In the first years of my marriage to Bill, I tried to wrangle the baby wanting in me back down. I went on as though nothing had changed. And, from the outside, nothing had.
Each morning, as I’d done since college, I pressed a tiny yellow pill through the tinfoil at the back of its plastic bubble. Cupped my hand to catch it. Bill was asleep or already at work. I was alone in the bathroom.
This was my ritual, what I had done for most of fourteen years, without thinking of what I was saying yes to. Or saying no to. My periods came every fourth Tuesday in the week of the white sugar pills placed in the packet as markers to keep a woman who didn’t want children in the habit of taking her daily pill.
But now, on some mornings, I paused. Me, the mirror, these pills.
What if?
If I stopped. If Bill didn’t know. If I became pregnant anyway. Would he finally surrender? Or would he push me to end the pregnancy? Would he leave? Would he fall in love with the child?
The me with the pill in her palm caught eyes with the me in the mirror, the woman I would have to face, the child in her arms come to life from secrets and calculation. A child I didn’t want that way. A relationship I didn’t want that way.
I wouldn’t do it. Honesty was what we had, Bill and I, what I valued as much as the way he made me laugh, as much as the way he told me, daily, that he loved me. We were not made of secrets and calculations.
It was as though there were two parts of me, two separate women.
The woman of my logic embraced common sense and plans and agreements. She took pleasure in her life. The freedoms, career, friends. The family already here. The exquisite moments. This woman said, You have enough.
This woman understood the struggles of mothering, the demands and self-sacrifice, the always being torn between work and child, self and child. This woman took in the love of other people’s children and gave it back completely, joyfully. She said, If you have children of your own, you won’t have the time or energy or love for these children already here.
The woman of my body pushed against logic. The woman of my body leaned to the pull of history and family expectation. Leaned so far that her body yearned. This woman said, Now. Before it is too late.
The yearning distilled into a singular desire that overwhelmed logic and common sense. I wanted to be pregnant. To be filled with baby and movement of baby. To have my breasts swell, belly grow, to feel the pressure and weight of carrying within. I wanted to run my hands over the taut skin that sheltered a soon-to-be child and know the pains of a baby pushing out.
Words I’d once heard Mom say echoed in my sleep. The women in our family have easy pregnancies. In my sleep my belly grew with a dreamed-up baby. I dreamed the special attention that a pregnant woman gets, the chair given up, the soft eyes and hopeful questions, the baby gifts and baby shower. I dreamed a hurried hospital drive, the birth beginning.
In these dreams I never had the baby.
Waking was a loss. I ran my hands down my flat stomach, over my small breasts. Next to me, Bill slept, his leg long against mine.
Did the dreams mean I was making the wrong choice? Were my dreams my secret truth?
I told Bill, “I dreamed I was pregnant.” Or “I was in labor. It didn’t hurt.” I told him how much I loved it. “This is the part I feel like I’m missing,” I said. “I can’t know what it’s like to have a baby in me. To give birth.”
Bill stayed quiet. Because I tried to keep my wanting small, to not burden him, he didn’t know how big it was. To him, my dream-telling must have sounded the same as when I told him my dream of driving off a road into a lake and the water was rising; the dream of putting on new running shoes and I could fly; the dreams of the man or boys or killer bees outside the door and me inside terrified.
I said, “The women in my family have easy pregnancies.”
Bill did not pick up this hopeful offering.
The dreams of pregnancy and almost-birth held in me through the day. In the skin of me, the blood of me, the womb of me.