Disclaimer: Ghostbusters © Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. Extreme Ghostbusters © Fil Barlow, Jeff Kline and Richard Raynis. The Spengler Twins, here mentioned but not named, © Fritz Baugh. All other original characters © the author i.e. me.

Extreme Ghostbusters: The New Mother's Handbook: Pregnancy

Stage One: Shock

The first thing Kylie felt was surprise. Then she was quietly very annoyed with herself for feeling this way. Why the hell was she surprised? She'd just done a pregnancy test. You didn't go out and buy a pregnancy test unless you suspected something. She'd started to worry after a week. She'd let herself go to two. And now she was surprised. God, pregnancy really did turn your brains to mush.

Then she felt stumped. She wasn't worried yet, not about herself or her lover. It didn't occur to her to wonder how he'd react. Before she even really knew what she was doing she had gone through to the bedroom and said, "I'm pregnant."

Eduardo was clearly very much more surprised than she had been. He stared at her with his mouth open for what seemed a very long time, though neither of them could have put a figure on it. Then he said the most unoriginal thing he could: "Are you sure?"

"Well," said Kylie. She waved the white stick vaguely in the air. "I did a test."

"Can I see it?"

What? "All right."

She walked over to the bed and handed him the stick. It didn't seem to bother him that she'd peed on it about four or five minutes earlier. Perhaps he didn't realise. He wasn't being particularly clever about any of this.

"Why are you so surprised?" she asked, as he frowned at the stick, trying to make sense of the blue-line code while the instructions sat out of reach in the bathroom. "We've been having uninterrupted sex for five weeks."

He stared at her. "Have we?"

Honestly, he had no idea. Kylie wondered whether it was just him, or whether all men lost the ability to count to four whenever sex came into the equation. It really wasn't difficult: three weeks on, one week off. (Her friend Janine said Egon was the same when she'd fallen pregnant with their twins, and Egon was a man whose capabilities Kylie knew to be far beyond kindergarten mathematics - but she wasn't to learn anything of other people's experiences before Stage Three.)

"That good, was it?" she said, in response to Eduardo's apparent lapse of memory.

"Don't be like that," said Eduardo. He indicated the stick. "Are these things reliable?"

"I don't really know," said Kylie. "I heard they sometimes say you aren't pregnant if you are, but I don't think they do it the way other around. I'll get it confirmed by the doctor."

Stage Two: Tenterhooks

Kylie didn't know which "doctor" she was supposed to go to about this, and so went to her GP, which turned out to be the right thing to do.

"How pregnant?" asked Kylie, when she received the news, which was delivered very tentatively - her doctor knew she was still in full time education.

"Well," he said. "I'll have to refer you to obstetrics for that."

And so…

"Five weeks," said the obstetrician, a typically patronising woman somewhere in her thirties, only about a week after the initial test in the bathroom. So it would have been four weeks then. Hardly anything. "It's best not to tell people until twelve weeks."

"Why?" asked Eduardo. But Kylie knew why.

"Risk of miscarriage," the obstetrician smiled pleasantly.

For Kylie, the news that she was pregnant still hadn't sunk in, and yet her heart seemed to skip a beat at the word "miscarriage". She really hadn't been planning on having a baby - possibly ever, but certainly not now. Getting herself pregnant right at the start of the academic year meant that she'd be cutting it fine; finals could well fall uncomfortably close to the birth. And what about after the birth? The whole… family thing was to follow. Kylie and Eduardo had been together for just over two years, known each other for three - it was much too soon to know whether she wanted it to be forever. He said he did, and she loved him with a white hot flame that burned at her very centre, but what did any of it really mean when you were only twenty-one? But that word… it was horrible.

The next seven weeks felt like a tightrope. Neither of them felt that they could talk about how the prospect of a baby was making them feel, in case it all just went away. Kylie even refused to believe she was going to have a baby at all. The way that woman said "Risk of miscarriage", she'd made it sound like at least a fifty percent possibility. And at the end of the twelve weeks - then what? Would the risk disappear entirely? Of course it wouldn't, Kylie knew that really, but none of her thinking on this had been sensible.

And then one day she woke up, and she was twelve weeks pregnant. At last, her body had given her the green light.

Stage Three: Hysteria

People reacted in so many different ways, they just had to laugh about it. Their friend Garrett's initial response had been, "Eww!" Then, "Whoa. That's… whoa." Kylie quite understood. She couldn't imagine herself and Eduardo as parents either.

