Guest post from a (possibly?) pregnant Lady Bit

-- The following is a guest post from our secret lady friend who chooses to remain 

anonymous until a baby kangaroo is officially put into her mama pouch --

Right now I am being held hostage by something that may or may not be true. Namely, I may or may not be currently pregnant. This means I may or may not be damaging the development of a teeny tiny speck of life that may or may not exist with every gulp of alcohol I drink and every whiff of smoke or pollution I inhale and every schmear of unpasteurized cheese I consume.

 The exhausting part is that, due to the widely held three-month rule of secrecy, I can’t tell most people why I’m acting differently. Why I have to say, “That sushi looks delicious, truly madly deeply delicious, but I’m going to have to pass.” Why I’m ordering ginger ale in small glasses and pretending (unconvincingly) that it’s scotch.

 My husband and I decided at the end of June that we wanted to start trying for a spawnling. I was nearing the end of my last pack of birth control, and the timing seemed good with both of us in secure jobs and in a financial place where we felt like we could bankroll a child. I scheduled an appointment with my regular lady doc to get her blessing, and she told me that Hubs and I should have sex every other day until we’re sick of each other for the next year. If, by that point, nothing was happening we could then start discussing infertility treatment.

I got an app to tell me when I was going to be most “ripe,” to be totally disgusting about it, and made sure that we were doing the business on the proscribed schedule (Lady Doc told me not to do it more often than every other day so that his swimmers would be at peak strength). I forced my husband to abstain from alcohol during this period along with me—over the July 4 holiday no less—partly because I read online that he should and mostly because I wanted to see how far he would go for our unborn child.

The one exception I made was the night that the conception may or may not have taken place, and I was at an event where a glass of wine was included in the price of admission so I felt like I had to drink at least half of it in order to get my money’s worth. I had watched a pregnancy documentary starring Courtney Cox earlier that day, so I knew that if everything had gone according to plan, cells were only just beginning to divide into a raspberry the size of a pen tip and burrow into my uterine lining. There wouldn’t be a brain to destroy for another few weeks, if, you know, there would be a brain at all. I thought of it as my last hurrah.

Now, all I can do is wait. Assuming I have a regular cycle, I’d be getting my period this Thursday. The thing is, I never had a regular period before going on the pill all those years ago, so maybe I really have a 32-day cycle or a 46-day cycle. My mom assured me that she had the same irregularity issue, and yet still managed to get pregnant, “every time your father gave me that special look after holding a baby at a party.” She recommended that I smell pregnant mothers and their children to try to stir up a hormone soup in my brain. Seriously. What???

This is the advice I have to rely on because she’s one of the only people in my Circle of Trust who has given birth.

I’m a talker. I like telling everyone everything always; it’s somewhat of a family trait. And it’s K-I-L-L-I-N-G me to not be able to talk about this to anyone. I want to talk about how weird it is to be trying to get knocked up after a full decade of actively and fervently making sure that didn’t happen. I want to talk about the “Another one bites the dust…” angst I’m sure to get from some of my gal pals who will view this development as an end to Life As We Know It. I want to talk about all the confusing information out there (try reading this article without going cross-eyed).

Ladies of Lady Bits, will you let me talk to you?