A soft orange light, 2:43 AM, glows amongst the darkness you know to be your room. You squint, trying to make sense of the time. You calculate how many hours you have until your morning alarm is set to chime. Two hours and Twenty minutes. You have been having trouble sleeping through the night because every night you wake up craving eggs and cheese. It’s an immense craving, like wanting cold water after running a 5K. Your mouth is dry and your hair line dripping with sweat. Your body is begging for eggs and cheese. Not just any egg,

a boiled one,
with a slightly soft yolk,
as orange and yellow as a sunflower,
sprinkled with everything bagel seasoning.

Not just any cheese, soft chunks of cheese:

Original Babybel,
Light Laughing Cow,
Aldis Brie,
Cheddar Jack Cracker Barrel Cubes.

You peel the quilt off of your body, careful not to wake your partner sleeping next to you; his lips slightly detached causing a sigh of a snore. You slip your feet into your house shoes as you stabilize yourself off of the bed and walk to the kitchen. In the fridge is a glass Tupperware with your boiled eggs, you prepared them at the beginning of the week. Long gone the nights standing over boiling water for 8 minutes, plunging the single egg into an ice bath for 10 minutes, peeling, and eating before tucking yourself back in bed. Now, you can select an egg from the dish, a handful of cheese, and carry them back to eat in bed, and fall asleep shortly after the craving wakes you up.

This night, now 2:57AM, you realize sitting in bed chewing your chunks of cheese, that you have never liked cheese or egg, and now you have a container of slippery, pre-made eggs waiting for you to eat every night when you anticipate this craving to wake you up. You pick your phone from the table, straining your eyes to its light, and type, why am I craving cheese and eggs, in the google search bar.

Hormonal change. You guess you could start your period soon; you can’t remember the last time you had it. Your iPhone health tracker usually predicts your period, so you open the app to see when your next one will start.

Your stomach turns liquid. You haven’t had a period in thirty-nine days, that’s eleven days late. Summer has just ended, college classes have picked up again, you have been picking up more hours at work; amidst all that change, you must’ve forgotten that you were supposed to start. You must’ve not realized that you were late. This has never happened before, ever since you started your period in the seventh grade, your period has come once a month for 3-6 days. For nearly a decade, you’ve never missed a single period.             

You can’t wait, you take the last bite of your egg, slip your slippers back on and grab your keys on the way out the door. You drive four minutes up the road to The Friendly Gus gas station. You park in the empty lot and make a beeline to the section with “vitamins”:

“Rhino Super Long Lasting”,
“Make America Hard Again 3000”,
and “Pink Pussycat”

and various two packs of condoms:

“Trojan Ultra-Thin”,
“Durex Classic” and
“Skyn Elite”.

To the left is

“Vagisil instant burn relief”,
a pack of “Tampax Radiant”
and “Clear Blue”.

You grab the Clear Blue pregnancy test, then another, and another; just to be sure. On the walk up to the cashier, arms cradling the multiple boxes of overpriced early result, the thought of embarrassment hits you. You didn’t check your hair before leaving the house, but you could feel its weight bouncing in a tangled, unbrushed nest. You are wearing a stained sweatshirt, your partners loose boxers, and house shoes with no socks. Worst of all, you’re a young woman, all alone, buying a handful of pregnancy tests at 3:17AM. You decide that you will not be embarrassed. This is natural. There is a biracial, female Vice President God Dammit. I have a right to buy whatever the hell I want unashamed. Would a man be ashamed to buy a pregnancy test? I don’t know. I am not a man.

Your pep talk didn’t save your face from turning bright red when standing in front of the cashier while you watch him take the time to fiddle with each box finding the bar code, lifting the scanner and scanning it.  Maybe he was bored during his nine-hour shift, or maybe he wanted to make you feel like shit.

“Would you like a bag”

“No”

He slides the boxes of tests across the counter, and you stuff them in the pocket of the sweatshirt.

While you’re reading them, you just know a man had to write the instructions for pregnancy tests. It’s more complicated than scripture. Do they think that women have more hands than men? You don’t have any reusable cups, so you settle for the cap to your hair spray and rinse it out with water. Hovering your butt over the toilet seat and one arm, you attempt to pee in the cap, pee streams on your wrist, drips on the floor, and puddles under the cap on your counter. You set the stick to soak for the three minutes directed on the packaging, but it doesn’t take that long. Underwear still wrapped at your ankles, bending over your bathroom counter, you see a plus sign in the results box. You are pregnant.

You shake your partner awake with your piss covered stick in your other hand, and he squints his eyes in the bathroom light.

“I’m pregnant”

He sits up, “huh”

“I’m pregnant” You point the piss stick in his face, “See”

You are both quiet, you are waiting for his reaction, he is trying to figure out what year it is. A few years from now, with degrees under your belts, rings on your fingers and a place to yourselves, this would be great news. You would go to target and make some sort of “we’re pregnant” basket. You’re both seniors in college, your strongest commitment is the three words you repeat at the end of phone calls and right before you orgasm, and you have roommate.

“We’ll make it work,” He takes the piss stick into his own hand and looks at the plus sign.

You miss school to drive to your OBGYN in Athens. They wanted to get you in immediately to discuss your options. You wait two hours in a plastic chair, the staff continues to reassure you that they will get you in as soon as they have an opening. Children’s toys sit in the corner, and you watch mothers shush their children as you all wait. I have one of those in me. They call you back for the usual weigh, piss in a cup, blood collection and then undress in the small room, dressing in their paper gown.

Jessica walks in, “You’re right, test came back positive”

She has you bend your legs at the knees and inserts a probe into your vagina, it doesn’t hurt, and you watch the black screen on the monitor begin to fizz with white and grey as she moves the probe around inside of you. You see two circles on the screen with smaller circles inside of them.

