Pregnancy Test
You sit so patiently in my plastic crate for extra toiletries, the ones that aren’t for daily use. Perhaps you are used to waiting - in the factory, in the truck, in the Amazon warehouse, in the container ship. You slot in neatly between two boxes of wax strips, so that the only thing visible is your pink edge. You could be just another box of wax strips. You could be nothing, or everything.
You are not the first pregnancy test I’ve owned. In the frantic first weeks after I arrived on this island - as I sorted through the junk the previous Assistant English Teacher left behind, and sorted through my feelings of fear and loss and loneliness; as I pulled myself together each morning to arrive at work neat and shiny, only to collapse in a flustering heap of sweat and flyaway hair and relief when I got home - my period did not come when it was supposed to. I had stopped taking my birth control pills some time before I left, as my prescription had run out and I knew they would be too complicated to get in Japan. J and I always used condoms, but what if?
Then, too, my mind had been a jumping bundle of crossed wires - one wire of generalized panic, one wire of rationality that knew it was probably just the stress of moving to a new country, and a tiny, secret spark of hope. Among the various panics, my main fear at that time was how to get hold of a pregnancy test. I could not, a sore thumb foreigner in this tiny island town, simply walk into a pharmacy and buy one. There was a genuine possibility that it would get back to my supervisor at school, even if I went to one where the pharmacist’s daughters were not my students. And besides, no, I just couldn’t. Finally, I got J to order it for me on Japanese Amazon from his computer in Cape Town, so that it would cross land and sea to arrive on my doorstep a few days later, in an unassuming cardboard box.
I sat in my little bathroom, staring at the pale blue plasticky wallpaper, so close I could lean forward and rest my head on it. As I waited for the lines to form, I noticed the dust collecting in the corners. I mustn’t forget to sweep in here.
Two lines: not pregnant.
First thought: Thank goodness.
That’s a lie. First thought: Of course it’s nothing - I knew it was just stress.
That’s a lie. First thought: Oh. No baby. No baby for me.
*
Starting approximately three years ago, the same thing happens to me whenever I see a baby - whether real or on screen or even just a picture. It’s a hot pain, a sliding slicing shock right down my middle, so forceful it still surprises me after all this time. It’s a pain of longing, of desperately wanting something that I can’t have. The initial shock does not die out, but seeps a dull throb throughout my body, one that paints a long, bleak future of could-have-beens, a forever of living with a giant hole in the life I build. Yet at the same time it is always suffused with a faint glow of warmth, because babies never fail to make me smile. I walk away feeling tender, with the sense of having touched something golden, having felt the warmest of gentle embraces, then having the door slammed shut in my face.
So I push my baggage trolley to the gate. I turn to my desk. I put my grocery bags in the car. I take my partner’s hand. I walk on into my empty life.
Let me be clear: these are all imagined melancholies. I have no reason to believe that I cannot conceive. For now I am still young, still drifting. I am in a temporary job in a foreign land, I have plans for a master’s degree. And yet I want a baby. I know this absolutely. The knowledge of it is inscribed on my cell walls, etched across the inside of my eyelids, it bubbles deep in my marrow. And yet I know with (almost) equal clarity that it can never happen. Because each stroke of love for my child would be a scrape of guilt for me. Because any suffering my child went through would be a result of my own selfishness. Because I could not do something so cruel as to invite the being I loved most into a drowning world.
Yet even as I write this I do not believe myself. I keep trying to find the right excuse, to look past the corners of my own words, to see again and again if I can add the same ingredients, toss them together and get a different result. My future identity of mother is scored so deeply into my bones, brewed inside of me over all the years of my life, that my body is marinated in it, no matter what my mind tells me.
*
This time around, J got the test for me from a pharmacy while I waited in the car. This time around, it wasn’t even a missed period, just brief spotting at the wrong time that J manufactured into a crisis. The instructions on your pink box say ‘pregnancy takes at least a week to be detectable in urine. Therefore, you are advised to wait one week after a missed period before using this pregnancy test’.
So you remain slotted in my toiletries box, while thoughts bubble in my brain and an imaginary foetus swims circles in my belly. ‘There’s almost no chance I’m pregnant’ I tell myself. I don’t mention it to anyone else. I still have a beer when I go out with friends. For much of the day, I don’t even think about it.
But in those brief, quiet moments - sitting on the toilet, in the car on the way home, at my desk towards the end of the day, cuddling up to J at night - I tiptoe down the path of daydreaming the ‘what if?’ I plan conversations with my supervisor, plane tickets home, where we would live, how we’d get by. I imagine my family’s reaction, that of my friends, and my colleagues in Japan. After one last look, I bat those thoughts away. I never let myself go too far down that path.
Jeran asks me if it’s time to take the test yet. We puzzle out how long I should wait if the clue wasn’t even a missed period. Then, a few hours later, as if woken up and realizing it has overslept, my period rushes in. Sticky, thick, red, unapologetic.
First thought: Oh. No baby. No baby for me.
*
We are meeting one of the school nurses for coffee: me and some of the other English teachers, all women. They invited me along because to not do so would be conspicuous - I am part of the group labeled “women English teachers” so I must be included. But I do not know this nurse like the other teachers do, in fact I have never met her. She was already on maternity leave when I arrived. Her baby has a shock of black hair, thicker and longer than I’ve ever seen. It looks like a cartoon of an electric shock.
When we sit down, the baby remains in its harness strapped around its mother’s torso, staring out from under its flame lick of hair. Above its head, the mother is chattering away, seemingly oblivious to the baby apart from occasional taps and jiggles. When the coffee comes, she stirs in two sachets of sugar. The talk is about work, husbands, other teachers, the usual. I have nothing to add, and I only understand snatches anyway. I want to talk about the baby, but we’ve moved on from that. I try to follow the conversation, interject where I can, so it’s not so obvious that I don’t fit in. But my eyes keep sliding to the baby’s and my mouth keeps slipping into a smile.
Later in the day, as I walk to class with my favorite co-teacher, she asks me if I plan to have a child. This teacher is also the one who gets up at 5am every morning to make cooked breakfasts and lunch boxes for her husband and kids. I look at the dark trees on the mountains that border the school, billowed by the wind. I think about you, still nestled in your box in the plastic crate. I imagine telling her about climate change projections, best case scenarios, tipping points, negative feedback loops. I wonder how I could explain my densely tangled, agonized thoughts on the subject to this woman whose children are her entire world.
A student, late for class, narrowly misses us as he hurtles past. “Maybe one day” I say. “But not anytime soon”.
Julia Laurie is a copywriter and educator pursuing an MA in sociolinguistics at the University of Cape Town. Her work has appeared in Levitate Magazine, and she has an upcoming publication in October Hill Review. She loves to spend time in water and on mountains.
