2nd June 2016

A few days after we discovered my wife was pregnant – and she had done a second test to be sure, and then a third test before I had to stop her madness – we asked ourselves: what next? Initially, she thought we had to meet a gynaecologist – after all, that is what you would do back in India – but I did some research of my own and the matter was finally settled and we called a midwife clinic in Södermalm called Mama Mia and they gave us an appointment for 2nd June.

In between, we had an Italian trip planned and we found out it was safe to travel. We had a good itinerary but the saddest part was that my wife just could not eat anything during the whole trip since she could not bear the smell of meat (any meat). I felt sorry for her because here I was relishing carbonara, pizza, porchetta, everything that we both loved, while she sat small faced nibbling at a plain baguette we bought at a grocery store near our hotel.

Finally, the day arrived when we met the mid-wife for the first time. We were both a bit nervous and after a bit of discussion, we had the first ultrasound. After a couple of minutes of trying to make sense of what we were seeing on the screen, we finally saw it.

I still do not know what I had expected to see, because what I saw was a very tiny oval-shaped figure – like a small toad in a bubble. To me it was not a baby yet. I preferred to call it a foetus. I later told me wife that it is like a parasite which lived and fed on the host and survived only as long as the host did and it sucked out whatever it needed from the host without giving a damn about her health. Perhaps, I did not want to rush into an attachment at such an early stage. I mean, there were still a lot of tests remaining and one could not be 100% sure until much later so I was perhaps trying to shield my emotions. But before you go judging me, I was enjoying every moment of it anyway.

It was when the mid-wife announced that it appeared to be doing okay did my wife finally breathe a sigh of relief. She was obviously quite tensed, maybe I was too.

We got a print of the ultrasound and on our way back in the metro, while me wife took out the picture and looked at it secretively, I saw a woman sitting with her own baby on the other side of the aisle turn her head slightly towards my wife and smile. It was a smile which, perhaps, I could never understand before that day – she knew exactly how we felt.

How did you feel when you first saw your baby (or foetus) on that monitor? Did you think it was just a foetus like I did, or was it something else? Let me know by leaving a comment below.