Womb with a View

So we just passed one of the most important hurdles of the pregnancy a couple days ago, the first ultrasound… and we’ve learned that COUCH is flying solo in the womb.  In other words, COUCH does not apparently have any little extra potential brother(s) and/or sister(s) cramping its living space.  This revelation is important for several reasons:

1)      It could have been emotionally detrimental to the older kids (my stepchildren) to suddenly drop a litter of squalling newborns on them, rather than just one.  Not that there hasn’t already been a dumpster fire of changes to throw on them already, but I’d kinda like them to not despise a whole passel of furniture-themed children for the fact that during their first few formative years the rest of us were eating cardboard and shoe leather just to be able to afford diapers and formula.

2)      With two or more children, buying a new car or minivan would suddenly jump from a suggested eventual course of action to an outright absolute right now necessity.  With just COUCH, my Suzuki Reno could handle most runs that didn’t require the entire family to go along if it needed to… and there is even the possibility that we could ride squished in Reno for short distances.  (Comfortably?  Oh, hell no.  But I come from a family that was large enough that we were required to squeeze in once in a while for everyone to go somewhere.  You learn to make do.)   Not having to pay for a new car is important because:

3)      There’s that lack of money thing again.  I do realize the wisdom in what others have told me, that you will never really be financially “ready” for a child.  But by the same token, when you start looking at the cost of living day to day, even the addition of one more mouth to feed and body to clothe makes you get a nervous tic just doing the math.  

No joke—the kids are currently gone to Florida to visit their dad for a month, and my Trophy Wife™ and I went grocery shopping last week: we bought enough for us to get by for a couple weeks, and still managed to spend less than fifty dollars.  When I pulled out my wallet to pay, I unexpectedly found that it was drenched, despite it being a warm sunny day outside.  It wasn’t until later that I realized it was wet because it had been weeping tears of joy.

So this nervousness about the possibility of twins had been embedded in me within the first few days after the initial pregnancy test.  My Trophy Wife™ mentioned offhandedly that she was feeling pains that she hadn’t felt until much further along in her earlier pregnancies, and she wondered if maybe it was twins.  She even coined the name SOFA for a possible second COUCH… as in, “Sofa King Not Expecting This.” 

At first it was cute, and I treated it like the little joke it no doubt was, but slowly as time passed and facts began to hammer away at us, the idea that we could have two (or more!) babies began to take root and become a full blown paranoid delusion.  

First it was the mention that she’d read that twins often happen at the pre-embryonic level when a woman suddenly quits her birth control and over-ovulates (oh, and by the way, she did suddenly quit her birth control).  

Then the fact that women over thirty are more at risk for twins (my Trophy Wife™ is officially twenty-nine with a very slight remainder).   

Then the fact that twins run in both of our families (which I was totally and completely unaware of, not that this in itself is at all surprising… I often have to ask my mom who people are at family reunions.  My brother was mildly insulted one year that I had to ask his name).  

Then the plain and simple fact that Murphy’s Law just seemed to point at us a lot and laugh, not unlike the ever-so-slightly-mad serial killer on whatever cadaver-coroner-clone TV show is popular these days.  

I started to get so paranoid about how our lives would be impacted by twins that when the ultrasound tech said there was only one embryo, I jumped up and high-fived her like she’d just tomahawk-dunked the ball to win the game… and posterized LeBron in the process.  

Okay, no, I wasn’t that excited.  I will admit that there was a small part of me that was a little saddened by the idea that we wouldn’t be having both a boy and a girl, especially since there is a pretty good likelihood that COUCH will be our only child together.  But then again, that small part of me enjoys doing up flower arrangements, watching overly sentimental movies, petting cute little fuzzy animals and engaging in idle thought rather than looking at our skyrocketing bills and empty bank account. 

So, yes, the ultrasound.   I never realized that there even was such a thing as multiple ultrasounds until I got in there.  The tech mentioned that there would be a normal ultrasound, and then they would do a vaginal ultrasound.  (Apparently this is standard operating procedure now.  There’s every possibility it has always been standard operating procedure, and everyone simply thought I was too immature to hear the word vaginal before, so they didn’t repeat it.  Of course, they never realized I would someday hear it while watching commercials during the Price is Right on daytime TV and would forever after be scarred by mother-daughter talks.)

I blinked very slowly and was going to raise my hand and ask her to repeat that, but thankfully thought better of it.  (Seriously, if you’re male and you ask a professional woman to repeat something like that term, you are immediately earmarked as a clod, a joker or a troublemaker, if not all three.  This holds true even if the professional woman mumbles and you have a pair of hearing aids and honestly didn’t understand a word she said.)   After the initial ultrasound—which is the one I grew up knowing about, where they gel up the mother-to-be’s stomach and run the scanner over it, kinda like buttering an overripe watermelon with a travel iron—my Trophy Wife™ was asked to adjourn to the bathroom and I was left in very awkward silence in the main exam room as the tech prepared for the… other… sort. 

I swear during that time she looked at me and slowly shook her head disapprovingly from side to side, as if to say that all of this was my fault.  I had no idea what she meant at the moment.

When my Trophy Wife™ returned, the tech explained the procedure, and in no-nonsense manner, made absolutely sure that she did not blow a single iota of smoke up my Trophy Wife’s™ dress.  Yes, she said, the probe and its gel was by necessity cold; yes, the procedure was invasive and would be uncomfortable, if not outright painful; yes, it would require the whole “feet in the stirrup” position that every woman utterly loves; yes, the probe was obviously a torture device created by a male, probably one who took great perverse pleasure in making it look as much like a magic wand as humanly possible.  I must have had a case of sympathy lightheadedness for her medical procedure/borderline-violation, because I more or less blacked out after that.

Fortunately, I awoke in time to see COUCH playing hide and seek in the confines of his current housing.  Currently, COUCH is about the size of a healthy lima bean (and he or she has a tail right now, Jess was quick to point out to me), so the ultrasound tech had to point out that yes, the small vaguely-circular blob was our child-to-be and not in fact a finger-smudge on the screen.  She printed out a picture for us to embarrass COUCH with later in life, right next to the one of him/her in the bathtub and the one where I’m frantically carrying him/her away from the carpet while he/she takes offense to me changing diapers and pees on me. 

Even so, there’s something sort of awe-inspiring about seeing that little vaguely-circular circular blob and knowing you had a part in its existence… like you can’t help but look at it and have your heart melt, thinking, I created that.  We created that.   It’s pretty fucking amazing.

You know what’s even more amazing?  That something as small as that can get a loudmouth smartass like me to shut up once in a while and just enjoy the moment.