Untold Stories - "We're Pregnant"

First, if you've caught only the title and are coming over here to congratulate us on a second addition to our family, I am going to disappoint you. There is no bun in the oven, we are not on stork watch, or in the family way, we are not expecting, or in a fix. No, we are not currently pregnant.

One of the online blogs I read is written by a woman named Grace, who started a blog for their expected child, now named Ian. I've been reading her blog for about six months now, following along as they chose baby names, testing a different one each week, as she struggled with bodily changes, eventually having to give up her love of running toward the end of term, and now with her baby's progress toward walking and crawling toddler. Anyway, reading her blog made me start remembering those days in the beginning with Short Person and I realized that I didn't have any of those stories on my blog. Since I view this more as my journal than fodder for the world review, it's important to me to put it here. Especially for Meg, who one day when she's full grown and through the angst-ridden teenage years, I hope, will still like herself and me enough to read it.

Considering the naked booty picture I just posted at Melody 365, that last is highly questionable.

It was August. I remember sitting in the car, counting days and months over and over again, going back to a recent doctor appointment in June, where I was certain they'd have noticed if there was a baby in there, forward, filling in dates. I sat in the car, looking at the day planner, looking at the dates, thinking about all the other pregnancy tests I'd purchased over the last seven years of fruitless attempts. Hundreds of dollars and dozens of heartbreaks at getting the same result. I lay the calendar aside, and went in to my nail appointment, looking forward to my hour of pseudo-counseling from my manicurist and friend, Kim.

As I sat there, having my nails filed, sculpted, and painted, I recounted the "symptoms". I'd been nauseous for a week and felt like a bloated elephant. I'd gained 10 pounds in two days and my mid-section felt like I'd swallowed enough water to flood the Willamette River. My breasts hurt so much that at my aerobics class, I had to stop after 5 minutes and went into the bathroom to cry and soak them in cold water, hoping for relief. It had been two months since my last period, but I was still unwilling to buy a pregnancy test. I just couldn't bear the heartache again at having it say the same old thing. She argued with me and when I left, I stopped by the drugstore to pick up an EPT.

I felt a lot of emotions walking the aisles of the store looking for the small shelf of home pregnancy tests. Trepidation about what I might feel if it was negative. Trepidation about what I might feel if it were positive. There were a lot of things also going through my head. Seven years of trying and failing to get pregnant. My doctor visit when I was 20, when I was told by the specialist I'd been seeing that if I wasn't pregnant by 22, it was probably not going to happen. At the time that diagnosis was rendered, I wasn't engaged or married, so things weren't looking good already. The year of fertility drugs, which we eventually stopped due to my lack of normal body function- I didn't ovulate, a necessary process for getting pregnant. The mound of adoption brochures we'd gone through. All of it was jumbled around, tangible and overwhelming.

I tried to push it all aside and truck on, doing my best to bury it all behind a facade of "just another day". But, there was that seed, already planted, of hope. It kept poking through not letting me rest. It had begun to grow at my first diabetic consultation when I was told about a condition that diabetics get where the ovaries are basically "encrusted" with sugar, preventing ovulation-- sort of like a candy-coated peanut. The nurse had said that once it was under control, I'd see my body fix itself and many diabetics got pregnant soon after. Hope. It made my stomach flutter like a butterfly's.

I remembered hearing that prognosis and laughing about all the money we'd wasted on condoms and birth control pills early on. If only I had known, I could have saved all that money and gone to Europe or something. I could trace the diabetic symptoms back as far as my junior year in high school. That's a lot of cash I could have had for other things.

I purchased the test and took it home, immediately going in to take it. I just wanted to get it over with and done. Move past the heartbreak, if at all possible, and start getting mad about the $15.00 wasted. The test said you needed to wait three minutes for results. They appeared in 3 seconds.

I was pregnant.