A Fine Line

"Don't drink out of this!" I warn Bobby as I see him coming down the hall towards the bathroom. I hold up the little plastic medicine cup I swiped from the top of an old Robitussin bottle.

"Why not?" he asks skeptically. I can see all over his face that although he had no previous intentions of drinking from the cup, now it's all he can think about, for no other reason than because I told him not to.

"Because I peed in it."

"What?" Bobby says in his high pitched voice reserved for moments he thinks I'm being ridiculous. "Why are you collecting pee? What are you, Bear Grylls?"

"Come here." I figure I may as well explain this to him now, since it is going to be our life for awhile. Bobby tends to stay out of all this infertility nonsense, but recently he seems to be much more interested. He'll check my app (and look forward to "marathon sex days" when he sees them lit up yellow) and ask what my temperature was. He's even beginning to understand how ovulation works and how I get pregnant from that (our sex ed in high school was reeeeeeaaaalllly lacking).

I show him the ovulation predictor test strip lying on the bathroom counter. "We're waiting to see if this line on the left is as dark as the line on the right."

"And that means you're pregnant?"

I laugh. "No, that means I'm ovulating."

He raises his eyebrows, "So...sex?"

"Yes. It tells us when to have sex."

Bobby leaves the bathroom and heads back to the couch, pondering what this means. "Those tiny lines on that tiny piece of paper with pee on it tells us when we have sex?"

"Yup."

"And then we wait for more tiny pee lines to tell us when we get a baby?"

"Pretty much."

"Our whole life is being dictated to us by tiny lines!?"

I curl up next to him on the couch and lay my head on his shoulder. "Kinda sucks."

We sit in silence for a minute or so, and I assume his mind has drifted to sports, or Call of Duty, or pie.

"Lil?" he asks finally.

"Yeah?"

"Can I watch the pee lines get dark next time?"