Now that I’ve been listed in Babes in Blogland, I’ve been reading some of the blogs listed there, and I stumbled upon a post by Becci at Bedrest and Beyond. She has an Incompetent Uterus, so she wanted to tell people what pregnancy is like when you suffer from IC. And boy, did she get me thinking.
Because truth be told, having a baby wasn’t in my plans. At all. My plan was to never have kids, or at least wait until Michael and I had been married for about 5 years before incorporating anyone else in this equation. But preferably never.
Sometimes I think about this and try to pinpoint the real reasons why I decided this was what I wanted. First, I suffer from scoliosis and lordosis, both of which affect the spine. The first one gives the spine an inward curve; the second one curves it to a side, which makes my spine look like an S on x-rays. When I spoke to a physiotherapist, she said I’d have to be put on bedrest since my 4th month if I got pregnant. So I figured if I could barely handle the pain without being pregnant, how the hell was I going to live if I added more weight to my back? I might sound selfish, but I was definitely not prepared to put my life on hold for the sake of having a baby. Not yet, that’s for sure. I mean, I have a stinky job which hurts my back like there’s no tomorrow (sitting down 8 hours a day without the possibility of going anywhere except on your 30 min lunch break in which, guess what, I have to order in and eat it in the kitchen because I. Need. Food. To. Live, can be really bad for your back), I’m going to start school, and I’m just going to get married, so why would I want to complicate things even more.
A little over a week after I got married, I started feeling really weird. I had been feeling weird before the wedding, but my mom and I just thought it was stress. It wasn’t. I’m just the biggest moron ever. I mean, I used to smoke 2 packs of Marlboro Menthols a day, and all of a sudden, I start feeling sick every time I light up a cigarette. Nah, just stress. Then I can’t eat because food makes me want to puke. Stress. I sleep 50,000 hours a day. Stress, I tell you!
And then, I got married. And my so-called stress level would not budge. Sleepy, pukey and everything else. And a week went by, until the day when I came to work feeling especially lousy, wanting to puke but also wanting to eat an avocado sandwich. By 10 am, I felt like I was about to barf all over my desk. So I asked for permission to go home. And then I called my friend Marcela and told her that maybe, just maybe, I should get a blood test. You know, to rule out a pregnancy because I obviously wasn’t pregnant. So I go and take the blood test, and then we go to my other friend Marcela’s. And we open the envelope. And there it is: POSITIVE. So I start crying because life is so fucking unfair. I never wanted to have a kid and I did everything I possibly could to avoid it. No way. I don’t know how, but I’m not having this kid. (In Costa Rica, abortion is illegal, so it’s incredibly hard and expensive to get one. Pretty impossible).
When I get home it takes me a while to work up the courage to tell Michael. I tell him to sit next to me in bed because I need to talk to him about something very important. He just looks at me like Dammit, you don’t want a divorce already, do you? And I tell him he’s going to be a daddy. He stares into space for a few minutes, I start crying like crazy because, again, this was not what I wanted, and life is unfair, so wah. And then, he holds me in his arms and tells me it’s going to be okay. He loves me more than anything in the world, especially now that I’m about to make him the happiest man on earth. And for that, I love him more than I ever thought possible.
Michael, my parents, my brother and sister, my friends. They have all taken it upon themselves to make me see that this is not a bad thing. That this baby did not come from a one night stand or some other not-so-good circumstances, but from the love my husband and I have for each other. That this child will make us happy in ways we can only imagine. And that I should enjoy this, because there are so many people out there who won’t get to have it. And when I saw that little bean for the first time I really felt it. I love this tiny person. I would never go back to the way things were before I knew of its existence. And now my heart is filled with the desire to protect it, and make it feel loved.
Kid, I can barely wait to hold you in my arms so you can see how much we love you. You just don't know.
