LJ Idol - Week 5 - Inconceivable
When I crept into the library that Saturday, all fumbling keys and shifty eyes, I had a mission. I disarmed the alarm, tiptoed up the back stairs and slid into my desk, glancing around the dimness of the second floor to ensure I was still alone. I powered on my computer.
I’d already lied to my husband that morning, saying I needed to go in to work to finish planning a teen event I was hosting in a few days. He was still in bed, blissfully dreaming, when I told him I’d just be gone an hour or two. So trusting, so clueless, he’d given me a kiss and said he’d see me at lunch and then rolled over to sleep again. I felt so guilty about my subterfuge. We’d only been married for three months and I was already lying to him?
I sat in the dim coolness, illuminated only by the early morning light streaming through the windows. The desktop was taking forever to load so I clasped my hands together in my lap, willing myself to be patient. I squeezed my chilly fingers together tightly.
Three months. We’d been married for three months. We were so broke, just poor graduate students when we got married, that we’d had to postpone our honeymoon back in March. We’d just returned two weeks ago from our trip to Key West. It had been wonderful, camping on the beach, snorkeling, eating conch fritters, making love in our tent, in the ocean, in the cabana bathroom by the pool…
My desktop wallpaper finally popped up, a photo I’d taken at the Grand Canyon the day before our wedding. With knots in my stomach, I clicked onto the Internet. Google was my homepage and I stared at the cursor blinking in the search bar.
I had a computer at home but I couldn’t risk being caught in the middle of this search, couldn’t chance these words being left behind in the cache, couldn’t believe I had to think about this at all.
My husband and I both had one more year of grad school. We were renting a crappy apartment in a crumbling antebellum house that featured bad plumbing, a leaky roof and a host of bats in the attic. The plan was to finish our degrees and then take a year off from the “real world” before we got “real jobs” and acted like “real adults.” We both loved Ireland and had been researching how to get a job managing a youth hostel overseas. But you know the Yiddish proverb, right? Man plans, God laughs.
I took a deep breath and began to type. Not even a question or a well-worded query, just a search for exactly what I feared.
“I think I’m pregnant.”
-click-
The results were positively glowing.
“My husband and I have been trying to conceive for six years and I think we are finally pregnant!!”
“I was considering adoption because I’ve wanted to be a mother for so long but now I think I’m pregnant!”
Ok. Good for those ladies but that really wasn’t where I was at this morning. I tried again, a little more specifically this time.
“Oh shit, I think I’m pregnant.”
-click-
My eyes widened at the results.
“Oh shit I think I’m pregnant! I’ve been sleeping with my boss for six months - he’s married - and I think we just got caught!”
“I’m 17. I been fooling around with my mom’s boyfriend and oh shit I think I’m pregnant!”
WHAT?? This wasn’t me either - my situation definitely fell somewhere in the middle of these two extremes! Realizing I was lucky that I wasn’t knocked up with my stepfather’s kid helped me center my thoughts. I was nearly done with school, I had a job with insurance, I was actually married to the father of my child.
Back to Google, I typed the words “pregnancy symptoms.”
-click-
Reading the list, I solemnly considered what I knew.
1) My period was 8 days late.
2) I was crazy hormonal, elated one moment, crying the next and then bombing-Hiroshima angry five minutes after that.
3) My sense of smell was heightened and things smelled weird. I’d noticed a fishy odor in the kitchen the day before and when I went to investigate, I discovered it was a box of… Ziplock bags?
4) My breasts hurt. Abnormally and constantly. Not like “Ouch, that hurt when you elbowed me in the boob,” but “Oh my God, turn off the shower!! The spray feels like a car door slamming on my chest!!!”
Things were not looking good. I tried one final search. Something scientific this time.
“ovulation calendar”
-click-
A cutesy-pie, pastel pink and aqua blue website greeted me. As I entered the dates and cycle lengths it requested, I wondered what percentage of women found themselves here because they desperately wanted to make a baby and what percentage of them were like me, terrified that the deed had already, accidentally, been done.
My future was foretold to me on a simple calendar decorated with dots. Red dots for when I should have had my period, green dots for when I was most fertile. Those green dots were spread right across my honeymoon in the Keys.
I wasn’t ready, wasn’t prepared, hadn’t even considered that motherhood was a possibility in my near future. In that age-old gesture of pregnant women everywhere I placed my hand on my belly, my still flat belly, and tried to breathe.
Inside my head I wailed “There’s NO way!!!” but I knew there most certainly was a way. And like good little honeymooners, my husband and I had been doing it like rabbits on Ecstasy.
It looked like we'd better start making some different plans.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(As a P.S....Truth be told, it wasn’t until six weeks later, until the first time that I heard my child’s heartbeat and saw the fuzzy image of the tiny peanut inside of me, that I recognized what a miraculous blessing that pregnancy really was. Now I look back, after eight years and loads of growing up, and think how lucky I was that I didn't have to fight and struggle to become a mother like so many women do, but at that moment, I was simply terrified!)
