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When my friends began entering their child-bearing eras, I was tending to my mother’s soiled diapers. Hot off her third, and ultimate, overdose, she was laid up in a nursing home in theoretical recovery with her brand new ostomy bag. Shortly after her ashes were spread at the beach she taught me to swim, it was my husband’s turn to sprinkle his mom’s remains.
Raised by a single mother who loved me so fiercely that it broke her, I knew that I never wanted to hurt the way she did when I left for college, or feel the anxiety she did whenever I got into the car with a boy (even if we were just going to the local Cheesecake Factory). I came to understand that same paralyzing panic when she found narcotics. After a lifetime on her feet as a hairdresser, the back pain finally caught up to her so much that the occasional Oxy stopped cutting it. On the days she made her way to the bottom of the bottle, and didn’t respond to my calls, I could only imagine the worst case scenario. Before long, I didn’t have to just imagine it.
My husband didn’t get to know the full extent of my biggest champion. Though she appeared during our best moments over the course of our 15 years together (before she passed), during the worst ones, I wasn’t exactly in the right headspace to consider having a baby, let alone making one. Not to mention, we were sharing a studio apartment while I was paying off my journalism school debt, and supporting her. This left plenty for the beer fund, but not enough to raise a human. The idea of producing an heir to our Murphy bed was compartmentalized away in the little recesses I shoved my deep-seated Catholic guilt into. Plus, as a hobbyist whose never finished a craft, I couldn’t fathom taking on the ultimate DIY project–one that I couldn’t leave collecting dust with my cross stitch kits.
But once in a while, when my husband would kneel into a catcher’s squat during a toss with our goddaughter, or I’d overhear him teaching her about the stars, the thought of what a great father he’d be would bubble up like acid reflux. Thoughts I pushed down during our rumspringa spent making up for time lost to trauma with tequila and trips to Fire Island with a group of male friends who weren’t born with biological clocks.
But on the eve of my 39th birthday, or what my OBGYN has always warmly referred to as “my last good year,” I found myself sitting on a grimy New York City street outside of a Gray’s Papaya, having a full blown tantrum. I wailed to my husband (and several onlookers), that it was time we stopped procreation-ating. We needed to decide whether we were going to be content to live selfishly ever after as DINKs (that’s double income, no kids, for those who didn’t watch Doug in the ‘90s), or if we wanted to think about starting a family someday.
