Thursday 12th April 2007. Got up as usual at 6.30am and got ready for work. At 7.30am I went to the loo and took the pregnancy test. I was four days late and had needed the loo a lot. A line appeared confirming that I’d done the test correctly. Over the next 60 seconds another, fainter line appeared. ‘Bloody hell!’ I thought to myself and took the test into the bedroom to show dh. He was sleeping in after doing a late shift so I had to wake him. I showed him the stick and he said ‘Oh my God’.
I recall spending the rest of the day in a daze. Inwardly I felt different but outwardly I was still just me. I took the afternoon off work to spend it with dh and we went to the park to discuss what would happen next. We weren’t expecting it to happen so soon, if at all. I have polycystic ovaries and I was advised to try for a year and seek further help if nothing happened in that time. This was only our second month of ‘trying’ (yes, I still hate that term) and I’d got a big fat positive. Well, a weeny thin positive really but there’s no such thing as a false positive.
Of course, at that point we had no idea what was in store for us and the twin news was still to come (check back on 11th June for the anniversary of that particular revelation) but I wrote the following pros and cons list in a notebook on the day I found out I was pregnant and have replicated it here:
Pros
• Broodiness – internal feelings
• We have lots of love and care to give a child
• Makes dh and his family happy
• It should be fun
• Big life change = new opportunities
• Easier to have a child and a career these days e.g. flexible working practices
• Really exciting!
Cons
• We don’t have anywhere to live (not big enough)
• My career may end
• I don’t want to give up my life and ambitions
• Money constraints
• My health and wellbeing
• Fear of getting it wrong
• Not being able to cope with responsibility
• Loss of freedom
• Changes to relationship with dh
The thing that strikes me about the list is that the cons list includes some solvable problems and quite a lot of selfish thoughts. We lived in a tiny one bedroom flat. We now live in a two bedroom house. Dh and I earn decent salaries. At this stage I can’t comment on my career as I haven’t gone back to work yet. Everyone fears getting it wrong and the loss of freedom is inevitable.
The pros list is also interesting. I think it shows that you can be practical about some things but you can’t fight feelings. I’m not sure that the daily grind is exactly fun or exciting but it is certainly different. I think the list shows how naïve I was about the realities of being pregnant or having a baby. However, I think we’re all naïve until we actually go through it.
12th April 2007 – 12th April 2008. What a difference a year makes.