Waiting in the uterverse

A personal story of pregnancy



On every one of my previous visits to the fertility clinic, the waiting room was full.

Women of different ages, ethnicities and income brackets would take their seats in fertility limbo. Some would sit on their own, while others sat with partners who held their hands and brought them water or coffee until they were called up.

On a particular day last April, the clinic was unusually quiet. My husband and I had managed the miracle of travelling through the congestion of cars, pedestrians, cyclists and never-ending Toronto construction without missing our appointment time.

That was the day we would learn whether our procedure had worked, whether our little embryo had managed to safely cushion itself somewhere in the walls of my uterus and begin to grow.

The preceding months had been one big expensive blur of frequent visits to the pharmacy for seemingly endless sets of injections and boxes of pills.

“Here’s another thing I can’t do,” a voice in my head said each time my husband pulled out his wallet, the dollars I couldn’t cover with my own earnings weighing me down.

In the weeks leading up to this appointment, I had experienced the common symptoms of early pregnancy. I could smell anything across a room or down the hall. But my husband and I both knew better than to let ourselves get too excited. We’d made it this far before. It didn’t guarantee anything.

The previous year I had become pregnant, even though doctors had told us the chances of this happening naturally were slim to none. The pregnancy was later ruled unviable.

Watching someone you love break down and cry is a searing and stifling sort of hell. Especially if their eyes had been filled with joy only moments before.

As we sat together in the waiting room on that morning in April, I wondered whether we’d visit that terrible place again. If we did, how long would the pain linger this time?

Finally, we were called up. I changed into a hospital gown while my husband waited in the hall. The nurse welcomed us into the dimly lit ultrasound room.

She was friendly and talkative, and this was relieving for both of us, even though her kindness did not guarantee that she would deliver good news. She explained that she would first scan everything before turning the screen so that we could see.

We waited. My husband sat in a corner of the room.

“Are you ready?” the nurse asked. My husband came close. We fixed our gaze on the screen. The nurse zoomed in on a tiny shape outlined in white against the darkness of what I’ll call the uterverse.

“Do you see the gestational sac?” she asked. We nodded, not knowing what to expect next.

She zoomed farther into the darkness. What we saw knocked the heaviness out of our nervous systems in an instant. From the darkness appeared a little being that resembled a seahorse. It had big eyes, a pointed nose and what appeared to be cheekbones.

The nurse hovered her cursor over a small, beating sac inside its chest, and a blue glow emerged.

Three things came to me at once; one of them was music. I wish I could say it was a hymn or something from a gospel choir, but it wasn’t.

Instead, I heard the blaring bounce of songs that filled nightclubs in the 2010s, where the drunkest of drunks danced into the night, eyes closed, not a care about the hangover that awaited or how they looked or how soon security might kick them out, dancing in their own worlds and in the one where everyone else could see.

While my husband and I were wondering and worrying, our little seahorse and his blue glow had begun to dance to his own tune, at 170 beats per minute.

The second sensation in the dim ultrasound room was the certainty that this was a boy. This didn’t make sense to my husband or any other logical thinker. We would later find out I was right.

The third feeling told me that there was a happy, mischievous and funny personality on the way, but whether this is also true remains a mystery among other mysteries for now.

“It was a very happy moment,” my husband now recalls. “It was the moment it became real for me.”

Our son is supposed to arrive at the end of November. Of course, there are other fears that come with this type of waiting. “What if I don’t make it?” I sometimes think. I know a couple of women who have lost infants to fatal conditions that went undetected prior to birth. I think of them every day.

Being pregnant literally looks like holding the world in your midsection. You hold it in your head, too.

I think of how society celebrates some children but not others. I then think how irresponsible it is to bring more people into the world as it is being destroyed. Scientists have made it clear that the climate destruction we’ve caused cannot be reversed at this point.

It’s a rather long stream of concerns.

Eventually I remember something a man told me years ago. He believed women were closer to God than men because they bring life into the world. I have been annoyed with what he said ever since.

Firstly, anyone who wants to come close to God can do so. Secondly, some women will never have children, and this in itself can deepen their connection with God. Third, there are a multitude of ways to bring life into this world besides childbearing. Finally, this sounds like a primitive idea from a time when humans had limited scientific understanding about the conception of children.

However, in my journey of enduring the mental and physical tolls of pregnancy, I have been pushed to the edge over and over again. That’s the place where conversations with God tend to happen.

I had forgotten all about Psalm 46:10 until one day my sister posted it to her Instagram in between a series of clips about food and skincare. “Be still and know that I am God.”

When you try to balance hope with the possibility of despair, you are forced to surrender what you can no longer carry. There’s a much-needed stillness in such moments. This is where childbearing women may come closer to God. It’s almost like we don’t have a choice.

Our little guy is running out of space in the uterverse. He moves at the sound of my husband’s voice. He once swayed from side to side to an old Lebanese song. Neither of us is Lebanese. It was really funny. This is a very different place where we laugh as we wonder and wait. It’s as simple as that.



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