• Menu

Turn Out That 1 + 1 Can Equal 3 (I’m Pregnant!)

31 weeks pregnant, September 6 2012 (Note the appropriate tee-shirt!)

I’m pregnant. Not the “I-just-peed-on-a-stick” kind of pregnant. I have been expecting our own little Canadian-Chinese-French (in alphabetical order) for over eight months now (33 weeks exactly).

Yeah, I know, I hid it.

Believe it or not, even though I was given the “birds and bees” talk many years ago, finding out I was pregnant was a bit of a shock to me—don’t ask, I know exactly how it happened—and I needed time to get used to the idea. And here I am, eight months later. Ahem. A bit late for a baby shower, but not too late to share funny stories!

It all started in late February after coming back from Central America. One morning, I woke up feeling like crap. I thought I was having a hard time adapting to the cold weather or that I had caught a winter bug. I also blamed it on the stress because I had just learned my mother needed emergency surgery, and I was getting ready to fly to France to be by her side.

But my body and I have been together for a long time, and deep down I had doubts. It didn’t feel like the flu.

The day I woke up and couldn’t look at the contents of the fridge without gagging, I knew something was up. I had been grocery shopping the day before, and the food had looked appetizing enough then. And I am never nauseous. I have puked exactly twice in the past ten years, and in both instances, there was a logical explanation for it: once was on a winding road in Mexico, and the other one on the infamous Honduras to Belize boat. Food had never made me sick. It was odd.

I took a pregnancy test. It came out negative. But I still felt like crap and I couldn’t eat much over the weekend. I had no energy and I had to drag myself out of the house.

The following Monday morning, I mentioned my mysterious condition to a friend I was chatting with.

“Your body seems to be fighting something,” she said wisely. “Maybe the flu? That or you are pregnant!”

She was only half-joking. “I thought about it,” I typed “but the test I took was negative.”

She gave me the name of another brand, a more reliable one she claimed—these things are expensive, I hadn’t exactly splurged on a name brand.

I shut down my laptop and got dressed. I needed to be sure.

I felt like a 16-years-old who had just enjoyed a crazy slutty weekend when I handed the pregnancy test to the cashier. Buying a pregnancy test at Walmart on a Monday morning isn’t the classiest thing I have done… look at me, “People of Walmart” I am one of you!

Unable to wait until I was home, I locked myself into one of the supermarket’s bathroom stalls (another trashy moment!) and did what I had to do. And I waited, an eye on my stopwatch and the other on the stick (that is slightly harder than it seems).

Sure enough, a few minutes later, the word “YES” appeared on the stick.

See, that’s the perk of pricier pregnancy test. You don’t have to decipher the badly-written notice to interpret the results—you get an unmistakable “yes” or “no”.

And my pee had brought up a “yes”.

I had a closer look at the test, calmly threw it away, flushed, washed my hands and walked back home.

Fifteen minutes later, I stepped into the room where Feng was working. I stood at the door for a second.

“Okay, I am pregnant,” I blurted out before bursting into tears.

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

“I am not sure” I wailed.

Yep, I was pregnant.

“The pregnancy test brand you recommended works fine,” I wrote to my friend later on. “I am pregnant.”

I had to repeat that sentence in my head several times because it sounded unreal. Me, pregnant? Seriously?

“Is that… good?” she cautiously replied.

“I think so,” I said. “We will work things out.”

Deep down, it wasn’t a surprise. We wanted kids. While I wasn’t necessarily feeling ready for it, I have never imagined not having children. And I didn’t want to try to get pregnant—I wanted to let nature make the decision. Apparently, it had decided that now, at almost 29 years old, I was ready.

I called my mother. I thought she deserved to know, with the upcoming major surgery and all. Plus I’m the oldest kid in the family my mother loves children. Some days, I can’t help thinking she has been waiting for me to get pregnant for a good fifteen years—yeah, she probably wouldn’t have minded me being a teen mom!

“Remember the bug I thought I had caught?” I said. “Well, it’s not a bug. And it will get better… like in seven or eight months.”

She understood right away. “You… you are expecting?” she asked.

Yes, I was. She was overjoyed but I told her to keep the news to herself for the time being. I wanted to make sure everything would be okay, and I needed time to get used to the idea.

Meanwhile, I had to deal with a more pressing matter: booking a doctor’s appointment to confirm I was pregnant.

That day of March 5 felt unreal.

Share this article!
Zhu

French woman in English Canada.

Exploring the world with my camera since 1999, translating sentences for a living, writing stories that may or may not get attention.

Firm believer that nobody is normal... and it’s better this way.

View stories

Leave a Reply to Cynthia Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

51 comments