- Mom, looks like my diarrhea medicine's arrived.
- It's not funny if it's not true.
I don't know what to believe with you.
- I'm not lying.
Like so many people at the beginning of the pandemic
I found myself moving in with my parents
once my New York City lease ended.
Yeah, it was embarrassing.
But I know I was lucky that I even had that as an option.
But as an adult, living with your parents is different,
especially when some have lost jobs,
and some are working from home all the time.
It's just like a lot of everyone being on top of each other.
I'm living with my parents,
and just when I think things can't get more complicated,
this happened.
Okay, so my period has not come.
So I just went out and bought like five pregnancy tests.
I don't think you really need to take that many.
Let's do this.
You see that (beeps), two lines.
It just appears that I am indeed pregnant.
I'm pregnant, I live with my parents.
That's gonna be funny to tell the baby one day, right?
Yes, that's right.
I found out I was pregnant and I had to hide it
from my roommates, who happened to be my parents.
(jazzy music)
Before we go into that, let me backtrack a little.
Because, as anyone knows, to get pregnant
in the traditional sense it takes two to tango.
And yes, my tango partner was my husband, Mike.
He also moved out when our lease ended
and in with his in-laws.
The pregnancy, was it planned?
Well, that's like debatable because yeah,
I eventually wanted to get pregnant,
like in two years or something.
You know, post pandemic, post living with parents.
That was the plan.
So let me just say that if you thought
there was a grace period, after you switch off
contraceptive pills to another method, you're wrong.
Take it from me and my belly.
There is no grace period.
Anyway, so my husband and I find out I'm pregnant
and we freak out.
So we decide to wait to see if the pregnancy is viable.
Now with any pregnancy, most people decide to wait
to tell anybody till the end of the first trimester.
And that's because up to a quarter
of pregnancies end in miscarriage.
And most miscarriages occur during the first trimester.
But also, we needed some privacy,
which was a lot easier said than done.
Alcohol, it's a dead giveaway.
Once you reach a certain age as a woman
and you refuse a drink, everyone around you is gonna ask,
oh what, are you pregnant?
Yeah.
So I did not wanna get that question.
My big problem was my parents are a big fan of nightcaps.
Like every night and also afternoon.
My family likes to drink.
So avoiding alcohol was a real challenge.
We go to kind of an outdoor,
socially distanced dinner at my cousin's.
And my one cousin's making margaritas.
And I'm being given a margarita.
So what do we do?
I pretend to sip the drink throughout the night.
And my husband strategically switches his drink,
which is nearly empty, with mine.
End of night my husband is drunk, not blackout but gray.
So we realized that wasn't a method
we could really continue with.
So we developed a second method
of strategically only drinking canned beverages,
beers, hard kombucha, ciders.
So when my mom would offer me a drink, I take the cider.
I'd soon after go to the bathroom, dump it out,
put a funnel in there,
and replace it with something that looks similar.
So like with a cider, I would pour in some apple juice
that I had hidden underneath the sink.
And then I would drink that the rest of the night.
Although my mom was getting me my favorite cider,
and so I felt particularly bad dumping it down,
feeding it to whatever sewer people live deep down there.
But the ruse was a success.
There was a second telltale sign
of pregnancy I had to cover up.
And that was weight gain.
Now not everyone gets that in the first trimester,
but I did.
Fortunately that one was a little easier
to just blame on the situation.
It's the pandemic.
Yeah, I ordered a bunch of jeans in a new size.
And then that kind of ended the conversation
'cause no one's gonna inquire further, because that's rude.
Vomiting is the third telltale sign, aka morning sickness.
Although I don't know why it's named that
unless you also consider the night and the afternoon
the morning, because morning sickness occurs all the time.
After a few weeks, I find myself vomiting.
So I have to hide my frequent bathroom trips.
I dramatically order a bunch of diarrhea medication,
which I open in front of my mom.
Mom, looks like my diarrhea medicine's arrived.
And make a big deal of.
Thank god my diarrhea medicine is finally here, huh.
So that she knows there's a reason
why I'm always in the bathroom.
And then when I'm in the bathroom
I'm either playing a podcast,
or I've put some water on to kind of hide the retching.
It was horrible, but it worked.
After all of that, I'm pretty confident
I'm gonna be able to make it the full 13 weeks
with this ruse, lying, keeping the secret.
I feel really great about it,
until I make this one really dumb, really huge mistake.
