counting blue cars...

‘Perceptual vigilance’ is the phenomenon of noticing things in our environment that are immediately important to us. Like when you buy a blue car & all of a sudden you are overwhelmed by the number of blue cars you see everywhere – and many of them are the same make & model as yours too!

My husband & I have been trying to conceive our first child for 9 months now, thus my recent interest in the phenomenon of perceptual vigilance relates to pregnant women. Yes, it really does seem that every woman is pregnant but me!

After a few ‘false starts’, the ups & downs have been getting to me lately so tonight at the gym I came up with the idea to write a blog. Writing has always been my modus operandi for working through my melancholic tendencies & processing difficult life events. I have tomes of poetry dedicated to lost love, missed opportunities & even global warming!

So, there I was, at the gym (what I thought was the last safe-haven from pregnant women – surely they’re too tired to exercise?), pounding away at the treadmill watching my big boobs, still engorged from the hormones of yet another missed miscarriage, bouncing in the mirror, and out of the corner of my right eye I saw a belly. Not a rolly-polly/way-too-many-samosas/time-to-get-serious-about-my-weight/oooh-look!-Fitness-First-have-waived-the-joining-fee-this-month belly, a PREGNANT belly! Right there on the treadmill next to me! I felt one of my heart strings snap & the two newly created ends spring back like curling ribbon. I shook my head in disbelief: left-right-left-right-left, WAIT! What the hell is that? On my left hand side was yet another protruding abdomen – the tell-tale signs of recent child birth obvious; the woman’s swollen mid-section yet to shrink to it’s pre-pregnancy size.

This had to be either a conspiracy, candid camera or both! Unnerved, I took a deep breath & briefly fantasised about breaking down right there & then; falling to my knees on the treadmill & being flung unceremoniously by the conveyor belt into a howling mess in the path of the serial lungers doing laps of the stretching area.

I strengthened my resolve. What doesn’t kill me will only make me stronger (although as Manny Delgado quite rightly pointed out – there are plenty of things that don’t kill us that make us weaker!). I scanned the row of TVs in front of me & settled on The Simpsons just as it went to an ad break. The first ad was for some investment fund – a pregnant woman staring wistfully into the sky where the words ‘change’ and then ‘tomorrow’ appear in the clouds. I cranked up the volume on my iPod and set the treadmill speed to 12kph – I need to be in shape when the baby finally does come along…