It’s hard to know what this blog – which has been all about trying to get pregnant – should be about now I’m actually pregnant. And I suppose that sentence alone is something that speaks volumes. I didn’t start this as a blog about trying to get pregnant. When I started it, it was a blog about freezing my eggs. And when, later, I came back to it, I thought it was going to be a blog about being a solo mother. But life has other plans. And so I suppose now it’s a blog about being pregnant with a donor egg after trying to get pregnant for so long.

And part of that means coming to terms with the idea that we’re going to have a baby. We’re going to become parents and everything is going to change. And I know that that was obviously the goal all along. But at some point that goal became getting pregnant and staying pregnant. And if that had happened early on, I feel like the getting pregnant and the reality of actually having a baby would have been so closely linked in chronology that I wouldn’t have the feeling that I have now, which is – weirdly – that I’m not ready for this.

When we were away, B said to me “our next summer holiday is going to be completely different” and I just hadn’t really thought about it. Just like I hadn’t thought about the fact that we were going to need to get a car that would be practical with a baby seat. And it started to dawn on me that we probably wouldn’t be going to the concerts we’d bought tickets for next year. And I know that – to a certain extent – not thinking about all that had been a self-protection mechanism to shield me from disappointment if/when it didn’t work out again. But even taking that into consideration, the disjunct feels odd.

I think it feels particularly discomforting because this is something that I’ve wanted for so long and now that it’s actually happening, rather than being totally bloody thrilled, as I should be, all I’m thinking about is the stuff that being pregnant and having a small child is going to stop me doing: I can’t ski this winter, I’ve had to get rid of my pride-and-joy sports car, I’m going to have to share B with someone who he’s probably going to love more than me, it’s going to be a long time before I can just lie by a pool and read a book on holiday… etc etc

And, when I think about it, I know that on the scales of life and happiness, this sort of negative weighting is kind of inevitable. Because these are my known knowns. I know what I’m going to lose, what I don’t know, and what I hope will balance that (to some extent at least) is what I’m going to gain. I can’t possibly know that – and to be honest, even if I could, I’m not sure I’d really dare to dream about it after all this time, it would feel like tempting fate.

And so I’m here, juggling fear, excitement, anticipation and all the rest of it. So in some ways, pretty much like most of the last eight years really…