Apparently their friend Roland could. He was so excited, you'd think the baby was his own grandchild. Interestingly, both Egon and Janine reacted similarly to Kylie's father, who received the news over the phone. They told him first, and then when they arrived at the firehouse and told Janine as soon as they saw her at reception, she was able to give them an idea of how Steve Griffin's face must have looked during that unnerving silence.

All three of them - Steve, Janine and later Egon - had asked: "How do you feel about it?"

Kylie didn't want to say, "It hasn't really sunk in yet." But that was how she felt, and from Eduardo's lack of communication on the matter, she thought he must feel the same way. Now she understood entirely why cliché came about. Phrases such as this became overused simply because they were true every time.

"Fantastic," said Eduardo. (To her father, on the phone, Kylie had said, "All right.")

"Oh." At this, Janine's face broke into a smile. "Well, congratulations!" This followed by hugs all round.

"Do you?" murmured Kylie, as they made their way upstairs. "Feel fantastic, I mean."

Eduardo wrapped both of his arms around her - not ideal for walking, but they managed it all right - and kissed the top of her head. "Of course."

However, in spite of being so happy about it, Eduardo was reluctant to tell his own family that Kylie was currently incubating a new relative for them. By the time he got around to it, Kylie wasn't twelve weeks pregnant anymore. It was getting on for fourteen, and she had to give him a little nudge or three. She wanted to get on and make plans. They'd had a two-year relationship and weren't even living together, and now the promise of a baby seemed a good reason to take that next step. But, as Kylie pointed out, before they could do anything about it they'd have to communicate to some extent with Eduardo's landlord, who also happened to be Eduardo's brother.

"You were happy when Beth told you she was expecting Kevin, weren't you?" said Kylie.

"Yeah, sure," said Eduardo. "But she was twenty-five and she'd been married to Carlos for two years."

He practised on his mother, of whom he was slightly less afraid, and not being able to see her was a big help. He had a beer first ("Just because you're not pregnant - what if I'd wanted to do that?"), and then dialled. He looked extremely disappointed when she actually answered the phone, and then proceeded to talk to her in Spanish. Kylie listened, with absolutely no idea what was being said. Had he even told her yet? Just what was the Spanish for pregnant?

After a good twenty minutes, she learned that the Spanish for pregnant was a very long and convoluted word, that Eduardo blurted out very suddenly: "embarazada". It was the last thing he said before slamming the phone down. (Later, Kylie found a dictionary and looked up the word "embarrass", whereby she learned that it was Portuguese in origin rather than Latin, allowing her to feel somewhat reassured that Spanish speaking people did not necessarily equate pregnancy with embarrassment.)

By the time the phone started ringing, Eduardo was already out of the door and making his way down the metal staircase. He lived above his brother's garage, while Carl occupied the rest of the house with his wife and son. By the time Kylie caught up with Eduardo, he was knocking on the door. Astonishingly, it seemed he would rather report the folly of his raging hormones to his brother than answer the phone to his mother.

Kevin described the news as "Awesome!", which Kylie found surprising in a twelve-year-old boy, while Beth remained silent but visibly delighted. Carl, rather predictably, did a lot of shouting. Kylie watched Eduardo's unflinching face and body language as he was hit violently with words and phrases such as "finances", "education", "haven't thought this through", "carelessness" and "keep it in your pants".

"Carl," said Kylie.

He looked at her sharply.

"I was there too, you know."

"But this is fantastic news!" Beth exclaimed suddenly. She hugged Eduardo first, and then wrapped her arms around Kylie and held her like she was a baby herself. "Carl doesn't mean it - he's just surprised." (Kylie had never known anyone to react so violently to surprise.) "You'll ask us if you need anything, won't you? Where are you going to be living? I'd feel better if you moved in with us, Kylie. Please do - I won't give you any help unless you want it, I promise."

Carl didn't argue, but Kylie didn't accept right away. Now that they knew, she was going to have sit down with a calculator and a good deal of knowledge about the cost of rent for this place and for her attic room, their monthly outgoings, their monthly income and the cost of all the hundreds of essential items that made even wealthy people bemoan the expensiveness of babies. And Eduardo was going to help her whether he liked it or not.

They were about to start having a "serious talk" about their plans when Eduardo's mother suddenly turned up. As far as Kylie could gather, it was the custom for Carlota Rivera's visits to begin with a stream of very shrill Spanish directed at the collarbone of her younger son, who was considerably taller than she was (that this woman had given birth to Carl, who could never have been exactly a small baby, was just incredible). This time was no exception. Kylie thought she was probably hearing the Spanish for phrases such as "sanctity of marriage" and "wedding night", but perhaps that was unfair - she shouldn't presume to guess Carlota's exact feelings on this.

