Due

Content Note: pregnancy loss

Today is a special day, and I don’t want to let it go by without celebrating it. Today was my due date for my first pregnancy. The one we lost at Christmas.

I’ll never forget the moment I discovered I was pregnant. I was so shocked and excited and so, SO happy. I won’t go into the personal details, but it’s important to know that in my mind, I was only on day 12 of my cycle. I woke up that morning and went to breakfast with Sean. I got about halfway through my meal and felt sick. That’s odd, I thought, but it didn’t even occur to me that it might be morning sickness because, again, I thought I was on day 12. Pregnancy wasn’t possible.

Later that morning, I took an ovulation test, and it was glaringly positive. As positive as an ovulation test can be. (Of course, now I know that those tests can’t distinguish between the pregnancy hormone and the ovulation hormone, but I didn’t know that at the time.) I was so excited to know that I would start ovulating soon. I remember being blown away by my timing. Wow! First ovulation test I take in my entire life, and it’s positive. What are the chances?!

That evening, Sean went out with a friend, so I used the time to watch my shows Sean doesn’t like. The episode I was watching centered around a character who had decided to sell her eggs. The whole episode was about fertility, and I literally paused it and said out loud to the dogs, “Could I be…pregnant?”

I truly didn’t think it was possible. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how sick I got at breakfast and how coincidental it was that I got a positive ovulation test on the first try. I finally decided to just go take a test “to rule it out.” I was STUNNED when the word “pregnant” popped up. Not only was I expecting a negative result, but I also hadn’t realized I had grabbed a digital test.

“PREGNANT”

I actually squealed. And then I was so excited to tell Sean and was dying for him to get home. And then I got this text.

The future father of my child. (Not sure why the picture won’t load, but it was an alcoholic version of a Baja Blast.)

I was so excited that it didn’t even occur to me that my bladder would be empty, so I ruined my only remaining test. So I made a desperate trip to Walgreens to buy a bunch more to super-confirm that it was in fact true.

YEP!

As I prepared to tell Sean, I knew he’d be happy, but he’s also a planner. It’s what he does for a living. And I was worried he might immediately jump into planning mode: budgets, spreadsheets, calendars. But he didn’t. He was just as excited as I was, and the only math he did was to determine when we’d get to meet our baby and how close in age he/she would be to our friends’ children.

We only got 13 more days with that pregnancy, but dammit were they happy ones. I was fucking exhausted and emotional, and I loved every second of it. Sean managed to get a picture of one of my many accidental naps with my sweet Kane.

I imagined a fifth stocking at Christmas next year. We discussed names. I drank a lot of club soda with lime to fool people. I sobbed at breakfast one morning. Why? I don’t know. I told Sean it was because I was cold and my arm hurt (I had my flu shot and COVID booster the day before), but he gently suggested it was probably hormonal. I lovingly rubbed my non-existent bump imagining what it might look like one day. We imagined telling our family and friends.

I will never forget those 13 days and the unadulterated joy that consumed them. I will forever be grateful for that time, no matter how brief it was or how it ended. And I credit my first pregnancy with saving us a lot of potential trouble a few months later when my second pregnancy turned out to be ectopic. I was only getting bloodwork because of the prior loss, and I don’t think we would have caught it so early if it weren’t for the bloodwork and early ultrasound. I had zero physical symptoms of an ectopic. But thanks to my first pregnancy, we caught it early and made it through relatively unscathed.

So happy due date to us. I wish we were at the hospital right now holding our baby, but I know that day will come for us eventually.