Get Pregnant But Don’t Tell Me About It
One pink stripe. Only one. Not two. Not pregnant.
“Okay,” I said out loud to no one. I put the tester back in its bright magenta packaging and threw it in the trash.
I was pretty sure it would be negative. It was only our first month trying. And we weren’t even trying. We were one of those couples who agreed that we were not trying. I had just stopped taking birth control. “We’re not trying, but we’re not not trying,” we said, which is what couples say when they pretend they don’t care if they get pregnant or not.
But I did not not care.
How could I not care? For the first time in my life, I was having premeditated, unprotected sex. In high school health class, they tell you that if you have unprotected sex, you will get pregnant. How was I not going to get pregnant? I looked up my ovulation date on the internet and learned that sperm can live in a woman’s body for up to a week. And we had sex multiple times in the week leading up to ovulation. I had made it so easy for myself to get pregnant.
Still, the internet said only 30% of couples get pregnant in the first month.
Besides, I “didn’t care.” It was just an excuse to have a lot of sex, I assured myself. We were not really trying.
I was trying. When my husband climbed out of bed to use the bathroom, I lifted my pelvis, hoping gravity would push the sperm through the Fallopian tubes so it might find my egg more easily. When I heard the bathroom door open, I dropped my butt to the mattress and pretended like I hadn’t done anything but lay in sweet ecstasy while he was gone.
I didn’t even let him know how much I was trying.
Last week, when I was talking to my mother on the phone, she mentioned that her friend’s daughter, a woman two years older than me, called her mother in tears that she got her period and she wasn’t pregnant. I scoffed into the receiver. “Mom, she’s 33. For most people, it takes six months to get pregnant, and she’s not so young anymore. She needs to chill out about it.”
Chris, on the couch next to me scrolling through Reddit on his phone, rolled his eyes. I know. What a drama queen. Has to run to her mommy and cry every time she gets her period.
Then I saw my test result. And I wanted to call my mommy and cry about it. Only my mother didn’t know we were not not trying, because I didn’t want her telling everyone she knew and making a big deal out of it.
Because it wasn’t a big deal. We were only taking a chance on creating a human, a person that would change our lives, our minds, and my body from here on out.
But procreating is such a flimsy process. Nearly half of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Better to keep our struggles to ourselves. Better to hide our desires, to distance ourselves from disappointment so it doesn’t hurt as much. Better to keep our loved ones in the dark; we don’t want to get their hopes up.
So I didn’t call.
The night before, in the car, I had told Chris, “I’m going to take a pregnancy test tomorrow.”
“Okay,” he said without taking his eyes off the road.
“It’s one of those first response tests, just to see,” I said. “Do you want me to wait for you to get home from work to take it?”
“It doesn’t matter. I say take it whenever you feel the need to pee,” he joked, and I laughed lightly.
“Yeah, I’ll do that,” I replied. “I’m pretty sure it will be negative, but on the off chance that it’s positive, I didn’t know if you wanted to be there to see it with me.”
“You can take it whenever you want to,” he said.
So I waited until I had to pee. And I took the test by myself. And I read the result by myself. The result that told me I wasn’t pregnant.
Oh, well, I assured myself, it’s not like we were trying.
