To tell or not to tell

Way back when my husband and I started "trying," we had a discussion about when we would start telling people that I was knocked up, if such a miraculous event might actually occur. I had always thought I wouldn't want to tell anyone, not even family, until the first trimester was over. My husband, on the other hand, was of the call-everyone-you-know-before-the-pee-stick-is-dry school. We hashed it out, and eventually settled on a compromise: Tell immediate family and close friends (as Julie once wisely put it, everyone whose support we'd want in case of something going wrong) after we saw a heartbeat on ultrasound; tell everyone else after the first trimester. ("Compromise" sounds so civilized--actually, it was more like my husband saying in exasperation, "Fine, just tell me when I'm allowed to say anything.")

When we got the first real confirmation that, you know, something good might be happening, we reaffirmed this plan. (Of course, I made an exception for my friends inside the computer.)

We lasted one day.

My husband cracked first. Monday afternoon, he called me at work, all sheepish and apologetic. "I told M," he said. "I couldn't help it, I was dying, I had to tell someone." M is a friend of ours who lives on the other side of the country and is not in touch with any of our other friends or family. So, okay, I gave him that one. He didn't have the friends-inside-the-computer outlet that I have.

Then yesterday, a few hours after I got the results of my second beta, my friend F called.* She's one of the few people who know about our infertility issues, and she knew I was doing injectibles. When she asked how it was going, I paused for a second, then broke down and told her. I started crying when I said the words, I couldn't believe they were coming out of my mouth.

So since the seal had already been broken, after much discussion, my husband and I decided to go ahead and tell our parents and siblings now. We called them all last night--our parents were overjoyed, of course. We warned them that it was still way too early to tell anyone else (MIL: "So what are you, a few months?" Husband: "No Mom, a few weeks.") but that we wanted them to know.

It was the right thing for us, I know. (Your situation and preferences may be quite different, of course.) Our logic: Would it be any less painful to get bad news if no one else knew? No. Would it be any less painful at next week's ultrasound versus the week after versus the week after that? No. And if something does happen (again, as Julie put it so well--wish I could find the post), I at least want there to be some acknowledgment that, for a short time at least, this ray of hope existed.

The next hurdle is a family wedding this weekend, where I must try to conceal my ridiculous bloat and evade nosy questions. I'm also concerned about how much longer it will be before someone at work notices and says something. My husband had a novel suggestion: If anyone asks if I'm pregnant, I should say that I'm bloated from fertility treatments. This is technically true, and has the bonus advantage of making the other person feel really crappy for asking! Not sure I can stomach outing myself to nosy relatives like that, though. Seems like it might just invite other unwanted questions and comments.


*F and I talked about the night I wrote about in that post--she said she had a sense how rough it was for me, and she didn't know what to do, and she felt so terrible for not being a more sensitive friend. I told her the truth, which is that my whole life had become about not being pregnant, and there wasn't anything she or anyone could have done to have made that better for me. So we're okay now, more or less.