“Let’s freeze some of your sperm,” I joked with Bill. “If you die first and I’m young enough, I could have your child, but you wouldn’t have to raise it. It would be like having a part of you still here. A little Billie.”
Or, after him, there might be another man. Not as good in a thousand ways except for this: he would want a child.
I didn’t want another man. I wanted Bill.
He touched my face and kissed me. He didn’t think I was serious. I didn’t know if I was serious.
That little boy, with his dark eyes and black curls, would hold my hand as we walked, he would look up at me and ask about his dad. He would have loved you, I’d say.
I was thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-seven. My periods trickled off from five days to three, three to one. The pills stopping what a woman’s body can do. And then only for a day, that fourth Tuesday. A mention, a spot of blood, a small monthly reminder that there might still be a chance.
Sometimes I looked at my tidy end-of-workday desk, projects complete, files filed, and the missing pressed in. An uncried cry in my throat, chest, gut. Why am I here? If not for a child then what will I be for?
Bill didn’t take a last step. Vasectomy. I didn’t want him to. And for me there would be no tubal ligation like my friend Bonnie, who had told me over lunch those years ago that this was her plan, and then she did it. Other women might be sure enough for this final cutting of possibility. I was not.
Bill could change his mind. Wake one morning from a dream of fatherhood and say, “We must. Now, before it’s too late.”
But he wasn’t that man. He wouldn’t change his mind without me changing it.
Once, I did.
I asked, “Don’t you want a baby with me?” For the twentieth or thirty-seventh or ninety-first time. My voice was innocent, forced-perky. Pleading thinly veiled.
Bill said, in a giving up voice, “Okay, Jackie.”
My breath held. I didn’t know if he meant it. He must have been worn down, exhausted by my ambush questions.
“I’m tired of this,” he said. “And I don’t want you to blame me for saying no. If you really want a child, then okay.”
The strings were attached in the short pause between what he said first and what he said next.
“But I’m going to retire in a few years.” His steady career and the early retirement he could take for the toll of being a firefighter. “If we have a child, you’ll have to work longer than you planned.” His voice was calm, but I could hear the frayed edges of having to repeat this plan to me, the fear that I might push so hard he had to give it up. He said, “I want to travel. It’ll be harder for you to go. You’d have to be okay with me going without you.”
His conditional surrender trapped me in a box canyon. Surrounded by my wants, his limits.
To have a child with this man who felt the burden of it before it even arrived meant passing on the unfinished legacy of Bill’s father. From father to Bill, from Bill to child.
And anyway, he didn’t mean okay, I was sure.
But what if?
My romance of a perfect stay-at-home motherhood was rigid. His conditions revealed my own. I wanted him to share the joy of trying, the expectancy, the naming and welcoming, the parenting. I wanted him with me on all of it, one hundred percent. I wanted to be a mother under the easiest of circumstances, or no motherhood at all.
The limits to my own wanting embarrassed me. The only way out was to go back the way I’d come. My surrender.
I stopped asking Bill why he didn’t want children and followed the trail of my own motivations, the yearning for what I didn’t have. Yes, I loved children. I believed what women said about the powerful love and sacrifice you only know when you have a child of your own. Yes, at times, my body called out to be filled with child, to know what birth was like.
But my body also called out for other possibilities that I didn’t pursue: to run a marathon, to climb the face of a cliff, to go beyond my limits. My longings always called out for more, more, more than what I had.
And I kept opening the same wound over and over, thinking a child would be the salve. I wanted Mom’s approval. I wanted the approval of the women in the mothering club. I didn’t like to be left out. I didn’t want to be pitied. Or judged.
Maybe this thing I called wanting a child was a distraction from a bigger need: to understand why I was here, why I was alive. My need to justify myself.
Would a child justify me?
Would it make me happy?
Wasn’t I already happy?
I had the life I had because of the absence of a child. Bill and I were free to explore each other and ourselves in uninterrupted time.
In wanting this one thing that I didn’t have, I was squandering what I did have. Here was the rising of that seed of knowledge I had taken in all those years ago when I was raped. Death can come at any moment. Be present, or you will miss your life.