It’s my urine and I’ll test if I want to

Here’s how it went down:

Within 48 hours, I was hauling my boobs around the house like a pair of cement sacks and sticking a pillow under my aching back. However, I’m also on a ridiculous number of fertility drugs at the moment and I stand on my feet all day, so it could be anything.

I’m not good at patience when it comes to waiting in line at the DMV. This was not going to go well.

By Sunday — three days after the transfer — I was taking a First Response home pregnancy test. It was negative, but I didn’t freak out. There aren’t many things in this world I know for sure, but I do know that I am ridiculous and that this was a bit early to test.

Made it through Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on almost no sleep. Wednesday night, I decided to take the second test in the pack. If it was negative, I would wait until the blood test on Saturday.

So I peed on a stick. And for the first time in two years of stick-peeing (soon to be an Olympic competition), I wasn’t nervous. Not so much because I knew I was pregnant, but because I knew it was probably still too soon to check.

And for the first time in my two years of inept urine-splattering, I saw those three letters pop up in the window. I have to confess: It was kind of amazing. Like passing your driver’s license test on the 23rd try. I just kept staring at the letters. I came out of the bathroom and showed the stick to My Young Man, who didn’t know I’d been testing. He kind of stared at me blankly, then smiled. “Really?”

Well, sort of. It didn’t feel entirely real. First of all, because it was (is) so, so early. And second of all, because I was supposed to wait for the blood test Saturday. So I spent the next three days googling things like “pregnancy symptoms” and “sore boobs” (thankfully, no porn sites resulted) and “pregnancy test accuracy.” Turns out false negatives are way more likely than false positives.

Still, the next two days of work were brutal, particularly as I spent each night staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. My brain has been bouncing back and forth between extreme caution and total wackadoo. One minute I’m thinking: “It’s just a cell cluster. It could be gone by next week. It’s just the next step.” And the next: “I could paint a really cool Eloise mural on the wall.”

Because if there’s one thing all the pregnancy books recommend, it’s decorating a nursery when you’re 10 days pregnant.

Finally, it was Saturday morning. Eyes flipped open at 5:30 a.m. Drove 40 minutes to Fancy Shmancy Fertility Clinic. Waited another 30 for a 10-second blood draw.

The lab tech looked at my records and said, “This is the big one, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Are you nervous?”

“Not that much. I took a test on Wednesday and it said I was pregnant, so I’m just hoping for confirmation.”

“Oh, you cheated. A lot of women cheat and test early.”

I cheated. A day later, this lingers in my head. Women in their 30s and 40s, “cheating” by taking matters into their own hands and assessing their family futures instead of waiting patiently for the blood draw.

Of course we cheat. We go through this process which in the best case is months long and in the worst takes years. We’re told what to eat, what to drink. We’re told to take all kinds of disruptive drugs and when we have to take them. We’re told whom to call and when, and then told to wait for a call back after we follow the directions.

We are, in short, reduced to the very thing we so desperately desire: Children.

Is it so surprising that at the last minute, we do the one thing that won’t jeopardize our chances and restores a few molecules of autonomy and adulthood?

Yeah, I peed on a stick, I’ll tell the jury. And I’d do it again.