Then suddenly the shrieking stopped, and Eduardo was being hugged by his mother. And then Carlota went over to Kylie, held onto her and wept. Kylie didn't quite know what to do. She just stood immobile while Carlota sobbed and muttered, "Mi nieta pequeña!"

"You don't know it's a girl," said Eduardo.

His mother let go of Kylie, turned to him and said in extremely mother-ish tones, "Have I ever been wrong?"

It wasn't until after Carlota had gone to make a fuss of her other, rather more mature grandchild that Kylie asked, "Has she?"

"Has she what?" said Eduardo.

"Ever been wrong."

"Oh, well, she said Kevin was gonna be a boy, and she says she knew she was gonna have boys both times. But she can't know for sure."

"Do you have a preference?" asked Kylie, hoping that the answer would be no. She would feel terribly pressured otherwise, besides which she'd worry about procreating with somebody who minded that much about the gender of his child.

"Of course not," he said, and then he did something that Kylie found strangely touching, even though it was corny. He knelt down in front of her, wrapped his arms around her and pressed his ear against her lower abdomen. "We'll love it whatever."

He really did seem genuinely excited at the prospect of becoming a father, which Kylie reluctantly admitted to herself she never would have expected. He had just always seemed so… so anti-responsibility. But, she thought, that didn't seem to apply when it came to people that he loved. He'd go out of his way for Beth and Kevin, she could tell he adored his mother in spite of all the arguments, and it was obvious that Kylie herself was loved wholly and passionately by him.

"What did she say to you?" she asked.

"What?" He looked up at her. "Oh… more or less what Carlos said."

"She's less pissed off than he is."

"Yeah, I know. She cried."

And then they both burst out laughing, Eduardo still kneeling on the floor. It wasn't funny, really, and yet it was. People had been shocked, angered, thrilled, disgusted, deeply cynical - and it was funny because, quite honestly, they weren't prepared for this at all. They had absolutely no idea what they were doing. Kylie strongly suspected that at some point before the baby was born, she would be gripped with an icy sense of utter dread. She had no idea how to look after a baby. But for now, May seemed like a lifetime away. She simply couldn't believe that she was ever going to give birth.

It wasn't funny - at least at first - when Kylie's mother came over, having heard the news from somewhere. Her mother, possibly? Kylie didn't know - she certainly hadn't told Jill that she was going to become a grandmother. Things like that - major events in her only child's life - had never been of much interest to that woman.

Kylie was at home alone, and afterwards didn't remember much about the encounter, except that it made her cry most prolifically. Eduardo was understandably worried when he came home and found her. It was about ten minutes after he'd asked her what was upsetting her so much that she was finally able to hiccup out the simple word, "Jill."

His next question was, "What did she say?" The answer this time took considerably longer than ten minutes, not so much because she was crying - the way he was holding onto her was encouraging her to stop that - but because she just couldn't remember.

"Something about I have no idea what I'm doing," she said after a while. "I'm stupid and careless and she really thought I'd break the trend of young mothers in our family… just look what happened to the rest of them… I think she might have told me to have an abortion."

She felt Eduardo's arms tighten around her. She didn't know he felt about abortion generally, but in this case the very idea was clearly upsetting him. Interestingly, though, she wasn't too upset because she just couldn't imagine it happening. Even when she wasn't sure she wanted a baby, simply getting rid of it had never crossed her mind.

"Forget her," Kylie said at length. When she had been on her own with her cat Pagan (an addition to the household that Carl had been less than thrilled about), it had all seemed terrible; but now that she was with somebody she loved, it didn't seem to matter at all. "Sorry about the tears."

"Don't be sorry."

"I don't care what she thinks - I never cried at anything she said to me before. Well, not after she left. God, I feel so stupid," and she laughed, because laughter is the hemlock of embarrassment. "I can't believe I went all weepy - I'm turning into your mother."

"Oh God, don't do that," said Eduardo, and he laughed too.

Stage Four: Euphoria

Another cliché: the magical ultrasound moment. It happened the second time. Kylie had already had a scan in Stage Two, and seen a dot, which had only made her all the more doubtful that there actually was a baby inside her. But now… well, it didn't look quite like a baby, but she could definitely see how it might turn into one. So, apparently, could Eduardo. He said, "I didn't know it'd look like a person so soon!"

"Oh," the patronising obstetrician said, "the basics are all formed in the first few weeks."

"Yeah…" murmured Kylie, staring at what was most definitely a hand. The first time, she hadn't really believed the dot was inside her - it was just an image on the screen. Now she believed, because she could actually feel movement, and it corresponded exactly with the movement of the image before her. She still didn't feel quite ready for any of this, but she now realised that she was going to have to start feeling ready very, very soon.

