[Read part one HERE]

Finally, I left the store with no pregnancy test and no lack of huffing and stomping. As I drove to the next grocery store, I started to think about what I would do when the test told me I was pregnant.

I had all but assumed that I was, at that point. I had talked about it with my boyfriend, who was enormously supportive, as we tried to figure out how I could be pregnant. We were almost always safe when we had full on sex, but not quite as safe during foreplay. And there was that time we played the pull out game.

I honestly had never really thought about this situation before, because in the almost three years that we had been having sex and playing that game occasionally, nothing like this had ever happened, not even close.

I stood in line at the next grocery store, sandwiched between two harried looking mothers and their brood, and cursed myself for being so stupid. I should have gotten on the pill even though it was expensive and made me fat, I should have used spermicide even though it grosses me out, I should have made my boyfriend wear a condom at all times, even when I was just thinking about sex.

Eventually, I bought the damn pregnancy test. I read the instructions and, in my haste to be done with the damn thing, made the mistake of not peeing on it long enough. I sat on the toilet, staring in fury at the now useless pregnancy test that had taken so much guts and time and money to acquire and threw it across the room. I was mad at the thing, yes, but mostly, I was so mad at myself, that I wanted to cry. Read More »

I’m at a certain age and place in my life where I thought the time had come and gone for bad decision making. You do enough stupid things that at some point, you are supposed to cross this imaginary line into something that looks suspiciously like adulthood. Once on the other side of this line, you can look back on all the youthful blunders you and people close to you have made and you learn from it, move forward.

As of last week, I was forced to admit that maybe I hadn’t come quite as far as I thought I had.

I had a pregnancy scare.

My period isn’t like clockwork, but it’s close enough that I know the part of the month in which it will fall. As March drew to a close, I looked at my calendar and realized that I hadn’t had my period when it was supposed to come, around the 12th.

At first, I didn’t think anything of it. Two weeks was a long time, but I had been stressed out from school and I wasn’t eating as well as I should have been. I also sit next to about four girls at work, so I assumed that we were syncing.

Every day that my period didn’t come, I felt the small lump of fear in my chest grow exponentially. I kept finding little things that made me worry, like the fact that my breasts were tender and that despite the fact that I wasn’t eating as much and getting a lot of exercise, I thought that I was gaining weight. I started to feel nauseous, and although part of myself knew that I was feeling this way because I was scared and I was almost looking for these telltale signs, they persisted. Read More »