"I don't know how to read this".

What? I said. She looked at me with a look I've only seen once before, on that day I found myself witnessing the marriage of my wife to… me.

On that occasion, she had this look I've never seen before, a mixture of excitement and uncertainty mixed with hope and that other thing… oh, yes, love I think they call it. But I think it was mostly fear. I'm pretty sure anything anyone could read from my face that day was primal terror. Man, that was a happy day, round two of our nuptials. The first attempt wasn't so pompous.

"I said don't know how to read this, I think it's broken". She was standing at the toilet door, with that exact same look. I can tell you now, chills came down my spine. Last time I saw that look, I was married 10 minutes later.

I already knew something was on, because she had been locked in the toilet way longer than normal, and when I asked "Tu, all good in there?" She said - after an unusual pause - "I think so. Give me a minute". But, as with so many other little things in the day to day of a marriage, I didn't give it much thought.

I've always thought family is a curious thing. You come to this world and get to choose nothing. I mean literally nothing, not even your sex. Probably the soul that lives in us choses some things before you're born, but the rest is pretty much chance. So you arrive to a place, time and family that you have no power over. If you're the first one out, then cool you at least get some attention from your parents (oh, yes, you don't get to choose those either. And in these times we live in, it could be one parent, two of the same gender and in rare cases one mum and one dad). But if you're the second sibling, or even the third, you have to share all the things you didn't choose with someone who came before you. So you basically get leftovers of the things your older sibling didn't choose to get. Nice.

On the bright side, you arrive to this world, which is full of challenges and surprises. And most of the time, someone will take care of you, at least until you can feed yourself. Oh and those annoying siblings end up becoming the only people that really understand you. I think this is mostly by years and years of putting up with you.

So yes, family is curious. In the end they are the closest people you have, and for some weird reason they are always around, ready to help when you're in trouble. This is specially notorious when you decide to go live far away.

"Either I'm reading this wrong or its broken, This can't be right." I heard while my mind was divagating on the curiosities of the family I had left behind so many years ago. Which, by the way, happens all the time.

Right there, for the first time ever, a new kind of chill came up crawling from the bottom of my spine. You know what I'm talking about. That moment when you face the undeniable reality a split second before it actually happens. Her beautiful green eyes were fixed on mine, while mine were lost in the sudden storm of mixed emotions that had just appeared in my head.

And as she gave me the little plastic stick with the bright undeniable red stripes, I look at her pure, innocent eyes and understood that my life was going to change forever. And she found out for the first time about life, the beginning of a new life blossoming inside her.