I Knew I Was Pregnant Before The Test

On March 26th, I wrote in my journal, “I think I might be pregnant.” And despite surrounding myself with confident, intuitive women both in real life and in myth, I still questioned myself.

How bold of me to know I was pregnant before something external told me so? And what if I was wrong?

I went on to write, “I feel like that is a surreal option for me. I woke up at 3 am with a pinch in my lower belly and immediately googled if that means I could be pregnant. I’ve spent the day with hyper-focused awareness on my belly and womb space and it feels different than it has before, but is that the amazing superfoods of Bali? I’ve been stopping and zoning in when I feel any sensation in my stomach. But is it constipation? Full of water and smoothies? AND I spent yoga class grappling with the anxieties that are not new to me, as familiar to me as the yoga poses I’ve practiced many times before. I hear the chorus - you can’t have a baby right now, you don’t even have a real job, you should’ve tried harder to support a family, what if you’re too tired to work? When will you focus? For some reason, this time, these questions felt important, like they were rising to the surface to give me one (last?) chance to look at and clear them.”

Four days later I would take a pregnancy test and the line would be too faint to recognize. Another week later I would take the test that boldly told me what my body already knew. I then watched myself be able to celebrate and feel sure. But in this there was a quiet voice inside that said ‘I’ve been showing you this, I’ve been trying to tell you.”

There were other instances - butterflies in my stomach, insatiable hunger, a deeper level of tiredness. There was a yoga class where I nearly slept through the whole thing. Each time I had an excuse for what else it could be because, how could my body know something that a test couldn’t detect?

Actually, how often do we know things and question ourselves so deeply? How often do we let fears arise and distract us? How often do we sink into the vulnerability of facing what it means if we are right? What if I listened to my 3 am callings that night instead of turning to my phone, to a test, to waiting for someone else to tell me what was happening?

I see this happen all the time. People who know things that they “shouldn’t”. I see it in birth - women who just know they want or don’t want something. Or know that something is wrong, or something is right. I also see them give away their intuition to a test result, to their aunt telling them a story that scares them, to an AI google result that pulls up a study that they don’t research, but read just enough to prove themselves wrong. And hey, I’m an advocate for research, facts, and science, but there’s something bigger at play here that I fear we’re losing quickly, I fear that I’m loosing it quickly, and I need it now more than ever.

I don’t shame the steps I took those weeks. Google reminded me of feeling implantation, and the positive test was ultimately a sweet coming home gift for us. Looking back on that journal entry just gave me a spark of remembering and questioning the power, and an almost immediate need for answers from external sources to make me feel confident and validated.

As I sink further into this journey, I question this more. I think there will be multiple things that Google can’t answer. The intuition that will tell me what works in labor, what my postpartum body needs, what my baby needs, and how to find balance in our family will be far beyond google-able. This might just be the initiation that allows me to go off the books and into the 3 am lessons that my body lays out for me.