The Day of the Pregnancy Test
8:48 a.m. -- 2011-07-15
Throughout the various indignities of IVF, I was anticipating a day in the future, and wondering how I would react when the result of a pregnancy test was revealed.
How can one properly react to a piece of news, when one is hoping for the exact opposite outcome to the person delivering the news? In virtually all other matters faced so far, we�re united. With the exception of Victoria�s inexplicable enjoyment of occasional pieces of televised brainrot such as �Don�t Tell the Bride� or �The Apprentice� we�re on the same wavelength.
The pregnancy test. If it�s �positive� and the horror shows too starkly on my face, I become the villain of the story. If it�s �negative� and I�m too obviously relieved, I become the villain of the story. So do I make a joke, to defuse the tension of the moment, in much the same way that I would have done back at school when coming under attack? Do I respond with poker-faced inscrutability? Perhaps (as when somebody tells you some iffy exam results and you don�t know whether that�s good or bad, for them, with a question: �And how do you feel about that?�
With inevitability of a French air traffic controllers� strike in the summer holidays, along came the Day of the Pregnancy Test.
(Which is actually far more terrifying than the Day of the Triffids, let me tell you.)
Vicky woke up early, and slipped away to the guest bathroom to piss in peace. I got up and sat in the living room to await results.
My anxiety about the tone of the conversation, and my reactions, was unfounded. The situation rapidly acquired a farcical quality in which my own thoughts were safely concealed in the ambiguity of the test result itself.
It showed �positive�, but Victoria was convinced that she�d �done it wrong�. �I can�t be pregnant!� she said, claiming that she �didn�t feel any different.�
I wonder how many thousands of teenagers say something similar, every year?
The instructions for the pregnancy test kit that the IVF-clinic had provided said not to invert the dippy thing, once it had been wetted. While Vicky hadn�t held it inverted, she had laid it flat for the waiting period, and was convinced that this was a mistake.
Since she�d got up early, there was enough time before work to go to a 24-hour pharmacy, and obtain a new pregnancy test kit. Two, in fact. She returned home for another test, with a much funkier electronic pregnancy gadget. LCD display screen, for goodness sakes!
�Pregnant: 2-3 weeks� it said.
�O.M.G.� she said (exact words), and almost immediately had to dash off to work, and from there on to a business trip that took her overseas. I have been spared the need to express my feelings at length. Not that they seem to count for anything around here: the all-consuming need to have a baby outweighs any hopes or fears I might have. She�s not being mean to me. I don�t believe she is consciously using me; it�s just that she just hasn�t noticed anything other than the instructions that the clinic have given her, since this wretched process began.
Now, obviously, I�m biased here. I know I�m being a sore loser. I gambled and lost.
I feared that Victoria would leave me if I didn�t let her have her shot at parenthood. I believed, based on the success rates published by the IVF clinic, that the chances of her getting pregnant were relatively slim. So I weighed up the risk of divorce, or at least doing significant harm to our happiness in the future (since I�d always be blamed for our having no kids...) against the risk of a child, and I decided to make the bet.
And I lost.
�The first IVF cycle is very much a learning process,� they said. Yet here we are, expecting a child from the very first attempt. Nine out of the ten eggs fertilised at the first try, for fuck�s sake. Because, of course, the success rates for an IVF clinic as a whole include a lot of distinctly sub-fertile people. Not us, according to our test results: we were probably just people who didn�t fuck enough.
There was nothing wrong with us. Nothing except our lifestyles, I suspect. Lifestyles that will now be torpedoed anyway.
I don�t think Vicky actually understands what parenthood means. There, I said it. All the junk she leaves around the place at floor level. This vast expanse of bare wood and slate floor. The white furniture. The open fireplace. The oak staircase that is far too nice to have wanky child safety gates attached on it. Her job, and mine. Her designer clothes... there is nothing child-compatible about us.
Now, as I say, I gambled and lost. Lost at the very first round. Maybe I should have taken the other gamble and expressed my misgivings back when I could have changed something. But I didn�t, so now I have to live with the consequences.
It�s not entirely that I didn�t say anything, though. I thought we had an agreement: but it was eroded. There was baby-creep.
At first, we agreed upon two years of quality time together, after marriage, before we�d consider children. After that, we agreed, we could leave it to fate. First, the grace period was nibbled away to �two years before a child could arrive� by subtracting a gestation period. Then we weren�t leaving it to fate any more; rather, I was being �jumped� on days when Vicky thought she might be ovulating (which makes for a VERY unsatisfying form of sex that does nothing for the self-esteem, I can tell you)... and then the quest to obtain IVF began.
Leaving it to fate, my arse.
I feel used. I feel trapped. I�m sure that hundreds of men, every day, feel trapped when they are told that their girlfriend or wife is pregnant. Maybe they get used to it later, and maybe not. But this was no random event. Fate was not at work here. I went to the IVF clinic and put my own head firmly in the noose of parenthood.
I feel like a chump. I feel like a loser, and rightly so: because I gambled and lost.
But I chose to gamble. I think it was a pretty shitty pair of choices that were available to me, but I was complicit in this. However much I come to regret it in the future, I have to remember that.
So there we are.
Now, Vicky is expressing displeasure that I�m �not at all excited about it�.
I know that one of the side-effects of her cocktail of pregnancy drugs is said to be memory loss, but still: it�s hard to take.
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