My Big Fat Positive

Slumped on the couch in my mother-in-law’s living room, I couldn’t keep my eyes open as the idiot box kept an eye on me. It was the Queen’s birthday long weekend, Lee and I were lounging about at his mum’s Hunter Valley home after a long day of wine tasting and sight-seeing.

I doubted that a single glass of red wine would have made me feel this sloppy so early in the evening. It was as though I had popped a double dose of sleeping pills by the rude inattentive way I sat in the living room while the rest of the family bustled about for dinner. Maybe I was just coming down with the flu.

The next morning back in Sydney, Lee and I were getting ready for work. I knew my period was a couple of days late, in spite being irregular. But we also had been trying to conceive the last three month, so I figured if I wasn’t showing a temperature, I might as well pee on a stick.

I tore open the single pack of Pregnosis and did the deed. “You’d reckon I would’ve bought more of these sticks since we’ve been TTC,” I thought to myself and acknowledged that I might have been a little too cocky with one pack. The last two tries, my period arrived on practically on cue. I didn’t need to put the solo pee stick to good use, until now. “Third time’s a charm” was the cliche.

Instead of waiting for the result, I placed the life changing pee stick by the sink and stepped into the shower. Just to torture myself further, my mind wandered “What if it was positive? Then what??”

“Okay, maybe I’m not ready. Just because I had all those pre-pregnancy vaccinations and blood tests done, doesn’t mean we need to get preggo so soon… right? We can still take time to save money, spend more time with each other… Maybe even think about whether we really want kids.”

“Oh crap… If I was preggo, what about that glass of wine I drank yesterday?? Maybe it’d be better if the test was negative.”

Yet, a part of me felt a potential tinge of disappointment should that pee stick deliver bad news.

Out of the shower, and I started to retch. The signs were a little too obvious – lethargy the evening before, the retching… I probably don’t actually need a pregnancy test to tell me that it is -

“A positive?! Ack!!!”

A heightened sense of excitement overwhelmed me. I wrapped myself in my bathrobe and walked quickly to the bedroom, half nauseous, half giddy. Was there even a difference between the two? I plopped onto the bed, exhausted from the short distance and almost vomiting my guts out.

Lee checked in on me to see if I was okay. I looked at him and barely thinking said, “There’s something for you on the sink…”

He grimaced at me. And just before he walked out the bedroom, it hit me that he must have thought I meant I chucked in the sink and left it there for him! D’oh!

“No! It’s nothing disgusting…”

By then, he was already out the bedroom door. I wasn’t quite sure if he was going to the bathroom, but I already felt like a muppet. A green one, no less.

“Maybe I should’ve planned on how to break the news to him, instead of just leaving the damn stick on the sink! Or I should’ve just showed it to him! Now I can’t see his first reaction! Urrgh…”

Just as I rolled over to bury my face in the pillow, Lee came bounding back and propped himself next to me on the bed – giggling and grinning like a schoolboy with candy! He gave me a big sloppy kiss for our big fat positive.

Then I knew that that moment was just spontaneous and special as it was.

What would you have done to break the news? Or how did you break the news the first time you knew?