Um...No

4-30-09

(Sorry for the cliff-hanger, folks.)

Saturday I awake with a rollercoaster tingle in my belly. Sure, it’s 2 days before the supposed arrival of my period, but I’ve been feeling all the symptoms: random nausea, weird bursts of energy, and haven’t my boobs been looking a little larger? Plus my dreams were all about Neal Pollack a.k.a. Alternadad. No interesting narrative arc to report. We were just hanging out, palling around, talking yoga and the like. But I associate him with fatherhood, and with this leap of faith that Mr. Crud and I have taken twice so far so this dream is Significant, right? Right? I whisper in Mr. Crud’s ear, “I gotta pee. I’ll be back in a sec,” lest he worry about my disappearance from our lazy Saturday morning in bed.

I walk to the bathroom. Each step is a change of heart: no, I should wait, it’ll just be a waste of pregnancy test. Why the hell not? I spend more on drinks that I don’t finish than I did for the pee stick. Nah, this is silly. Just wait. 2 more days. You can wait.

Even though I’m not sure I am knocked up, I’ve been acting like a preg. Friday I skipped the sauna and my weekly martini. All week I loaded up on sushi in preparation for a possible sushi drought. I even used my possible pregnancy as a bargaining chip for the last piece of Gonzo Roll, the favorite roll of Mr. Crud and I that is cut into 5 pieces, which necessitates an alternating extra piece rule.

“This may be the last time I can have this for a long time,” I say to Mr. Crud over our weekly Thursday night sushi binge.

He looks at me skeptically. “Maybe.”

“If I’m wrong, I’ll give up my Gonzo rights for 2 weeks,” I say.

“Deal.”

In the bathroom I skim the side of the EPT box: detects pregnancy in 93 % of women 2 days before their period begins. Good enough.

I do the test like I’ve done before. As I wait the 3 minutes for the results, I realize that I’ve never gotten a negative result on a pregnancy test. Always 2 lines for me. I steal a glance at the stick. One line. The other one isn’t even faint. I zip back to check the microwave. 30 seconds until the results. My gut sinks. Negative. The microwave beeps. I pick up the stick and face the result window. Negative.

“Oh well,” I say and head back to bed.

Mr. Crud mumbles, “What took so long?”

“I took a pregnancy test,” I say.

“And?” He perks up a little.

“Negative.”

“I don’t even know how I feel about that.”

“Me neither.”

The cramps on Sunday and blood-streaked toilet paper on Monday confirm it. Not pregnant. Negative. All my inklings and stories were not intuition, just imagination. For the first time in the history of the Crud’s pregnancy attempts, we have not gotten pregnant our first month of trying. I tell myself that this is good. We are breaking the cycle of immediate impregnation and miscarriage. This time will be different. Third time is the charm.

“I feel both sad and relieved,” Mr. Crud says. “Is that weird?”

“Nope, that’s about how I feel.”

While I plot my week of pregnancy-less life—totally taking a Vicodin tonight, I think—I wonder if maybe my body has finally learned to tell the difference between a good egg and a bad one. Our timing was on. I felt ovulation cramps shortly after we, uh, you know. Maybe just maybe my uterus has learned discernment. (See, I knew that some part of my body was learning something from all that yoga.) For lack of finding any scientific reason for the miscarriages, I find myself tunneling deeper into superstition. I write and rewrite the story of conception, of the baby that I envision us holding one day.

Last night I tell Mr. Crud of my future fantasy that my niece Emma will one day come visit us all by herself. (No offense intended JADE, I just had this vision of Emma and me going about town on a niece-auntie mission for chocolate and costume jewelry.)

“By that time we might have a Peabody of our own,” he says. “That’ll change things.”

“If we don’t have a Peabody by then, then we’ll probably never have one,” I say.

“Yeah,” Mr. Crud says. “If that happens then we’ll have our house full of mangy cats.”

“And our well-groomed dog.”

Plan B is becoming the crazy cat and dog couple. For some reason the idea of having a lot of cats that we don’t treat well and a dog that we do cracks us up. Such is what passes for humor in Miscarriage World.