When it finally came time to take the pregnancy test, my first thought was not any of the inspiring lyrics from “Soon Love, Soon,” but rather, It’s way too early in the morning to find out we aren’t pregnant again!” and then, “We really ought to be doing this on a weekend because now we have to be ready to make it through a full day at work after we get the bad news.”

 People who have just met Cari and I will sometimes mistake me for the optimist in our relationship. Perhaps this is because I can appear even-tempered and positive next to Cari’s passionate and sometimes hot-headed responses. But the truth is, I seem even-tempered because I’m a tried and true pessimist. Or at best, a realist. I tend to keep my expectations low, plan for the worst, and am pleasantly surprised when the worst gives way to something unexpectedly better.

 This is why, in the days before Cari peed on the little white stick, I was busy frantically creating plans and back up plans for where the next six month’s supply of sperm would come from now that we had used up all the vials we’d purchased. Cari, meanwhile, was busy yelling at me for giving up hope on the baby she was convinced she was already carrying.

 The moment itself nearly passed me by unnoticed. Cari dragged me out of bed at 4:55 am, urging me come to the bathroom with her so she could capture that essential first pee of the day before getting ready for work. In my groggy haze, I somehow missed her pulling out the stick. One minute I was busy trying to figure out if we should wait out the torturous 3 minutes looking at the stick or sequester ourselves outside of the bathroom, and the next I suddenly noticed that Cari was staring in fixed, unblinking concentration at something on the bathroom cupboard.

 “What, what is it?” I asked her, fearing the worst… perhaps a spider, or a seizure, or maybe even a combination of the two. “What are you looking at?” I demanded, louder.

 And like that, we were pregnant.

 The I-Phone photos we snapped of that moment show our faces puffy with early morning haze, and just beginning to master the particular blend of ecstasy, shock, disbelief and terror that would become the defining feature of the months that followed.

 From the moment we saw those two pink lines it was sudden onset neurosis. First came the OCD-like checking. We checked, double-checked, and triple-checked the two lines on the stick. I snapped pictures of it and checked those throughout the day. I simply could not believe that we were pregnant. This was the one outcome that my tried and true approach of preparing for the worst had left me ill prepared for. After months of trying to conceive you could hardly say that our pregnancy was a surprise. And yet, that’s exactly what it was. Unable to believe the existence of those two lines, I re-checked them when I got home that afternoon, and kept right on checking until the next neurosis set in.

 Cari and I have often said that Anxiety is the third person in our relationship. We have it in all three models- mine, hers, and ours- and all three showed up during the first few weeks of our pregnancy.  We rode the first wave of anxiety together, equally convinced that the pregnancy wouldn’t stick.

 When you get pregnant through the infertility department, they treat the early part of your pregnancy as well, even if your infertility is the kind that is defined solely by the absence of regular access to sperm. For us, this meant Cari had to have her blood drawn every three days to confirm that we were Still Pregnant. Actually, technically, it was to confirm that her HCG levels were doubling on schedule, but for us each test result carried the full weight of Still Pregnant or Not Pregnant Anymore.

 You see, most of our friends who have been down the two-mom fertility road have experienced at least one miscarriage, and we were not about to start assuming we were the exception, only to be caught unaware. It’s not that the rate of miscarriage is actually higher in our community; it’s just that we have to be so intentional about the whole business that we’re often keenly aware of a pregnancy long before a straight couple who wasn’t trying every would be. That, and we’re probably a lot more likely to talk to each other about it, since we need the sage wisdom of those who have gone before us to even stand a chance of successfully navigating the complicated process.

 So given all of this, we somehow arrived at the misconception that worrying about losing our baby would be the same thing as preventing it. Lesson number one of pregnancy: You have absolutely no control over anything that happens from here on out.

