The Secret is Out

Never go to a Lucky Dube concert unless you expect serious repercussions. Remember that night of free love, peace and utopia three months ago? Well the lurve continued on into the bedroom at home. And the lounge actually. (The kitchen was out of bounds ‘cos it’s next to the baby’s bedroom). A week or two later I started feeling exhausted. Not tired like after a good walk or a big night out. Finished. Obliterated. Unable to function. You may remember me complaining about it. What I didn’t say was that I was also perpetually green, feeling like I was constantly reliving the last moments of The Titanic. I even had a warped Celine Dion track droning in my ears (that was one thing the real victims of The Titanic were at least spared). I did a home pregnancy test, already preparing myself for the double line, the phonecall to a shocked R.

Negative.

I felt strangely sad. Like I’d failed an exam. Then the panic set in. Oh My God. It must be cancer. Or depression. Or a cancerous depression. I went to my doctor for a blood test. He phoned me the next day. We have your results. I steeled myself. Surely there must be an upside to cancer? You’re positive. He said. Positive? For what? HIV? Hepatitis? Ebola? Psychotic Hypochondria? You’re pregnant.

Two lessons there. One: Lucky Dube is a fertility god. Two: Never trust a home pregnancy test.

I started calculating my due date. Oh My. I’m due exactly a month after O turns one. Two children under 14 months. Surely that’s illegal? Aren’t I meant to be going back to work? Yes, there is a big part of me that wanted this, but I never imagined it would happen so soon. I’m the girl who was told by her doctor at fifteen that she would never be able to have a baby. Then again, the same doctor also wanted to break my hymen surgically as he feared “some guy would come at (me) like a ram and hurt (me)”. The man was clearly a perve.

So I call R. He’s in a meeting. He goes numb from shock. A few weeks before, we’d had his sperm tested. The doctors had told us there was a large amount of wonky sperm with two heads and no tails, or two tails and no head. Or something more clinical. They said he was obviously under a lot of stress and needed a holiday if he wanted to improve his sperm quality and count. Failing that, the next time we wanted to fall pregnant, we would need to have ‘sperm washing’ in which R jacked off into a jar and selected sperm were inserted into me via a pipette. The concept horrified me. I was never good at science. I cried for a day. R stared at the wall a lot. We decided it was better not to try for another baby for a while.

Seven weeks later. Our first scan. This scan dates the pregnancy, checks to see it’s not ectopic, and tells you if the baby has a strong heartbeat. I’m nervous. I lift up my shirt and say the strangest thing to the sonographer I’m not worried about multiples. She looks at me like I’m slightly deranged. She immediately finds the foetal sac. There’s your baby, she says. Then she hesitates and rolls the ultrasound over my belly again. Silent. I look at the screen. That looks like two sacs, I say, laughing. Mmmm, she answers. Why don’t you empty your bladder, come back and I’ll do an internal? I rush to the loo. It’s not just my bladders that get emptied. The expression “shitting yourself” exists for a reason. It could just be a left-over follicle, I think, not convinced. I walk back in to find R being offered a whisky by the sonographer. He’s breathing heavily. She inserts what my friend Ova Girl refers to as a “dildo cam’”. Yip, she says. Two sacs. Two placentas. Two heartbeats. R is an intelligent man. He works in brain science for God’s sake. But I swear I hear him ask, What does that mean? TWINS, I scream, surprising myself. Two babies means TWINS! Dildo cam almost lurches out from inside my hoo-hah as if it too is in denial.

The sonographer checks that everything is ok with B1 and B2, then tells me to get the number for the Multiple Birth association. She reminds me that my next appointment will take double the amount of time and cost double, gives R the rest of the bottle of Scotch to take home (mainly because he's clinging to it like a catholic priest to a copy of Barely Legal) and sends us on our way. He’s a dark skinned man, R, but he’s turned whiter than pure cocaine. I take my Brave Face out of my handbag and slap it on. Three children under 14 months, I think. Piece of Cake.

Then I feel a giggle welling up deep inside me and I laugh and laugh until my chuckles turn to tears.