Chapter 0 : BFP (big fat positive)
I broadly consider myself to be a person who knows about stuff. I believe myself, at 31 years of age, to have a fairly decent grasp of how most things work. Hiring a car in a foreign country, for example. The electoral system. Radiators. I know that soda water gets out stains, what an ISA is for, how to register as self-employed, and what to do if your toilet starts doing that thing where it sounds like it’s flushing all the time.
I like to think of myself as a clued up gal of the world. So it’s a little embarrassing to be sitting here, pregnancy test in one hand (yes, there is still a little bit of wee on it), iPhone in the other: Googling “what to do when you find out you’re pregnant”. Embarrassing only to myself, you understand, since there’s no one else here to witness this pants down, one-handed Googling debacle (praise be). As I wait for the results page to load, I quickly run over what I do know. Or at least, what I think I know based on knowledge I’ve gleaned from TV and films; my, very few, friends who’ve done this; and that great, fluffy pile of titbits known as ‘conventional wisdom’ — which are sometimes totally solid but which sometimes, terrifyingly, turn out to be complete bollocks.
WHAT I KNOW
- You’re not supposed to tell anyone until after your first scan. In fact, up until that point, says conventional wisdom in its this is just how the world is voice, you’re not really even pregnant. Tons of women don’t even know until that magical 12 week point. Given how sick I’ve felt for the last few days, I find that somewhat difficult to believe.
- For some reason, sushi — normally the lunch choice of the health conscious — is forthwith basically poison and must be avoided at all costs.
- Alcohol, caffeine, fags, and everything else fun are off the table for approximately the next two years — first while gestating (you heard), and then while breastfeeding. By the time you’re finally permitted to start partaking of fun again, you’ll be rubbish at it. You’ll start embarrassing yourself at 9.30pm after half a glass of Pinot, and have to be taken home — chances are to get knocked up all over again.
Here’s the thing: while the two lines in the little window on the test that apparently signal PREGNANT (although they don’t look exactly like the lines on the leaflet. Does that matter? I wonder to no-one) aren’t a huge surprise, neither were they exactly expected right now. If there was a scale of surprised to find yourself up the duff, and the scale went from the Virgin Mary (“WTF?!”), to one of those poor lasses from the Handmaid’s Tale (“here we go again”), I guess I’d fall closer to the handmaiden. But only a bit closer.
So do I just cease my raw fish, alcohol and occasional fag (sorry) habits, and rock up at the hospital in three months like “scan me, bitches!”? No, the approximately 3m websites that spring up prompted by the magic keyword ‘pregnant’ chime in unison. Pregnant ladies are big business, and the page impressions generated by their frantic searching and posting and searching again support a flourishing ecosystem of forums, blogs and online magazines. Where Mumsnet boldly went, others followed. Netmums.com, tommys.org, lifewithmylittles.com, babycentre.co.uk, madeformums.com, disneybaby.com (yes, really)… The list goes on. I’ve stumbled across the mum forums occasionally in the past, Googling other girl-stuff received wisdom hasn’t quite given me the full lowdown on, and always beaten a hasty retreat — the frantic swapping of completely anecdotal evidence as fact, and total lack of irony, a little too rich for my blood. Now I scroll down the page, deciding which result looks the least likely to prompt that feeling you get when you’ve just walked into a pub, and every single person in there turns to look at you — “you’re not from round here, are you?” written all over their faces.
What to do when you’re pregnant Once you see that BFP … (BFP? No, I don’t know either) reads one heading. You’re pregnant: Now what?, says another (well, quite). Me and my husband have been TTC for six months… Now I’m 5dpo and hoping this is it?! Anyone else in their TWW and want to symptom spot together? writes one of the Netmums. I start to feel dizzy. It’s probably time to get off the toilet.
I put the test on the kitchen table, take a picture of it, and WhatsApp it to my boyfriend, who’s working nights just now, with the caption “Eek.” 15 minutes tick past, during which I’m the only person in the world that knows I’m pregnant. I wonder if I should get on with making dinner. Is that what you do? Take the test, wash the wee splashback off your hands, and crack on? I find an NHS website that’s blessedly free of confusing acronyms and sign up for “Start4Life” emails, which promise me “expert advice, videos, information and tips on pregnancy, birth and beyond.” Ok then.
“Whaaaaaa?!!!!!!” my boyfriend writes back. “Call me!” If i’m not quite Virgin Mary levels of shocked, he’s not Joseph either, but no-one uses that many exclamation marks unless they’ve been taken a little off guard do they?
