I'm Not feeling Hope Today

As teenagers and young women, we’re taught all about the responsibility of not getting pregnant. Don’t have sex, you’ll pregnant. Make sure you use birth control, you don’t want to get pregnant. (For the sake of this conversation, we’re going to assume that all bases of STD’s are covered.)

I can remember two instances – both wedding hook-ups incidentally – when I was late. And I freaked. Did I want to be pregnant? Pretty much since I was 16, I knew I was meant to be a mom. But at that moment in time, after my college roommate’s wedding, in my little apartment above my landlord’s mother, making $23,000 a year, did I really want to be pregnant? No. I wished and prayed with all my might that I was just late.

And I was.

It happened again in 2002. I was living in Baltimore but was back in NY for a wedding. I made an instant connection with the guy and ended up having the most amazing non-sex of my life. However, parts touched and I’m sure things leaked – and the Dear Abby column that terrified me when I was about 14 about how you can get pregnant without actual intercourse (slight as the chance might be) came rushing back.

I remember vividly, being at an after-work function behind the museum. I opted out of the baseball game and slightly tipsy, drove to Target for a pregnancy test. The test was negative and stayed on my bathroom sink counter for three hours. I checked it every 10 or 15minutes to make sure it didn’t change.

But again, would it have been so awful if I got pregnant? Not really. It wouldn’t have been the way I would have planned it, the way I imagined it, but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.

And so now, fast forward to 2008. Still not the way I imagined it, still not the way I would have planned it, but by far, not the end of the world. Except now, I can’t get pregnant. Even with medical intervention, with the most careful planning of my cycles, the most optimum conditions of my ovaries and uterus, and nothing.

I wonder why I bothered to be so responsible, why I bothered to be so careful. I could have not worried about birth control and just had fun and gotten the baby I wanted. The first night that Chris and I hooked up, I wouldn’t have sex with him. He didn’t have a condom and at that point, I wasn’t on the pill. He practically begged and I said no.

As drunk as I was, the message that was instilled into my head at such a young age, and repeated over and over again through media and pop culture and peers, was stronger than my urge to have sex, my wish to be a mom.

If I had said yes, would I have a beautiful four-year-old right now? Who knows for sure? All I know is that I wasted hundreds and hundreds of eggs because I’m the good girl, I’m the responsible one.