Erin Lawless - The One with the White Wedding

Despite the warning, Daisy flinched as the woman squirted a clear stream of gel from a tube directly onto the skin of her exposed abdomen; it felt like a knife of ice. The hard head of the sonographer’s wand wasn’t much better; it pressed insistently into the softness of Daisy’s belly like it was trying to iron out the folds of skin there. Somewhere, deep inside, her supposed foetus was in there, and according to the pregnancy app she’d downloaded, currently the size of a lime. Daisy held her breath, with no idea why.

The sonographer’s brow creased ever-so-slightly as she peered at the screen, maddeningly angled away from Daisy. The wand pressed in a little harder, rolling over from right to left, and then back again, before being abruptly withdrawn. Daisy felt hard, spiking panic gripping at every part of her. Oh shit. Shit. She’d only known about this baby for two weeks. She’d not really been thinking of it as real, if she was honest, but suddenly – with that faint furrow of concern between the nurse’s eyebrows – it was the realest, realest thing that could or would ever exist for her.

“Okay, Daisy,” the woman repeated, all cheerful business. “Now what I need for you to do is to bend your legs, bring your heels up to your bum for me, then lift your hips and give everything a good shake.”

Daisy, who was halfway through complying with the instructions to bring her feet up to her middle before the nurse got to the end of her sentence, almost fell off the table.

“A good shake?” she echoed, panicked. “Why? Is there something wrong?” Was this how they encouraged along miscarriages of unviable pregnancies? Surely not. Daisy felt sick. For the millionth time in the last fourteen days she cursed every single alcoholic drink she’d consumed, every ibuprofen pill she’d popped, all of the hundred foetus-unfriendly things she may have done while she was still unknowing.

“Nothing’s wrong,” the sonographer assured her immediately, putting a capable hand to one of Daisy’s knees to gently force her legs and feet back into the instructed stance. “Baby’s just in an awkward position, and I just want to see if we can make them move around and say hi!”

Still numb with anxiety, Daisy did as she was told, lifting her hips from the bed and waggling them repeatedly from left to right.

“Okay, let’s try again.” Once again the wand pressed in unrelentingly. “That’s a little better!” the sonographer said, brightening, before reaching out with the hand that wasn’t holding the wand to push the screen on its bracket so that Daisy could see too.

It was exactly as she’d expected at first. A nondescript grey landscape, like the kind she’d seen a thousand times in movies, or on her Facebook newsfeed. The pale shape in the centre twitched and moved – moved! – and suddenly Daisy realised she could see an arm, could see the little slope of a nose.

“Okay, so this is the head,” the nurse confirmed, clicking a button and zooming in on the relevant part of the image. Daisy realised she was craning up on her elbows a little, desperate to see. “And legs, and arms – see one of them is up by the side of the face?” Oh, yes, Daisy saw. “That little black area in the middle there, that’s baby’s stomach. They’ll already be swallowing and passing the amniotic fluid, so that’s very good. And I’m just going to log the heartrate, but I can already tell it’s about right.”

And Daisy started to cry: big, deep, unladylike, gasps – because there it was, the baby she hadn’t even known had been growing inside of her for these long weeks, the true cause of her endless fatigue, her loss of appetite, the “stomach flu” that had seen her off sick from work with her head down the toilet. And it was fine. Its little heart was right there, bright and flickering and strong and fine .

“Okay, so from the crown to rump length, I’m putting you at… 11 weeks and 6 days,” the sonographer confirmed with a smile. “So that will put conception back around, ooh, September 20th or thereabouts.”

Daisy’s eyes fluttered closed. Darren’s birthday weekend. Well, they’d done the drunken duvet dance several times that night after dinner, so she guessed the odds were always going to have been that way inclined. Oh god. How was she ever going to look this child in the face whilst knowing that it was conceived during a stay at a self-advertised “Sex Hotel” in Blackpool that had had a mirror stuck to the ceiling?

The sonographer chatted away happily, snapping pictures of the baby, zooming in and away and from different angles. Daisy drank it all in, ignoring the rub and burn as the lubricating gel ran thin and the ultrasound wand pressed across her, cry-laughing as she noticed how the baby squirmed away as if the pressure was bothering it. She couldn’t believe how much it was moving – a bad dancer already, just like its mommy! – yet she couldn’t feel the slightest thing. It was like a dream.

“Just a few more measurements now and we’re all done. And you can go to the loo!” For all Daisy didn’t want the appointment to end, this was welcome news: the appointment letter had been quite insistent that she come to the scan with a full bladder and she was more than a little uncomfortable at this point.

“Say, see you in two months, baby!” the sonographer trilled – before withdrawing the wand and leaving Daisy feeling oddly bereft – pulling the blue medical paper from the elastic of her underwear and swabbing up the smeared remnants of the gel on Daisy’s stomach with it. Her skin still felt tacky and cold under all her winter layers as Daisy – stumbling and shell-shocked – exited the ultrasound suite. The slightly peaky-looking, I-need-the-toilet-jiggling woman sat in the waiting area outside shot her a conspiratorial smile. The husband or partner glanced up from his laminate-bound parenting tome to expectantly watch the suite doors, not-so-patiently awaiting his turn to greet his offspring.

Darren. She had to tell him. Daisy’s palms suddenly felt very sweaty. She slipped the tiny square sonogram images the nurse had given to her into her planner to keep them safe. She pulled out her mobile phone. Shamefully, shamefully, she’d already deleted his number. She’d have to Facebook message him. Poke. Hey, remember me? Smiley face. Well, you certainly left me something to remember you by…

Well. Obviously her opening approach needed some careful crafting.

Heading in the direction of the toilets, hoping she had enough time left before her appointment for her blood tests, Daisy opened up her WhatsApp and tapped into Nora’s Bridesmaids group for ease.

Big news , she typed out to her friends. Immense, large-scale news. Immediate discussion mandatory. Dinner this week? xx

I was the maid of honour at a wedding where the bride and groom had written their own vows, and my mate gave them to me to look after until they were needed. Needless to say, beautiful empire-line bridesmaids’ dresses do not have pockets, so I safely placed her beautifully written words of love into my cleavage whilst helping her with last minute touch-ups… Halfway through the ceremony it was time for the vows. My friend stared at me for a full minute before I remembered. So, right there at the front, next to a priest, I had to reach in-between my boobs, only to find the folded paper had slipped out of place and moved, making for an awkward, terribly silent few moments of me digging around.