Two lines. There they were. Two lines. Oh shit. Two lines. Surely, it was a dream sequence. Two lines. I was treading water in slow motion. The bathroom took on surrealist qualities.
True, I had just watched my wife pee on a plastic contraption but that only added to the slightly out-of-body experience. I had never watched my wife urinate on a plastic contraption before, but then it would prove to be a day of firsts.
A moment earlier, she had passed me the oval-shaped, white plastic contraption. It reminded me of a fried egg - a fried egg that someone had just peed on.
'Lay it flat on the top of the toilet,' my toilet-bound wife ordered.
'Why have I got to take it? It's covered in piss,' I replied petulantly, clearly taking the shine off the potentially beautiful moment for my wife.
'It's got to be left face up and flat to get a more accurate reading,' said the lady on the throne.
With a theatrical sigh, I took the still warm plastic contraption, held it at arm's length in such a way that it suggested it was radioactive and rested it on top of the toilet. I love my wife dearly, but there is a line. Well, actually, there were two lines.
I noticed them almost instantly. My facial expression at this sudden development clearly betrayed me because my wife began jigging up and down on the toilet and shouting, 'What? What is it? What have you seen? What does it say? You've looked at it before me, haven't you? I told you not to do that. Well, what does it say then?'
She often does this. Argue with herself and win.
'Er, I saw something but I genuinely don't know what it means.'
Sad but true. She had read the instructions before taking aim. I hadn't.
'Well, what does it say?' my excited wife cried, craning her head left and right and waddling slightly from side to side like a disoriented penguin. 'I can't see it.'
'Two lines have come up,' I replied with all the casualness of a man who hasn't read the instructions.
'In which window?'
'What do you mean which window?'
'Is it in the square window or the round window? Are the lines in the same window or is there one in the square window and one in the round?'
'Round windows? Square windows? What is this? Bloody Play School?'
'Don't mess about. Give it to me.'
For the second time in two minutes, I handled a urine-stained plastic contraption, lifting it from the back of the toilet. My indomitable wife snatched it from my tentative grasp and stared at it for several seconds. Then she smiled. Now, I know she was sitting on a toilet with most of her clothes around her ankles and holding something that now had a distinct whiff of piss, but she had never looked more beautiful.
'Neil, I'm pregnant,' she said softly.
And we both burst out laughing.
That was when the surrealism kicked in. It was not real. Or at least, it didn't seem real. I had waited for this moment, rehearsed this moment, for years. I met my wife fifteen years ago. I've known her half my life. When she came down the stairs of our Year 12 common room and offered me some of her strawberry lip balm, I had a vague idea that we'd probably end up being in this situation at some point in our lives. Perhaps not fifteen years later. Having grown up in Dagenham, on a Greater London council estate, some of my peers ended up in this situation fifteen minutes later.
I had anticipated this moment for several years because I'm sentimental. That's why we still have that almost empty Body Shop jar of strawberry lip balm in the house. And it smells worse than the plastic contraption that my wife was holding in her hands.
She was pregnant. My wife was pregnant. She was not going to have a baby though. Don't be ridiculous. She was just pregnant. That was all. I could not connect the dots. There was a chemical malfunction in my brain and it was refusing to compute. I'd waited for this moment for fifteen years and now that it was here, it was literally too mind-blowing to digest. Instead it played with me; it toyed with me. We giggled like cheeky cherubs and danced around the bathroom to Judy Garland - once my wife had pulled up her trousers.
The recriminations followed the dancing.
'I told you I was pregnant, didn't I?' my wife said, after slumping onto the sofa to rub her belly for the first time. My God, it would not be the last.
'Yeah, you did.'
'I can't believe you forced me to paint the fence last weekend.'
My wife often speaks in such absolute, melodramatic tones, intimating that I had held a gun to her temple and screamed, 'Paint the fence, woman, or I'll blow your head off.'
'How was I to know you were pregnant? Besides, I only asked you to help with the paint touch-ups. It's not like I had you up a ladder with a roller.'
'Well, I knew I was pregnant. I just had a feeling.'
'And missing your period was a fairly big clue, I suppose?'
'All right, smart arse, but I did tell you I was pregnant.' She had. But I was sceptical. Even the two lines were not yet conclusive proof. I need a weatherman to tell me when it's raining.
'I'm not being all doom and gloom but we've waited a long time for this and I want everything to be confirmed first. I want to make sure that everything is perfect,' insisted my tedious voice of reason.
It's true. I did. Throughout the pregnancy, I wanted everything to be as perfect as possible. On the road to fatherhood, I turned into Mary Poppins.
'You're such a miserable sod sometimes,' my wife pointed out.
'You know these pregnancy tests are not foolproof. Let's take another one tomorrow and then we can be totally sure and see the doctor.'
'All right, but I'm not going through all that supermarket nonsense again.'
Extract from Be My Baby: On the Road to Fatherhood by Neil Humphreys.
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