About six months ago, I had the contraceptive implant that had been keeping me distinctly un-handmaidenish for the past five years removed. For the record: I can’t say a bad word about these devices. If you’ve never seen one, it’s a little strip of bendy plastic about the length of your thumb, and as wide as a thick elastic band. They shove this innocuous looking object into your arm, which isn’t entirely pleasant, but is totally bearable, and the wonders of medical science keep you completely sterile with no further action needed on your part for THREE YEARS. Plus, if you’re like me, you might lose a couple of pounds compared to your contraceptive pill taking days. And your periods might become almost completely non-existent. For the first three years, I was Implanon’s biggest fan.
Then, roundabout the time the first implant expired, to be replaced with Implanon II, some icky stuff started to happen (overshare incoming). I started bleeding on-and-off throughout the month, to no particular schedule. I’d get sudden, hot flashes of rage at completely random moments — I’m no zen master at the best of times, and have been known to fling objects across rooms for reasons unrelated to any hormonal event — but these were pretty extreme even by my standards. Worst of all, I started getting weepy. Tears during RSPCA adverts were the final straw.
Over a breakfast that we pretended was a business meeting, but was basically just an expenses paid reason to catch-up on each other’s lives, an old colleague told me sagely that she’d stopped taking the pill months ago, and was using nothing more than an app to keep any potential buns out of her oven. “Isn’t it convenient,” she mused, over avocado on sourdough, “that the pill was invented by a man, and it’s women that have to take it? There’s no male pill. It’s us that have to pump our bodies full of hormones so they can have sex with us whenever they feel like it with no consequences.”
It all fell into place. There was me thinking my Implanon was a modern-woman freedom ticket, when actually — like a lot of other things that seem kinda useful until you think about it — it was just a massive tool of the patriarchy. I hadn’t seen it coming with bras, and now I’d been duped again. I made a mental note to be a better feminist and booked an appointment at the clinic the same day. One mildly unpleasant surgical procedure later (“I’m just struggling to get hold of the end of it,” said the nurse, plucking at my inner arm tissue, as I tried not to faint) and the implant was gone.
I chose Natural Cycles, one of a plethora of ovulation calculating apps whose developers have realised they can double their market by helping to prevent pregnancies, as well as plan them. This one comes with a little thermometer, and instructs you to take your temperature first thing in the morning every single day. When you’re fertile, your temperature rises by a tiny, tiny amount — we’re talking fractions of a degree — and this is how Natural Cycles’ algorithm knows you need to keep your knickers on that day. All very clever, but actually the thermometer was the thing’s downfall. The instructions are explicit: measure first thing in the morning, as soon as you wake up. If you wake up an hour before your alarm, do it then. The problem is, I wake up through the night all the time. My area is noisy, I’m a light sleeper, and I share a standard double bed with a giant. I was forever waking up at 2am and wondering if I should take my sodding temperature then or not — and as I fumbled around looking for the time, my brain would wake up properly and I’d start thinking about unanswered emails, and all the usual nighttime crap. Not ideal.
Also, if you’ve been drinking alcohol, are sick, or have slept two hours more or less than usual, your temperature that day is void. That knocked out pretty much all of my weekends, and usually a couple of days in the week too. The fewer temperatures you enter, the more “red days” (knickers on) the app gives you — partly because it has less data for the magic algorithm, and partly because it doesn’t want you to realise you could figure out the whole thing for free with a Google calendar so long as your cycle is regular.
I started to ignore some of the red days, thinking I knew better. Then, on holiday in Romania in a white Hilton Hotel room with the fluffiest duvets our young eyes had ever seen, me and the giant snuggled and talked about how it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if we relaxed the rules around the red days a bit more. “See what happens,” we said, as though what would happen wasn’t biologically inevitable, and I pictured a future-me: older, wiser, and for some reason wearing a floral wrap dress, serenely pregnant sometime after New Year’s.
That conversation would have been 8 August, and according to the two lines in the test window, I was pregnant about a week later. Could that conversation have knocked me up?! I wonder stupidly, googling “BFP” — which stands for “Big Fat Positive”, as it turns out. While we’re at it “TTC” = “trying to conceive”, and “2WW” is the “two-week wait” between ovulation — when you’re TTC’ing your little heart out — and missing your first period, when you can take a pregnancy test and hopefully get a BFP. Still with me?
While I’m weeing on my second test stick for verification — if anything, it comes up even more BFP than the first — my starter email from the NHS Start4Life service comes through. Somehow, I seem to have accidentally signed up for the expectant father mailings. Becoming a dad can be the most rewarding and fulfilling experience of your life it reads breathily, alongside a picture of a large bald man kissing a newborn. Most dads look back and say it’s the best thing they’ve ever done.
It’s going to be a long nine months….
