Babies in Waiting (7 page)

I didn’t even notice that I’d missed a period. Well, strictly speaking, I hadn’t . . . I only have about six a year. That’s
one of the symptoms that sent me to the doctor in the first place, so it didn’t occur to me to count the days of my cycle like the other woman in the TTC group did. Also, it was Christmas . . . we were dashing out to parties and going down to Sussex to spend time with James’ mum, then dashing to Hendon to see my dad. We were having sex a lot, but I certainly wasn’t thinking . . . well, anything really. The first thing I noticed was that my breasts were really sore. I was in the shower, and they felt lumpy and hot and incredibly tender. I decided that it was because my period was coming, making my hormones go all funny. Two days later, I woke up and went into the kitchen. James had brewed a pot of coffee.

‘Want some?’ he said.

‘Yes please,’ I yawned. But when he put the cup in front of me, it smelled vile. ‘Eurgh,’ I said. ‘Is this a new brand of coffee?’

‘No, it’s the same one we always buy.’

‘It smells disgusting!’

James sniffed my cup. ‘Smells normal to me.’

I poured it down the sink and made myself tea instead. Later, on the Tube, I found myself noticing other smells. The perfume of the woman next to me was overpowering. A guy standing up near us reeked of cigarettes. Out on the street, near my office, I was hit by the diesel reek of a passing bus.

I got to work and had to rush to the loo to pee. That’d be that big mug of tea I drank. But by 11 a.m., I was off to the bathroom for the third time. Angela, who sits at the desk next to mine, never misses anything. She notices
if I buy a new skirt, or wear my hair slightly differently. I promise you, she has no life. She couldn’t resist commenting. ‘Off to the loo again? Upset tummy, is it? Or cystitis?’ She has no understanding of boundaries either.

‘No, I just seem to be peeing a lot today.’

‘Oooh!’ she shrilled. ‘Maybe you’re in the club!’

‘Yeah, right,’ I laughed, and headed for the Ladies.

As I sat on the loo, I thought about it. What a ridiculous thought. I couldn’t be. We’d only been trying for a few weeks. I had shrivelled-up old-woman ovaries. But I was showing a lot of symptoms . . . No. That’s ridiculous. It couldn’t possibly be.

But the idea wouldn’t go away, and at lunchtime I found myself wandering around Boots, and, accidentally on purpose, ended up in the pregnancy-test section. There was quite a selection, so I ended up buying three different types: a double pack of the Boots own-brand cheap ones, and two different digital ones that flashed up how many weeks you were in a little window. I wouldn’t use any of them now, of course, but I might as well have them for a few months’ time.

I left them in my handbag and tried not to think about it. I had a busy afternoon at work and a lovely, peaceful evening at home with James. But the next morning, I woke up half an hour before the alarm and lay in bed, thinking. There was no harm in trying . . . I mean . . . it would be an experience. Like most women, I’ve had the odd scare, but I’d never done a pregnancy test I actually wanted to
be positive. I got up quietly, fetched the Boots bag from my handbag in the living room and went to the bathroom. I opened one of the cheaper tests and read the instructions. It wasn’t rocket science . . . pee on the end of the stick and wait two minutes. If the test was negative, one line would come up in the window. If it was positive, two lines would form a cross.

I sat on the toilet and did the necessary. I knew it would take two minutes to register, but I looked at the test to see I’d peed on the right bit, as it were. In the window, I could see a faint blue cross. That couldn’t be right. I hadn’t waited the two minutes yet. It must be faulty. I put the test down and read through all the instructions again. It didn’t say anything about a cross coming up immediately. By then, two minutes had passed and I looked at it again. The cross was now properly dark blue. I couldn’t believe it. I sat there for quite some time. The cross had come up so quickly, it must be a mistake. There must be something wrong with the test, or I had done something wrong. I would have to do another test, but unfortunately, I was all out of pee to do it with.

I went to the kitchen and made myself an enormous mug of tea. Could I be? It seemed unbelievable. From what the doctor had said, it was a total long shot that I would ever get pregnant. It was supposed to take years, if we ever managed it at all. It must be the cheap pregnancy test. It had to be faulty.

Halfway down the cup of tea, I needed to pee again. This time, I used one of the digital tests, and it took an
excruciating three minutes before it popped up a result. ‘Pregnant’, it announced emphatically, then helpfully added ‘Two-three weeks’.

