Incision

I know I should take a test. I should have done it days ago. Every morning I tell myself, tomorrow, I promise. But the thing about tomorrow—it doesn’t arrive on its own. It only exists in our collective consciousness, an abstraction I can choose to conjure or deny at will. Today I choose deny. 

I read, in a self-help book packaged as a scientific analysis, that productivity can be a form of procrastination. That doing things you need to do, but don’t really really need to do, is a way of putting off your goals. You don’t think you’re stalling because you’re getting things done. But folding the laundry or responding to emails before you finish your dissertation isn’t serving your degree (this was the example in the book). I was supposed to read this and be awakened to all the ways in which I am misusing my time, to get my priorities straight and achieve my goals. Accomplish. Instead I see a hundred new ways to wield a strategy I didn’t even recognize I was using. 

My entire life is spent on the tasks that detract from goals. I am a procrastination virtuoso. Who has time for a pregnancy test? 

Today, I will donate the kids’ too-small clothes, the size sevens and nines. Today, I will put away the Christmas decorations I forgot to put away when I put away the Christmas decorations. Today, I will wash the sheets and the dog bed. Today, I will replace all our toothbrushes and return the library books I was supposed to drop off last weekend. I will make the photo album I swore I would make last fall and finally order the new filter for the humidifier. I will call the plumber about that leak from the shower no one ever uses. I will meditate and take a walk and bake fresh cookies for when the kids get off the bus (I’ll cut the sugar in half, though, because apparently giving my kids sugar is tantamount to child abuse). And I’ll tell myself that all this is very important. That it’s enough. (It isn’t.) 

I’ll take the pregnancy test tomorrow. 

***

It’s still not tomorrow. 

***

Today is not tomorrow. 

***

Here’s my problem: I didn’t think this would happen. I’m raising my kids. I’m not having them anymore. That part was supposed to be done. The thought of doing it all again, a third time, is so unthinkably paralyzing I prefer to hide my head in the sand. There are lots of very important things hiding in the sand. I could stay in the sand. A fucking ostrich.

I should just take a test.

But it’s not tomorrow yet.

Besides, I already know what happens, and if I already know, what’s the point, really? Because the longer I put it off, the longer I can pretend. The longer I can pretend that the life I’ve tricked myself into enjoying—the one where I’m cast as Former Executive Turned Stay-At-Home Mom: an overeducated woman who chooses motherhood over career only to slowly, painfully realize she’s wrong, then bakes every recipe in the cookbook called Denial—is someone else’s. The longer I can pretend every milestone and checkpoint and moment I’d thought was over and done, in the past, isn’t; it’s slung again into the future. Tomorrow. 

***

I look at my children’s faces and I see every iteration of them all at once. The sleepy, needy newborn. The adorable but tempestuous toddler. The precocious kindergartener. The self-assured kid (when did they become kids?). I love them all so much it hurts. No one tells you it’s like this. 

I didn’t plan to press replay. I didn’t want to. Except that maybe, I might? I just don’t know if I can. 

Either way, apparently I am. I’ve never believed in maternal intuition—it borders too close to the supernatural, the kind of indeterminate semi-religious conviction that is dangerous precisely because it is inarguable—but this is different: I know. 

Buckle up, my obstetrician will say. Three’s a party. 

Whose party? I’ll want to ask. But I know I won’t. 

***

I know this happens. It happens. Just not to me. God, how pathetic: that’s what everyone says. That’s what everyone says about everything. When did I metamorphose from prototype to stereotype? How do I go back?

“Whoopsie babies,” my friends call them. Like an unplanned child is nothing more than a silly mistake, like forgetting eggs at the supermarket. Forgotten groceries don’t change the course of your life. Anyway, I never forget groceries. That’s why you make a list. 

Now here I am. Willing to put off tomorrow in perpetuity so I can hide from a reality I can’t face. A reality that leaves me feeling sick because I can’t keep it hidden. Because whatever procrastination wizarding I might be capable of, I can’t magic my way out of this one: telling her.

Because how am I going to tell her? How am I going to tell her? 

How am I going to tell her?

She tries to hide how painful it is, to hear the same news from all her friends, our brothers, her neighbor, her sisters-in-law. But she’s me and I’m her, and I see it. I feel it like the hurt is mine. Except it’s not. I already have what she wants, what she’s committed years of her life to pursuing, what she’s suffered through every torment medicine can hurl at a woman’s body to receive, what she’s risked her marriage on, what she’s emptied her life savings to pay for. 

I got it for free, on a whim. 

Who am I, to deserve this family? 

I imagine the second line materializing, and I see it like an incision. It will cut us in half. Everything will be different. I will have to tell her. I will have to tell her it was an accident, and I will need to tell her the ugly truth, I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. Is it worse if I am overjoyed or if I am devastated? What about both? 

I can’t not tell her. 

But I’ll worry about that tomorrow.

***

I sit sipping coffee in the wake of a school bus, surrounded by half-eaten breakfast plates and crumpled-up napkins, food smudged onto the sides of chairs and forgotten worksheets and pajamas turned inside-out, all the wreckage of every weekday morning. The table vibrates with a persistent vibrating beat, bzzz bzzz bzzz, bzzz bzzz bzzz, and I already know what the screen will tell me: my sister is calling. 

“Hey,” I say. 

“Hey, the kids get off to school okay?” 

