"Oh my God," said my sister when I told her. "You're actually spawning? With him?"

I had, reluctantly, to confirm the news that, after two years of marriage, Toryboy and I had decided to try for and then successfully conceived a baby. "I'm sorry," I said. "But you had to know there was a chance this might happen."

"I know," she said sorrowfully. "But I always hoped that your wrongness for each other would extend to your gametes. But, as they say in Jurassic Park, life finds a way. So…congratulations."

And here I am, eight and a half months into pregnancy, an experience at once so profound and so mundane that you daily risk a dozen stress fractures across your psyche.

My sister was nearly right, in fact, and it nearly didn't happen, not just because of the politics or because my husband and I largely regard each other as captive monkeys in a tiny domestic circus, capering and performing minor absurdities while the other looks on in bemused fascination, but because, as the Daily Mail daily warns, my aged generative organs had started packing up.

We'd had a year of trying, failing, having scans and cystectomies, and of consulting doctors who took vials of blood, tested them and said, "You really could try ovulating a bit now, you know?" And I would nod my head obediently, go home and give it my best shot. But I've always been useless at multitasking. Then they started me on some drugs and before I knew where I was, I was staring at a urine-soaked stick that said I was three weeks up the duff. Whether we'll have cause to praise or curse the miracle of western medicine only the next 18 years or so will tell.

Are we ready? This is the question that comes most frequently to gibber at me in the night. I have to break it down into smaller, more manageable sections to have any chance of answering satisfactorily enough to allow a return to sleep.

Is the house ready?

Major European land wars have been fought and won in less time than it has taken for this house to be rewired, repainted and its furniture rearranged to allow for a nursery, but the process is now complete. All has been done under duress. My nesting instinct has remained dormant throughout. The only part I have enjoyed is honing the emotional Dewey Decimal library system to which I subscribe and reshelving my 5,000 books accordingly. When the baby comes, he will go under "First tier unread non-fiction – M".

He is a he, by the way. We saw it, unmistakably, at the first scan. I had wanted a girl, only because it seemed more of a comfortingly known quality within a rising tide of panicky unknowns. But when I see in my friends (all of whom are in the procreative, as in any other social, personal or professional endeavour, at least half a decade ahead of me) the agony that bringing up a girl entails, I am increasingly grateful that the gender lottery has awarded me a Y chromosome. The cliques girls form, the psychological acuity they manifest at such impossibly tender ages, their awful vulnerability to ideal diets (one friend already has a six-year-old who is turning down sweets and puddings because they'll make her fat) and all the other airbrushed images of perfect bodies with which they are bombarded, are painful to see. So although it's weird to be growing a penis inside me, I think it's ultimately for the best.

Is the family ready?

My dad was born ready for grandfatherhood. He has looked like a grandad for the past 30 years and has always possessed that interested, indulgent yet slightly remote air that characterises those one step removed from the messy business of childrearing. He is currently filling my and his freezers with homemade fish pies, shepherd's pies and chicken pies. With any luck, I won't have to cook until Toryboy minor is old enough to wield a box of fishfingers and a grill pan on his own. Result!

My mother spent the first 30 weeks of the pregnancy regaling me with the probabilities of different kinds of disaster that could overtake me each week. How glad I was that I had taught her to Google. I myself have stayed off the internet and bought only one baby manual, and that in a weak moment – What To Expect When You're Expecting, which should be renamed What Not To Buy When You're Expecting Unless Schmaltzy Americanese Interspersed With A Few Salient Facts Is Your Thing – and still find I have somehow been furnished with more than enough information, misinformation, reassurance and fear-mongering about the whole process to see me safely through.

At 37 weeks she relaxed, bought most of Mothercare and installed it in the nursery. Muslin squares, nappies, nappy disposal bin, muslin squares, wet wipes, more muslin squares, bum cream for everyone, a changing mat, some emergency muslin squares, a bottle steriliser, some bottles and some back-up emergency muslin squares. (I intend to have a crack at breastfeeding, feeling about lactation much as I do about windfarming or solar energy; it's foolish to look in the mouth a gift horse that, if harnessed properly, provides a cheap, convenient and deeply satisfying way of turning a natural resource into something fabulously valuable. Of course, if it ends up being roughly as painful as getting your nipples stuck in a turbine, I shall rethink.)

Meanwhile, my lovely godmother has been knitting and sending me tiny matinee jackets that make me weep with delight as I pull them from their tissue paper and stack them reverently on the Too Good To Wear shelf, and my sister has been acquiring all the remaining stuff secondhand. I have a cot, a Moses basket, 1,800 long- and short-sleeved babygros, sleeping suits, bibs, a travel cot and a high chair.

Is Toryboy ready?

It has been a steep learning curve for a man who still cleaves to the Latin pronunciation of the word "vagina". ("With a 'w'. And a hard 'g'. Wageena.") But we have slowly moved on from the days when he blanched at the words "amniotic fluid", staggered at "discharge" used outside a military context and, when asked what he thought the placenta was, replied, "A sort of edible mattress. The baby lies on it, nibbles at it and when it's all gone, decides it's time to be born." I can only hope there's nothing in heredity.

