#imnotproud | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bedheadisme · 5 years ago

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Part 2

It was around the end of January 2019 that I missed my period. I waited and waited, thinking it was my body adjusting to not being on birth control for the first time since I was 13. All the same, I decided that I’d stop drinking to be better safe than sorry.

A few days later I worked up the nerve to go buy a pregnancy test. I spent a lot of time online looking for one that was the most accurate before I went to the store and picked out the one I had decided on. Even though TJ and I had been together for eight years and my mom was constantly nagging me about giving her grandbabies I was worried that someone would see me. Funny that I was still afraid that my mom would just decide to be at Kroger at that very moment and lose her mind. I knew at that point that even if I was pregnant the chances of a miscarriage were high.

I didn’t want anyone but me and TJ to know until we were through the scary part. So the next morning I woke up extra early so that I could take the test. It was around 5:30 a.m. when I took it and I went and laid back in the bed with TJ. I wasn’t going to sit in the bathroom staring at the clock. I held his hand while the time ticked by and he remained blissfully asleep. Five minutes passed and I crept out of the bed. I stood in front of my bathroom door for another two trying to psyche myself up for whatever was behind the door. Finally, when my heart felt like it was pounding in my throat, I opened the door and peeked at the test.

I was pregnant.

Holy shit I was pregnant.

I crept back in the room and curled up next to TJ. “Hey babe,” I whispered into the dark.

“Hmm? What babe?”

“Are you sure you want kids?”

“Of course I do” he said tiredly.

“Well, that’s good because I’m pregnant.”

He grabbed my arms and looked at me, as if to make sure I wasn’t kidding and then pulled me closer to him and crushed his lips to mine. When we finally rolled out of bed together he stretched over the bed and kissed my stomach with a little grin.

“I don’t care if we’re late today, we’re getting donuts and coffee before work. Wait. You can’t have coffee. Or caffeine. Or sushi. “

“I’m sure it’s fine hon. I’ll get a tea and it will be fine.”

I spent a lot of that first day randomly grinning and resisting the urge to text literally everyone I knew that we were starting a whole new adventure. My mom was going to be so happy. The one thing she was always asking me for was grandbabies. Between the random grinning and impulse control I also yo-yo’d with little tinges of fear. What if I lost the little nugget? What if I was a bad mom? What if the major change to our relationship pushed us apart instead of further together. I had spent the majority of my youth doing everything in my power to avoid being a single mom.

If I’m being honest I never thought I wanted kids until TJ. I had always held the stance that if I wanted a child i’d like to adopt because of how full of addiction, depression, and anxiety my family history is. My mom, great as she is, got so stressed that she would pass out in random places. I imagine some kind of panic attacks because I only ever heard about it in hindsight. My dad, an alcoholic who consistently made the worst life choices possible. Supposedly a great grandpa who killed himself. An uncle who recovered from alcohol addiction just to hang himself in the garage. Another who died of cancer. Add all that up to a gene pool that I didn’t know how to protect a tiny little human from.

The thing about TJ was, he was the only boy who would pass his line down and I had watched him for the last eight years. Confident that we could overcome anything. Every child he met was mesmerized by him. It’s like they saw him and simultaneously saw a big kid and a jungle gym to climb on. He’s so good with them that the fears I have of being a bad single mom with a crappy gene pool seem like a minor risk.

The next week he surprised me with conversations about things like decorating for the baby, taking me to the pharmacy and buying me prenatals. Once, when I sat my phone down and didn’t hear it ring he showed up where I was, saying he was worried that something had happened. I laughed it off and told him that he was already acting like a worried dad. He went out and got a little onesie with his family crest that said “Coming Soon” for his parents.

I had scheduled my very first appointment for February 18th. It was a Friday when I started spotting. I was worried but a quick google told me that a little spotting was normal but much more and it was a sign of a miscarriage. A rock settled in my stomach that night when I told TJ what was going on.

“We knew this was a risk, we’ll just wait it out and see what happens.”

Saturday I was still bleeding and I called the doctor and asked them what they thought. They told me that they couldn’t see me until after the first appointment but if I was really worried I would need to go to the ER. Sunday I was still spotting and I procrastinated, thinking I would go tomorrow if I hadn’t stopped. As I sat at my desk on that Monday, still bleeding I texted TJ and told him that I was going to go to the ER. He told me that he would go with me if I waited until he was off of work.

Looking back, I don’t know why I didn’t wait. Maybe it’s because I’m used to dealing with my health on my own. Maybe I was afraid that I had waited too long. Mostly, I think I didn’t want to see TJ’s face when the doctor told me that I was in the process of miscarrying. I was convinced that I had done something to make this happen. Maybe it was that I hadn’t quit smoking soon enough. Maybe the universe was telling me that this wasn’t meant to happen for us yet or at all.

I walked into the emergency room and spoke in hushed tones with the admissions lady. I explained why I was there and they took me back almost immediately. They took my blood and asked me questions like how long I had been bleeding and if I had taken a pregnancy test. The sterile smell of the hospital was making me nauseous. I sat in the room in my paper gown and waited - shaking.

How was I going to tell TJ about this. I wanted to text my mom and ask her to be there but I hadn’t even told her that we thought we were pregnant for this very reason. The doctor came into the room finally and sat across from me in my paper gown. He was a middle aged man and I don’t really remember what he looked like.

“So after looking at your blood levels, it doesn’t look like you are pregnant. Your hormone levels don’t show that you’re having a miscarriage because you weren’t pregnant. I’ll let you decide if that’s good or bad news. We’re going to give you a routine pelvic exam and then you’ll be free to get out of here.”

