BODY WATCH : The Trauma of Buying the Right Home Pregnancy Testing Kit : It’s Expensive and Hard to Locate--Never Mind the Humiliation at the Checkout Line
When it comes to home pregnancy testing, you owe a lot to your childhood chemistry set. Not that it takes much technical skill to set up your own urinalysis mini-lab--minimal motor coordination is about all that’s required.
No, the crucial lesson you learned was that your lobbying efforts (“I won’t blow anything up, Mom, honest !”) proved considerably more challenging than the experiments themselves. Miss a period and you’ll discover that, like your anticlimactic chemistry set, the sprint to the bathroom and ensuing three-minute wait are mere addenda to the gantlet you run from the moment you step through the pharmacy door. That’s where you realize that years of experience as a Kotex consumer (remember those gigantic boxes?) do not prepare you for the transition to pregnancy tester.
Not only are you in unfamiliar territory, but the ante has been upped: These kits are expensive. Presumably in an effort to persuade you they are not, the boxes offer a confounding array of two-pack discounts, instant coupons and mail-in rebates. If you’re budget-minded, the packages demand considerable analysis. Bring along your calculator--or your accountant--assuming you can find the kits at all.
Only diligent surveillance will reveal whether you’re in search of a gender-specific Feminine Needs aisle (this female needs appreciation, love, some help in the kitchen and equal pay for equal work, none of which are available here), or a more egalitarian Reproductive Health counter.
Ironically enough, your goal may very well be the Baby Care display--where one can only suppose the marketing strategy targets harried mothers who, loading up on talc and formula, might impulsively grab a kit to see if they’re in for another round of Mommydom.
Chances are, you’ll end up in the euphemistically dubbed Family Planning center.
Despite its hygienic title, no white-coated professional waits to counsel you. Instead, just when you should be deciding whether your mood calls for the alchemy of mysterious vialed compounds or one-step efficiency, a suddenly lurid condom display will appear before you.
At the exact moment you should be facing a crucial issue like stick versus cup, you’ll start to wonder if passersby think you’re really weighing the relative merits of natural golden ribs versus mint flavored latex.
Admittedly, none of this should matter. It’s nobody’s business if you do want to make a studied prophylactic selection. And anyone who cared to speculate must already suspect you’re no virgin.
Maybe the problem is that your mind-set is more “newborn baby” than “French tickler.” Maybe it’s because the last thing you want to be reminded of is the sort of activity that brought you to this impasse in the first place. Whatever the reason, it does matter. It can matter to the point that you’re reduced to seizing a kit, any kit, just to escape.
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Not until you reach the checkout line will you realize that you’re clutching nothing but your pregnancy kit. Then your mushrooming paranoia renders you telepathic. You know what people are thinking. That woman in the power suit is wondering how another member of her sex could exercise such pathetic lack of control over her reproductive destiny. The guy in the T-shirt is thinking, “Slut.”
Yes, in a rational moment, you might concede that neither of these people is even marginally interested in your reproductive status, but this is not time strong on rationality.
The mood is oddly reminiscent of Tampon Purchases, the Early Years, when a trip to the drugstore could take hours while you pretended to read magazines until the teen-age male clerk went on break. Or a jaunt turned into a trek because you had to lay in a basketful of decoy sundries to divert attention from the little blue box buried at the bottom.
At this point in your life, though, you probably refuse to acknowledge your insecurity by picking up extraneous shampoo and toothpaste to disguise the true nature of your mission. In my own phenomenal maturity, I simply make sure my wedding ring is prominently displayed to the clerk, the customer behind me in line, and whoever it is that monitors those security cameras . . . and I hope I don’t have to pawn that band of gold to pay for the kit.