“Usually around 5-week gestation we can see the gestational sac and the yolk sac” she pointed to one of big circles and then the smaller circle inside of it.

“So my baby has two gestational and yolk sacs?”

“You’re two fetuses each have a gestational sac,” she gages your reaction.

“Two?”

“Yes, twins.”

She takes the probe out of your vagina and tells you that she will leave so you can put your clothes back on.  She comes back in to discuss how you want to handle this pregnancy.

“In the state of Georgia, you still have a choice, but it must be soon. You are measuring at 40 days, and you cannot legally receive abortive care past day 42. If it is your choice, we can send you home today with an abortion pill regimen that will chemically ab-”

“No, no,” you stutter an interruption, “I want to keep them. I’m keeping them.”

She looks surprised, probably because of your age, or maybe because you’ve been seeing her since age 12. You became her patient when you were in middle school, educated you on STD prevention when you admitted going to second base with Ryan (your first boyfriend), asked you about your college plans, gave you your first Pap smear last year, knew that you were in college now.

She quickly apologized and moved on, asking about your dietary habits, exercise, smoking, what you could eat, apps you could download, loaded your hands with pamphlet after pamphlet. You got excited, like you were taking on a new hobby.

Life went on as usual; you ate your eggs and cheese at midnight, went to work, went to class, went to the gym (with Jessicas approval). You started gaining weight quickly but didn’t develop a bump until November. Gaining traction into winter, people couldn’t really tell that you were pregnant, with the sweater and jackets, it hid the shape of your belly. You did an intimate gender reveal with your partner. You brought the results to your roommate, who baked a cake with red or yellow frosting in the middle. (You and your partner’s favorite colors) Red for boy, yellow for girl. Your doctor let it slip that the twins were the same gender. You cut into the vanilla Funfetti cake, and the icing showed like the yolk of your daily eggs. Two baby girls.

August of your senior year isn’t the worst time to get pregnant after all. The baby wasn’t due until May, which is just enough time to finish school, plus or minus a few days at the end. You told your family when you found out the gender, and they were not angry like you expected them to be. Both your parents had children before age 22, so you were behind generational schedule. They threw you baby showers, ordered your groceries, and your grandmother even came to one of your ultrasounds when your partner couldn’t make it. You had a job lined up after graduation that paid salary, and your partner got a full-time job in the meantime to save money. You could tell he was taking on too much, but it was only a few months before you both had your degrees and two baby girls.

Hopefully they would have his eyes and your smile. You daydream while sitting in class, hand cusped at your underbelly, dreaming about their fat thighs, bald heads, and warm fat tummies. You can’t wait to hear them cry, laugh, coo.

The weather warms in late February, and people start to realize. Your peers, professors, co-workers, they start to look down at your stomach for too long and avoid eye contact after. Sometimes you get looks of disgust or confusion from strangers passing by. You pity them for not being able to comprehend the blessing that this is. You have always struggled with body image, and this is the first time in your life that you have loved your tummy. This is the first time that you have loved your body for what it does, for who she is.

At 1:24AM March 5, 2025, you wake up craving your usual egg and cheese, and when you stand up to go retrieve your nightly snack, you feel liquid drip down your thighs. Has my water broken? You step into the crack of light coming from the bathroom, and the liquid is black, thick, blood. You wake your partner, you’re scared, tears making their way down your face into your mouth. You try to wipe the blood up your thigh with your hands in disbelief, while your partner wraps a towel around your bottom half and carries you to the car.

Baby one experienced placenta abruption, which can be survivable by both mother and baby in the case of immediate delivery. The complication was the risk of delivering both babies at 28 weeks, when full term is 40 weeks. The twins were slightly behind in development at their last anatomy scan, and there was a possibility they wouldn’t survive after birth. The placenta abruption seemed too severe to leave baby one in your womb, jeopardizing the health of both babies and you.

“So I have to have them today? I have to have them right now?” You try to control your breathing, but small sobs come out as you speak.

“Unfortunately, inducing you would be considered a termination of pregnancy, because the babies have heartbeats, according to Georgia law, we cannot terminate this pregnancy until.”

“Until?”

“There is a life-threatening condition, and you are at risk of death”

“What do you mean, what does that mean?” You’re in shock, eyes wide, holding your breath for his answer.

“We have to wait until you are actively dying.”

The law allows for abortion if the mother

“Has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated,
caused by,
or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death
or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”
But lawmakers haven’t spelled out exactly what that means, and a doctor found to be in violation of the law can face loss of their medical license and a possible life sentence in prison.

The doctors allow you to stay in the hospital, because they suspect that you will face the risk of death in a few hours. When you reach a 103-degree temperature, the doctors state that it is deadly enough to induce labor. You give birth to your babies, drugged, and in and out of consciousness. You’re told that they are alive, they might make it. The room is flooded with doctors and nurses, who start wheeling you out of the room away from your crying babies. You can hear them calling for you in their chattering lips.

“Where am I going?” You are calling out to your babies; you’re trying to raise your head to see them.

“The ICU”

“Why”

“You’re developing symptoms of sepsis.”

The loss of blood, exhaustion and infection brings you to death’s door. Your knock is the faint breath escaping your lungs, your lips slightly parted, a sigh.  And when you exhaled your last breath, knowing what it meant, never seeing the faces of your girls, leaving your partner to raise them alone, you think, “What will be of my girls if I cannot be alive to raise them?”

You think, “Should I have taken that pill?”

– Mckenzie Weathers-Skinner

Author’s Note: I wrote “Eggs, Cheese and American Dreams” as an advocate for protecting female rights to safe and ethical healthcare