So I’d been feeling under the weather a bit for the last week or so. Nothing too significant, given the amount of stress I’d been experiencing at work. I was kinda tired all the time, my stomach had been a bit queasy. That sort of thing. My period was a week overdue and all, but again, there was stress. Stress has a history of throwing me off by a week and sometimes more. So while I was “thinking about it” I hadn’t been exactly thinking about it. I’ve had too many not-pregnant weeks during the last year where I’d try to convince myself that I was pregnant based on quasi-signs and ended up disappointed.

I mean, I was only a little queasy. It hasn’t prevented me from eating or drinking anything special. And yeah, I felt like my nose was super sensitive to the smells around me, but that happens a bunch. It had been the main reason I thought I was pregnant previous months and was always a red herring. And I was kinda really moody, but the job is stress and I get moody before my period and there was “that one day” but seriously? Work was awful that day. I was kinda tired, even after decent nights’ sleep, but I’m always kinda tired and work has been soooo draining lately.

But it had been a week, which was about the point where I get tired of waiting and checking for my period and the “maybe you are” monsters get too loud so I bought a test.

The tests I use have two lines. Two lines means pregnant. Says so on the stick. One line on the right means not pregnant. So fine. I pee. I set it down. I give in to the urge to watch it tell me I’m not pregnant instead of flipping it over after 3 minutes have passed. And the weirdest thing happened.

One line showed up, but it was the wrong line. And I thought, “well. That can’t be right. Is it on the other side or something? Why would they do that?” and then the other line, the right-side-not-pregnant line showed up and for a moment I thought “That’s better. That’s the line I’m supposed to see. I don’t know what that other line is doing there.”

And then I realized there were two lines.

Two.

There’s a little key that says “pregnant” next to a drawing of the testing window with two lines in it, and that matched my window.

Two.

My eyes flicked back and forth and back again. Two. Two means pregnant. There are two lines. That means pregnant. That means I peed on the stick and I’m pregnant. It’s not an ovulation detector stick telling me I’m ovulating. It’s a pregnancy stick. It means that when there’s two lines, I’m pregnant. Two lines. Pregnant.

Pregnant.