When Bill and I traveled, I calculated time zones to leave no chance of an egg being released. At the right time each day, sometimes morning, sometimes night, I took out the round packet and pressed a tiny yellow pill through thin tinfoil. I placed the pill on my tongue, drank water, swallowed it down. Then Bill and I went out to see the world or slipped into bed and made love in a new place.
Mom had once told me she knew when she conceived each of us kids. How could this be? Were these the moments when she decided to not use the usual protections? Were the moments of sexual intimacy between her and Dad so rare that she remembered each? Did she know her body so well, like I once thought I knew mine?
In Luxor, Egypt, Bill and I walked through the columns at Karnak Temple. The tour guide showed us a statue of a giant scarab beetle. He told us the scarab was an ancient sacred symbol of fertility. He told us it would bring a baby if we walked around it counter-clockwise seven times.
Maybe this man told other people it would bring health or prosperity or luck, but he told us it would bring a child. We looked like a couple in love, and a couple in love must want a child.
I laughed and stepped away. I felt the usual spotlight embarrassment that came with the expectations of others as they pointed at the prescribed path that led to children.
But, on this day, in this place, I was where I wanted to be. If, after learning of Mom’s disappointment, I had said we must have a child or else, I would not have been here now, on this adventure.
I did not walk around the scarab counter-clockwise seven times.
In Cairo, a driver drove Bill and me through the center of the city, tall stone buildings, laundry drying from windows. Cars honked and traffic went this way, that way. In the middle of an eight-lane road, a group of men dressed in white carried a small coffin, also white, through traffic. They carried the coffin on their shoulders. The traffic moved around them. A child had died. I thought of the mothers. The grandmothers, the aunts. They were somewhere else, holding their burden in a private place.
Back home I gave silver cartouche pendants to our nieces, each with her name spelled out in hieroglyph enclosed in a long oval. I kept one for myself, with the symbols of my name in gold: a cobra, an eagle, a basket, and double slashes. At the bottom was another symbol, a scarab.
Back home I looked up the story of the scarab. For some, the celebration of the scarab is the glorification of birth. For others, the scarab is seen as having the power to emerge after a period of hiding.
The sacred scarab is a dung beetle. The beetle rolls dung into balls and buries these balls in the earth. The dung is used by the beetles for food and to nourish the eggs they lay in it. When the young scarabs hatch, they come up from the earth. They look like small dark suns rising in the same way the sun appears to come from the earth on the eastern horizon. A transformation that is not what it seems.