you are what you are and you ain't what you ain't

[john prine]

When to take a pregnancy test:

Don't take it the day you miss your period. It is better to spend the whole day imagining that you actually are pregnant than it is to get a negative test and ruin the fun.

Don't take it the day after your missed period, either. Once you've made it to the second day you are even more convinced it's working, that your body is somehow doing this thing it has stubbornly refused to do for a year and a half. Calculate what your estimated due date would be and realize it is for sometime in February, which is definitely the worst month to be born, but then chide yourself for looking a gift horse baby in the mouth. Being born in a freezing cold, wet month with no legitimate holidays will give them character, you decide. Not like those ungrateful summer-born children, drunk on their own good luck. 

Now that you have gifted your unborn child with moral fiber, it's not too hard to begin imagining the rest of them. They will definitely have your husband's athletic ability and your love of reading. They will happily wear the tiny baby shirts you eye in the window of the vintage store down the street, which you will buy without hesitation at $28 a pop. 

They will gleefully ride your shoulders when you go to art festivals and farmer's markets, and definitely not vomit on your head the way your friend's baby did on him that one time. (He assured you it had happened more than one time.)

But you're getting ahead of yourself. First, you need to plan how you will tell your family. Just yesterday you saw an older woman walking down the street with her daughter, who looked around your age. The older woman had a baby slung to her chest and looked as though life had delivered her seamlessly and without pain or tragedy to that very moment. Her hand cupped this baby's small downy head and she gestured animatedly to her daughter, probably in the middle of exhorting her to stop buying vintage baby clothes. Yes, you need to think of something, figure out a way to make it special.

And then, you'll need to find out a sweet way to tell your friends! And your coworkers! You feel a pang in your abdomen, which feels like a cramp but is probably just emotion, you reassure yourself as you pull up your Google Doc of baby names. You stopped bringing up baby names after a year had passed but you still write down the ones you love. There was a good one yesterday in the book you were reading.

Don't take the pregnancy test that second night, because you have made it almost forty-eight hours and are now riding high as a kite. You have been playing the world's most slow-motion, tedious video game but you may have just won, or at least scored a point?  Is winning the game getting pregnant at all? Or having the baby? Or the baby getting through childhood? Or them eventually becoming a  happy adult? Having a baby of their own so you can be a grandmother? While trying to smooth out the contours of this metaphor you feel some definite twinges in your abdomen. You ignore them, while also zeroing in on your body's every nerve ending. 

Are you going to take a test? your husband asks casually. You have both decided that you are not suckers and will no longer subsidize the pregnancy test industry by taking multiple tests every month at fifteen bucks a pop. No way! You guys are cool customers. Eh, probably not, you respond with a shrug, your feet on his lap, both of you on your laptops. Maybe tomorrow. 

Okay, he says. Whatever happens, it's okay.

Meanwhile you are frantically Googling when is a pregnancy test 100% certain and feel like kicking down a door when you read the official recommendation to wait a week after your missed period, as though you did not know this from Googling it constantly, from trying to get pregnant for a year and a half, and from being an actual OB nurse. A goddamn week? Who waits a whole week? Probably the same women who floss and who waited fifteen minutes for the second marshmallow, or whatever.

Your Google questions get progressively more desperate until they just become a stream of consciousness conversation you are having with no one. Likelihood of false negative pregnancy test 2 days after period. Likelihood of 34 year old woman getting pregnant without intervention. What if I can't get pregnant. Essays by women infertility. Finally you just type in What if and stare at the screen. 

If you can wait 72 hours, that is the best of all, but you already know you can't make it that long. You go in to the bathroom and take out the test. You won't tell your husband you're taking it. You just want to know if someone else is in here or not. What if.

It takes a couple of minutes for the results to blink onto the screen. In those two minutes you perch on the bathroom sink and track your cramps as they rise and fall. You think about the same things you think about every month, and in all the days in between: how it will be fine either way, how this is not the most important part of your life, how you are happy regardless. You think about how many ways there are to mother in this world. You think about how grateful you are to your body for carrying you, even if it will never be able to carry anyone else.

The result shows on the digital readout, but you already knew. You flush the toilet and come out of the bathroom to your husband, who is not fooled, but doesn't ask. He stopped asking after a year. He squeezes your hand, you squeeze back, then side by side, you start dinner.