“They did.” I nod even though she can’t see me. 

“How was your morning?” 

“It was fine,” I say, straining to sound cheerful. I’m going to vomit. “Stella only spilled one glass of water and Leo only left without one mitten and one worksheet, and we were almost on time.” 

“Sounds about right.” 

“How’s your morning been? What do you have today?” My sister is still in the club of working people, that cult of possibility to which I long to return but have no map to find my way. Maybe it’s just the idea of work that I miss. It’s no matter, I can no more imagine myself working than standing on the moon. How long do you have to be away before it no longer counts as going back? 

“Today’s my appointment,” my sister says. “The embryo transfer.” Oh my God, how did I forget. Shit. I close my eyes and bite my lower lip, bring the palm of my hand to my forehead. “I’m on my way there now,” she says.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” I blurt out. No use trying to hide that I’d forgotten. “How are you feeling?” 

“It’s fine,” she says. “I’m fine.” 

She’s not fine. It’s not fine and she’s not fine and I know this. I know this because I’ve sat with her until her tears have run for so long her hair is wet with their saltwater. I know this because she keeps it bottled up until she can’t and the top blows off. I know this because I know her better than I know myself. When our genes split in the womb, was this fate already decided? Is there any way to trade? Maybe I should give her the unborn child burrowing into my uterus right now—it would be half her, wouldn’t it? 

Maybe I should. 

Shit, no, I can’t.

“Is Jesse meeting you there?” I say.

“He’s coming.” Her voice is different, higher, and there is a pressure on my chest, a weight compressing my lungs and ribs and heart. I try to swallow, but I can’t. This is the last one, she told me last week. After this, I don’t think I can do it anymore. It’s too much heartache. I don’t have enough hope left in me to take any more disappointment. I’m just not strong enough. You’re the strongest person I know, I told her. But we both knew it didn’t matter, because being strong has nothing to do with it. 

“The doctor still said your odds are—” I begin. 

“You know what,” she cuts in, “can we talk about something else? I have about ten minutes until I pull in.” 

“Of course,” I say, shaking my head. Tears sting at my eyes, and I strain to ask, “What did you guys make for dinner last night?”

We talk for a while about shrimp scampi and the March Book of the Month picks and that new face cream I tried and whether she is growing out her bangs, and then she is pulling in, and it’s time to say goodbye.

“I wish I was there with you,” I say. 

“You are,” she says. “I know. I’ll call you after.” 

“I love you,” we say to each other. And then she is gone, across the country, two time zones away, walking in to let a doctor put an embryo inside her body.

And I am here, stuck in the morass of the morning and self-deception. What is wrong with me? My life is perfect. And I’m too much of a coward to even admit it: I do want this, I know I do. I didn’t plan for it and I never wanted another, but now the reality of it is weighing me down and maybe I do want it. I just don’t want to hurt her. Suddenly I am burning with the desire to know, for sure. Maybe knowing will tell me what to want. 

I will my legs to carry me upstairs to the bathroom. I rummage around in the cabinet, praying one of the tests she brought two years ago when she came for Stella’s birthday is still there. I exhale with relief as I extract a little bag filled with shrink-wrapped sticks, the cheap kind they use in the doctor’s office. I check the expiration date, tear open the blue packaging, and pee into a Dixie cup, then dip the thin piece of paper into it for five seconds, just like the directions say. I watch the little test flood with color, red blooming upward and the control line shifting into focus.

I lay it flat on a paper towel on the counter, set the timer on my phone for five minutes, and walk away to make the kids’ beds. I don’t know what I’ll tell her. I don’t know how, or when. 

It occurs to me then: I might be wrong. I could be wrong. Just because I know doesn’t mean I’m right. Maybe I’m not pregnant. Maybe I’ve got it all mixed up, and she will be. Maybe I won’t have to tell her anything. Maybe we can just go back to the way things were. 

Only, I’ll have to figure out what to do with this vacuum of a future. Whose future is it, anyway? Mine, or someone else’s?

I don’t even know anymore.

As I smooth the comforters and fluff the pillows, I change my mind. Then again. How do I want two things at once? I pine for separate, incompatible outcomes: the path I sealed off seven years earlier, when she started IVF—because there was not enough space to want for us both; it was her turn—and an accident that will shift my life into sixth gear. 

Back in the bathroom, the timer is still ticking down. I close my eyes and strain to see the second line, but all I see are the bright lights above the sink blotting the dark into pink and purple circles, a kaleidoscope to match my equivocation. I force myself to leave the room. There are other things to do while I wait.

Two minutes pass like two years, until finally my alarm rings the contrived sound of crickets, and I scurry back into the bathroom to look at the stick. Well, there it is.

Before I can stop myself, I’m on the floor, crying, flooded with relief and dread, excitement and disappointment all at once, and I realize I should never have done this today. I should have waited until tomorrow. If I had waited, I could still wonder. If I had waited, I could still be luxuriating in the pool of uncertainty, that glorious guilt-free bubble of desire. If only I had waited. Instead, I’d brought the unique thrill of not knowing to an abrupt halt. What now? What am I supposed to do with this? How do I stick my head back in the sand? 

I gather myself and stand up, glare at my splotchy reflection in the mirror, and splash cold water on my face. It will be okay, I breathe. It will be alright. There are so many important things to do today.