Being pregnant, like being awake, seems fairly black and white until you try it yourself. You’re either pregnant, or you’re not. Unprotected sex, a bloodless gusset, tender breasts – you’re pregnant. Except you might not be. Or might not be for long. Or might never be again.
When you get here, being pregnant suddenly becomes a far more delicate, changeable, more abstract state than you’d imagined. You may be pregnant. But then again, you may have endometriosis, so the swelling, the late period and tender breasts aren’t the result of a baby at all. You might be peri-menopausal, so the fatigue, the skipped periods and disrupted sleep are a sign of no more eggs, not a fertilised one. You could be stressed, have disordered eating or a hormone imbalance, causing your periods to halt for a while without you knowing why.
Of course, there is much to pregnancy that will be familiar to many women. As a student, pushed on to the combined contraceptive pill by a family planning system that had all the nuance of a left hook, your breasts may have turned into swollen, bovine sacks, your waist thickened, your mood dropped, your sex drive drained away like water through sand and, if you ran one packet into the next, your periods stopped.
As a 30-year-old, you may still have occasionally skipped periods, felt sick, put on weight at a rate of knots or found yourself lying awake at night, sweating like a boxer in the seventh round. As a 40-year-old, you may have experienced the odd lighter period, have seen your body thicken without warning, your breasts swell, your nipples turn to bullets, your eyelids droop. You may have read that since 2013 the largest percentage increase in conception rates occurred among women aged 35 to 39; that the conception rate for women aged 40 and over has more than doubled since 1990; that in 2014 there were an estimated 871,038 conceptions to women of all ages, but still you assume that your baby-making days are far behind you. Perhaps they are.
Even 12 weeks in, pregnancy can often feel like nothing more than a murderous hangover, twinned with PMT, car sickness and too many late nights. And, depending on your lifestyle, not to mention your body, you may have experienced all four before, possibly at once. You have been tired, you’ve been nauseous, you’ve felt sick at the smell of a stranger on the bus, you’ve craved pastry, your nipples have felt like raw nerves, you’ve wept without warning, you’ve eaten too much bread and you’ve fallen asleep in the cinema. All this has happened before and you weren’t pregnant then. So you can throw up in a lot of bins and on a lot of car tyres before you start to really believe a baby might be the cause this time.
It took four tests for me to start to believe I might be pregnant. I carried them around in my handbag like piss-soaked amulets – sometimes getting them out on the bus to stare at the blue parallel lines, trying to make it imprint in my head as real. I still have one, in a box-file on a shelf next door to where I’m sitting now, hidden below midwife notes and prescription exemptions and, even, a grainy black and white scan photo of a baby lying across my womb. Sometimes, late at night, when I look down at my unmoving stomach, at this unknowable, invisible, but apparently real baby, I will creep out of bed and look at that pregnancy test again, just to reassure myself that it really happened.
Having something you can neither see, nor feel, nor hear, growing inside your body is an act of imagination as well as biology. All you can do is have faith that it’s alive in there, in the hope that it will remain so. In the second trimester, as the vomiting eases, I often find myself wondering if I really am pregnant at all – or if I’ve just tricked myself (and my partner, and a pair of radiographers) into some desperate fantasy of motherhood. Queen Mary did it – conjured a phantom of hope and hormones and maternal desire into her abdomen – and there are many women living in Britain today with a longing as strong as a Tudor queen.
Just like being awake, being pregnant can also be temporary. According to NHS statistics, among women who know they’re pregnant, it’s estimated one in six of these pregnancies will end in miscarriage. Many more miscarriages occur before a woman is even aware she has become pregnant. While you may, at this moment, be what we deem pregnant, it wouldn’t take much to change all that; for you to become unpregnant. Which seems ever so much worse than being not pregnant. Through no fault of your own, no accident, no abuse, no choice, this pregnancy could end as quietly as it began.
Conception may be a miracle, but miscarriage is a reality. The fear of it will hum away at the bottom of your brain for months – you will swerve prawns, sleep on your left hand side, take folic acid and, sometimes, simply stare at a chart marking your probability, willing the numbers to be on your side.
If you’re asking the internet if you’re pregnant then, the chances are, something is happening to your body that you want to understand. That human curiosity isn’t just natural – it’s probably what’s kept you alive until this point. You want to know what’s happening and you want to know why. Forget about Eve, the apple, the serpent, the bruise – it is always better to know. So do a test. Why not.
At the moment we are lucky enough to still have a National Health Service that will look after you, whatever the cause, and whatever happens. That is a precious and wonderful thing and something we should be fighting for. For our own sake and the sake of our children. If we have them. And even if we don’t.
