Deflated

Serendipity. I like that word, it’s the first one that came to mind when Suze told me she thought she was pregnant.

The first thing I felt was quite different. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, my heart literally missed a beat as I felt adrenalin dumped into my bloodstream by those mischievous little buggers sitting on the top of my kidneys. For a split second I probably stared, I may even have let my chin drop, before, as Suze quite rightly put it, I developed a wide grin.

I haven’t been as happy for a long time. Not to say that we’re particularly unhappy. OK so we are skint and constantly worrying about finances, but Alex and Suze are otherwise a happy couple. It’s just that sometimes there are moments in your life when your happiness index reaches a zenith, and that was one of them.

After a few minutes of frantic hugging and kissing the reality of the situation kicked in. We had not been trying for a baby for very good reasons. Money. OK that’s not a good reason not to have kids, it’s a very bad reason, the worst reason. But it’s a practical reason. Then my mind started ticking over about how we could finance the sprog. It’s incredible the ingenuity that the human mind can apply to the most hopeless of situations.

We both wanted it to be true, more than anything. Impractical though the whole situation was we were both looking 8 months down the line at us, in a maternity suite holding junior and fighting off the grandparents.

But you’ve probably guessed by now that the tests were negative. Suze tested herself on Wednesday night and the doctor tested her on Thursday morning. Both negative. I (we) have gone from walking on a cloud to a grey pit of disappointment.

We are no worse off than we were a couple of days ago but in the intervening time we have experienced a rush of emotions, predominantly good ones, that have left us feeling drained. If the tests had been positive I suppose the trepidation about things to come would have set in alongside the expectation. But who knows. I feel a bit lost, I suddenly had something to look forward to, something unequivocally positive.

So not a very happy post but I thought you would all like to know. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to announce it to you all, we were excited and wanted to tell the world. The messages of support we got from everyone just added to the intoxicating wave of emotions we were surfing on. Thank you to everyone who wished us well.

It’ll be an interesting weekend, nephew’s stopping tonight and quite frankly I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing from our point of view. We love him dearly, but there’s a twinge of sadness at the thought of what might have been every time I look at his picture.

In chemical terms we’ve gone from C12H22O11 to CH3COOH and now need some C2H5OH.