Vacation

I deliberated under palm fronds, monkeys leaping overhead. Grew fat on pineapple, kumquat and jackfruit, and clucky amid womb-like seas; sleeping like a baby, in the upside down night. It was only when we got home again, I grew restless, knowing the execution date drew near. My holiday romance could not last, alas, for I knew it would soon turn sour. Tortured of sleep, and screamed at when god know, you’re trying your best: it’s a relationship I’ve known before, when I had far more tolerance for it.

Flirting with the idea of another baby is one thing when you’re taking a break from the daily grind, but the brute, day in day out reality? It was too awful to contemplate- especially when you consider what we’ve gone through with the two we’ve already got.

But it’s the money that scares me the most. Kissing goodbye to half my salary means holidays like this will come round even less, and this one took a decade to get round to. It was worth the wait. From the moment we stepped onto a flight that took us half the way round the world and a full day (or night, depending on where you’re measuring from) everything went without a hitch, except of course the big one; the life changing hiccup that exploded in two silent lines just the week before we left.

More fool me. The app, which faithfully tracked the ebb and flow of my hormones for two years let me down. It was, perhaps inevitable. But to fall accidentally pregnant more than once in a lifetime (at 37, indeed, ten years since the last, sole planned one) can only be seen as foolish.

It was full moon when we arrived, little more than a month gone, I’d filled up with fluid on the flight and the bikini body I’d honed in thrice weekly gym trips, was puffy, already pot bellied. But it didn’t matter, I was wrapped in a comforter of oxytocin, and only the queasiness ahead of mealtimes and greeting unfamiliar food added an unexpected dimension to a holiday which I’d planned to accommodate children themselves only just capable of appreciating something different, foreign and chaotic as Thailand.

They, at least, exceeded my expectations on unfamiliarity, took the journey in their stride, from the hazy heat and high rises of Bangkok – past and future cheek by jowl- to the craggy beauty of new found tourist traps; a pastiche of my haunts of 20 years ago. They tried new foods my belly couldn’t stomach, scrambled up rock faces, and swam in rock pools, roof pools, infinity pools and of course, the sea, where I wallowed in shallows, fretting about insect bites and repellent (which was worse?), and vitamins (didn’t feel like taking any, yet couldn’t seem to manage more than rice and chicken) and how much I missed good bread.

What was the point though, of refusing the good wine my father bought on our first night in Bangkok, and the plentiful Chang beer that Tom cheerfully supped on the beach in holiday humour from 11 am given half the chance. We weren’t keeping it were we?

Yet I found myself fingering the elephant mobiles, sold everywhere down sandy side streets, tourist tat at once cheap cheap and overpriced. One would look nice next to the purple sofa, now languishing in the little room, a makeshift playroom filled with toys long since abandoned but that I haven’t the heart to get rid of (not for the first time falling into the middle class trap of thinking a baby is what you can buy for it).

Ditto three cots, two walkers, a bouncer, a breast pump and a decade of clothes long since outgrown, surely stored for just such an occasion such as this? Then we could board the loft, kit it out with Thai mats and Jenga and chess for the oldies to escape to, just like the treehouse bar we sat in, watching lighting luminesce behind palm trees in a sudden storm. Tom remained dismissive, refusing to see possibilities, contently looking blinkered at the next ten years- retirement, travel, stultifying middle age.

He kept it up on the long journey home while I dozed in economy, aware going premium was a luxury I’d perhaps never now see. He kept it up to first one, then a second clinic, where I refused, in horror, the lethal pill that would see me vomit and cramp and bleed, and then an op where, unconscious, I would be disembowelled of the caul where an eight week mistake (six, it’s only really six weeks old) cell by cell gathered consciousness.

In the end, I played my trump card- tears. The Uber hearse that arrived to take me to end this little life helpfully turned up the radio to the Plain White Tees, a song that meant something to us, years ago, and waterworks came easy; easier still as they clamped plastic cuffs on my wrists, weighed and measured me (already only a shade under official overweight), all the while I dragged my feet, teetering on a decision point I may regret either way. In the end, the decision was out of my hands. They wouldn’t treat me when I was so distressed and by the time we walked home in the sunshine, there seemed little sense in going back further down that line.

We sat in the pub, I with a homeopathic shandy, thrashing it out; Tom resistant; an impasse reached. But I was already pregnant. Easier to stay so, however short-termist this approach may be.

And so ten years hence is now defined, marked out in clear milestones of routine, tantrum, park trips and story times, family gatherings, admin. It makes the future both terrifying and comfortingly predictable. But opens the door for risk, uncertainty, pain and worry. But joy, also joy. And it’s clinging on to this most optimistic of human emotions that we all journey into the well trodden path of the unknown.