Ok. I'm pregnant.
I thought this was the worst thing that could happen. Not only was I precariously balanced in the first year of an arduous career, not only is my partner years and years away from university qualifications that will allow him to make a living wage, not only are we broke and thinking about moving, but I'm on a really new and exciting kind of antidepressant. You know - the kind of medication that has no long term studies because no one's taken it long enough to study. When my doctor put me on this pill, she warned me about getting pregnant. So naturally, my first thought after seeing the dark blue stripe was "three-headed freak baby."
I panicked. I cried, I muttered, I plotted & denied. I went out to a party and then the Garden, and I smoked as many cigarettes as would fit into 5 hours. "Low birth weight and asthma are the least this baby has to worry about," I thought grimly. I thought back to my (entirely unwritten) adventures in the abortion clinic and wondered what it would be like in the stirrups. My sense of humour turned as black as the ace of spades. I found myself thinking consoling thoughts along the lines of, "hey, am I really a feminist if I haven't terminated a pregnancy?"
I tried to confirm it with a blood test, but the clinic was appallingly slow with my results (whole other nasty story there, one that starts with a 3-hour wait, carries on through my 4-minute appointment in a broom closet and culminates in a mean receptionist refusing to answer my questions about the meaning of my incomprehensible test results.) My family doctor didn't have an opening until Thursday.
Meanwhile, something beautiful happened. The Boy, who had greeted the news with an almost comical look of panic, started to make lists and timelines. We found ourselves in only two moods, one called "Go Go Baby!" and the other called "No! No Baby!" The Boy started to convince me that this was almost workable. I checked my own emotions, and found only worry about possible birth defects. But as I was rapidly learning, 5% of all pregnancies come up snake eyes on that particular throw, so there was no guarantee. The girls in the English department were positively giddy, telling me that I could just keep the baby in a file drawer in the office.
Over the course of a very secretive week, I began to let the Boy & Theresa's high spirits infect me.
By the time I got the blood result, I knew I wanted to be pregnant. Suddenly it made sense that I wanted French Fries all the time and the Boy's breath drove me round the bend. I was pregnant! I was crazy! It's all good.
We're going to tell my family tomorrow, on my Dad's birthday. This is really happening. And I'm happy as a clam.
So yeah. In honour of Earth Day, I'm introducing the arrival of another First World pollution machine. Whee!
