I knew it for certain after I sent Olivia to the store to buy one of every single type of pregnancy test she could find so I could have a panel of results rather than just one. Maybe I was that one person out of however many who got the false positive. That was a thing, right? There were tests that malfunctioned, and it was possible it could tell me I was pregnant when I really wasn’t. Or was it false negatives that were the possibility?
It didn’t really matter, because while that one test might have been a dud and given me the wrong answer, the other twelve I took throughout the day that day weren’t going to be. And they all agreed with the first one. I had a consensus… I was going to be a mother. In that instant, my life changed forever. I knew I was going to have a baby, and one day that baby would grow up. He or she would affect other people in the world. They would make friends. Fall in love. Hurt people. I wasn’t too fond of the idea of that last one, but it was an inevitability. I was just going to have to do my best to raise my child well and hope to keep the hurt to a minimum.
My thoughts about my current existence changed. My thoughts about my future changed. My thoughts about my relationships and potential relationships changed.
All that I was ready for. It kind of went without saying those things couldn’t stay the same after I found out I was carrying a child. But it was all the other things I wasn’t really anticipating. And those might have been hitting me just as hard. After all, it was easier, possibly borderline delusional, but easier, to compartmentalize emotions and not let myself think about anything too far into the future than it was to ignore feeling tired, always having to pee, and discovering new and odd things about my body on a near-daily basis.
Today’s discovery was that if I hung upside down for more than ten seconds, I felt like I was going to pass out. It wasn’t even an extreme hang. I hadn’t strapped myself into huge boots and dangled myself from the closet rod to adjust my spine. I just lay down on my bed, propped my legs up on the wall, and flipped my head back over the edge of the bed. It was something I’d done a million times in my life, a position I assumed when I was really thinking about something.
Not anymore. It took only a matter of seconds before black dots started dancing in front of my eyes and I felt woozy. Olivia saw me press one hand over my eyes and reached out to grab my hand and help me right myself on the mattress.
“You can’t hang like that,” she told me. “Your body is sending all your blood to the baby to help it grow, so if you do that what’s left is going to rush to your head and there won’t be any left for anything else.”
“Selfish baby,” I muttered. I instantly felt guilty and rubbed where my belly would eventually be. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that, Little Bean. I’m sure you are a very kind and generous baby.”
“Little Bean?” Olivia asked. “Are we trying out celebrity-inspired names? Unique and unisex so it works either way?”
“No,” I told her. “That’s not going to be its name. But I felt like I had to have something to call it. Then I saw it today and it just looked like a little bean to me.”
“That’s right. Today was your first ultrasound. Did you get pictures?” Olivia asked.
She sounded so excited, and I gestured toward the nightstand where I’d set the strip of black-and-white images. My best friend squealed as she scooped it up and looked at it.
“Do you have any idea what you’re looking at?” I asked.
“Of course I do. I’ve looked at all the ultrasounds for my nieces and nephews,” she told me.
“Well, good, because I didn’t. The image came up on the screen, and I just stared at it, not having any idea what I was seeing. Do you think that means something?” I asked.
“It means ultrasounds are really blurry and hard to see anything, especially when you’re still as early as you are,” she said.
“Or maybe that I’m already destined to be an inadequate mother because I couldn’t even distinguish my own embryo from anything else,” I commented.
“Don’t even start that. The only reason I can tell what’s in there is because my siblings have a lot of kids. I learned.” I turned my head to stare up at the ceiling again. “All right. Spill. What are you really thinking about?”
“He waved at me,” I said.