Pregnant After Our First Date...With Twins!

When Rebecca Evans, 47, broke one of the first rules of dating, her life changed forever

- Saskia Murphy And Julia Sidwell

Watching the second line gradually appear on the pregnancy test, I took a deep breath. As I looked at all five pregnancy tests sprawled out across the bathroom floor, there was no denying the result. At 29 years old, I’d always hoped to have children one day, but this pregnancy was completely unplanned. Thinking about how I was going to tell the father, I started shaking with panic. I had no idea how he was going to react because, the truth was, we’d only been on one date. And now, whether we liked it or not, we were tied together forever.

It was 31 December 1999 when I first met Richard, then 32. My friend, Suzie, had invited me to a party near her hometown in Abercych, in Wales, to see in the new millennium, and Richard – Suzie’s friend – was working in the pub where we went to celebrate.

Richard was good looking but I’d recently got out of a six-year relationship and planned to stay single, so while I really enjoyed chatting to him, when the night came to an end, we didn’t swap numbers and, three days later, I returned to my home in Windsor.

But a couple of weeks later, Suzie was having signal trouble, so she gave me Richard’s number to contact her on. I sent her a text message and, shortly after, I got a reply. But it wasn’t Suzie, it was Richard. ‘How are you?’ the text read.

I sent back a friendly reply, but soon we were texting constantly. Richard was funny and interesting, and it wasn’t long before I was checking my phone every five minutes to see if he’d replied. ‘What’s got you smiling?’ my mum, Pat, then 64, asked while I silently read one of Richard’s text messages at the kitchen table one morning. ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said, putting my phone in my pocket.