The next few weeks saw them sharing the attitude of a woman in a tampon advert, who feels brave enough to go to a party in a tight white mini-skirt. Every word they spoke to each other was double-underlined with the subtext, We can do this! Carl still had his reservations. Whenever he saw either of them he came out with a new, "What about…?" But Kylie and Eduardo pooh-poohed them all. There were no problems at all. They were going to be the most competent parents ever! They had baby clothes, a baby bath, a baby buggy, they had a baby everything - and they weren't even starving. They had a budget, for heaven's sake! And they had love. So much love. Eduardo couldn't wait. Kylie couldn't wait either, until she thought about the bit in between the waiting and holding the baby in her arms. Then she didn't mind waiting at all. The actual birth… best not to think about it, Beth had said. Once it starts, you just get on with it, and worrying about it in the meantime doesn't do any good at all.

Stage Five: Fear

"Do you want to know the sex?" asked the obstetrician, the next time Kylie was lying on her back with cold jelly smeared all over her abdomen. The baby's size was beginning to alarm her now. Beth's advice was all very well, but Kylie would have felt more reassured hearing it from a mother with a pelvis as small as hers.

A very long and convoluted discussion followed, and then at last Kylie said, "Yes, all right, tell us. Please."

The obstetrician smiled that patronising smile of hers - they probably made you practise it at medical school - and said, "It's a girl."

Later, at home, Eduardo confessed to being glad. Boys had their merits, of course, but he'd be happy not to be the one who had to guide the child through puberty. Kylie gaped at him in amazement when he said that. Puberty was worrying him? Puberty? How could he think that far ahead? What about birth? What about feeding and bathing? What about inoculations? What about sleepless nights? What about the terrifying possibility that the baby would refuse to be comforted and cry so much that her mother was gripped with a temporary madness and shake her to death?

Eduardo told her that Kevin had recently been coming to him with embarrassing questions, which made sense. He was twelve-and-a-half - about the age that Kylie had been when she started menstruating. And then, of course, she started worrying about puberty too. So Eduardo was happy to sit back and let her deal with it, was he? Well, he'd have to - any right minded girl would sooner talk to a stranger about that sort of thing than her own father. That was why it had been difficult for Kylie. Jill was long gone by then, and Kylie realised that she would actually rather talk to her feckless, uninterested, un-loved mother about her body than to the father who did so much for her.

She had Grandma Rose, of course. Well… it wasn't ideal. Grandma Rose was a great-grandmother, and her daughter - Steve's mother - was old-fashioned enough. But Rose was also the person Kylie was closest to, and the only person she felt comfortable talking to. It wasn't so bad. Rose was understanding and reassuring. All right, so she said things like "monthly visitor" and "the marital bed", but so what? It was all still valuable information; euphemisms still told you what you needed to know, and Kylie had got through it just like everybody else.

And then it hit her. It really hit her. She was going to have a baby. She was actually going to have a baby. She and Eduardo had put their money together and bought their daughter everything she'd need for the first… year? Six months? Six weeks? She didn't even know. She'd done everything she thought she possibly could. She'd read books. She'd been to antenatal classes. Her breasts were leaking an unpleasantly sticky clear liquid that promised to be milk once the baby started sucking. It wasn't milk until after breast-feeding actually started - she hadn't known that, but she did now. She'd made Eduardo read it all too. She'd made sure they were both prepared. Damn it, they were still solemnly sitting down together at the start of each month and budgeting.

But it wasn't enough. It wasn't nearly enough, because at the end of day being a mother had absolutely nothing at all to do with books and classes. She was sure to get a good degree in the coming months, and she'd achieved it all through books and learning - but how could she have been foolish enough to think that motherhood was in any way the same as that? Carlota had never read a single book about pregnancy in her entire life. "The only people who know what the child needs are the child and its mother."

At that moment, Kylie was hit by the most horrible thought: she was no mother. She wasn't Carlota. She wasn't Beth. She wasn't Grandma Rose. She wasn't a naturally caring person. The last time Eduardo's mother had come over to visit, she had taken one look at her older son and announced that he was "going to be ill". Sure enough, Carl had come down with a mild case of flu two days later. Kylie just knew she could never be like that. She'd held both of Egon and Janine's children when they were babies, and wanted only to put them down. She was terrified of being left alone in a room with them in case something happened to one of them, and she was forever blamed for not stopping it. No baby had ever stopped crying for her. She was like no mother she had ever met. Except… oh God, could it be? Was she going to end up just like her mother?