I’d already lied to my husband that morning, saying I needed to go in to work to finish planning a teen event I was hosting in a few days. He was still in bed, blissfully dreaming, when I told him I’d just be gone an hour or two. So trusting, so clueless, he’d given me a kiss and said he’d see me at lunch and then rolled over to sleep again. I felt so guilty about my subterfuge. We’d only been married for three months and I was already lying to him?
I sat in the dim coolness, illuminated only by the early morning light streaming through the windows. The desktop was taking forever to load so I clasped my hands together in my lap, willing myself to be patient. I squeezed my chilly fingers together tightly.
Three months. We’d been married for three months. We were so broke, just poor graduate students when we got married, that we’d had to postpone our honeymoon back in March. We’d just returned two weeks ago from our trip to Key West. It had been wonderful, camping on the beach, snorkeling, eating conch fritters, making love in our tent, in the ocean, in the cabana bathroom by the pool…
My desktop wallpaper finally popped up, a photo I’d taken at the Grand Canyon the day before our wedding. With knots in my stomach, I clicked onto the Internet. Google was my homepage and I stared at the cursor blinking in the search bar.
I had a computer at home but I couldn’t risk being caught in the middle of this search, couldn’t chance these words being left behind in the cache, couldn’t believe I had to think about this at all.
My husband and I both had one more year of grad school. We were renting a crappy apartment in a crumbling antebellum house that featured bad plumbing, a leaky roof and a host of bats in the attic. The plan was to finish our degrees and then take a year off from the “real world” before we got “real jobs” and acted like “real adults.” We both loved Ireland and had been researching how to get a job managing a youth hostel overseas. But you know the Yiddish proverb, right? Man plans, God laughs.
I took a deep breath and began to type. Not even a question or a well-worded query, just a search for exactly what I feared.
“I think I’m pregnant.”
-click-
The results were positively glowing.
“My husband and I have been trying to conceive for six years and I think we are finally pregnant!!”
“I was considering adoption because I’ve wanted to be a mother for so long but now I think I’m pregnant!”
Ok. Good for those ladies but that really wasn’t where I was at this morning. I tried again, a little more specifically this time.
“Oh shit, I think I’m pregnant.”
-click-
My eyes widened at the results.
“Oh shit I think I’m pregnant! I’ve been sleeping with my boss for six months - he’s married - and I think we just got caught!”
“I’m 17. I been fooling around with my mom’s boyfriend and oh shit I think I’m pregnant!”
WHAT?? This wasn’t me either - my situation definitely fell somewhere in the middle of these two extremes! Realizing I was lucky that I wasn’t knocked up with my stepfather’s kid helped me center my thoughts. I was nearly done with school, I had a job with insurance, I was actually married to the father of my child.
Back to Google, I typed the words “pregnancy symptoms.”
-click-
Reading the list, I solemnly considered what I knew.
1) My period was 8 days late.
2) I was crazy hormonal, elated one moment, crying the next and then bombing-Hiroshima angry five minutes after that.
3) My sense of smell was heightened and things smelled weird. I’d noticed a fishy odor in the kitchen the day before and when I went to investigate, I discovered it was a box of… Ziplock bags?
4) My breasts hurt. Abnormally and constantly. Not like “Ouch, that hurt when you elbowed me in the boob,” but “Oh my God, turn off the shower!! The spray feels like a car door slamming on my chest!!!”
Things were not looking good. I tried one final search. Something scientific this time.
“ovulation calendar”
-click-
A cutesy-pie, pastel pink and aqua blue website greeted me. As I entered the dates and cycle lengths it requested, I wondered what percentage of women found themselves here because they desperately wanted to make a baby and what percentage of them were like me, terrified that the deed had already, accidentally, been done.
My future was foretold to me on a simple calendar decorated with dots. Red dots for when I should have had my period, green dots for when I was most fertile. Those green dots were spread right across my honeymoon in the Keys.
I wasn’t ready, wasn’t prepared, hadn’t even considered that motherhood was a possibility in my near future. In that age-old gesture of pregnant women everywhere I placed my hand on my belly, my still flat belly, and tried to breathe.
Inside my head I wailed “There’s NO way!!!” but I knew there most certainly was a way. And like good little honeymooners, my husband and I had been doing it like rabbits on Ecstasy.
It looked like we'd better start making some different plans.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(As a P.S....Truth be told, it wasn’t until six weeks later, until the first time that I heard my child’s heartbeat and saw the fuzzy image of the tiny peanut inside of me, that I recognized what a miraculous blessing that pregnancy really was. Now I look back, after eight years and loads of growing up, and think how lucky I was that I didn't have to fight and struggle to become a mother like so many women do, but at that moment, I was simply terrified!)