THE POSITIVE PREGNANCY TEST AND THE QUESTIONS THAT FOLLOW

Sometimes, pregnancy isn’t exciting. Sometimes, it’s downright terrifying.

Where do you turn when you see the plus sign and feel like you’ve failed as an adult?

Who do you tell, and who do you avoid?

How will you pay for the doctor’s visits, and where will your family live?

Can you and your partner learn to co-parent?

Or are you destined for an endless parade of fights and bitter silence?

These are the questions my forever date, Mallerie, and I faced just a few months after we started dating.

For the second time in a week, Mallerie, was sobbing. This time, she had broken down in a restaurant parking lot, then driven to my house. She was sitting in my only chair, alternating between tears and silence.

“What are you looking at?” she mumbled.

“You. Obviously,” I replied.

“But why do you look scared?”

“I don’t trust it when women of childbearing age have unexplained mood swings.”

I’m nothing if not direct, something she had already come to love. Of course, I don’t mean to make light of mental health or emotional turmoil. In the moment, I sought only to make her smile for a moment. And she did. Then we laughed, watched a movie and forgot all about it. For about a week.

One thing you need to understand is that Mallerie absolutely loves pushing people’s buttons. In fact, I’d venture that it’s her favorite hobby, and damn is she good at it. I don’t mind. Her antics keep us sane, injecting comedy into tense situations and allowing us both a space to express frustration in a healthy way. So it’s against this backdrop that we’re wrestling on her bed. By wrestling, I mean that she’s trying desperately to pinch my nipples until I scream and I’m trying desperately to avoid said pain.

“Do you want to know a secret?” she asked, flopping onto her back, breathless.

“Sure.”

“I’m three dates late, and I’ve peed like a million times today.”

“Duh. You’re pregnant.”

She meant to scare me, but I wasn’t giving her an inch. Besides, her comment brought me back to the recent mood swings, and I suspected that perhaps she really was pregnant.

“No way!” she insisted. “You can’t even get me pregnant!”

“Yes, I can. It’s just super unlikely!” I argued.

Turns out, we had different understandings of what the fertility doctor had meant by a three percent chance. Since I already had identical twins, I took slim possibilities with a grain of salt. Mallerie, on the other hand, figured that three percent was basically the same thing as zero percent.

Again, we laughed off the conversation and headed to the store. Just as we walked in, Mallerie recalled that she really had been using the bathroom much more than normal.

“Should we get a pregnancy test while we’re here?” I asked.

“No, boo. I’m not pregnant!”

We both knew her stubborn refusal was just an attempt to convince herself that everything was okay. Neither of us wanted another kid, and we certainly hadn’t been dating long enough to know whether or not we could even raise a child together. We respected one another as parents, but our kids had only met each other a couple of times. Besides, four kids is plenty, right?

This time, she couldn’t shake the doubt. A few days later, now almost a week late, she decided to take a pregnancy test. I had pretty much resigned myself to the idea that she was pregnant, but she was hoping against hope that we were just being paranoid. No such luck. The test indicated positive almost immediately.

If you want to know desperation, sit in the room with two adults with four kids between them, both working full time and living with their parents to make ends meet, as they read article after article about pregnancy test glitches and the various reasons for a false positive. Has anyone else ever done this?

We found plenty of anomalies and anecdotes about foods, stress levels and faulty test methods, but we’re both too logical for our own good and dismissed most of the things we read as improbable. Queue the second stage of grief. We weren’t angry with each other. Just angry about the situation. We weren’t ready to raise a child together. Hell, we weren’t even ready to live together. We cursed our luck again and again.

I wasn’t supposed to be able to have children. We were careful. Hell, I was still married. The universe had seen fit to bring another child into the mix before my divorce was even finalized.

Because we’re human, anger and frustration often manifested in our conversations. We didn’t want to tell anyone yet, which only made things worse. How are you supposed to process a life-changing event in isolation?

Sure, we had each other, but we were both too caught up in our own fears to be offer much support. Instead, we lashed out. Biting quips and short tempers were the discourse du jour.

One of the hardest things for me to hear was that Mallerie hadn’t felt connected to me since she’d taken the test. I was crushed. Have you ever met someone with hands that just feel like home? Like you’ve been holding your breath for your entire life and you finally tasted air the moment your fingers interlocked?

Pregnancy turned all that on its head.

To make things worse, I knew full well that a break-up meant that I would only see our baby a handful of times each month. I was still getting used to splitting custody of my daughters with my ex-wife. The one thing I never, ever wanted to do again was be a part-time father.

I’m just not the guy who’s content to spend every other weekend with his kids. I crave the evening rituals, the bathtub splash fights and endless story times. I knew that I was willing to fight harder than I had ever fought to keep us together.

I felt foolish in my resolve. I had always promised myself that I would not force a relationship for the sake of my kids. I’m the child of divorce myself, and I’ve seen firsthand how traumatic it can be for kids to live in a house full of tension. But I wasn’t concerned with logic in those first days. All I saw was another baby I would only get to love in pieces.

That simply wouldn’t do. Cue the fight of our lives.

The scariest part of unplanned pregnancy is that we react impulsively, and those reactions don’t always reflect our true feelings. On the night that we found out we were having a baby, Mallerie and I curled up on the bed for hours. She cried. I was in a stupor. I couldn’t speak, which meant that I couldn’t reassure her. Even if I could, I’m not sure I would have believed anything I might have said.

I thought about our future all the next day, spinning through the scenarios in my mind. I wanted a simple resolution. But when it comes to babies, there are no simple resolutions. Every moment offers its own brand of chaos. My toddlers had already taught me that.

I’m as bullheaded as they come, and I decided to use that to my advantage for once. So, I did the only thing I could do: I latched onto hope. My forever date was pregnant with my baby. We already had four children between us. By every measure, we should have been failing, but we weren’t. We were survivors. We found strength in our kids. As far as I was concerned, one more would only make us stronger.

Have you ever felt the disappointment of a positive pregnancy test? Who, if anyone, did you lean on? Where did you find hope?