Men would do well to remember pregnancy scares when assuming women have it easy.
It’s true that policemen occasionally let us off with warnings instead of brandishing our driving records with citations. And, yes, sometimes our bar tabs are taken care of. All it takes is some whimpering and batting of eyelashes. But nothing makes up for the experience of a pregnancy scare.
If the average woman is anything like me, she lives in constant fear of becoming a manufacturer of humans. I’m still too young, too selfish and too dysfunctional to have a baby or even process the idea that one could be a desirable outcome of sex. The most I hope for when I hook up with someone is the chance to practice my acting skills. A handful of years of sexual activity, and my fake orgasms are almost as convincing as my fake smile.
Crippled by the fear of birthing children prematurely, I’ve developed a monthly ritual. A tradition, if you will. It begins with me feverishly accessing Google and wondering, Did I gamble with the integrity of my birth control pills just a bit too much this time? I picture Clint Eastwood, à la “Dirty Harry,” narrowing his eyes and looking over my shoulder as I type “pregnancy symptoms” into the search bar.
“‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”
Mr. Eastwood, the answer to that depends on how much vaginal hubris I’m wielding. This month, I was wielding little vaginal hubris. So little, in fact, that my vaginal hubris levels were at an all-time low.
My period was four days late, and my boobs, usually a modest, but ambitious, B-cup, were spilling out of my bra. The cup runneth over, as they say, and I could not have been less ecstatic about it. Typically, I’d celebrate a bigger rack, but around the proverbial time of the month, an abnormally good-boob day could mean I’m brewing a child.
“This time is definitely it,” I texted my best friend, Haley. “My eggo is preggo.”
This is all, of course, just another instance of me being a narcissist. Thinking that I’m special enough to defy odds and be one of the few who manages to get pregnant, the barriers of birth control, condoms and an inhabitable uterus withstanding. (My lifestyle — football season, questionable diet choices, etc. — has rendered my reproductive system the North Korea of organs. Somehow, I still fear that an unsuspecting zygote will end up in there and thrive.)
Via: ABC
As I paced through the squalid handicapped stall of my nearby Walgreens, waiting for my store-bought pregnancy test to yield a result, I imagined what an abortion would be like. That would no doubt be the next step if my godforsaken 19-dollar pee stick were to reveal that, yes, my eggo was indeed preggo.
In my head, an abortion looks a lot like making a smoothie does. You know, you saunter up to the counter at Whole Foods, ask for what you came for, and a smiling woman armed with a menacing stick stabs at a Vitamix, turning fruit pieces into little pulpy bits. Except replace “Vitamix” with my lady parts and “fruit” into, well, you know.
The thought of undergoing a smoothie surgery made me shudder. And my iPhone’s timer going off, signaling that it was time to check the result, immediately after that mental image practically sent me into an epileptic seizure.
Full of trepidation, I took careful steps toward the stall’s gleaming porcelain sink, which was no doubt crawling with smallpox and other medieval diseases. The way I figured it, my destiny was in the hands of a 4-inch-long piece of plastic. It could either show me mercy or ruthless apathy.
I’m normally blind as a bat — reading small font on my computer screen is an everyday challenge — but the amount of adrenaline coursing through my veins gave me 20/20 vision, and from a few feet away, I could see a single blue line, instead of two, resting on the tiny screen. Meaning, “not pregnant.” Cue sigh of relief.
I relished in the fact that I was alone in that stall with no bun in the oven and did a little jig.
Via: Giphy
But my celebration was put on hold when I began to wonder, What the hell would I do without contraceptives?
Realistically speaking, I’d be a miserable, sexless hag with graying skin, brittle hair and cobwebs over my inner thighs. Thankfully, my mind need not wander in that direction because this month’s prescription of Reclipsen was awaiting me at the pharmacy counter. (Shout out Margaret Sanger.)
So that’s what I’m giving thanks for this year: Birth control, not being preggers and having control of my body and reproductive system. And if my flippant assessment of babies and motherhood tells you anything, it’s that you should also be thankful for those things. My offspring would be nothing short of a nightmare. The apple, after all, does not fall far from the tree.
Happy thanksgiving to you and yours.
Featured photo courtesy of: Nooga
