A Pregnant Pause
“Wot the fuck is this?” I’m looking through the bag Leslie brought home from the convenience store, staring, mesmerized, at one item in particular.
“It’s a pregnancy test,” she responds, evidently unruffled. “My breasts have felt sore lately. Do they feel any bigger to you?”
They feel the same but what do I know? My life flashes before my eyes and not in the way I might have expected. Gotta get a bigger place, I’m thinking. No more boozing and whoring. Private school or public school? Definitely private. Not gonna spoil the child with a lot of consumerist crap—yeah, throw out the television and move out of this country of morons. Daycare definitely out… I’ll be a stay-at-home-dad. Plenty of activities, yes, and get the kid on the golf course early. Glad we went to a good school; halfway decent grades and college is taken care of. What am I thinking? Of course the kid’ll be a fucking genius. A girl might be nice but then I gotta keep her off the stripper pole, yanno? And she ain’t dating anyone til she’s thirty. Break the guy’s fuckin’ nose, I will. If it’s a boy, well, gotta keep him off the pole and he ain’t dating anyone til he’s thirty. Break the girl’s fuckin’ nose, I will. Twins? Christ. Just get ‘em out of the house and retire somewhere warm—tired of this winter bullshit. “Uh…”
Les putters around the house for a while. I’m trying to bite my tongue.
“Are you—are you, you know, gonna take the test? Because I’d really like to know whether we have to start thinking about the future and stuff.”
“Fine.” When she emerges from the bathroom with the plastic stick I don’t know what to make of the results. “It’s negative,” she says.
“So it’s all good then.”
“Not so fast. We won’t know for certain until I get my period.”
It’s not the result, one way or another, that kills me; it’s the Schroedinger’s Cat uncertainty of the whole thing. If all that nonsense about Intelligent Design were true a giant plus sign would appear on a woman’s belly as soon as she conceives—and a college fund would pop out of the woman’s vagina along with the child. We can only dream.
A few days later Les does indeed get her period. Sure, I’m relieved, but what truly frightens me is I’m not that relieved. In my twenties I might have had an aneurism, but now? Fatherhood just seems like another adventure.
More: Pregnancy | Fatherhood