As I sat on the loo, speechless with disbelief, I heard the alarm go off in the bedroom and James groan and roll over to my side of the bed to switch it off. He got up and shuffled into the kitchen. There was no point in speaking to him before he’d had his first cup of coffee. He wouldn’t be able to tell me his own name before that, let alone deal with my startling bombshell. I decided to have a shower. I wasn’t avoiding the issue, just giving James a bit of time to wake up.

I showered, washed my hair, shaved my legs, moisturised all over and plucked a few stray hairs out of my eyebrows. I wanted to be ready. Then I made a dash into the bedroom to get dressed. Well, I didn’t want to tell James wearing just a dressing gown. But what do you wear to tell your husband you’re pregnant? I was standing in front of the wardrobe in my underwear, trying to choose a dress, when I heard James go into the bathroom. The bathroom, where two positive pregnancy tests were lined up on the countertop next to the sink.

‘James!’ I yelled, and ran through to the bathroom. I pounded on the door. ‘Come out! I need to . . .’ I hadn’t thought this through. What could I possibly need to do so urgently? I’d just come out of there. ‘Come out!’ I yelled again in desperation.

James opened the door slowly. He had the digital test in his hand. He didn’t say anything. I stood looking at
him, dressed only in pants and a bra, my wet hair dripping down my back.

‘I was going to tell you . . .’ I stuttered.

Eventually he spoke. ‘But we only just . . .’

‘I know.’

‘And I thought you couldn’t . . .’

‘Me too.’

‘But I don’t understand how . . .’

‘Me neither.’

He looked at the test again.

‘Fuck me.’

And, predictably, I burst into tears.

We didn’t really have time to talk about it. We both had to get to work. I calmed down and dried my hair and managed to get dressed and organised and ready to leave. James kissed me and hugged me hard before he dashed off to the bus stop. He hesitated in the doorway and then said, ‘I love you, okay? This is huge, but we’ll work it out.’

That made me feel a bit better, but in another way, it made me feel worse. It was huge, but what was there to work out? We’d set out to get me pregnant, and I was. Granted, we’d banked on two years and it had taken two weeks, but this was the desired outcome, wasn’t it?

I went to work, but it would be a lie to say I worked. My boss was out at a meeting all day, and I didn’t have anything too urgent to do, so I spent most of the morning on the baby website, reading stories of women trying to do what I’d done, against all the odds, more or less by mistake. I’d never posted, in fact I’d never signed up or given myself
an online alias. At about midday on a whim I registered on the forum, giving myself the username PR_Girl. Hesitantly, I started a thread headed ‘Unexpected BFP’.

Hi,
I’ve been a lurker here for a while, never posted before. I’m twenty-six and I was diagnosed with POI a few weeks ago.

(I didn’t need to spell out what that was . . . there were loads of other women who had it and the women who spent their time in that group were versed in every pregnancy-related acronym under the sun).

This morning, I did a test, and it seems I have a BFP. This is the last thing we expected . . . we thought it would take years, if ever. I’m excited, but so, so scared.

I didn’t know what else to say. In fact, I wasn’t sure why I had posted at all. I pushed my chair back and sighed loudly. When I looked up, Angela was staring at me. Sometimes, she gave me the creeps . . . it was like she was watching me like a spy. Didn’t she have work to do, for God’s sake? You might think I had work to do, but there was no hope of that, not that day. I thought for a minute longer, then I sent a quick text to James. ‘Lunch? Tx.’

My office was in Holborn and James’ office was a ten-minute walk away in Covent Garden. We didn’t often get
a chance to have lunch together: he’d have to work through, and I was frequently out of the office or lunching with clients. He fired back a text within two minutes. ‘Sure. Jack’s at 1? Jx.’

For the first time that morning, the tumble-dryer that had been churning in my stomach stopped moving. I’d go and have lunch with my husband. We’d make sense of this together and everything would be okay.

I got to the sandwich shop ahead of James and grabbed our usual table in the back corner. Jack, who knew us well, brought me a tuna-and-salad on wholewheat and a cheese-and-pickle on white for James, without being asked. The smell of my sandwich made me want to heave, but I was really hungry, so I switched sandwiches. James would have to eat the tuna one and like it.

James rushed in fifteen minutes late, dropped a kiss on the top of my head and slid into the chair opposite me. ‘I’m starving,’ he said, grabbed the sandwich and took a huge bite. His eyes widened. ‘Yuck! This is yours,’ he said, and pushed the plate across the table towards me.

