We sat across from each other, cloth napkins on our laps, and spoke gently about work. I didn’t want to wait and miscarry naturally because it could happen while I was teaching, and after reading about the off chance of hemorrhaging, I was afraid to take the pills. Neither of us felt like cooking or being in our apartment or making decisions about what to do with the prescription that the doctor had written for me and that Bryan had filled at the pharmacy. Bryan and I ate at a fusion restaurant on the farthest edge of town. We shared the news with our families, talked about names, and then, at my first doctor’s appointment, the obstetrician couldn’t find a heartbeat.

O women, sings the chorus, how you upend the natural order of things, how you bring ruin and despair.Ī year after I married Bryan, I got pregnant. And who wouldn’t? Except wanting to have it all is the wordy way of saying hubris, and even your mid-level Greek god will warn you of the folly to come. Maybe I’m surprised to find myself so centered in the zeitgeist.Įach article includes some new statistic or angle, but humming beneath all of them is an assumption I’ve come to recognize: Women just want to have it all. Maybe I’m looking for reassurance or a good scolding. I didn’t own a pet because of the commitment.Īnd then, when I was thirty-six, I surprised everyone and got married.Īmerican women are waiting to have their first babies, and I keep clicking on articles that explain why. My string of addresses looked like cars on a train. But I have always been restless.īefore settling in California, I lived in Tennessee-Thailand-Tennessee-South Korea-Iowa-Uganda-South Korea-Minnesota-Austria-Minnesota. It’s the one thing older parents have going for them. What I do not have is the serenity my age presumably bestows. Soon I will have the rock-hard arms of a teenager. I shift her weight incrementally to ease the tension in my biceps. Kai pushes her toes into my mouth and giggles. Nana was seventeen when she got married, twenty-one when she had three children, forty when she became a grandmother. I hadn’t played with dolls in years, and motherhood felt as distant as the moon. I remember how she held out her papery cheek for a kiss and how inattentive I believed her to be. Kai’s crib is lined with a baby quilt my Nana made when I was fourteen. I have a stack of essays to grade and several semi-emergency emails to answer, but here I am. I sway and jostle, counting silently to a hundred, counting silently to two hundred. When I’m dying, I’ll see this room-the Marimekko print, the monkey mobile, the books spilling out of the bookshelf, the bear flat with age, the Ikea chair that Bryan says makes us look like college students, and the baby girl who looks like Bryan.

Wait for God to Notice by Sari Fordham