I can’t drink coffee.

I can’t stand the smell or the taste. It’s Tom Yum Soup, Nigerian peppersoup, sour patch kids or water. It’s gotta be spicy and it’s gotta be sour. No cream, no thickener, no wontons or dumplings.

The scary thing about having kids in a first world country is that it’s a choice. Of course it’s a choice, as it should be. People who aren’t financially or mentally equipped to should have the right to make the choice. Situations aren’t always ideal for kids. Why bring kids into bad situations when you don’t have to? Even if there are no reasons, there should be a choice for people with uteruses. Always. So when you’re a very liberal and educated person with choices, it feels weird to ignore logic in these times.

Flashback to 2012, I’m 24. I’m a few hours off my private pilot’s licence, I’ve got my own little ditty as a consultant to a bunch of market stall food people doing website stuff, my partner and I are filling in visas to move to the States, it’s all good. Then the nausea comes, so does the inability to focus. I do the test, positive. After years of being told I won’t be able to conceive without medical intervention, this was a shock. Yet, I already knew I wasn’t going to keep it.

Scan date came, the room was dark and warm. I remember walking in there committed to an outcome. Then, the ultrasound tech pressed on my very full bladder and this wee spot had a heartbeat. Strong at 163bpm. At 6 weeks, he told me, this was pretty rare to have a heartbeat so loud. I walked out of there still stubborn but changed. The unknown is scary, man. Like I knew people have had kids before but this was weird. Would I still able to travel? Earn money? Be a person? Could I achieve anything?

After the first trimester, the nausea eased up and I was totally set on productivity. The house was always spotless. I was reading a lot of books, I worked out twice a day. We found an amazing midwife who we looked forward to seeing every fortnight. Eventually the kicking came earlier than expected and he was rowdy about it. Pregnancy stretched through a hot summer, I was glowing, my skin was matte and opaque like a fresh canvas. My hair had grown thick and lustrous. People commented on how beautiful I was. In truth, I was sweaty and uncomfortable. By 37 weeks, I was waddling in the only shoes I could fit – my flip flops. I was a big little pregnant woman.

The night I went into labour, I roasted a big delicious chicken with a big delicious serving of creamy potato mash and veggies and salad, like some weird last supper. I breathed through the contractions with every bite and by the time it came to dessert, I was gasping. I took a Panadol (lol) and called my midwife. The drive to the birthing centre was a very long 10 minutes. So was the drive back home after they told us it was too early and to come back when I couldn’t sleep through the pain. So I went to sleep, spooning my now munted pregnancy pillow. At around 2am I stopped sleeping. The pain was a dull envelopment of my whole lower body and while it didn’t sting, it was undeniable that I couldn’t go through this without some intervention. That intervention being nangs in bottle and mask form – the most fun I had during labour other than meeting the hot anaesthetist who installed my epidural in the coming hours.

I don’t remember the ride back to the birthing centre, but when we got there, they strapped a big belt around me to monitor baby’s heartbeat, injected me with some sedatives and put me on the nangs, then I proceeded to text all my mates stupid shit.

The next few hours was a blur of me running out of gas and me taking it into the shower, but me trying to hold myself up through the waves of pain. (Also my midwife asked me if it was okay if she could go home, I later found out her other patient down the hall had a stillbirth). The contractions had started getting closer together and the kid was trying to leave but my body couldn’t expand that way. So, after hours of consultation and many manual internal examinations (exactly what you would think and not very sexy), they prepped me for surgery. It was fun, in hindsight. For the first time in my life, I felt some weird semblance of group support. I had 2 anaesthetists, 4 surgeons and my midwife’s partner. My partner was there too. I’d never had major surgery before so to me, this was kinda fun. They tipped the table 25° sideways and opened me up. It was rough. It was like someone just pushing your guts around and you knew but couldn’t feel it. I had these weird expanding and deflating cuffs on all my limbs to retain my circulation. 20 minutes til birth, tops. I hear the kid scream a bit, but like a scream I recognised. Then they brought him over. I recognised the face too. Biology is weird, man. Then I had a massive haemorrhage and they had to fix me up, whatever.

So I had a kid. Never really liked babies to be honest. But this baby was neat. He took liberty to have a full on babble conversation with me at 3am the morning after he was born. I remember it so clearly. I just lay there and listened to him babble. Seven years later, I still do this but I have to tell him to shut up sometimes. He wakes up, he talks and then he goes to sleep and talks. There’s no end to the shit that goes on in his brain.

Anyway, last week, I got the nausea, I got the lack of focus. I’m 32 now, I have my own business making stuff. It does better than the little website gig ever did. I’ve been through some shit, I’m definitely a better person now and I owe that mostly to being a parent. I wasn’t really committed to being a good person previously, but now I need to be and I sorta want to be. Yes I’ve done some travel and I’ve done it with the kid which is loads of fun. My partner and I aren’t together anymore but we have a good working relationship and we both love our son. People in our circles love our son. Those cynical people who generally hate kids in those circles love our son. I know those people and that’s some testament to a kid who I’m proud of.

But more than ever, I’m scared. I don’t have a supportive partner like I did way back when. The kid isn’t going to have the same dad, it may not have a dad at all but if anyone can do this, it’s probably me. Self-employed people get paid maternity leave (honestly, New Zealand is wonderful), but when you bake for a living, you don’t just get to go back to work. For 6 months next year, I’m shutting down my business. Can I even bounce back from that?

Then I get the reflection from lockdown, do I even like this lifestyle of 16 hour days? My scan happens on Friday. Maybe it doesn’t have a heartbeat, but what if it does? What if it has a strong heartbeat? Or two? One of my best buds has just had her first baby and my other bud is pregnant with twins. Earlier this year, I teased them both and now I’ve got the comeuppance. But we’ve all got kids now and that’s kind of an exciting part of growing up. Contributing some good, fun people into society is kind of exciting to me. In with the new, I say. But me? It’s always about me. The bigger picture is yes, everything is going to be okay. But short term struggles are always scary.