Maggie
I flushed the toilet, saying goodbye to my egg and bacon breakfast. I gave myself a second to compose myself then shakily rose to my feet and took a deep breath. It was day three of this bullshit.
After feeling sick the first day, I told Missy and she told me not to worry about it, I could work from home if I needed to. I thought I had the flu or maybe I had eaten something bad. None of the other flu-like symptoms were coming through though, but I didn’t have any reason to think it was anything else. Not until it kept coming.
Brushing my teeth, I tried to analyze my reflection. I didn’t feel like I looked different. My face was kind of red, but I had just been bent over the toilet bowl. I felt normal too. Normal-ish, at least.
I didn’t want to think about it, but it was getting to the point where I couldn’t afford not to think about it. Throwing up in the morning for three days was one thing but to top it off, I was late too.
A couple of months ago, I never would’ve entertained pregnancy as a possibility in my life because it had been years since I had seen a flesh and blood penis, much less had one inside me. Things were different now.
We had been safe, mostly. The night of Missy’s proposal, we had used condoms and those had a pretty good success rate unless one of them ripped and neither of us noticed. In the cabin, we hadn’t used protection, but he had pulled out every time. Yeah, I was way too old to think that was a reliable way to prevent pregnancy.
I started feeling sick again. I had to find out once and for all before I could really start panicking. After cleaning up, I took the short walk to a drugstore and bought a couple of pregnancy tests.
I felt like a high school student again. I remembered being seventeen, having just had sex for the first time, and being paranoid that I had gotten pregnant. We used a condom, but only after I agreed to let him stick it in just one time without the rubber on. The test was negative of course and the sex was horrible, but something about sitting on the closed toilet waiting for the results to show up took me back to that time.
I didn’t have any solid intentions of becoming a parent. Ever since my relationship broke down in the spectacular way that it did, I had pretty much resigned myself to being alone. If the desire to have children had shown up at some point, maybe I would have done so
mething about it. Brenna, my closest friend had briefly worked for a fertility clinic as a surrogate. That had gotten me thinking of alternative methods of having a family, but it looked like I had beaten myself to the punch already.
I stood up and checked the test sitting on the edge of the sink.
Just as I thought, positive.
I tossed it into the trash and walked out into the living room.
Of course, it would happen to me. Of course, the first time I have sex in years, it results in an unplanned pregnancy. The man was somebody who didn’t want a relationship with me, because of course he didn’t, and my life was simultaneously the best and worst that had been in a long time. What was I supposed to do with a newborn?
I felt like nothing around me was moving. I was floating in this formless, liquid world. Everything had stopped, but everything inside me was racing at a hundred miles an hour. I was pregnant. I was going to have Toby’s baby and he wanted nothing to do with me.
The dam broke. I sunk down to the ground and I sobbed. I cried like it was someone’s funeral. I cried because I had no idea what to do otherwise. I wished that this was good news because this baby didn’t deserve to be conceived under the conditions that it was conceived, but I wasn’t even allowed to be happy about it.
It felt like an hour had passed when I finally felt numb enough to do something again. I had to tell someone. I was getting tired of holding it all in, the secrets, the lies, and now this. I had been dealing with it alone and if what I needed was a sign to finally seek help, this was it.
I called Brenna. She was a mother so there was no guarantee that she would be available, but I had to try.
Did calling the baby daddy ever occur to you, I wondered as the phone rang.
Nope, never. Wasn’t doing that. Brenna picked up.
“Hey Maggie, what’s going on?”
“Hi, Brenna are you busy right now? Sorry for calling out of the blue.”
“No, I’m not, is everything okay? You sound a little different.”
She was giving me the chance to lie to her and tell her that yeah, I was fine, but fuck that. I was not fine. I hadn’t been fine for weeks now.
“Something happened and I really need some help right now,” I said to her.
“Where are you?” Brenna asked immediately. I smiled even though I felt like shit and she couldn’t see me. I was so lucky I had a friend who would drop what she was doing to see me like that. I told her I was at home and she told me to give her a little time to sort out childcare; she’d be there as fast as she could.
I thought about fishing the pregnancy test out of the trash to show her for dramatic effect but that seemed a little much. When she got to my apartment, I let her in.
“I got here as fast as I could. What happened?” she demanded, coming through the door.
“You want the long or short version?” I asked.