Thanks for being here! You can read the first half of this post for free, and the rest with a paid subscription or free trial. If you’d like to support this lady-run, independent publishing enterprise and read paid subscriber-only posts, consider upgrading for $5/month or $50/year.
I’ve had a thought in a little filing cabinet inside my brain since I started this newsletter: I’ll have a lot to write about if/when I get pregnant. Now, I’m trying to. Recently I took a pregnancy test and for the first time in my life wasn’t hoping for a negative.1 I’m doing period math. I’m calculating how pregnant I’d be at various points in the future. I’m already noticing the parenting-related words that are like machetes on a chalkboard to me: Mama. Boymom/Girlmom. Littles.
Growing another body inside one’s own is up there among the most transformative human experiences, I’m told. It’s also in some ways no big deal. Billions of pregnancies have happened since the beginning of time. A pregnancy is miraculous and tedious at once. That’s the human body for you. Mundane and sublime.
I’m used to writing about how my body delights, frustrates, and fails me. Going through something new, annoying, risky, exciting, or whatever else my potential pregnancy could turn out to be — I think I’ve always looked forward to the idea of writing about that, because writing about things is how I make sense of them and myself.
At the same time, I’ve long been a fence-sitter about having kids. I’ve changed my mind day to day, minute to minute. I’ve bought books, bored my therapist, driven my friends and husband insane. When I thought of my future I saw children, but I couldn’t square that the future me involved the present me taking action. Those were two different women. The future me with children was the same future me who would definitely start waking up at 5:30 a.m. to get to the gym extra early, definitely2. Many of us imagine these “future selves” that will “have more time, interests, and generosity than we actually do.” I imagined a future me that had definitively figured out all the Important Parenthood Stuff (such as? Couldn’t tell ya). I guess I thought I’d know her when I saw her.
It was almost two years ago that I wrote in this post:
At 33, if I want to have even one child — and I do, I’m just terrified for reasons great and small, real and probably overblown, and am not sure I’ll ever feel “ready” — I’d like to get started soon.
“Soon” turned out to be 21 months later. Why the delay? Well, the future me with kids required the 33 year-old me to take action and I didn’t. I chose to do other things. After I wrote that post I married myself to my husband and took two international trips with him since we didn’t pay for a “real” wedding. My now-literary agent contacted me to ask if I wanted to write a book. I produced my own live storytelling show that sold out four times. I made this newsletter a bestseller, climbed the ladder at work, PR’d my deadlift, and went to a rave in Bushwick I wish had been a little more like this minus the crack. My gut told me to do other things because I had the energy, time, and inclination to do them, so I did.
Now I’m 35. The S.S. Fertility has docked in Geriatric Pregnancy Harbor. So while yes, I am doing my classic thing of waiting until what feels like a “deadline” pushes me to act, the past two years — and all the years before them, really — have brought me a sense of readiness for trying to get pregnant and all the things that could happen to my body. Here’s why:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Body Type to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.