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Sunday, January 1st, 2006

Another new year, another hour spent puking my guts up. I didn’t even drink that much last night.

Kate and I ended up staying in. She’s definitely sick of my moping about by now. I would be if it was me. I mean, if it was her. I don’t know what I mean, but hopefully you get my gist. I am annoyed with myself, is the point. At least I acknowledge the fact that I’m a pathetic loser. Which makes it okay.

Resolutions:

- Lose 12 pounds to return to pre-Frank weight, and then another 10 pounds to achieve normal human being weight.

- Eat healthier foods. This corresponds to #1 but also my periods have almost completely stopped because of my terrible depression diet. Ben & Jerry’s has pretty much been a staple corner and clearly it’s taking its toll on my nutrition. I don’t know if it’s because it reminds me of Frank or something else but it’s all I seem to be eating these days. Every other food seems inferior by comparison.

- Cut out alcohol for all of January. My skin is breaking out and I’m sick of spending every morning barfing. My body seems to be so used to being hungover that sometimes I vomit even when I haven’t been drinking at all. I just can’t get a break.

- Move the fuck on. This is possibly the most important resolution. For some reason this man got under my skin and I can’t get him out of my mind and it’s gotten so bad that I’m mixing up my metaphors and nothing makes any sense any more. Everybody is sick of it, especially me. It’s over, Daisy. He’s gone. It’s time to start again.

I had the weirdest dream last night. Like most of my dreams, Frank was in it. It was kind of a sex dream but I woke up before the actual sex. A foreplay dream. We were kissing very heavily and I mean really getting into it. It’s all kind of blurry as most dreams are, but there’s a part which stands out quite vividly. We’re both naked already and I’m fumbling in my drawer for something and then I give it to Frank and carry on kissing him and then some other stuff maybe happens and then he says, “I can’t get it on,” and I just tell him to shut up and something gets thrown across the room and we both laugh because it hits the wall with a squelch and slides down into the bin. Then I guess I woke up because I don’t remember much after that...

Oh.

Squelch. Bin. I can’t get it on.

Suddenly I felt very sick again. Gripping the basin above me, I pulled myself to my feet and stared at my bedroom door. Surely not. Very, very, very slowly I padded across the room to my bin and, sure as there is blood running through these veins, there is a stain on the wall about halfway up. No way.

Desperately racking my brain for more clues, I reached out a hand to steady myself. “Kate!” I yelled, but of course she wasn’t there. She didn’t come. She was at work. It was just me and my brain now.

I closed my eyes and let myself slide all the way down the wall, just like the unused condom had done two months ago. Not in a dream, but in a memory. Fuck fuck fuck. It all makes so much sense. I’m so fucking stupid. The weight gain, the mood swings, the morning sickness, the irregular bleeding. Denial. Somewhere in my mind I had known this information all along but I’d repressed it in a drunken haze. This is real life. This is happening now.

No way I can find out for sure on New Years Day so I spent the remainder of it crying and then told Kate I was sick when she got home. She brought me soup, god bless her, but for the first time in my life I didn’t feel like eating.

Monday, January 2nd, 2006

Two excruciating minutes. I sat heavily onto the edge of the bathtub and stared down at the little stick in my hand. It seems quite ludicrous that something the size of a pencil can change your whole life forever. I let out a long sigh and placed it down beside me, picking up the box to read the instructions for the thirtieth time. Pretty straight forward: two pink lines for yes and one pink line for no. Wonderful. Foolproof. Only an idiot could misinterpret something like that.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever taken a pregnancy test, dear reader, and really it is none of my business, but I will tell you now that it was the most terrifying experience of my life. Much more terrifying than the thought of childbirth itself, for sure.

The two minutes that followed were the longest ever. Mostly I just stared into the mirror ahead of me, blinking very slowly and sighing a lot. Trying to decide how I felt about the prospect of becoming a mother.

On the one hand I was fucking terrified, obviously. I am twenty-three years old. I have just started my career. I still watch Spongebob Squarepants for crying out loud. There is no way I am ready for a child.

But on the other hand, I thought about this test being negative and it made me kind of sad. Last night I barely slept for thinking but when I did I had this dream in which my baby was the size of a chicken nugget but it got dropped into the sea and I was crying and Frank had to dive in to rescue our tiny helpless chicken nugget child. It was a surreal dream, but I think the point of it, when you really boil it down to the bones, is that I was actually scared when I thought my chicken nugget baby was going to drown. It actually scared me in the kind of way you get scared when you have a bad dream and you know it’s a dream but you can’t wake up and then it starts to feel so real that you think maybe it’s not a dream, maybe this is real life and my baby is drowning and I am petrified of losing it. In a way, I thought I’d probably be devastated if this test turned out to be false because I had already come to terms with the possibility of a baby in my future and a negative reading seemed like I had lost it. Lost something that I never had to begin with. I’m not ready and god knows what would happen with Frank but the prospect of life inside me made me give an involuntary smile, which I caught in the mirror and wiped away immediately.

Clearly I’m living in a fantasy world because I am not ready for a child. Not by any measure. No no no no no. Please be negative so I can go back to living my life.

DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR-

I had set the timer on my phone to sound when the test was ready but still I almost leapt out of my skin as the cold, loud tones echoed around my small bathroom. With a shaking hand I reached to silence the device, and took a very deep breath as I allowed myself a glance at that little white stick. My heart caught in my throat.

Two pink lines. Unmistakable.

Next to the lines was a smiley face. This angered me. Who is this jackass pregnancy test bastard to dictate to me how I should be feeling or what facial expressions I should be making? Fuck you. You don’t know me. You have no right to judge me. You don't know judgement until you've been patronised by a stick covered in your own piss.

I glared intently down at the stick and threw it into the bin. Then I sat down on the edge of my bathtub with a heavy head and an even heavier heart.

“Why now?” I whispered to my abdomen. I lifted my shirt up and gently poked the soft flesh. I am definitely chubbier. Rounder. It’s plausible that that could be attributable to my tub-a-day Ben & Jerry’s habit, of course, but I didn’t just feel fat. It felt different.

I had been in denial for so long that it became really difficult to say the word to myself.

Pregnant. I am pregnant.

I placed a tentative palm on the bare skin of my belly and took a deep breath. Getting rid of it is not an option. It never will be an option. There is a tiny weeny ball of life inside me now and it is my responsibility. I am going to have a baby.

Before anything else could be done, I needed to make an appointment with a doctor. But as I sat there on bath with my hands on my stomach, I felt far too scared and alone to really do anything. So I just stayed there for a while, glaring down at my stomach and cursing myself for letting this happen.

I felt like a mess, to be honest. So I called the only person who might not judge me, at least not out loud, and who would still love me even if she did.

“Kaaatieeee,” I whined as she picked up the phone. “Come home. I need you.”

She made the journey from work to home in a record-breaking seven minutes and then she was straight by my side and I didn’t say a word before burying myself in her shoulder and crying and crying and crying until there were no more tears left and I was just sat on the edge of the bathtub hiccupping. After all the tears were gone, I felt eerily calm and tranquil, almost to the state of catatonia. She gave me an inquisitive look, as if to say, ‘where did all the tears go?’

“I’m pregnant,” I said monotonously.

Kate froze for a second, and then nodded slowly. “Oh.” We sat there in silence for a long time. “Is it...”

“Frank’s? Yes.”

“Did you use-”

“A condom? No.”

“Are you-”

“Keeping it? Yes.”

“Have you-”

“Told him? No.”

“What are you going to-” She paused for a second, obviously expecting me to continue her question. I did not. “-do?”

I shrugged. “Obviously I have to tell him.”

“When did you last speak to him?”

I sighed. “A couple of days after he left I sent him this really embarrassing email when I was drunk.” The look she gave me was priceless. If I hadn’t been in such a stupor I might have laughed. “I know. It just said how I miss him basically. Never got a reply, of course. God I’m an idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot,” she said softly, rubbing my back. A rogue tear slid down my cheek and we both ignored it. Kate took a deep breath. “I think you have to go to America.”

I pulled away from her and gave her the kind of look that you might present to somebody you caught shitting on your father’s grave. A look that can only be described as dumbfounded. Clearly she was a crazy person. “What?”

“You have his address, right?” She was being awfully nonchalant about this.

“Well, yeah, but-”

“Seriously, Daisy, you have to tell him and you have to tell him FACE-TO-FACE. He’s going to be a father. You are having a child together. He’s responsible for a whole new life and that’s not the kind of thing you can tell somebody on the phone or in an email. You have to go to his house and knock on his door and he needs to take responsibility for his sperm.”

I let out an unamused chortle and let my head fall back a little, staring up at the tiled ceiling above. “Do you really think I can just, like, fly across the ocean and rock up on his doorstep all like ‘Hey, remember me? I’m that chick you had a fling with in England last year and then never spoke to again. Bet you’re wondering what I’m doing here, huh? Well, it’s a funny story actually; it turns out I’m pregnant with your child and yes I will marry you. Well now that’s all sorted let’s go to bed.’”

“Maybe not in so many words,” she chuckled.

I looked back at her. “Less words? Really?”

She gave an exhausted sigh. “I’ll come with you, Diz. And if he doesn’t want anything to do with it then fuck him.”

“That’s what got me into this mess in the first place,” I muttered with a half-smile.

Kate laughed and stroked my hair. “We’ll be okay, Daisy,” she said softly. “Whatever happens, I’ll be here. You know that, right?”

I nodded. “I know. Thanks Kate.”

“No problem, kiddo.” She kissed the top of my head and I gave out a sort of half-laugh half-cry noise and then started thinking about Frank again.

Clearly the time we spent together didn’t mean a thing to him. I’m sure my suspicions are right and he is already with some other skank in a different part of the world, probably breaking her heart as he left her with false promises and a baby just like me.

I felt used and helpless and lost. Way in over my head, just like my drowning chicken nugget baby.

I could have happily crawled into bed and slept for a long long time and woken up to find that everything was all part of a long and realistic dream and I’d laugh and feel silly for ever believing any of it. As if a rock star would want me to start with, and besides I am still too young to be having babies so obviously none of it was real. Silly Daisy.

Unfortunately though, it is real, and from now on it doesn’t even matter how I feel about anything because I am very aware that there is a tiny person living inside me.