Fever Pitch

Drew Barrymore runs across the green grass at Fenway during a game in the playoffs. She is heading to the arms of Jimmy Fallon, her ex-fiancé, weaving and bobbing from security guards, hoping to stop him from selling his season tickets, and to let him know that she doesn't care if he loves the Red Sox as much as he loves her. And I am on the couch sobbing, as if I'm watching "Schindler's List."

I must be pregnant.

But it is still too early to take a test. Well, technically there are tests that promise to give you results days and days before you are officially late, but those can just be a big Catch-22. False positives, false negatives, did I do the test wrong? It seems crazy that there would be such a big margin of human error when all you have to do is pee on a stick, but apparently tests are taken incorrectly, or misread all the time.

So I'm determined to wait. It's a big waiting game, this "trying" thing. Waiting to ovulate, waiting to test, waiting out the first few excruciating weeks of "will it stick?" In chat rooms filled with hopeful moms-to-be, they wish each other stickies. 

But this crying, sobbing at the final scene of a comedy about a pair of dating 30-somethings and baseball, was a bigger indicator to me than any smiling face on a test stick. I don't think I'd cried like that since I was in the throes of nursing my newborn daughter with colic-esque symptoms who woke up every two hours. I happened upon this film when there was about 20 minutes left, and I had seen it before. I was feeling pretty positive about getting a positive.

I couldn't wait any longer. The day before the official end of the two-week wait, I tested. And it was positive!

But that waiting is really not the hardest part, even though those two weeks of watching the calendar turned into watching a clock as the seconds ticked by. It felt like the slowest time in history. Until I actually got a positive result. Then the real waiting began. Will this pregnancy stick? Given that a huge number (some estimates are 10-25 percent) of recognized pregnancies end themselves beyond our control, every day of the first trimester can be tough.

Some days I feel like a ticking time bomb. It is not my fault if something happens, and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. But that doesn't stop me from worrying about what I eat, drink, lift, think and feel. If I'm having a hard day and wondering, "what am I going to do with two kids demanding all of my time?" I feel guilty and worry that I am jinxing myself. That it won't work out because I don't want it enough at that very moment. Or maybe I don't deserve it because my daughter ate Cheerios for dinner.

The tricky part is that these thoughts are inevitable. Hormones, the very things working tirelessly to support this new life, are making my life, let's just say, less than awesome.

Nausea, heartburn, being more tired than I ever thought possible, and many other less attractive symptoms come and go on a daily basis. And I've had many episodes of crying to a fever pitch.

Still, as the weeks go by, sparks of the real me, mixed with the juicy, exuberant feeling of actually being pregnant, re-emerge. I feel like the Rockefeller Christmas tree, waiting for the lights to be turned on. The books and the midwives assure me that during the second trimester things will settle in. It's known as the honeymoon period. Morning sickness and all of its fiendish pals will hit the road, and the belly won't be big enough to be uncomfortable and squash the internal organs just yet.

This time feels different than the first, as is expected. Each pregnancy, each baby is unique. And I'm not the same person I was the last time. Couldn't be. I've changed since becoming a mom almost four years ago. And then there is the amnesia that makes us want to do it all over again.

Now if I could just find a time machine and skip ahead a little. But not knowing what the future holds is everyone's daily game, right? Waiting for a new life to form from a bundle of cells just magnifies this a wee bit. All I can do is breathe, attempt to be in the moment, and stay away from those pesky romantic comedies.