Something felt different. I woke up with my cat splayed across my belly, his paws outstretched to my chin and down to my knees, his eyes wide and staring. At first, I wondered if that’s how it feels to sleep with a baby because it was quite comforting. But my cat never sleeps with me, or on my bed, he doesn’t even sleep in the same room. He pressed his paws against my stomach and purred, and that’s when I panicked. I jumped out of bed so quickly that I knocked him to the ground. It was the first time I saw a cat not landing on his toes.

In the bathroom, I threw myself over the fully stuffed bin, tossing rubbish aside to try and find the pregnancy test I took the previous day, the unmistakably negative one, or so I thought. Here it was, its single red line still visible. I let out a breath of relief but then wondered if I did the test too soon, if even for a day. My period was still late, and my belly was still seriously bloated, although maybe the two pints of ice cream I ate the day before could have something to do with it. Fed up with my doubts, I tore apart another test and furiously peed on it. I glued myself to the test’s screen which turned red nearly immediately. I couldn’t breathe. I started shaking. I’ve never before seen a positive pregnancy test, and the sight of it scared me to my bones.

I rushed to the bedroom where my husband was sleeping blissfully. I nudged him a couple of times, but my hands were shaking so hard he thought that I was urging him to wake up, that something terrible had happened.

“Who died?” he asked in panic.

I pushed the pregnancy test towards him and burst into tears. After some fumbling with it, he finally understood what I was telling him.

“I thought someone died!”

I followed his laugh, even though I was crying.

“It’s positive, why is it positive?” I stuttered, gazing at the test multiple times as if I was unable to understand.

“We got lucky I guess.”

I looked at my husband through the blur of my eyes, “But we’ve never been lucky! And it’s too soon!”

“Is it?”

“Yes!” I snapped, “I was so close to finishing my book!”

“You still have nine months.”

“But my brain will stop working now!” I lowered my head to the floor. “And I’ll get nauseous, and fat, and my legs will get swollen, and my back will hurt all the time, and, oh god, I didn’t even think about the delivery!”

My husband took my shaky hands into his, which stopped me from rambling for a second. “Everything will be okay.”

“I thought we were gonna start trying next year when we’ll be ready!”

“We were never going to be ready, and you know it.”

I gave him the longest stare. I was trying to swallow back more tears, but I was unable to. I continued to cry, even though I knew that what he was saying was the truth. We weren’t ready to become parents, and we probably never will be.

Still, one positive pregnancy test didn’t mean anything. I needed more proof of what was happening to me, so I drove to the nearest pharmacy and bought every test they had in stock, and back home, I peed on all of them. My mind was whirring with possibilities. I wondered if the test that showed me a plus could be faulty, if I could still undo it all. I thought I might still go back to the unpregnant me, to the obsessive, indecisive me. I spent years pondering over a possible pregnancy, talking and writing about it, always feeling unsure if to go ahead and have a baby. I must’ve gone through a hundred scenarios, through endless pros and cons, I played and replayed every movie, I read all the books on the subject, and I spent hours going through boring mum blogs. Nothing offered me the insight I was hoping for. That flicker of doubt didn’t want to leave me no matter what I did. I deep down knew I wanted to have my baby, I just didn’t want to give up my life, my work, or my body for it.

Whatever we decide, we’ll probably always wonder about the path not taken. Even people who are contentedly childfree will likely feel pangs of “What if?” (Source)

My biggest misbelief was thinking that everything explodes once you’re pregnant; your hormones, your boobs, your belly, even the vomit coming out of your mouth, but weeks after not much had happened, except the unusual calm that settled over me, which for someone frantic like me, feels surreal. I always thought that once I’ll get pregnant I’ll start challenging my state and worry about the million things this will prevent me from doing, but being pregnant seems to have the opposite effect on me. My newfound zen state of mind allows me to do and write much more than I ever did. It’s as if all the anxiety I was living with evaporated. It’s weird how I’m suddenly incapable of worrying about all the silly things that were on my mind before. The only thing I worry about now is if my cat will continue to come in the morning because I got so used to his belly massages I wouldn’t know what to do without it.

This article was originally published in Illumination.