 Yes, this could have been a lesson learned during the roller coaster of conception, but for me, it wasn’t. I managed to emerge from that process feeling magically powerful over the whole business. It was, after all, the month after I implemented my own special fertility regimen that we successfully conceived. I read everything I could on the topic and put Cari on a strict routine of a nightly bucket-sized cup of fertility tea I blended myself, snuck flax seed into everything from pancakes to stir fry, and developed a dozen new ways to prepare Kale. I had her licking liquid Vitamin D drops of the back of her hand, and swallowing a small army of overpriced food-based prenatal vitamins and omega-3 tablets. The result? When our positive pregnancy test came back I felt more confident that I had impregnated her based on these measures than I did based on the fact that I had actually pushed the plunger on the insemination syringe.

 Unfortunately, the confidence didn’t last.

 After we finally finished the 3-day cycle of having her blood drawn, waiting for the results to come back, and receiving an arbitrary HCG number only to begin waiting again, like a 28-day cycle in microcosm, we moved on to anxiously awaiting our first ultrasound.

 By that time my work life had been reduced to a series of Google searches: What is the normal range of HCG levels at 5 weeks and 4 days pregnant? What is the rate of miscarriage at 4 weeks? 5 weeks? 6 weeks? If a pregnant woman’s HCG levels triple, does that mean she is having twins? If my HCG levels don’t double, does that increase her risk of miscarriage? What are the odds of having multiples when conceiving on Clomid?

 Seven weeks and two days into our pregnancy, we arrived at Kaiser for our confirmation ultrasound. I knew the odds of finding no heartbeat, a visible heartbeat, or a both visible and audible heartbeat, and how each of these outcomes would impact our odds of miscarriage from here on out. Cari knew that her ever-present exhaustion was starting to give way to all-consuming waves of nausea, and that she didn’t have the energy to think about much else.  I don’t think either of us knew what to expect when that first image of our child projected on the screen.

 Nurse Beasely walked into the room and greeted us calmly, as though it was the most expectable thing in the world that our monthly visits to her would have resulted in this strangely terrifying miracle. As I stood to hold Cari’s hand while Nurse Beasely moved the ultrasound wand into place, the blood rushed from my head, my legs threatened to collapse, and I had the sinking suspicion that if I was this useless at our first ultrasound, I would be a complete bust at our baby’s actual birth.

 But I managed to retain consciousness, and there up on the screen was our little one, having grown from a poppy seed to a blueberry in the short time that we’d know . Now, looking for all the world like it was well on it’s way to becoming… well, a kidney bean at best, since it certainly didn’t resemble a baby, but a kidney bean with a fluttering little heart! Nurse Beasely used the keypad to zero in on the flutter, and the room was filled with the sound of a galloping horse, our baby’s heartbeat, both audible and visible.

 That first fear abated, we moved onto the next. We insisted Nurse Beasely double, triple check for other little beating hearts. We’d had at least four potentially viable eggs the month we conceived, and were equally as afraid that there were be three or more beating hearts as we were that there would be none.

 Lesson number two of pregnancy: If you are always looking forward to the next milestone to ease your fears, instead of inward to yourself, you’ll be afraid for a very long time.

 After Nurse Beasely verified the little bean was alone in Cari’s womb, she briskly asked us what ob-gyn we would like to see for our first pre-natal appointment.

 “But what about you?” Cari asked, “When will we see you again?”

 “This is it,” Nurse Beasely replied, not unkindly, “my work here is done.”

 Moments later we were standing on Piedmont Ave, booted out of the Infertility Specialty Clinic and into the land of the really, truly pregnant.

 We stared at each other in disbelief, then, and in the nearly silent hours that followed, as we tried to wrap our minds around the blob projected on the screen, lop-sided with a galloping racehorse heart, who would soon become our own very little person with a big, big role in our lives.

 It didn’t feel at all like I thought it would. Yes, excitement bloomed from the tight knots in my stomach, and love swelled in my overwhelmed heart, but mostly there was just terror, tingling from my fingertips to my toes.

 Lesson number three of pregnancy: sometimes getting exactly what you wanted is much, much harder than you ever thought it would be.