On Wednesday, I twisted the cap and broke the seal of my orange glucose beverage, downing it in five minutes then hurrying to the doctor’s office. I felt sure that I wouldn’t screen positively for high sugar–after all, Halloween is coming up and the last thing this nation needs is for candy corn factory workers to lose their jobs because I can’t partake this year. Even though The Sis had gestational diabetes, and much about our pregnancies and lives mirror each other’s, I was confident. They stuck my finger, gathered the blood, and I waited.

The doctor arrived in my exam room and checked my chart. “Oh no!” she said, and my heart skipped a beat–those are words you never want to hear from a doctor, especially during a pregnancy that hasn’t been problem-free already. “You failed your glucose test by one point!” You want to know what the hardest part of that statement was for me to hear? Not the implication that I might have gestational diabetes; not the fact that I was headed for a three-hour test requiring a fast; but the word fail.

Old habits die hard.

I almost asked her to rephrase the diagnosis as I had not studied for this test and therefore could not be held responsible for my results. For the majority of my life, my identity was founded on my ability to test well, and though grace has broken me free from most of those chains (after a substantial amount of fighting and scarring), the old ghosts still cast shadows. “I feel like a loser,” I told The Sis when I called her. I remember telling my counselor the same thing seven years ago when all my friends were getting married and I was planning an escape from the South to New York. And that turned out pretty well, didn’t it?

The next day, I showed up at the apartment complex for the weekly outreach. This week was a prayer meeting, which is not as big a draw as the biweekly lunch meetings, so only one kid was there: the one who flicked me off last week. He sauntered up in his hat and sweatsuit and I was charged with keeping him alive for the next hour and a half. Sadly, the TV/VCR combo wouldn’t cooperate, so we headed outside with a package of bubbles. We both stood in the middle of the desolate playground, which boasted a slide and two broken swings. “Why are the swings broken?” he asked, and rather than get into a political discussion, I just said that I didn’t know as I gazed over the barbed-wire fence. So we sat on a wooden bench and opened the bubbles.

Things were going pretty well for awhile; we had a pleasant discussion about bubble shapes and wind. Then he chased a bubble for a few feet and popped it, yelling, “That’s what you get, FUCKER!” I looked at him and said, “Excuse me?” He smiled back beatifically and sang, “I didn’t cuss.” I shook my head, amazed at the language he must hear at home even as I recalled the night before, when I had spilled water all over the floor and yelled the same word. And according to What to Expect, my son can hear my voice by now. Oops. Move along, people–nothing to see here. After a few more minutes of playing my new friend told me he was going to leave me at the playground overnight so that Michael Myers would come and get me. Has this kid seen my voting record? And I thought we were doing so well.

The ghosts have a way of reappearing, especially this time of year, but toys and sun and wind have a way of connecting. Despite the verbal setbacks, we shared laughter and awe, watching rainbows bounce off the bubbles as they floated through the air. By the end of the morning, he only occasionally glared at me with suspicion. At one point, he even trusted me to lift him up to a high beam so he could cling to it for two seconds before letting me bring him back to earth. “Watch me!” he cried next, tearing across the sand as my own boy kicked madly away inside.