The Abstractness of Pregnancy

I had lunch with my friend Emily today, and we got to talking about getting pregnant. We're both planning to make a baby in the next few months, so it was fairly inevitable (especially given how I've got baby on the brain right now) that the topic would come up.

I've been experiencing an interesting phenomenon around the topic of pregnancy lately: it seems completely abstract to me...not real.

I've been fascinated by pregnancy for most of my adult life. The fact that the body does what it does to create life is beyond my comprehension. When I'm with a pregnant woman, I can't really wrap my brain around the fact that there's a living being inside of her. And experiencing being pregnant is something I've been craving for years and years. Not so much the pain, discomfort and potential (likely?) nausea, but the opportunity to feel life growing inside me and the idea of bonding with the little creature from the beginning.

And yet for me, pregnancy has always been a "someday" thing.  Back in 2006, I (delusionally?) thought that Brian and I were getting close to the point of having a baby. Then we broke up. During my three years of being single after that, I would tell myself that if I didn't meet someone, I could always go the artificial insemination route and have a baby on my own. Then I spent some time around people with kids and decided that I really didn't want to do it on my own. When I met Donovan, he didn't want to have kids, and I wasn't sure anymore. Then came clarity, and the realization that I did indeed want kids. Lo and behold, Donovan was amenable. Someday. We got engaged, we planned our wedding, and a year ago we got married. And it became a "we should wait at least a year until we get pregnant" thing.

So here we are, a year (next Tuesday) after getting married, and four weeks from today I will take my last birth control pill and we will make a baby. And it's STILL...NOT...REAL! I've spent so long having pregnancy be a "someday" thing that I'm not sure what will actually make it real for me. Clearly not the knowledge that I'm going off the pill in four weeks. Will it be the plus sign on the pregnancy test? Will it be the first ultrasound when I see (hear?) the little heart beating? Will it be the first time I feel a kick? Guess we'll have to wait and see!

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