So one day in particular, I'm feeling very tired and lazy,
which is another pregnancy sign that I blame on medication.
I text my husband, can you bring me that pregnancy book?
Only, I didn't just text my husband Mike.
I texted a chain with Mike and my mom.
So he replies to me, uh, did you mean to do that?
I am horrified.
I want to cry.
I have put so much time and work into this,
and I ruined it all with like a really dumb text.
I didn't even spell pregnancy correctly.
I didn't spell pregnancy correctly.
Maybe I can cover it up.
So I text, haha, just kidding.
I meant producer book, because I am a producer.
So you know, maybe, I don't know.
I don't know what a producer book would be.
But I texted that and (beeps)
I didn't feel like that covered it.
So I'm like, you know, okay Sarah,
you have to face what you've done.
You gotta go talk to your mother.
So I slink towards the kitchen to just come clean to my mom.
And I see that she's standing there,
with her back to me, washing the dishes.
Her phone is behind her sitting on the table.
It appears to be untouched.
My adrenaline's pumping.
I grab the phone.
I run to the bathroom.
I find the text message chain, delete, delete.
And then I come back out quietly,
and I put the phone back exactly where it was.
She doesn't notice.
I breathe a sigh of relief.
I had so, oh (beeps), her computer.
Her computer gets all the iMessages from her phone.
So it's gonna be there.
She's gonna open her computer, see it, and figure it out.
So I find her computer in her room.
Take it out.
I again, go to the bathroom, probably to engage in what,
she must assume, is another bout of diarrhea.
And I attempt to delete the messages.
Only, I don't have the password to her laptop.
And I know I only have a certain number of tries.
So I try password birthday, capital P password anniversary.
You know, it's not working.
My sister's name plus the year exclamation point.
It works, which also I'm like,
my sister's name, not my name?
But whatever, it doesn't matter.
I'm in the computer, I find the messages.
I can't figure out how to delete them individually.
So I just delete everything.
I just hope she thinks it's
like an update that wiped everything out.
I get off the computer, flush the toilet to cover my tracks,
and then I put it back where it was.
And then I'm like, Sarah, you just got (beeps).
She has an Apple watch.
The texts would've gone there and she's wearing the watch.
So I wait a little bit, and I walk over to her.
I don't know if she did see the text,
I don't know if she'd come right out and say it.
So I start off by saying, mom,
I've gotta come clean about something.
And then I stop, and I look at her.
Like giving her time to fill it in.
If she saw the text
maybe she would just say, you're pregnant.
Or maybe more likely she'd say something like,
oh what, pregnancy brain?
You forgot to do something.
But no, silence.
She just looks at me, completely clueless.
So I'm just like, I spilled soda on your duvet.
I'll get you a new one if it doesn't come out.
But she's like, okay, and she goes back to washing.
And I'm like, I can't believe it.
I can't believe I just got away with all that.
But I have to be smarter and I have to be more careful.
And so I am.
So fast forward a few weeks.
All right, we're about to go find out
if what's inside me is a baby.
My first trimester is about over.
Baby still looks healthy.
Baby exists.
I decide to tell my parents.
I wait till they go to visit my sister in another state.
You know, my sister, my mom's password.
So we're doing a Zoom call,
and I surprise her, and I tell her.
- Nuh uh!
Nuh uh!
- Really, really? - Really.
- [Mom] You're not kidding, right?
- No, it's real. - No I'm not.
- It's real.
- And I accidentally texted Mike
and you on a text message chain.
- Even if you had not deleted that pregnancy thing,
I would never, I would not have thought anything of it.
- Were you not suspicious at all from that?
- No.
- I mean she has no idea.
My secret was safe.
It didn't come out.
Because she thinks I'm a total lightweight with drinking
she wouldn't have thought twice if I had refused alcohol.
Also, she said, she just thinks I go to the bathroom a lot.
So I didn't even need to make up a diarrhea excuse.
Yeah, in retrospect I wish I hadn't come up with that lie.
Anyway, few months later,
Mike and I move into our own place again.
We have our own privacy.
And we tell the news to a wider friend circle,
so we're not keeping any secrets from anyone anymore.
Literally not anyone because you know now.
Like you and everyone else on the internet knows.
So yeah, I'm pregnant.
So that's it.
Now it's out there.
No more lies, no more deception.
No more lies about the deceptions and I can just be excited.
And that feels really good. (laughs)
I think I just got a kick.
(peppy music)