If you think I have been a little all over the place of late you would be more astute than I would normally have given you credit.
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But you would be correct.
I just haven’t been me. One minute I am in full flight, the next it’s almost as if another me wants to huddle in the corner and cry.
Things seem to be slipping my mind, my occasionally acid tongue seems to have been sterilised.
This morning, however, was the last straw.
I slipped into my favourite powder pink Givenchy power suit, armed myself with the first bag I could reach as I flew out of the dressing room (it was just the Prada if you must know) and before I could even think to stop myself I vomited, for the first and only time since puberty.
It was a singularly revolting experience and my quick left turn for the bathroom came too late for the second wave.
By the time I arrived I was grey, I was clammy and I knew something very, very serious was amiss.
And that girlfriends is when the penny dropped and the tears started.
This could not be happening to me. Don’t get me wrong, I am not pro anything – well, alright, obviously I am pro me.
Wouldn’t you be?
I felt like screaming. So I did.
And a second time for good measure.
Yet deep down inside I knew it wasn’t changing anything.
Amiss was my Freudian slip. A MISS.
In the brave new world in which I had found myself, with a lover on tap and on demand (and even when you’re not too demanding) I had lost track of the real world.
And my calendar.
I wasn’t even game to think about then next step.
This just could NOT be happening to me.
I just wanted to cry.
Again.
Instead I slumped down in the corner and wailed.
My body.
It’s a temple for two. Just two (well almost always just two, but that’s another story for another day).
And you only get an invitation from me. Not sneak in under the cover of darkness, when I am not looking.
With a panicked gasp this explained my unexpected breathe-in with the pants.
I’m going to be fat.
And the wailing began again.
Then I dry retched.
And the wailing began again.
Until I ran out of tears.
Bereft is the only word to fit. No tears, not even any vomit (as I dry retched again).
But the worst thing about it all, in the midst of my world changing – forever – was this insane thought that just kept popping into my head.
To call my mother.
CALL MY MOTHER?
ARE YOU INSANE?
Apparently if I had one of the nation’s leading silks presenting my case at that very moment, I was.
My carefully crafted orbit had just spun out of control – and was fast vanishing from sight.
If I was right, about something so very wrong, I was about to descend into the ranks of the very ordinary.
OMG.
MY SISTER!
My sister has babies, my mother has babies, I, I have style.
My body is something people envy. No-one envies striae. Who even had the time to stop and think we need some fancy Latin name when English covers it just as well – ruin.
So I did what normally would only happen in the case of a family bereavement. And it would have top be very close family even then. My mother not normally fitting that category.
But I got her on the phone and couldn’t think what to say, so I screamed at her: I’M PREGNANT.
“Oh, dear, she cooed. It’s about time you know, you are 30 something.”