By Ali Solomon of wiggleroomblog.comÂ
You got pregnant from only having sex once, with your partner/best friend whom you’ve had simmering romantic tension with for seven seasons, but never acted on until now.
Despite having a successful non-child-friendly career (like the CEO of your own company, or solving grisly crimes committed by serial murderers), all you really want, deep down, is to be a mother.
Although you haven’t gotten your period in months, you have no idea you’re expecting.
Your morning sickness arrives while you’re running a pivotal board meeting, negotiating a huge business deal, or meeting your significant other’s upper-crust parents for the first time. While you dash out to vomit in a file cabinet, everyone will figure out your secret.
There will never be a good time to tell your partner you’re expecting. He’s always complaining how stressful and dangerous his job is, how much he hates children, and how he’s up for a big out-of-state promotion that fulfills his lifelong dream.
On second thought, now seems like a good time to blurt out your news. All you need is a public setting and a lull in background noise.
The only symptoms you show are food cravings, like pork rinds or ice cream, which you’ll make your partner fetch in the middle of the night, then hit him over the head with, since you wanted Moose Tracks, dammit!!!
You and your partner won’t get married, even though you’ve secretly pined for each other for ages and finally got together that one time. No one is interested in a happy couple discovering what it means to be in a committed relationship! Suddenly things are “complicated.”
At your Lamaze class, your partner will accidentally set fire to the practice baby doll. While you roll your eyes at his lack of maturity, you know deep down he’ll be the ‘fun’ parent.
Although you eat a gallon of Moose Tracks a day, you won’t gain weight anywhere except your baby bump. No need for compression socks or mesh underwear, and you’ll rock a pair of stilettos like your center of gravity still exists.
For the entire duration of your pregnancy, you’ll look 7-months pregnant (at least, according to your overly-invested-friend-who’s-experiencing-fertility-issues, who knows more about your fetus’ development than you do).
At work, your “pregnancy brain” causes you to flub important presentations or shoot the wrong serial murderer. Your boss wants to put you on desk duty, but you won’t let impending childbirth hold back your career!
A particularly tense argument will be interrupted by amniotic fluid geysering out of you like an ice bucket challenge. Despite living in a major city with more than ten hospitals, you definitely won’t be anywhere near one when this happens.
You’ll go into labor somewhere inconvenient, like the back of a taxi dangling off a bridge, trapped in an elevator during a power outage, or a bank robbery hostage situation. Most likely, your baby will be delivered by a non-doctor who’s surprisingly chill about checking a total stranger’s cervical dilation.
According to the cab driver you’re stuck in an elevator with, you’re not just dilated; the baby is actively crowning!!! Even though you’ve only had contractions for two minutes, are still fully dressed, and this is your first child.
You will scream, grunt, and threaten your makeshift doctor with bodily harm if he doesn’t get this baby out of you immediately, while your partner races around trying to get to you before the birth.
Your “doctor” will give you the highly medical advice to “Push!” and you do, for three painstaking minutes, or the length of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” playing as your dulcet darling enters the world.
Surprise, you’re having twins; which is a miracle, since multiples don’t run in your family, you used no fertility drugs, and only had sex that one time.
The only signs of exertion are some sweaty hair strands artfully framing your face. You didn’t bleed, tear, or burst any capillaries in your eyes, and definitely didn’t poop in the back of the elevator, because childbirth is dignified. You decide to keep your placenta inside your body forever, since afterbirths are optional. So is postnatal care for you and your magically-swaddled, toddler-sized newborns, with perfectly round heads and no traces of amniotic scourge.
As the power comes back on, you’ll be reunited with your partner, who searched every elevator in the city to find you. You’ll choose to name your twins after your unusual birth circumstance. This moment makes him finally commit, because with little Pullman and Stairwell B, you’ve officially bypassed the normal progression of a relationship and jumped straight into “family.”
*****
About the Author
Ali Solomon is a teacher and cartoonist living in Queens, New York with her husband, two daughters, and an insane amount of comic books. Her work can be seen on McSweeney’s, Huffington Post, Scary Mommy, and Belladonna, among others. Find more of her nonsense at wiggleroomblog.com or on Twitter @AliCoaster.