Unplanned

Unplanned

By Spiral Breeze

It had never been like this before.  She was rational, level headed and optimistic about a very successful future.  She and her husband had planned everything strategically with the utmost attention to detail.  Finding out she was pregnant was supposed to be the second happiest time of her life, the first being her wedding day.  Yet as the days passed and the picture on the ultra sound grew to look more like a real baby, with moving limbs, a spine and a strong thumping heart beat, the happiness that she had planned on feeling simply did not present itself.

Her days began to run into one another: wake up, shower, breakfast, which she couldn’t eat, prenatal yoga, work, doctor appointments, parenting class, cook dinner, which again she could never eat, shower and bed.  It was one giant blur exacerbated by her ever expanding stomach; the ever expanding supposed to be momentous occasion in her life.

It was always at night, when the worst of the “non-happiness” as she called it would make itself known.  She couldn’t sleep; she could never sleep anymore, not one wink, not even an accidental dozing off.  As she lay awake staring out the window, she was positively sure that something was going to happen to her unborn child.  Instead of diapers, she’d have to buy a tiny coffin to hold the baby in eternal rest, she’d be presented with a certificate of death, not birth and that would be all.  

Anything could happen and not just to the baby, it could be her as well: a house fire could consume her as these thoughts raged inside her head.  Mother and unborn baby killed in four alarm blaze.  All that would remain were their bones.  She could perhaps go into preterm labor and hemorrhage, dying slowly in a pool of her own blood.  The list went on and on, each scenario becoming more gruesome than the last.

Why did she have such unspeakable fears?  Why could she not plan ahead like everyone else did?  In her pre-pregnancy state she would have planned a huge baby shower.  She should be bringing in a decorator to discuss what in-vogue colors to paint the nursery.  No.  Instead, she wallowed in an ever present ever looming fear or knowledge that something was going to go terribly horribly wrong with the baby growing inside her.

Night after night, day after day it had all become an unplanned mess.  When she marked her expanding stomach on a calendar, she was quite sure that there wouldn’t be one more day, one more week or trimester.  Week 40 would never come, no kicking at week 25.  No restless motion at week 33.  Soon, but she didn’t exactly know when, something someday would happen.  The thoughts festered inside her growing more rapidly than her baby.  There was no life inside her, only a ticking time bomb.

THE END