But now he is, if not ready, then at least thicker-skinned, better informed and in possession of a hand-drawn map to the hospital which he claims to understand. He still asks perturbing questions from time to time. "How long until he gets interesting?" was the most recent one.

"How do you mean?" I replied, putting down my book and reaching for my special tablets.

"How long before he can smile, crawl, talk to me about the Battle of Jutland, that sort of thing?"

"Ah. Respectively, six weeks, nine months and, if he takes after you, a year, or after me, never."

"What do we do for the first six months, then?"

"I look after him and you look after me."

"Right you are."

Everything will work out eventually, I'm sure. I'm sure.

Am I ready?

Well, let's see. I'm ready to start walking normally again. I've had SPD for the past five months, which means my pelvis separated too fast, too far and too early, and rendered me incapable of walking, sitting or turning over in bed without much forethought, paracetamol and tears. And I'm ready to start eating sushi and soft cheese again, that's for damn sure. I haven't missed booze – I've never been much of a drinker – but it turns out that the body can crave raw fish and the risk of listeriosis just as passionately.

Am I ready in any other way?

No. Not at all. In no sense could I be said to be ready. It would be foolish even to suggest such a thing. In fact, it would be foolish to suggest that I am not actually crying in fear as I type this. Yes, of course we thought it through. We did doctors, drugs and general anaesthesia to make sure we got from there to here, but really – who is ever ready?

The best that can be said is that in some ways I am prepared. I know I want an epidural. Actually, what I want is an elective caesarean (I planned to be wheeled out of the operating theatre shouting, "And anyone who wants to judge me can kiss my untorn perineum!") but you can't get one on the NHS without creating the kind of fuss I find myself, even in the most hormone-swamped state, constitutionally incapable of creating – so spinal blockading it will have to be.

Toryboy is against the idea. I made the mistake of allowing him to come with me to NCT classes and he has fallen, to an unexpected degree, for what I am going to characterise briefly yet unfairly as their hippy bullshit. By some malevolent quirk of fate, it turns out that Tory individualism overlaps with the NCT's anti-medical authoritarianism stance and unites them in a way I find Not Helpful.

"But it's an injection into your spine!" they cry as one.

"Yes – before something the size of a baby passes slowly through something that is most definitely not and is never supposed to be!" I cry back.

"But it prolongs labour!" is the next refrain.

"Painlessly!" I shout back. These people are so strange.

"It can set off a cascade of interventions!"

"I'm numb from the waist down! They can send up a miniaturised team of scientists in exploratory submarines à la Fantastic Voyage if they want! What do I care?

"But you might be paralysed for the rest of your days!"

"Worth it," I reply, and I mean it from the bottom of my about-to-be-quite-traumatised-enough-thank-you bottom.

They try to convince me by telling me about the naturally produced wonder that is oxytocin and showing me a fake pelvis to demonstrate that part of it is hinged to allow smooth passage for the baby. Yes, well, allow me to make two points.

First, any naturally produced hormone at this point is the equivalent of frozen low-fat yoghurt compared with the Häagen-Dazs cookie dough ice-cream of an epidural. Give me the good stuff, and no one gets hurt, least of all me.

Second, I can see the coccyx wiggling, yes. I understand that if I have to lie on my back because my legs don't work any more, I will be unable to use this pivoting advantage. But still… it's not a huge evolutionary leap, is it? It's more a gesture of goodwill by nature, I feel. To hear them go on about it, you'd think the birthing pelvis transformed into a catflap or something. I am more than willing to trade this minuscule benefit for the miracle of synthetic drugs pumped in industrial quantities into my grateful body. Case, and coccyx, rests.

(For the avoidance of doubt – these are my feelings about myself. And I must laud the kindness and patience of my NCT teacher when presented with someone who basically wanted her pregnancy sponsored by ICI. If you had, are planning on having, or can contemplate with anything approaching equanimity the mere idea of one day in the far distant future experiencing a natural birth, well, I couldn't be happier for or more impressed with you. Good luck, you're amazing, truly, well done and hallelujah. Each, absolutely, to her own. And I will be drugged up to the eyeballs for as long as humanly possible. See you on the other side.)

But am I ready for the long, hard, unremitting slog of being a parent, no matter how potentially joyous the journey may be? No, of course not. I hope I won't be entirely incompetent. I think I will be able to put a tiny, helpless bundle of needs and desires before my own. I think all the stuff I've bought him complies with European health and safety standards. I don't think I have a teetering stack of unrealistic hopes and expectations for him or for me lurking anywhere in my psyche that will threaten to bury us in the months and years to come. I think I'm as ready as I'll ever be. I mean, really – when you've got this many muslin squares to fall back on, how wrong can things go?

• This article was amended on 11 May 2011. The original suggested that babies start smiling at around six months. This has been corrected.