Her fiance was lying naked on a massage table overseas and her Holocaust-survivor grandma was pushing her to use a pregnancy test. So Elise Esther Hearst got creative.
I was with my grandmother when I found out I was pregnant with my first child.
At the time, both my then-fiance and my parents were overseas (not together – my husband-to-be was a professional cyclist competing in China, and my parents were on holiday on top of a mountain somewhere).
On my way to my grandmother’s I’d asked if she needed anything. “Toothpaste,” she’d said. I waded through a sea of bright pink and yellow stickers in the discount pharmacy. I left with a tube of Sensodyne and a First Response pregnancy test. Despite being told explicitly by my wedding-dress maker not to fall pregnant before the wedding, my then-fiance and I had thrown caution to the wind, and I suspected the wind had other ideas.
When I arrived at the aged-care facility, I handed her the toothpaste and showed her the pregnancy test. “What’s this?” she’d asked, eyebrows raised, nostrils flared. My grandmother was suspicious of most things presented to her from the pharmacy. She was also fiercely loving, wonderfully hilarious, and would casually threaten to kill herself if my hair didn’t look the way she liked it to. “I might be pregnant. Should I take the test?” She’d practically leapt out of her skin and yelled at me to pish on the stick as soon as humanly possible. So I did. And together we waited.
Read the article by Elise Esther Hearst in the Herald Sun.