Writing Prompt: Write About Being Late

This past New Year's Eve, I was late - in the monthly way. Don't worry, I'm not going to divulge the details of my monthly cycle. Suffice it to say that as I sipped a glass of yummy, homemade Long Island Iced Tea and watched my husband flip through the channels on the TV (We're not big on New Year's celebrations), the realization dawned on me that my monthly visitor was overdue.

I don't remember the thought process that took me to that discovery. It could have been one of those annoying feminine hygiene product commercials, which, by the way, have become entirely too brazen in this millennium. I mean, who wants to watch a girl take a tampon out of her pocketbook and use it to plug a hole in a boat? And what male moron isn't going to figure out that that's what happened? And what woman is going to use a tampon to plug a hole anyway? Better yet, who has one to spare? It seems like I'm always bumming one from a coworker or trying to get the damn machine to take my freakin' quarter, even though it's never stocked with my preferred brand.

Sorry, probably too much info for you, so we'll move on. I was late by a week - not an abnormal amount of time but enough to freak me out. My husband tried to convince me to wait until the next day to get an at-home pregnancy test, but I could not be calm without knowing for sure.

Off to Kmart we went, and after perusing the choices, I decided on one of those with a digital readouts - no ambiguous colors or faint lines for me. Then it was back home to take the test. Luckily, the package had two tests in it because I botched the first one. I have a hard enough time peeing in a cup at the doctor's office, so when given nothing but a strip of paper as my target, my odds worsen even more. While the package had two tests, it had only one reader, and that fancy schmancy digital readout had to have 30 minutes to an hour to regroup before I could use the other test. That's what I get for going the technological route.

So I spend the next half hour running all the situations in my mind. I hadn't lost the weight I needed to lose to lower the odds of a high-risk pregnancy. We were still in debt up to our eyeballs. I couldn't afford not to work, but we couldn't afford the daycare costs for me to work away from home. And so on, and so on... I turn a problem over in my mind until it eventually throws up from motion sickness, and then I panic.

I retreated to the bathroom again to check that digital reader. It was still blinking that little icon that means, "Ha! You can't even take this stupid test! How are you going to raise a kid?" I figured it would still be a while before I could retake the test, so I went ahead and used the bathroom, and wouldn't you know it... the visitor arrived.

So the pregancy scare disappeared, but I did have those conflicting emotions of relief tinged with disappointment. Not to mention the fact that I paid for a two-test pack and the unused test was good only through February, so I couldn't even save it for when we actually were trying to get pregnant. Oh well, if I had been pregnant, I'd be due right here at the end of the summer. I'd be miserable, and I'd probably be making everyone else miserable because I like to spread the love. :-)

I'll just try to keep hitting the snooze alarm on my biological clock until I'm a little better prepared.