She couldn't voice these concerns to anyone. When she thought about it later, she wondered why she didn't go to Beth or Janine, given that she was so reluctant to talk to Eduardo about it. She felt bad for that, but she understood why. This was his child. She didn't want to worry him by making him think that his daughter's own mother wouldn't be up to the challenge, especially when he seemed to be so damn calm.

One day, when he was feeling the baby kick through Kylie's t-shirt with a big fat smile on his face, she snapped suddenly, "Aren't you nervous at all?"

He looked at her as though he'd been bitten. "Of course."

"How can you be so calm?"

"I'm more excited than nervous."

Of course. He didn't have to give birth. He wasn't expected to know instinctively what his child needed at any given moment. As a general rule fathers took a more active role in child-rearing than they used to, but still, nobody really expected anything.

"I don't know what to say to reassure you," he said.

Kylie shook her head. "I'm sure I'll be fine once I've had her." She wasn't sure at all.

"I want you to be fine now."

"Well I can't. Everybody's nervous before they have a baby."

It was true, everybody was nervous. But was everybody terrified out of their wits? She didn't dare ask. She imagined any loving mother would react as though she had shown a tiny kitten to her and said, "Is it wrong to want to drown this?"

"You love her, though, don't you?" said Eduardo.

"Of course I do," snapped Kylie. She didn't mean to keep snapping, but she couldn't help it. She didn't believe there was any way he could make her feel better, and quite honestly she'd prefer it if he didn't try.

But, now that he mentioned it, Kylie did love her baby. She'd never seen more than a distorted picture, but she had felt the baby girl growing inside her, and she felt her moving every day, and that was just… indescribable.

"Well," said Eduardo. His hand was still on the bump, and Kylie wondered how he could bear to get no closer to his child than that. "Then you've got nothing to worry about."

It seemed a very long time after that before she stopped worrying.

Stage Six: Come on…

For the past week, Kylie had been desperately trying to take back every last silent scrap of dread. It really felt as though somebody or something had taken her at her word, and granted her wish not to have to progress to the next stage of motherhood, but be pregnant forever. She even wondered how she ever could have felt scared. Yes, fine, it was terrifying - but she knew she'd feel better once she actually had a baby to work with. The anticipation is always the worst part. Maybe she would completely fail as a mother, but at least let her try it. Maybe labour would half-kill her, so then let her get it over with.

"They're talking about inducing my labour," Kylie said frantically to her GP. "I don't want anybody to force her out - I want to do this my way."

"Well," the doctor said, "you could try having sex and see if that kick-starts the labour."

Eduardo looked at once puzzled, surprised and delighted. Kylie had vague memories of an early stage in the pregnancy, when she'd worried that the changes to her body would compromise his desire for her, or maybe even kill it altogether. But that just seemed silly now. She'd had a pretty bad attitude back then, she thought.

"Babe," said Kylie, when he was beginning to look as though he might suggest putting the doctor's plan into operation. "I want to name her first, before she's born."

"Why now?" asked Eduardo.

"We should have done it ages ago. I've just realised - I was so busy worrying about myself I hardly thought about her at all."

"Of course you thought about her. So… how do you name a baby, anyway?"

"I want it to mean something," said Kylie.

Eduardo blinked. "Mean something?"

"Yeah. I don't wanna just give her any old name."

"Neither do I." He paused. "Can we call her something Spanish?"

"You know what? Let's."

Eduardo looked faintly surprised by the number of names that Kylie knew the meanings of. At one point he asked her what his name meant, and laughed when she replied, "It means 'wealthy guardian'. Yeah, I know - it doesn't always work out."

"Conchita," he said suddenly.

"I haven't heard that one before," said Kylie. "It's nice."

"I like it," said Eduardo. "It's unusual around here, though - I thought you might not."

"Eduardo, since when do I care about stuff like that?"

"Would she care?"

"No, because we'll bring her up to value the opinions of people who like her for who she is," said Kylie. "So… does it translate into English?"

"Conception."

"That's not usual either."

"No, I think it's more usual in Spanish speaking countries."

"I love it," Kylie said decisively. Then, addressing her own abdomen, "You hear that, Conchita? You've got a name now - there's no excuse for not coming out."

"So what's it mean?" asked Eduardo. "I mean… conception…"

"It doesn't mean anything crude," said Kylie. "It means 'new beginning', which is just what she is. Things…" - she felt compelled to pause, as she realised the true significance of what she was about to say - "won't ever be the same again."

"No, they won't," said Eduardo. "But they'll be better," and he started to kiss her, because if ever there was a time to obey doctor's orders, this was most definitely it.

THE END