“OK.”

I shuffled to the table and let them poke and prod me. It was cold and I couldn’t stop replaying what the doctor said. It was like, because I was there by myself, it was no big deal. Just another girl dodging the pregnancy bullet. I did cry for a few minutes in the silence of the office. Then I told myself that I didn’t want to walk out of the hospital crying. I needed to be somewhere else. I waited in my paper gown to have them take the IV out of my arm. When the nurse came in and took it out I asked her “Is this common?”

“Oh I don’t have your case I don’t know.”

“Oh, is having a false positive pregnancy test common” I asked numbly.

“I’m sorry honey, it’s my first day. I really don’t know.”

After the IV was out and I made my way to my car I sat in the ER parking lot for about 20 minutes numbly. I think I texted TJ that we’d talk about it when he got off of work. I’m pretty sure I went home and sat in my living room in silence. I might have turned on the TV but to be honest I just sat there and replayed the doctors words in my head over and over again. When I was finished replaying his words I tried to mentally rehearse how I was going to tell TJ that I had let him down.

What if I couldn’t give him a child? Was this the beginning of the end for us? What had I done wrong? Was I seriously so dumb that I had managed to do a pregnancy test incorrectly? And that little baby onesie was just sitting in my office at home. Staring at me like some kind of beacon of failure. When TJ texted me telling me he was ready to get out of work I drove in silence to get him. I sat at the wheel and gripped it as he climbed in.

I started driving and as we got on the new circle exit he asked “So are we going to talk about it?”

Woodenly I told him that I had never been pregnant. And then I told him that I didn’t want to talk about it. What I meant when I said that was that I didn’t want to talk about it with other people. Looking back on that conversation, I can see why he interpreted it as me not wanting to talk to him about it altogether. I told him that he could talk to another person about it. I certainly wasn’t prepared to work through everything that was going through my mind at that moment, much less his feelings.

“Honestly, I think it would have been worse if you had had a miscarrage. At least we didn’t lose it.”

I didn’t. I had been mentally preparing for the relatively common miscarraige that one out of three women experience. Not to find out that I never had a child. Not to hear the doctor say he’d let me decide if this was a good or a bad thing. Not to be hit in the face with the fear that I wasn’t going to be able to give TJ something that he wanted so desperately.

I spent the first week after that doctors appointment glancing at the alcohol in my house thinking that I shouldn’t pick it up at all. I had a gut feeling that once I started, I wasn’t going to be able to stop drinking. I try not to drink when I’m feeling down. Sometimes I succeed and more often I end up crying at the bottom of a bottle. The next week I broke the news to my mom and she was understanding. We both cried. She said I was young and that me and TJ could try again.

It was around week two that I broke down and started drinking again. Every night for weeks. I’d wake up numb and hungover, go to work, listen to depressing music and go home and do it all over again. There was one Saturday in particular that was pretty bad. It was the weekend after my scheduled first pregnancy appointment. I had cancelled it but I marked it on the calendar all the same. TJ went out to hang with his friends and I sat at the house by myself. I was drinking and depressed. I was lonely.

That’s the thing that I wasn’t prepared for. I didn’t know how to talk to people about everything that had happened. I didn’t even tell my best friend. I just swirled further down the bottle. I was getting more and more anxious as I drank more. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that there was a gun in our bedroom. Let me pause here, because I know what this sounds like. It sounds like I was thinking about blowing my brains out and being done with everything.

But that’s not what this was. This was me thinking about it being there. Me thinking about the possibility of getting so drunk that I’d lose all reason and my drunk self would make the decision for me. I didn’t want to die. If only because the thought of how it would hurt everyone around me. That being said, the more I thought about that gun I decided that I needed someone here with me.

I texted my best friend Becki and asked her if she’d come over and keep me company. That I was lonely and sloshed. Looking for someone to pass the time. Looking back, I’m glad that I did. She came over and we talked about everything except what I should have talked about. Movies, television, books. Those are easy things to talk about. Losing a pregnancy that I never had, that was something infinitely more difficult.

February and March were difficult months. I was at an all time high consumption of bourbon. The first week of April TJ and I got into one of our bigger arguments. We both got drunk and ended up yelling at each other. Him about how I was always drinking and wasn’t talking to him about the no baby thing. Me about how I thought he was going to leave me because I couldn’t even get pregnant.

“Do you really think that I would leave you if you can’t give me a baby?”

“Yeah, I do. I mean, it’s what you want more than anything. Why stay with someone who can’t give you that? I’m fucking useless.”

“Babe, I’m not going to leave you. I love you and I’m tired of you saying I’m going to leave. I’m not.”

On April 13th we both woke up and shuffled around each other. Offering apologies and me promising that I’d try to communicate better. Surprisingly, the fight had left me feeling lighter. Like for the first time in months, things might start to turn the corner for us. Maybe the timing hadn’t been right for us to start a family. But we could keep trying. Through the haze of the last few months I had learned that it wasn’t unusual for pregnancy to take up to eighteen months to happen when you’ve been on birth control as long as I had been. It didn’t change what had happened, but gave me a little hope that my body wasn’t defective.

“You wanna go out today and see a movie or go ride? Just get out of the house today? I think we could both use it?” TJ asked.

“Sure. I think it’s supposed to rain tomorrow, so let’s go ride today. If you still want to see a movie we can go tomorrow. I’d hate to waste the sunshine.”

#false positive #depression #imnotproud #losingwhatyouneverhad #ptsd

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