Contributed to "New Beginnings" in The Rumpus

My reader contribution was published on The Rumpus' edition entitled, New Beginnings, February 10, 2012.

LINK to full article.

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Call it women’s intuition, a pinging in your gut, a hunch or whatever you’d like: I just knew. But I needed irrefutable evidence.

So off to the drugstore I went. I placed my surprisingly expensive purchase between other nondescript items, paid for them and headed home.

I did the dead-woman-walking march to the bathroom. I sat down and cradled the First Response box. I took my time, carefully unwrapping the cellophane. I glanced at the instructions, already knowing how this worked. I removed one white plastic stick, unzipped my jeans and completed step three. I did not time the test for two minutes as recommended. Instead, I did what every woman has done as long as these kinds of tests have been around: I stared the thing down with baited breath.

One faint pink line began to fill itself in. I anxiously peeked at the stick again, hoping to see an abyss of white space next to that first line. I couldn’t deny the shadow of a phantom line. Another deep breath, and there it was: two lines. I was suddenly sickened by their misogynistic shade of Pepto pink. There was no reality at that moment, just hard evidence. My life, plus one. The future was staring me dead in the face.

Some women save these tests and keep them in a memory box as mementos. I threw mine out, covering it under tissues, and tore open the second package. Fast-forward, same result. Not that I had expected anything different, but I wanted to be certain. So there I had it: irrefutable proof.

After burying the second test in the trashcan beside its used partner, I fell to my knees and cried. I cried for what felt like a long time, though in reality it had only been fifteen minutes.

They say it takes thirty days to break an undesirable habit. Here’s another fact: it took me roughly fifteen minutes to come to terms with the fact that I was pregnant. I went through Kubler-Ross’s famous five steps in record time! I denied (despite confirming twice), I got angry (“my life is over”), I bargained (“if I misread the test, I will never buy anything I don’t need  again”), I got depressed (since I’m already depressed, I bypassed this step) and I reached a place of what could vaguely be called acceptance. Fifteen minutes and my life was no longer my own. Nothing would ever be the same again.

– Lisa Rufle