Image via iStock.
I grabbed my partner’s hand the other day and forced it onto my belly.
“It feels weird,” I declared. “It’s all hard.”
Distracted, he laid his palm across the previously-rather-flat area now bulging against the waistband of my jeans and there it was, sitting below my belly button: A hardness.
A rounded hardness that could only be described as – a bump.
My hip bones, usually easily discernible by touch, if not by sight, were obscured by the strange new weight, a fullness I’d only ever seen on my older cousins.
Panic briefly flashed across my boyfriend’s face and he immediately leapt on his smartphone to Google the symptoms he hoped I’d instantly dismiss. (Post continues after gallery.)
Celebrities who weren't pregnant
“Bloating,” he read. I nodded.
“Sore boobs. Weight gain…” he reeled off. I nodded.
“Constipation…?” he gingerly queried.
I redded—but paled at the same time. Because there was no two ways about it: I was displaying symptoms normally associated with early pregnancy—and a baby was certainly not in our five-year plan.
While my partner tried to soothe me, I insisted we take a test before we began to panic. My ashen-faced partner sprinted to the nearby pharmacy and returned with the most accurate pregnancy test money can buy in inner-city Sydney at 7am.