Good things come in threes

Read Time: 5.5 mins

“You never know.” 

“No.” Christine sat facing me, arms crossed, glaring.

“It could be.”

“It won’t be.”

“I can feel it.”

“You can’t”

“I can.”

“It’s not and you’ve got to stop this,” she started to look a little worried, “what if you call it into existence.”

Christine had peed on a stick only a few weeks prior to this conversation. Late October had brought with it surprisingly mild weather and we were sitting in the lounge in loose fitting shirts, twiddling our thumbs, waiting to leave for the fertility clinic. Christine was 7 weeks ‘pregnant’ and today we would find out if she was in fact — pregnant.

I didn’t know that you could be pregnant but not pregnant. It felt very Schrödinger’s Mother. 

It could be, the clinic had informed us, that the baby didn’t have a heart beat or even that there was no baby in there just a delayed egg jump. Upon hearing this, my mind had wandered to a muddy field where twelve eggs were completing egg-army drills: Egg jumps, egg crawls, and my personal favourite, egg rolls.

Christine was 98% sure she was pregnant. She had proudly informed me, whilst out on a stroll one afternoon, that she had never felt how she had been feeling in these first 7 weeks.

“All those morning after pills were completely pointless,” she said cheerily, “turns out I was never pregnant.” The Dutch part of her paused for a second before adding, “think of the money I could have saved.”

She was certain there was a bouncing baby inside of her. I, on the other hand, had a different theory. 

I reckoned there were three.

Triplets, I felt, would be the most well suited option for us. Not, I should add, from a practical stand point but more from a metaphorical one. Considering how, over the years, life had put me at the centre of impractical and highly amusing situations whereby I tended to make a fool of myself. I felt, if I was to have kids, the complete insanity of triplets was the right vibe. I could picture it. Three little humans all dressed the same, running around after their glamorous dramatic soprano mother as a literal three person fan club. Somewhere in the background their other mother, carrying seven bags and looking like she had been pulled through a hedge backwards, tried to work out with which hand she was supposed catch the third.

It had, of course, started as a bit of a joke. The fertility process was a long one and for the entirety of its duration I teased Christine about us having triplets. My father joined in when he came to fix up the house over the summer and then, very amusingly, twins and triplets kept appearing in shows we watched, places we went, and things we read. My favourite one of these was that in one of the later seasons of our favourite show Only Murders In The Building an entire song was dedicated to triplets. This allowed me to burst into song every time Christine mentioned the baby journey.

When Christine discovered she was pregnant, she started to panic that it could actually be triplets, or at least twins. 

I simply panicked about a baby and promptly had a full mental breakdown. 

We arrived early at the clinic and plonked ourselves, once more, on the female reproductive organ coloured sofas whilst waited to be called in. This time I couldn’t help but notice how uncomfortable they were. I suggested to Christine that perhaps this was a metaphor for the female reproductive cycle. She suggested that I should stop analysing the furnishings.

Our doctor was a bubbly young woman who seemed as excited as, if not more than, us to find out if we were pregnant. 

“So,” she smiled at us. “It was your first time?”

I opened my mouth. Christine stood on my foot.

“Yes,” Christine smiled back, “crazy, right? Is that common?”

“No, not really. You were very lucky.”

“That is one word for it.” I muttered under my breath, Christine pushed harder. It will never work first time, I heard her voice ringing sarcastically inside my skull.

“So, if all goes well there is a little baby in there!” The doctor typed something heavily on her keyboard.

“Or,” I said cheering up, “there could be three.”

“That’s also possible,” the doctor continued typing on the keyboard and missed the expression of terror that crossed Christine’s face.

“Emma stop it,” Christine hissed.

“It’s a 1 in 10,000 chance,” I added.

“Gosh, really?!” the doctor looked up for a second, “that’s higher than I thought.”

Christine pushed her heel in harder and I yelped. The doctor didn’t seem to notice.

“Shall we have a look then?” 

Christine clambered gingerly back on to the chair where she’d had the full ‘tube experience’. She held my hand and half-smiled, half-sneered, as the doctor squirted the freezing cold blue gel onto her belly. 

The image came up on the screen. We both looked at it, and then at each other. Neither of us had any idea what we were looking for.

“Well,” the doctor began in an overly merry voice, “there is a double egg jump.” My eyes widened in semi-delight, semi-horror. Christine went white as a sheet. I couldn’t help but think I would never hear the end of this. Before she had a chance to rip into me, the doctor continued, “but only one egg took.”

The sound that came out of Christine upon hearing this information was not dissimilar to that of how a cat sounds when stood upon. 

The doctor showed us the outline of a tiny little shrimp and in the shrimp there was a couple of zig-zag lines that were moving, a heartbeat. We both stared in silence at it as the doctor told to us, quietly and kindly, that we were about to become parents. When our eyes were a little dryer, and the energy had picked up a tad, I asked if I could record a video for my family. 

As I did so, and without thinking, I said, “see, love, you worried for nothing!”

With a hearty harrumph the doctor shot me a scathing look and said “and now, whose fault was that?!”

I grinned a goofy toothed grin back at her. There was nothing in the world that was going to bring me down. I was just delighted to hear, for the very first time, that I was about to be a dad.