These posts were written awhile ago but that does not mean that they are not very very important.
3/16/07
Being pregnant is a big deal, I mean it’s going to change you life, right? I guess its not as much the pregnancy but the after pregnancy that changes your life. So I think of the pregnancy as the nine months of pre life changing. The time you get to spend think about life changing. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me first introduce My-self and my wife. Annie is the wife and I’m Ben the husband. We have been pregnant for about 15 weeks.
This brings me to one of the first points of pregnancy that I noticed. I found it really strange to tell people about the pregnancy, not because of it but more how to tell people. I would often hear people say “We are pregnant” in referring to the husband and wife. I have to say right now that I do not feel very pregnant, for the following reasons but not limited to these reasons (new ones arise all the time); I do not have strange food aversions like say to oriental food, I do not spontaneously vomit, my moods are pretty even, I do not need new cloths because my body is morphing, I’m not receiving all sorts of books in the mail about being pregnant, and I am not growing a living beer belly. I think the husband becomes more of sounding board for the pregnancy. As husbands we get to watch our wives be pregnant. I think the whole “we” in the pregnancy was made up to satisfy some politically correct pregnancy equation. I personally feel like if I say “we” that I am trying to claim some of the insane bravery and credit that Annie has to go through to create our offspring. As the husband I am not that physically effected and need I point out I can still have a beer! More on that later, I got to tell you about our friend who decide not to drink in solidarity with his wife, yeah that lasted a long time. So here is how I often stumble through the pregnancy conversation.
Me: “Hey guess what we I mean Annie and I-I mean Annie is pregnant…” and then it goes into the standard responses slightly differing if you are telling a woman or man.
But once again I’m getting ahead of myself. One of the coolest moments is when you think your wife might be pregnant. By the way I’m going to be using wife not significant other because in my case it is my wife who is pregnant. I carry no moral baggage about being unwed and having a child it’s just easier in my case to stick with the Husband Wife equation. Onward, as I was saying Annie and I first suspected she was pregnant while on vacation in Indonesia. If I remember correctly we were at a local honey stand and Annie was way past her period. I was getting excited, no not in that way, and I think that Annie was getting a bit nervous, when she went off to the bathroom. She came back and said that she didn’t think she was pregnant because and I quote “I just had a tea colored pee” this usual is the precursor to Annie’s period. I was crushed. I had sort of convinced myself that we were going to have a child and was even coming up with names for the group of cells.
So a few days went by and the period never came. Fast-forward to a beautiful resort in Kuta, Bali and we decide that if Annie is going to have fancy drinks with umbrellas we first must confirm that she is not pregnant. So we headed off to a local drug store, in one of the most fantastic malls I have ever seen. The Indonesians really like their malls. So we are in the drug store and I have this really uncomfortable feeling, like I’m trying to buy porn or condoms. Annie tentatively approaches an employee and asks if they sell pregnancy tests. He loudly says yes and pulls one out then motions to a female employee to come over and show us how it works. Not a letter of English on the box and surprisingly, other than a nice little illustration of a one legged lady who’s genitals are cut in half peeing one her hand, no instructions. I was having that feeling of buying tampons and they need to do a price check, which has never happened to me but from all the ads and movies I’ve seen involving this scenario it must happen often.
It is strange because as much as having a baby is a natural and good thing for a couple to be going through both Annie and I had the same feeling of somehow doing something illegal by asking for this pregnancy test. As if a pregnancy is a top-secret project, hence project Malachi-I’ll get to that later. Maybe there should be vending machines for these test, maybe there are. So anyhow the kind lady showed us that two lines means pregnant and one line means rum drink with bananas and umbrellas sprouting form it. This surprised me, the line indicating positive and negative not the drink, I was assuming there would be a positive sign etc… I thought that the plus sign was a universal symbol.
Here I must note that I am really happy that Annie has a great memory because about ten steps out of the drug store I forgot which was positive and negative. I don’t think we could have gone back in we would have had to find another drug store. As if we went back to the same one they would freak out “YOU ARE PREGNAT AGAIN!!!!” We went back to the hotel and Annie snapped off one of her legs and peed on her hand, per the instructions. She came out pretty quickly and yep “WE” were pregnant. I had a beer Annie had an ice tea.
3/19/07
So once you know that you are pregnant then you have to spend the next 12 weeks pretending that you are not. I call this stage the “Annie has giardia stage” because that’s what we told everyone that asked why Annie didn’t want a glass of wine. Or she was really inexplicitly tired. She must have been on a serious antibiotics regiment. Normal humans would respond “oh yeah you shouldn’t drink on antibiotics.” While our peace corps friends would just say “So…?” Once you are able to tell people about the pregnancy they all say “Oh I knew, that one time when…” followed by some tale about when they “knew “ you were pregnant. The truth is they had no idea.
So anyhow you are not meant to tell people that you are pregnant until the 12th week in the very unfortunate chance that your wife might have a miscarriage. This happens and is sad and the truth is that I thought and worried about it a lot. Once I thought that I was going to be a dad I really started making plans. Annie and I spent these few weeks with a secret making plans that we could not share with anyone else. This is frustrating so we decided to tell people.
So what do you do, well phone up the parents, but who first. We didn’t want one side to know before the other. Luckily with the aid of modern technology we each have our own cell phone. Back in the day they must of sent messengers at the same moment hoping that they had similarly tuned horses. I head off to one room and Annie another and we make the calls. Coming back together to switch phones and parents. Lost of congratulations and words of encouragement. I believe that Annie’s mom said she was this close to having a “talk” with here about her responsibilities as a woman if she hadn’t reproduced within the year. Oh and of course both sides claimed to already know!
We then spent the next week telling all the friends and relatives. These conversations, for me, get very tiring, kind of like those conversation you have in elementary school after summer break. You know that after telling the tenth person that you went to camp for the tenth time it starts to get a bit repetitive. Annie would go into long detail of people’s reaction and then turn to me and say “What did so and so say about it?” Almost everyone says the same thing so I’ve condensed it to save time. I would respond “They were excited.” This is not good enough for Annie. “What else did they say?” she would beg of me. “Um…They were excited.” She has stopped asking me.
So now everyone knows the secret is out…what’s next? Morning sickness!
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