‘I swapped. Sorry, didn’t get a chance to tell you. I can’t eat the tuna. It smells awful to me.’

He looked put out. ‘Well, thanks for telling me.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Shit. I’ve only got a few minutes. I haven’t got time to get Jack to make another.’ He started eating the sandwich in big bites. I was a bit surprised about the ‘only got a few minutes’. He’d been fifteen minutes late to meet me after all. It seemed if we were going to talk, we’d have to talk quickly.

‘So, how are you feeling?’ I said tentatively.

‘Oh, it’s been a mad busy morning. A new brief came through – a billboard for a deodorant campaign. Ed and I have till four o’clock to scamp up three concepts.’

‘I meant about . . .’

‘Oh.’ He took another huge bite. ‘I don’t know, Tones. I mean . . . I’m a bit in shock, I suppose.’

‘In shock?’ I felt a knot in my stomach. That wasn’t the response I was hoping for. Joy, yes. Excitement, definitely. But shock? Shock sounded not good at all.

‘Well, I mean, it kind of changes everything doesn’t it?’

That sounded a bit better. It did change everything. I had a million thoughts I wanted to share. After all, there’d be a new person in our relationship . . . we’d be a family now. We could have the baby in our little house for six months or a year or so, but after that he or she would need their own room. We’d have to think about buying a bigger house . . . if we’d conceived one so easily, could we think about having more than one child after all? I was about to start sharing some of this, but James was still talking.

‘I mean, we’ve got that snowboarding trip booked for April. I suppose you won’t be able to go now.’

There was so much wrong with what he’d just said, I didn’t know where to begin.

I ended up just saying, ‘Snowboarding?’

‘Yeah, I mean, I’ve been really busy this morning so I haven’t had a chance to check the terms and conditions of the trip. Maybe someone else could have your air ticket,
if the name change isn’t too expensive. Alex – or Dave, maybe. He was keen to go.’

I was really, really tired of bursting into tears in front of my husband. It would have been just too pathetic to do it again, so I just got up and left. I heard him say ‘Tones . . .’ in an exasperated voice as I walked out of the door, but I just put my head down and kept walking. I knew he wouldn’t follow me. He was too busy. He had scamps to produce and an air ticket to Andorra to auction.

When I got back to the office, it was a ghost town. Everyone was out for lunch. Even Angela had wandered out into the watery winter sunshine to stalk another one of her co-workers. I sat down at my desk. I was really hungry – I had only had a couple of bites of the cheese sandwich. I couldn’t face going out again to get something, so I rootled through my desk drawers and found a box of slightly stale cereal bars, left over from a week when I’d tried to break my afternoon-Twix habit by eating something healthier. It had failed when I’d read the ingredients and calorie count on the cereal-bar box and realised I was getting more sugar and fat in the healthy bar than in the good old-fashioned choccie. I was eating for two now, I reasoned, and munched my way through three of the chewy granola monstrosities. They made me horribly thirsty, so I went to the vending machine in the office kitchen and got myself a Diet Coke. I gulped half of it walking back to my desk, then a thought struck me. Hadn’t I read somewhere that caffeine was bad for unborn babies? And surely a meal of cereal bars
wasn’t what was required to sustain a tiny, growing embryo. I typed in the URL for the baby website immediately, planning to look for an article on nutrition for pregnant women.

A notification popped up: ‘You have twenty-seven replies to your post’. Twenty-seven? How could that be?

I clicked on the link and there they were. Twenty-seven personal messages expressing joy and excitement at my pregnancy. All of them were full of love and encouragement from a group of women I had never met or even spoken to. Some of them were quite poetic (if a bit greeting-card-ish): ‘Congratulations . . . you’re about to embark on an amazing journey’. Some verged on the illiterate: ‘OMG that’s grate!’, and almost every one contained a rather confusing collection of brackets: ‘(((((((()))))))))’. It took me till message twelve to work out that it meant sending a hug, and I only worked that out because Lucy_19 wrote ‘((((((((((HUGS)))))))))’.

Well, then I did cry. This bunch of complete strangers had been kinder, more understanding and more excited for me than my own husband. It was too ironic for words. I typed an incoherent thank you, then went to the bathroom to wash my face and fix my make-up. It took a while to mop up the tears . . . they just seemed to keep coming . . . but eventually I managed to splash my face with cold water and reapply eye make-up and lipstick. I felt better and worse at the same time. Better, because someone had said that what was happening to me was something miraculous and worth celebrating. Worse, because it was totally the wrong someone.