I am not good with tears.  So it was particularly strange, in the early days of my pregnancy, to suddenly become A Person Who Cries. 

I am not good with tears.  I rarely cry and find other people crying very alarming.  Especially at work.  If anyone starts to well up in my office, my initial response is to ignore it completely.  If that fails to stem the flow, I say ‘no’, gently but firmly.  Failing that I panic and tell them to stop. This has a much higher success rate than you might imagine.  On the occasion it fails, I propose we hold the meeting another time.  My team does a collective impression of this whole routine, screaming with laughter at my inadequacy.  

So it was particularly strange, in the early days of my pregnancy, to suddenly become A Person Who Cries.  Partly because I didn’t expect it, but also because no one else did either.  The realisation of this change dawned gradually; it came with the sickness. But it was brought into focus by a crisis. A colleague stumbled in my office clutching her mobile.  Something was very wrong; her doctor was on the line telling her that she needed to go to hospital right away.  I was outwardly calm; I spoke to the doctor, called our CEO, arranged for taxis to be booked, answered questions from her family, spoke to HR about private medical insurance.  She slumped to the ground gasping; her doctor wanted her to have a paper bag to breathe into to stop her hyperventilating, but we’re in an office not a greengrocer, so instead I tore the top off a windowed A4 envelope and handed it to her (even in this moment the oddness of this struck us both). Her sister eventually arrived and they headed off wrapped up in each other.

I passed on the news appropriately, cancelled the rest of the day’s meetings and left.  I arrived home and collapsed sobbing and shaking in the hallway.  My husband was staggered – unused to me being so lost, so overwhelmed, so unsure of myself and so completely beyond self-control. I couldn’t explain why and couldn’t calm myself. He gently guided me upstairs to bed.

Days later I was still reeling.  What the hell happened to my decisive ‘T’ for Thinking?  When the ‘Thinking’ and ‘Feeling’ Myers Briggs spectrum was described to us by our facilitator, she posed a hypothetical scenario to help us identify which we were.  It involved the possible rescue of a dog by the roadside.  Perhaps it’s because my father used to be a butcher, or perhaps it’s because of growing up developing countries. But I was truly stunned to realise that my colleagues were pulling over to load stray dogs into the boots of their cars.  Yet now those ‘Feeling’ types that I’d always found largely mystifying were suddenly the people who made sense.  

It took several more weeks to discover the upside of these heightened emotions.  It happened when I was in Rome, lying down between all-day meetings and a work dinner in a classically grand yet shabby hotel room, and I felt something stir inside me.  Slowly I realised what it was: the first conscious flutter of another, separate being.  I remember trying to grasp hold of the feeling, the way you reach for your wedding day to last forever. Overwhelmed by a strange love, unfamiliar and yet certain, I bounced to dinner in a cloud of secret joy that not even the copious Campari swigging of my colleagues could crush.