* * *
Most children are okay once you get to know them. They’re like your flakiest, least employable friend who sleeps through brunch, makes terrible art, and name-drops characters you’ve never heard of. They’re also easy to beat at tag. Personally, I like my child friends to be at least seven years old, as there is little difference between what amuses me and what amuses a seven-year-old. But the idea of pushing a whole person through my major organs has always been simultaneously too abstract and too horrible. As someone who has met pregnant women, I can tell you that babies pound your bladder into a pancake and put your stomach level with your heart. This would be funny if women were men because the joke with men is that the way to their hearts is through their stomachs. But women are not men.
Deep down, I thought it was a moot point anyway. I secretly thought that if I ever wanted to become pregnant, a doctor would tell me that my uterus was not broken, but absentee. There’s just a bunch of insulation foam where a uterus might go. The one time I had reason to purchase a pregnancy test, I peed on the stick and waited for one blue line or two blue lines. When the timer went off, I went to check on the stick. The window was blank. Like a Magic 8 Ball without the magic. I consulted the box. “Blank” was not an option. I tried again with a second stick. Same deal. So I called my mother, who is generally useless on such matters but had recently knocked it out of the park after I lamented that a guy I was dating had never heard of Gloria Steinem.
“Eh,” she had said, “find out if his mother doesn’t know who she is. Then you’re really screwed.”
I thought perhaps this comment had ushered in a new era of wisdom. I was mistaken.
“This is a good thing,” she assured me about the test. “Clearly, you’re not pregnant!”
“I’m not ‘not pregnant,’” I said. “I’m nothing.”
“Which would you rather be?” she asked. “Pregnant or nothing?”
Those were my options? For so much of history, to not be pregnant was to be nothing. And while we have mostly sloughed off such beliefs, some animal part of me was speaking up, making a strong case for “pregnant.” Another minute passed before a solitary blue line appeared in the window. I sighed, relieved. But we will never know who was the remedial one, me or the stick.
* * *
As I got older, I was surprised to find it was not my fellow women who were pressuring me to have a baby or even to have an opinion. You’d think a group of people who dress for one another would also have babies for one another. Not so. While I’m acquainted with a few status moms who believe what the world really needs is more Americans, and who ask, “What are you waiting for?” as if I have—whoops!—lost track of time, none of my actual girlfriends pressed the topic. They knew better. As for the question of immortality, of pushing my bloodline into the future, well, this is not the primary preoccupation of my gender.
Yet just about every guy I dated assumed that children were at the forefront of my brain. They became increasingly vocal about this, ridding me of my need to ignore the mountain of trend pieces—they brought the mountain to me. One guy was forever sniffing out my DNA-hustling agenda. He shoehorned the topic into conversations about guacamole. You ever try to put toothpicks through an avocado pit? If only that’s how babies were made! His lack of verbal agility hit rock bottom as we lay on the beach one summer, chatting with our chins resting on our fists. I asked him if my back was getting red and he asked me what I would do if I got pregnant.
“What are you going to do if you go bald?” I shot back.
“That’s totally different,” he said.
“Biologically,” I agreed, “not topically.”
By this time, I was thirty-four. I told him that I wasn’t sure what I would do. Because I wasn’t. Furthermore, I resented what I perceived to be the weaponization of my own vulnerability for the purposes of this conversation. I could tell it would have been preferable if I had sprung to my feet and drawn ABORTIONS 4EVA in the sand. Looking back, it’s clear that he was building a case for himself, a verbal paper trail in which the reason it didn’t work out with us was because I was in a hurry to procreate. When the truth was he just wasn’t sure he wanted to have kids with me. Which was fair. I wasn’t sure I wanted kids with me either.
* * *
There’s an old riddle that goes like this: A father and son are in a car accident. The father dies instantly, and the son is taken to the nearest hospital. The doctor comes in and exclaims, “I can’t operate on this boy!”
“Why not?” the nurse asks.
“Because he’s my son,” the doctor replies.
How is this possible?
The riddle is a good litmus
