Mayim Rabim

For those who haven't been keeping up, I'm on two forms of birth control now: a low-dose pill and a diaphragm. This is because a medication that I'm taking compromises the effectiveness of the pill. It's just as well that I have backup, because I can be a bit of a scatterbrain. Case in point: Last month, when I came back from the mikvah, I forgot to use the diaphragm.

I tried not to worry too much, since I did have some protection from the pill. I didn't tell my husband, so as not to make him unnecessarily anxious. All the same, I was hoping that my period would come on the early side and reassure me. Usually, it comes on Monday or Tuesday. By Wednesday, I began to get nervous and told my husband.

All the next day I was worried and confused. I knew that we couldn't afford a child and that if I was pregnant I'd have to go off my meds, which might have done some harm already. But the maternal urge is very strong in some women, and I couldn't help feeling a wave of irrational excitement when I thought about having a baby. I browsed the web, reading up on signs of early preganancy and health tips for preganant women. I speculated on whether our apartment was big enough for a young child. And I worried about the lack of responsibility that I'd exhibited in various areas of life in the recent past. Could I get my career back on track? Could I care for an infant? Could I possibly do both at once?

When I didn't menstruate by Thursday morning, I went to the drug store to buy a home pregnancy test. It was too early to get the 99% accuracy that the tests advertise, but Husband and I figured that we might as well have a little bit more information by Shavuot. False positives are very rare even at early stages, and if my reading was negative, at least we'd know that the odds were on our side.

I took the test and set a timer for two minutes, the amount of time it takes to yield a result. My whole body was tingling. I closed my eyes, not sure what I was hoping for. When I opened them, I saw a blue minus sign on the strip. The tingling stopped and my breathing returned to normal. Between the pill and the strip, the odds of my being pregnant were now quite low.

I took another test this morning and got the same result. This didn't surprise me. It isn't uncommon to miss a period when taking horemonal birth control; I've missed one before myself. But this was the first time that I really, seriously thought that I might be pregnant. It's a great relief to know that I'm not, but the irrational part of me that was excited before is now a little bit sad.

Ah, well. I guess this makes up for the month when I had to go to the mikvah twice.