A Bog Standard Monday

3rd December 2018

Dear diary,

Today was a normal Monday. Nothing peculiar, nothing out of the ordinary, just a bog standard cold December Monday. 

I got up, dragged myself out of bed, caught the same old train taking me to work, worked a full 8 hours which only seemed to feel like 30, and jumped on the train home.

On the way home Jake had messaged me asking if I wanted to go see a film at the cinema, which of course I said yes to. Why would I not?! Fit, perfectly sculpted, beautiful Jake wants to go on a date with me! Yes okay, this is the same Jake that is currently my flatmate. Fine, not just flatmate ex boyfriend. Okay fine let me just be really honest with myself right now… Jake is the love of my life, ex boyfriend, current flatmate and now the guy I’m fucking every damn night.

Now I see how I am problematic, most normal people would just decide not to ever move in with their ex boyfriend of four years and I suppose, if for some bizarre reason that was the case then the sensible thing to do would be to sleep in separate rooms. But no, as you are well aware, sensible is not a word that describes me especially when it comes Mr Jake Branch.

Anyway, back to the ordinary, far from life changing Monday I was writing about. We went to the cinema and had a cute little date night. We laughed, ate popcorn and drank coke. Sometimes when I’m with him I almost forget that we aren’t actually together. For a brief moment in time, he isn’t the guy who ripped my heart out four years ago. Sometimes it honestly feels like we’re seventeen again and still so in love like the day we met. If I’m honest I don’t understand our situation right now, I want him to scoop me into his arms and tell me he was an idiot for ever leaving and then we’ll ride into the sunset together. Unfortunately, I then remember that I am not a leading lady in a rom-com film like the one we just watched. The night ends, we come home, he hops on the Xbox I go to the bathroom.

One minor detail I forgot to mention is that today, on my lunch break I picked up a little test. You know the kind, two sticks in a box, a leaflet longer than my arm explaining how to use it and what a positive and a negative result look like. Yep you got it, a pregnancy test.

So, I get home and pop to the toilet. This isn’t the first pregnancy test I have ever taken. I have panic-bought countless pee sticks. No matter how much protection I have used, (condoms, the pill, pull out method all at the same time) if Aunt Flo visits a millisecond later than expected I am peeing on a stick. I mean take today for instance, I’m only due on today, I haven’t even given myself a day to be late and I already have the tests at hand ready.

So anyway, I’m in the toilet, I’ve peed on the stick (as well as all over my hand, they are not as easy to use as the adverts make out) and now I am just going out my normal night routine. 

About 10 minutes later I’m cleaning my teeth and about to walk out when I remember that paranoid little old me had left the pregnancy test on the side. I flip it over and honestly I am expecting to see one line, no part of my brain genuinely believed I could be pregnant. I’ll turn it over and I’ll see one line, and go to sleep peacefully like I always do. 

I flip it.

Two lines.

Clear as day.

Two bright pink lines staring back at me.

I’m pregnant.

I AM PREGNANT?

My heart skipped some beats. 

The Earth was spinning.

I feel sick.

I sink to the bathroom floor and I am there for what could be hours, minutes, seconds; at this moment there was no concept of time.

I couldn’t tell you what happened next, if I cried, if I screamed or how many times I checked that I wasn’t imaging the second line. It had to be a trick of the light. Better yet it had to be a dream right.

That brings me to now. I am sitting here in the bedroom. I can barely hold this pen straight. The world right now doesn’t seem real, I feel like I’m looking into a parallel universe. How can I be pregnant? How could I be so damn stupid?

Honestly right now I am so scared. Scared to tell Jake. Scared of the thought that there is a tiny human growing inside of me. Scared that in 9 months I could potentially be a mum to a little person who relies solely on me.

I can hear Jake next door, shouting at the XBox. Little does he know that in a few minutes I am going to blow his world to smithereens. Whoever he’s shouting at on that stupid computer game is going to be the last thing in the world that matters.

I keep thinking that I am going to wake up in a minute, that none of this is real. 

I don’t feel any different, I don’t feel pregnant. You know you hear those women say they knew straight away, they knew something was different. I felt nothing.

I always imagined finding out that I was having a baby, in my head that had always been perceived as such a happy and exciting moment. I thought that when I looked down at my stomach the second I found out I’d feel an instant connection with my child. When I looked down at my tummy, it felt as it always did, no different than it did any other day.

The fact that this is the most important decision of not only my life but Jake’s and this unborn child too is crazy to me. Do you know what is insane? I have never agreed with abortions, I have never understood how someone could ever go through with that. Yet here I am, sitting here considering it. Imaging how it would feel to sit in some scary, small, clinical room and take a tablet that would kill a baby. My baby. Does that make me a monster?

Is that what he would want me to do? He is so far from ready to be a dad and we aren’t even a couple anymore, we haven’t been for a long time. What will his family think, that I trapped him? That this was my plan? Worse still, what will my parents say when they find out? 

God so many questions, and thoughts.

My mind feels like a storm; a hurricane.

I guess today wasn’t the bog standard Monday that I had originally thought.