FIRST TRIMESTER PSYCHEDELIA: FINDING OUT

first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes crying on the toilet

Welcome to the second installment of FIRST TRIMESTER PSYCHEDELIA. You can read the introduction here. Don’t have time to sit and read? Listen to me read via the recording below. If you want to support my work, there’s a subscribe button at the bottom. Maybe even opt for the paid tier. Who am I to stop you?

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One inch of love is one inch of shadow
Love is the shadow that ripens the wine
Set the controls for the heart of the sun — Pink Floyd

Of all the women who’ve ever claimed they knew they were pregnant the moment he busted, I am the surest. In fact, I’d love to see someone out-sure me. (My claws only come out in battles of intuition.)

It’s hard to parse our motivations that July evening. I’d been off birth control for like, a month. We knew I was ovulating. Decent probability on all fronts. But what’s sex without a little feigned naïveté?

Enter the ancient space where work and play collide. 

Tilt your hips skyward.

Take in the light.

Missionary is a position we never do but you move differently when procreation’s on the table, even when the table is built from passing comments and suggestive smiles. I was a Rold Gold, salty tanned midsummer limbs braided around his waist. Possessed by his menacing wolf tattoo—il lupo—avoiding too much eye contact, lest I start crying and ruin everything.

“Are we trying?” he asked.

“I guess?” I replied hesitantly, nervous that sticking him with a kid would destroy his life or worse, make him stop loving me. Guilt obscured every sweet conversation we’d ever had about starting a family, those dreams we disclosed on the second date with the faint impression that they’d come true together.

The next few weeks were privately illuminating. Life was ramping up and I literally could not keep pace. I fell behind the pack on group runs. Lost steam in social settings. We had just closed on a house, and I was useless boxing up the apartment. Didn't sleep a wink the full two weeks we stayed at Andrew’s parents’ between moves, constantly retreating to the bedroom to rest my eyes throughout the day. And all the while, I could feel something… happening.

I have friends who, I suspect, live with a perennial low-grade fever and don’t notice. They drink 2000 milligrams of caffeine and take adderall and go to work with yogic tranquility. Me on the other hand, I know exactly what’s going on in every corner of my body at all times. I’ve got eyes on every asymmetrical mole! A Garmin watch to track my heart rate, my blood oxygen level! A working knowledge of where all the major organs sit, just in case I need to GUIDE A TRAINED PHYSICIAN in my treatment! The idea of “not knowing I was pregnant” for weeks or months is a joke. I knew. And it was a lonely kind of knowing, all the fear and precarity and hopeless elation.

While in Andrew’s hometown, we visited his high school best friend and his wife to meet their new baby. Kyle is Andrew’s Irish counterpart: reformed stoner introverts who communicate almost exclusively by exchanging music. His wife Vanessa is my Puerto Rican counterpart: vivacious, sexy, nurturing. I don’t think opposites attract, but I look at both of our relationships and think all the best couples seem a bit lopsided on the surface, only mirroring each other behind closed doors.

It was a cute afternoon of coffee, cheese danishes, and baby giggles. “Mateo is truly latino Kyle,” I noted and we all laughed. The baby was this yummy amalgam of his mom and dad, all lips and eyes. “You’ll know it when you’re pregnant,” Vanessa told me, smiling, maybe suspecting what I already knew to be true. Never underestimate the grandmotherly wisdom of women who look like Kardashians.

As we left Kyle and Vanessa’s, I asked Andrew to slide through Target for some pregnancy tests. I bought a three-pack: one early detection, one digital, and one normal, all with varying rates of 90-some-percent accuracy. I hadn’t missed my period yet, so thought I’d at least see what that early detection was hittin for.

We got back to his parents’ and I snuck upstairs to the bathroom to perform the familiar ritual of peeing on a stick. Now, what I’m about to admit may suggest that I’m less intuitive than I purport, but stay with me. 

I have believed myself pregnant 1000 times in my life, and have been wrong every time. I’d long worn an invisibility cloak of presumed infertility, hence the whole “trying not trying” thing just four months after getting married. I assumed it wouldn’t happen, and that I better confirm my deficient womb sooner than later. Nonetheless, I knew. And I just needed evidence to support my claim.

Evidence arrived in that ocean blue bathroom with the double sink and the fresh flowers from the garden and the lavender Poo-pourri on the back of the toilet. Evidence was the space between the first and second line, where I lingered for all but one second before it appeared, bold and sure of itself. Cocky little thing!

every bathroom you occupy throughout pregnancy holds significance but especially the one where you found out

You consider all the trivial ironies that color a life and then you find out you’re not just fertile, but pregnant-on-the-first-try fertile. I thought of my mom rocking a baby bump at her senior prom in the ‘70s; I somehow felt younger and less equipped.

So began the hallucinatory freefall into first-time motherhood. Suburban New Jersey started feeling like the Costa Rican rainforest. Like I finally let one of my weird friends talk me into drinking mama aya, and my crimes against humanity were coming up my throat. I cried. Oh lord, I cried and begged God’s forgiveness for fucking so romantically, with such hubris. My entire body was vibrating and I couldn’t get up from the toilet. I sat there with vintage Tommy jeans around my ankles, counting the floor tiles.

My voice cracked, “Andrew, come here please!” I held up the piss stick. “No wayyyyyyy,” he answered giddily, failing to read the room. I started blubbering about my mental health! My finances! My body! My unpreparedness! My unfitness.

“I’ll get rid of it,” I sniffled.

“No, you won’t,” he assured me, chill as ever, already the dad of my dreams.

I’m not proud that my first response to motherhood—to the colicky, dress pulling reality of it—was cowardice. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” I could hear my friends saying, confused by the sudden rush to Planned Parenthood after lamenting baby fever for months. 

But in a fraction of a fraction of a moment, I became ready. I found the strength to walk into the unknown without a Modelo in sight for 10 months. To protect and love this little speck with animalistic ease.

I changed my clothes and went out and ran eight miles around a high school track—each lap, a life-affirming, psychic adventure.

That was the day monotony died.