I Am Literally Too Old for This Sh*t

I am not pregnant. I have a stick with a blue line on it that says so.

Stock photo. NOT my actual pregnancy test
that I peed on. That would be gross.

And while I'm relieved to be not-pregnant, I am also galled beyond belief that I had to buy a pregnancy test to prove it. I'm 44 years old. I have a daughter who will be a teenager in a few short months and a husband who has lost a significant portion of his hair. That is not the ideal family unit to introduce a new baby into. Into which to introduce a new baby. Whatever.

Oh, like you know so much about proper grammar.
You poop yourself eight times a day.

What's more, Beloved Spouse and I are not supposed to be able to make more babies. We have signed affidavits from doctors stating that we can't make more babies. Really. We do. There's a perfectly good reason for that; I mean, we didn't go around to a bunch of doctors and ask them to say under oath that BelSpouse was shooting blanks just because we thought they would look good framed in our library. We're not weird.

We're perfectly lovely people
once you get to know us.

But I'm not going into that story here. It'll be in my book. (Note to self: Get book deal, already.)

The point is, I shouldn't be turning up preggers.

Nonetheless, notarized documents to the contrary, I've been pregnant twice in the last five years.

They didn't take. Obviously.

Our nuclear family is a couple of protons short.

I'm not one of those women who think of my miscarried embryos as "angels" or "children in heaven" or "missed being tax deductions by that much." No disrespect to women who have suffered the loss of a pregnancy or delivered a stillborn child. My heart goes out to them. But in my case, I had two completely unplanned, unexpected, and frankly unwanted pregnancies that failed very early, presumably because God realized He was doing no one any favors by giving me another child at this stage of the game.

"Whoops, quality control failure. My bad. We'll just take that one back."

Still, I'm here to tell you that, as unpleasant as it is to endure a miscarriage, it's worse when you simultaneously feel grateful and relieved that the little bundle of cells in your womb turned out to be unviable. And on top of that, those feelings don't stop you from instinctively mourning the loss of something you didn't even want. I guess what I'm saying is that sometimes the best outcome for everyone still kind of sucks. Go figure.

And now I've had to buy a damn pregnancy test again. Because the numbers on the calendar weren't adding up right, if you know what I mean. Ugh. But it came out one line instead of two. So, yay for infertility, or luck, or God's warped sense of humor, or whatever you want to call it.

You've got to admit, the giraffe is a pretty poor argument for intelligent design.

FYI, there is nothing funnier than a woman on the cusp of menopause skulking into a drugstore to buy a First Response kit like a teenager buying his first box of rubbers. Ha. Ha.

This comes close. But no.

Oh, and to answer the question that may be forming at the back of your mind:

Because using protection would be the sign of rational and prudent behavior. Duh.