracks to get to the bathroom.

This particular Saturday morning I was in the shower and there were several other females in there too --talking to one another about how drunk they were the night before, guys they hooked up with, their plans for the rest of the weekend, clubs they intended to party at, etc.  I'm just sitting there thinking about all of that --having to walk through the barracks to get to the shower, lack of privacy, the environment of living in the barracks and I thought to myself, "I"m not going through my pregnancy living in the barracks.  Period."  Seriously, when I started getting bigger and showing, was there any size robe that would completely cover me as I paraded through the barracks to the bathroom?  I decided that afternnoon I'd go apartment hunting.