EMBARAZADA

A taste of natural perfection...Majahuitas Eco Resort near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

This extract from the Preggie app's blog, Women On The Verge, is - allowing for un poquito de artistic license - the tale of how Charong and I found out we were having a baby. I am the husband, reluctant to remove the monstrous spider-crab!

EMBARAZADA

I found out I was pregnant at my best friend’s Mexican wedding. We were in the middle of nowhere, at Majahuitas, an eco-hotel on a cove in a Mexican rainforest that you could only reach by a 45-minute boat trip from Puerto Vallarta. There was no power, no phones, no wifi, no glass in the cabana windows, just crashing waves, rustling palm fronds, the warmth of the ocean breeze – and some sort of freakish, mud-colored spider-crab snapping its monstrous claws on the mosquito netting above our four-poster bed, a creature my husband insisted the hotel staff should be instructed to remove.

I’d felt strange on the flight from Los Angeles – bloated, as if I was getting my period and yet wasn’t – so I’d asked my husband to go into a farmacia in Puerto Vallarta and get me something for my headache and a pregnancy test, because we’d been trying for a baby for almost a year.


He said he’d rather not, claiming his Spanish was even worse than mine, which was true but hardly an excuse. So I had to wander the aisles, with my head pounding and my inflated belly ready to rip my skirt apart, searching for Tylenol and a Mexican pregnancy test, which promised, “Resultados en 1 minuto” – only we didn’t have a minute there in the drugstore, because we were already running late for the boat to the hotel, where Liza and her fiancée Philip, and everyone who had arrived before us, were already waiting.

So it was in the room with the freakish spider-crab, or rather the Moroccan-tiled bathroom next to it (which in true eco-hotel fashion asked you not to flush any toilet paper, but rather to fold it and leave it in a trash basket), that I peed and used the plastic wand to test whether I was, to use the wonderfully appropriate Spanish word, “embarazada” (pregnant) or “no embarazada.”

“How does it look?” my husband asked from outside the door. “Can you tell?”

I could tell, all right – or at least I could tell what the plastic wand was telling me – but at that moment my eyes were welling up with tears.

“I’m not sure,” I murmured, trying to hold back the sobs. “Come here and take a look!”


I was still mad at him for his lack of bravado with the crab, but the plastic stick in front of me, even through my teary eyes, suggested that a life might be forming inside of me, and I needed his confirmation...

Read the rest of this post at Preggie's blog Women On The Verge, and if you're pregnant or a mom, please download the private women-only social network for iOS or Android at Preggie.

Also, if you can, visit the extraordinary beauty of Majahuitas in its final 2015-2016 season. It is one of the most tranquil and special places we have ever been, and well worth the trip.

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