The Phone Call

While making coffee, I keep an eye on the phone and an eye on pouring the boiling water into my mug. This is quite a trick to master, but the phone doesn’t always ring when someone calls me and I’ve come to distrust it. I don’t like phone calls so am quite happy, secretly, about this fault.

I’m waiting for the most important phone call of my life, two weeks after the intra-uterine insemination. One sharing the results of a blood test the day before, testing the human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) levels. When the phone call comes and Dr Tam Tam’s voice is on the other side, I picture her in her office, sitting calmly with the light streaming in through her window. I am not as calm.

I’m sure there are some hello’s and how are you’s but all I remember is Tam Tam getting right to the point and saying, “You’re pregnant! Congratulations! You’re one of the 25% who get successful first time.”

I’m dizzy and want to hug my doctor bathed in sunlight, and I tell her, “Well done!” and a hundred thank you’s before the phone call ends. Thank you, Tam Tam. Thank you, donor, thank you swimmers, thank you womb! I rush downstairs to get into my car to drive to Mom and Dad’s house, down the road.

I find Mom in the corridor and ask her to follow me, as we find Dad. Standing inside, in our little triangle, I tell them, “I’m pregnant!”

I’m the first to lose some tears and I well up more when Mom hugs me and congratulates me. Dad is thinking of something to say, no doubt, and walks off into another room, then comes back, and says something too witty for my soft heart to understand in the moment. Dad interrupts folding clothing to hug me too.

Mom can’t stop smiling and we go outside to sit in the garden for a moment, under the trees Dad has let go wild, reaching across the sky above us. A canopy for the birds, and the squirrels, and the cats who chase them. Dad spends much of his day trying to save the birds from our cats, hanging food for them where the four-legged can’t reach. I listen to the Cape white eyes pecking at an apple, taking in the life all around me.

“You know, we also fell pregnant after the first try,” Mom says, sitting next to Dad. Of all the things to inherit, I’m especially grateful for Mom’s fertility.

I’ve read up enough about pregnancy to know that there will be much more waiting, much more hoping for good news, and challenges that can break the joy in a second. I decide to enjoy the good news of this first step fully, four weeks pregnant, because the journey to get here has been long itself, with many doctor visits, blood tests, bills, and waiting. And it has been worth it.

Between September and November, I’ve already learnt a world beyond what I ever knew before, I’ve learnt how to wait, if nothing else, but also about the creation of life, and the magic of science to give us options where they didn’t exist before. I’m not bound to the ways things have always been done; I can create my own ways.