After my daughter was born, Husbandrinka and I decided to have another baby. Except I couldn’t get pregnant, so I did what any normal person would do–panicked and bought an ovulation kit.
So the way that this particular ovulation kit worked is that I had to pee on a stick every morning and it was going to tell me when I was pre-ovulating. It seemed really simple, so I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing. Except after 30 days of peeing on that fucking stick, it was still showing me that I wasn’t ovulating. And I could tell, by the carcasses that I left in my wake, that I was in an intense period of PMS. I was enraged.
So, I did what any normal person would do and called the 800 number on the ovulation box for assistance. Seriously, if you think that the recession is bad and unemployment sucks, but at least you’re not on the phone with hormonal women trying to get pregnant. And when I say “hormonal women”, I mean “me”.
I tell the woman who answers the phone the problem: I’ve been peeing on the stick for a month and it’s not showing that I’m ovulating and she says, “let’s take it from the top.” And, really, what can you say to that? “I was born at a young age. Then I moved here from the Soviet Union. Then I met Husbandrinka. Then we had our daughter. Then I couldn’t get pregnant. Then I bought your motherfucking kit and I’ve been peeing on the stick and it’s not showing me that I’m ovulating. I can tell you more about the immigration process if that would be helpful.” So she says, “maybe you will ovulate tomorrow.” I am so on to her. Because if that was my job, I would totally say that, hoping that the nonovulater would call back the next day, when I’d be off from work. But no. I knew that I wouldn’t be ovulating tomorrow because I was in the midst of full blown PMS and like an idiot, I told her that. Seriously, in the history of speech no conversation has ever improved from telling someone that you are PMSing.
So she got down to the nitty gritty with me.
“How long do you pee on the stick?” she asked.
“Well, I don’t know. Several Mississippis, easily,” I explained that it varied day to day, if she caught my drift.
And then she let me have it.
“You’re only supposed to pee on it for three seconds,” she told me. “You’re flooding the pee stick.”
Flooding the pee stick. This meant that I couldn’t even pee properly, which left the number of things that I could do well in the single digits.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I called Husbandrinka to tell him. “I’ve been peeing incorrectly.”
“I am not at all surprised,” he said.
It’s a good thing that we can laugh about it now.