Dear Pregnancy Test: I Wish You'd Grade On A Curve

I took a pregnancy test on Friday.

I didn’t pass.

I wasn’t really surprised to fail but I was disappointed, and that surprised me. Mike and I talk about our future-babies quite often because we’re both excited to meet them and teach them things, like how long you should dunk your Oreo cookie under milk before it completely disintegrates into a soggy, crumbly mess at the bottom of your cup. Important things like that. We agreed to wait awhile before trying to have babies for grown-up, responsible reasons.  So I was very surprised when my friend suggested that the culprit behind my menstrual cycle mystery might be something far less sinister than I'd imagined:

A baby.

When someone says "baby", I don't think of baby powder and dimpled hands and feet and wet, gummy smiles.  I mean, I do but the mental picture doesn't stop there.  I also think of college tuition, teen angst, diaper rash, chaffed nipples, sleepless nights, mucus plugs, emotional outbursts, emotional breakdowns, insurance, teenage drivers, diapers and bottles galore, etc.  I know there's nothing glamorous about ear infections and soaked breast feeding pads.  And yet when I think about babies, I feel

love.

Call me crazy but I'm excited to be a mom.  This has a lot to do with my relationship with my mom but I'll save that for later. 

I thought about my future-babies as I scanned the aisles for the perfect pregnancy test. I knew there was one out there that was perfect for me and my urine. Unfortunately, there were many options.  To an indecisive person, selecting one out of many feels like a trick or some sort of test.  I'm sure shoppers wondered why I was crouched in the middle of the aisle holding three or four different pregnancy tests.  What if I picked the wrong one?  What if one brand really was more accurant than another?  I was drawn to the pink box because the silhouette of the woman on it just screamed fertility, like it would really read my urine sample more accurately than the others. But the pink box, though alluring, was pricey.  I ended up picking the purple box because I like purple. And because I had used it once before, only that time I was so nervous I forgot to remove the cap that covers the actual test strip. I peed all over it (and my hand).

I drank a lot of water and waited. I drank more water and thought about my future-babies. I skimmed the instructions without absorbing anything. I kept telling myself, don’t forget to remove the plastic cap. Don’t forget to remove the plastic cap. This time I remembered.

I put the cap back on the test and waited, still on the toilet, because I was afraid that if I moved or left the bathroom I would mess up the results. I wiggled my toes, scratched my calf and wiped up the excess pee.  Slowly, a single blue line appeared. Just one, not two. I waited a little longer. Perhaps the second line just took a little longer to appear.

Nope.

I know I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up. But the thought of meeting our future-babies sooner than we’d expected flooded every cell in my body with sheer

Happiness.

Excitement.

Joy.

Wonder.

One day, I will pass the test. Today's just not the day.

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Distractions

Hello.

Sorry I’ve been gone so long. I’ve been distracted by
Dirty pennies
Sweaty string cheese in my purse
Pale spiders
The tiny new freckle on the top of my left foot
Angry in-grown hairs on my body
The way apples make my hands waxy as I wash them, and
How I always have to wash my hands after washing apples
Muffled voices though too-thin walls
Dust particles dancing in beams of light
Shadows and silhouettes
The ghost cats I always hear but rarely see
Baby snails
Hairlines
Hair loss
The hair art I make on my shower wall
Words
And non-words, too.
But recently—especially at night—I have been distracted by

The quiet,

Which has been my roommate this week while Mike has been not-with-me.

It used to be a familiar friend but now it makes me afraid, but only a little, and only deep on the inside in a wet sticky place beneath my spleen. But even worse than the quiet is the missing-him-ache I have in the lower ventricles of my heart. Don’t ask me how I know that’s where missing comes from—I just know that’s where all of the missing feelings are born. And when your heart is too full of missing, it tumbles out of your heart and fills up your stomach, and even if you’re full, it makes you feel empty.

I have been afraid of the quiet and full of missing all week. 

But every day

I sing silly songs about chocolate milk and poison oak and spiders that drink apple cider because these are songs I made up on our honeymoon. They make me laugh. If Mike were at home, he would laugh at them too (because he always does).

I play the same Iron and Wine record (usually the B side) on our record player because it reminds me of Mike.

I look at the blue shaving foam residue on the bottom shelf of our medicine cabinet. It reminds me that he will be back and that his can of shaving cream will go in that place. That light blue ring misses him, too, and that makes me feel a little better.

And every night

I stay up as late as I can to distract myself from the quiet and the missing.

I rub my feet together and wiggle my toes and slide them over to his side of the bed where his feet would be, because this is how my feet say goodnight.

I sleep with my bedside light on, curled away from where he is supposed to be because I don’t like that his side is empty.

But he is coming home soon.  Knowing this makes the quiet less scary and the missing shrink a little (but only a little). 

Knowing this makes me less distracted, which is good because there are some things I want talk about.

Later.

When I'm not distracted at all.