Wine about it
I was sitting in my car outside of a fine dining restaurant waiting to go in for an interview. It was hotter than hell and my AC had decided to go to its final resting place, so I timed it perfectly to arrive 3 minutes before I would need to go inside. I take a moment to calm my nerves. It had been a year and a half since I left the airline industry to go back to school, and I figured a serving job at one of the city’s most expensive restaurants would earn me enough to pay my half of the bills, and allow me to indulge in all of my guilty pleasures. I always kill interviews, but the feeling of the unknown still has me taking an extra moment, even though the inside of my car was over 100 degrees.
After I secure the bag, I meet my family back at home. It was the kids’ first day of school, and I couldn’t wait to hear all about their day and deliver my good news. I’m greeted with big hugs and excitement. It only takes 30 seconds before I’m gifted with the wonderful stories about who farted on who and who was digging for gold and wiping it on the carpet. I often think about being a kid and how the smallest things brought the greatest joys. I think about how innocence shields them from the horrors of the world, and I think about how it gets stripped away. Not all at once, but a day at a time. It is beautiful to watch them grow, yet surreal to think that one day, your biggest internal identifier, being a parent, will no longer be what consumes your day-to-day life.
The next day I had an errand to run. See, my man and I had a little too much fun a couple of weeks prior. I got the emergency contraceptive, but I wanted to grab a couple of pregnancy tests to calm my nerves instead of waiting for my monthly newsletter that would tell me whether I had a baby on board on not. As I walk down the aisle, I spot my favorite wine and decide I need it. If the test was negative, it would be a consolation, if it was positive, it would be my last hurray. After I grab my things and make my way to check out, I stand in line thinking about the explanation I would use when I sat the pregnancy test next to the bottle of wine on the register. Come to find out, the cashier had some words of her own. As she looks at the items that brought me into the store at 8am, I could feel the judgement oozing out of her pores. I make a joke about the wine potentially being my last hurray, thinking it would break the ice, and instead, she looks at me and says, “you know, there are boxes of condoms you can buy so you don’t have to buy these.”
For the first time in a long time, I didn’t really know what to say.
Did she really just tell me to buy condoms? How didn’t she know that I was a poor baren woman who had been trying to conceive, and the bottle of wine was my comfort in case it was negative? What if I was on birth control, but mother nature was late and so it was just a precaution? Instead, she had already labelled me as an unfit, reckless, teenager having reckless, teenager sex all over the city. I grab the bag and walk back to my apartment, thinking about the lady and her unwarranted advice the entire way home.
I get home, unscrew the wine, and take a big swig. I head to the bathroom and take the test. As I’m sitting there waiting for the results, I’m thinking about how I would feel if it was positive… or negative. I know I eventually want one more kid, but I told myself I wanted to be married and secure before having another. On the other hand, what is the difference in having three kids out of wedlock versus four? I also know that my current partner is adamant about not having another kid anytime soon, so would I really want to go through with it knowing there’s the potential that I would be doing it alone? How could I look at my kids and go through the rest of my life wondering what that 4th kid would have been like? I’m saved from these intrusive and depressing thoughts when I look down to see that the test, is indeed, negative.
