The opposite too is happening: men we have known for years are saying to their wives and girlfriends, “Give me a baby or I’ll leave.” Formerly happy couples are breaking up, and the one left behind sheepishly, heartbrokenly mutters, “She/he wanted a baby. I’m not sure I do.”
Daniel and I listen to all this and turn to each other, delighted that neither of us are pulled in this way. Instead we clink glasses long after our friends with children have gone to relieve their babysitters. We loll in bed, take hiking trips into the desert, go to Mexico, and congratulate ourselves for not falling into the trap that has enmeshed so many of our friends.
Child free is the term we use to describe ourselves. In this choice, we are wholly and luxuriously selfish.
*
But it’s not only our friends who are heeding the call to procreate. The grocery store racks are full of magazines that follow the progress of pregnant celebrities with the concentration and enthusiasm usually reserved for sporting events. It’s a nationwide obsession that follows a predictable path in the headlines. First, the all-important photos of the woman showing off the sparkling chip of compressed carbon gracing her finger. “He proposed! She said yes!” Then the exclusive shots of nuptials: “The Fairy-Tale Wedding. Flowers. Cake. Dress.” Immediately after follows a giddy anticipation of that lauded physical manifestation of fertility, the baby bump. Who has it? Who is showing? Almost immediately after the baby is born, the most important part of this equation comes into play: How fast does the woman regain her “bikini body”? How quickly can she shed the grotesque signs that her body has harbored another being for the last nine months? If this shrinking takes longer than a few months, there must be something wrong with the mother. She must be lazy or depressed. After all, this is her job as a celebrity, isn’t it? To model for us how our own bodies should act?
The message is loud and clear: women’s bodies are supposed to swell up, drop babies, and then shrink back down to a manageable size. The baby? Another perfectly designed accessory to match her heels and bag. All around us, this ambient roar of fecundity, and I for one am happy to be outside it.
*
Yet just a few weeks after the conversation with my mother I think back to it and wonder if it was a trigger. If all those nights Dharshi and I spent in twin beds next to each other had synchronized us so that even though I haven’t seen her in years, perhaps her body has somehow reached out and whispered to mine, because now I am late.
My period has never been regular, the ebbs and flows of it impossible to regulate. Also maybe having to pay so much attention to other people’s bodies makes it hard for me to pay attention to my own. I realize that it’s been some time since I bled, at least a month, if not two. I wait another week hoping and praying, the question gnawing at the back of my mind. What could have happened? I’m on the pill. But is it possible I have missed one here and there? Could his sperm have breached the gates in a moment of hormonal confusion, a morning where I rushed out without popping a tiny pink tablet? It’s possible. I’ve been working mad hours; I haven’t always paid perfect attention. I don’t tell him because a part of me is convinced I am being stupid. I am not pregnant. Soon my period will come and then I can tell him how scared I was and we will laugh at my silly anxiety and toast to our child-free-ness.
At the end of the week I buy a pregnancy test. Hands shaking, I squat and piss. I lay the test on the counter, wash my hands. I stare into the mirror at my terrified face. Then there are those long, long minutes. I go into the kitchen and eat a cold chicken leg I find in the fridge.
Minutes later, there it is, an unambiguous plus sign.
*
I sit on the old gold couch we bought together at a garage sale when he was moving in, and my entire life shimmers and vibrates and changes in front of me. How can it be? Even now, in some secret passage of my body, some tiny, unwanted person stirs and dreams. When did this presence come? Where did it come from? Can I get it out? It’s shockingly like being possessed by some outside force. I think about my skin moving outward and stretching taut, about pushing out a living creature through an orifice that seems far, far too small. I press my hands across my belly, imagining a tiny speck of life floating there. What will I do? What will he think? How will our lives be? Should I abort? Should I carry a child? Give birth to it?