Writings / Creative Non-Fiction: Leigh-Ann Worrell

I waited a week for the sign – the red light that told me everything would be okay, at least for another month. I waited anxiously for a few more days…and then another few more.
Three weeks passed.

“Going to the clinic tomorrow. Feeling sick and still no period,” I texted one night after work.

“Do you need anything? Let me know what’s happening as soon as you know,” he quickly replied.

I was too afraid to ask him what he would do if the test came back positive. The idea of bringing a child into the world carried scary thoughts: the loss of a freedom I had treasured for so long, trying to explain my relationship with Terrance to my family, and raising a child without a house or car and lingering student debt. But even scarier was that I was more than a little willing to entertain those thoughts.

Terrance and I both had good jobs and little financial responsibilities, I rationalised. Yes, we did not know each other that well, but we hardly fought – well, mostly because he hated confrontation. In my mind, we could be the kind of parents that got along as friends — even if not as lifelong lovers. Wasn’t it time we challenged ‘the perfect family form?’

“Plus twenty-seven is a perfectly acceptable age to be a mother,” I thought to myself.

I sat in the dark and thought of the last time I thought I was pregnant. I was 21 and in love with poison. Venom consumed me until my breasts were swelling, head was dizzy and I could not bear the smell of fried chicken.  My family doctor encouraged me to call on the strength of Mary to get through “this trying time” and to see all life as a blessing from God. I couldn’t. I shouldn’t. I won’t.

I didn’t.

My cousin held my hand in the waiting room as we sat in the small clinic I had been referred to. I ran into an old classmate by the receptionist’s desk. I wondered if we were there for the same reason.

The doctor barely looked at me as he explained what was going to happen to me and the alien eating me alive from within. I turned my head to the right as he injected a vein in my left hand.

I remember a grey steel garbage can.

I remember red.

I remember the blues.

I remember everything and nothing.

I know everything and nothing.

Now I was not scared. Now I had a job. Now I had travelled and tried things and seen things and known love and rejected it. Why not now?

“Fortunately or unfortunately, you are not pregnant,” the nurse informed me, placing her hand on mine.

“Oh, well.”

“I am thinking your cycle is going through some kind of change, which is normal. If your period doesn’t come in two weeks, come back to see us and you will take another test.”

I left the clinic with a mind of muddled emotions. I quickly called Terrence, who no doubt was having trouble focussing at work.

“Not pregnant,” I said when he picked up the phone.

He was relieved, and I guess I should have been too. As harrowing as our scare was, we continued to play with fire. Perhaps there was a part of me hoping to get burned.

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