Pregnancy

age 8: My parents fight a lot. I make straight A’s in all my classes, but they still fight and my mom still cries all the time. I’m obviously not trying hard enough to make them happy. They are going to get a divorce and neither of them will want to live with me. I will die homeless and alone.

age 12: My boobs don’t look anything like Loni Anderson’s boobs. No man will ever love me. I will die homeless, alone, and with little boobs.

age 16: I didn’t get an A on my Biology test. I won’t graduate at the top of my class. I won’t get a scholarship to BYU. I won’t ever get a job because no one will hire me because I didn’t graduate from BYU. I will die homeless, alone, and without a college diploma.

age 19: I can’t handle five English classes in one semester. Normal, righteous people should be able to handle five English classes in one semester. I’m obviously not living righteously. God hates me. BYU is going to find out that God hates me and expel me for not living righteously. The world doesn’t need someone who has been expelled from BYU. I will die homeless, alone, and officially rejected from the Lord’s University.

age 27: We’ll never find a job in Utah. We’re going to live in my mother’s basement forever. My step-father will get tired of sharing his bologna and convince my mother to throw us out into the street. We will die homeless, alone (albeit together), without any bologna.

age 27: I didn’t get pregnant on the first try. I will have to take fertility pills. It will take over a decade for me to get pregnant. The fertility pills will cause me to become pregnant with quadruplets. We will go from having zero kids to four kids all at once, when I’m 40 years old. I won’t be able to handle the stress. I will die homeless, alone, with no funeral because you just don’t honor mothers who abandon four perfectly good children like that.

age 28: I’m swelling in my face and in my hands. There are slight traces of protein in my pee. My doctor says everything is okay but the internet knows more than my doctor and I am going to develop preeclampsia and have to have an emergency c-section because my body is going to cut off oxygen to the baby and she will be born a hermaphrodite dwarf baby and we will have to decide whether to raise her a girl or a boy, and when he/she gets to be 18 he/she will stumble into an internet chat room with other people who were born hermaphrodite dwarf babies, and he/she will be told that what we should have done was raise him/her as both so that he/she could make his/her own decision about it at the appropriate time, and he/she will resent us so intensely that he/she will never talk to us again. We will die homeless, alone, willing everything including the stainless steel Kitchen Aid refrigerator which still isn’t paid off to our hermaphrodite dwarf baby.