Last week I took a pregnancy test for the first time in my life. I’ll spare you the suspense—it was negative, as I suspected it would be. But in the past three months since I stopped taking the pill, my heart has become more and more enamored with the idea of having a baby. We originally planned to wait until May or June to start trying, but when March came around, even though I knew it would mean having a baby in the inopportune month of December, I couldn’t help but want to give it a try. I suppose we sort of part-way tried it that first month—half the time using condoms and the other half saying, what the heck, let’s risk it. I knew there were at least two times we had unprotected sex when I could have been ovulating. So as the end of the month neared, I was a little hopeful.
Then my period came and went unusually quickly, so even though I hadn’t technically missed a period, I still hung on to that tiny possibility that I could be pregnant. I’ve found that it’s a bit like a switch that flips on—once that switch was flipped for me I knew I’d be happy if I got pregnant, regardless of what it meant for our previous timeline. So, with a couple of scuba diving trips planned in April and a vacation that’s sure to involve wine—both no-nos for pregnant women—I felt the need to know for sure whether I was pregnant or not, so I used one of the pregnancy tests I ordered online months ago.
It was negative; that one red line showed up right away, leaving no doubt. It’s good in a way, because I don’t have to skip the dive trips or worry about having a glass of wine next week, but at the same time I couldn’t help but be disappointed. The closer this reality has gotten, the more I’ve found myself afraid of infertility, something I never considered until very recently. I look around my friends, family, and acquaintances and see many people who could never have children at all, or for whom it took time, faith, and fertility medicine to make it happen.
At the same time, as I enter into the stage of actually, really wanting and trying to have a baby, it brings other fears, mainly of how once that sperm and egg combine it’s like a runaway train that won’t be stopped. My life will never be the same. Just a couple of weeks ago an old friend and his wife lost their 11 month old daughter to leukemia. They never even knew she was sick until the day she died—it was that fast. My heart breaks thinking about those kind of possibilities. One day, you wake up with a perfectly healthy baby, and by nightfall she’s dead.
But we have to open ourselves up to the prospect of pain in order to experience love, and I can honestly say I’m stoked about trying to get pregnant. I believe I am ready. I just really, really hope things go well for us.