Seven

Seven years ago today I sat on a table in an exam room wearing a paper napkin. When the dr stuck her head in the door and said, "Guess what?" I would have never guessed the next words out of her mouth, "You're pregnant."

You could have knocked me off that exam table with a marshmallow.

Mentally, I had prepared myself, prepared myself for the journey to find out why I wasn't getting pregnant. I was 26 and had been trying for a year. I'd read everything I could find on how to get pregnant, poured over TTC message boards and charted and took my temperature every morning trying to be able to pinpoint ovulation. Over the past year, I'd had my "monthly visitor" a total of once. Home tests were all negative. So there I was ready to be the doctors guinea pig.

My face must have reflected my shock because she looked at me and asked if I was happy about it. Of course I was. The gears just had to shift from what I thought I was there for.

She did an ultrasound to try and pinpoint the age of the fetus since the date of my last period meant I should have been like 7 months pregnant & obviously wasn't anywhere close. It was more like 3 weeks. Black and white lines waved across the screen and after a couple minutes she pointed to dot on the screen. "There it is. That's your baby."

Knowledge might be power but knowledge can also make you a raving lunatic. Being very aware of the miscarriage rate in the first trimester, I was terrified about finding out so early. No, sometimes you just can't make a woman happy. She wants to have a baby, finds out she's pregnant & instantly afraid she will lose it.

When I left the office that day, I called Jay who was working. When he answered, I asked him simply, "So, do you want to be called dad or daddy?"

After a silence he replied, "I'll have to get back to you on that, honey."

He was standing right in front of customers, whom he was trying to sell a car to. At that time, he was selling cars to make ends meet (don't hold that against him- he sucked at it because he couldn't be a 'salesman').

Later, I was going through some letters that I had received from my friend, Michele. One of them dated a couple weeks before I found out about my pregnancy, detailed a dream that she had that I was pregnant. I had to laugh. She knew before I did. And from 800 miles away too.

 

Today, also is the birthday of my late maternal Grandmother. She'd be 88, if she were still with us.