BEAUTIFUL NAMES FOR POTENTIAL DAUGHTERS
For as long as I’d been consciously aware of my capacity to have children, I didn’t want them. I long ago deemed myself a genetic stop marker, a combination of frizzy hair and low serotonin that need not see another generation. My mom even gave me the go-ahead, as the oldest of four there would be plenty of grandchildren from the rest of them.
“Save your youth for yourself, Doria, don’t waste it on kids.”
I would be the cool aunt to many a niece or nephew or nibling, mother to a large army of low-maintenance plants and perhaps a cat or two. That would be just fine.
That was, until I met with my OBGYN last summer, and while I sat there in a paper robe on the tilty-table, she informed me that I had a “potentially low egg count.” I was still young, so she wasn’t going to run tests or jump to any conclusions, but basically the way that my body had been running things—releasing unfertilized eggs for seven days every fourteen days for the past year— would, could, might, have an effect on my fertility. Just, food for thought. Now, put your clothes back on and go pick up your prescription. I held the back of my smock together and waddled over to my pile of clothes and walked out into the hot August Tuesday with my tail between my legs and my biological clock ticking like a time bomb.
Never had I ever wanted children. Never had I ever wanted one of those little burpy-barfy babies would eventually become a toddler who would knock over Christmas trees and try to eat crayons, who would eventually become an unloving tween and an angsty teen and then an adult who would dread calling me while at their partner’s house for holidays, leaving me alone with my wretched husband to sit in the reading chair, tears welling in my eyes under twinkling candy cane lights, flicking through family albums and getting drunk on Bailey’s. Never did I want the pain of disappointment, the pain of disappointing, the pain of looking in the sort-of-mine eyes of a child and realizing that they’re sad because they’re me and angry because their mom didn’t know how to teach them how to be their best selves, because she (me) herself (myself) couldn’t rise to that standard of living. Never did I ever want to say “no,” because money was tight, or “yes,” because I’m afraid they might feel the financial burden of their mom who worked through a choral concert and slept through a can’t-sleep-nightmare night.
And then suddenly with hot tears streaming down my face on a ride home from Planned Parenthood, I imagined a life without someone who would love me unconditionally, someone I would make and perhaps break but always piece together. Somewhere out there in my prospective future there could have been a little child who would draw stick figures in thick purple washable marker and be all, “That’s you mommy!” and I’d be all, “Fuck yeah that is, and I look great!” Somewhere, in one of the many alternate universes there would be a little kid who’d get all my jokes and want to wear my favorite paisley socks, who’d snuggle up beside me when I’m watching the news after dinner and share Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia with me from the pint. It would be their favorite ice cream flavor, too. Somewhere out there was a little boy or girl with a name they’d grow into, a name that I’d never regret giving them because every time I said it out loud or saw it scrawled in delicately demented first grade handwriting along the top of a homework assignment, I’d smile. Maybe they’d hurt but maybe it wouldn’t always be because of me, and maybe that was scary but then again maybe, sometimes, I could take the hurt away with a hug and kiss on the forehead. In this universe maybe it wasn’t that I didn’t want kids but maybe that I was afraid of being a parent, but just like swimming in the deep end or driving alone for the first time, I’d come to figure it out, and perhaps in another universe, one of the many that would butterfly out from this train ride home from the Planned Parenthood downtown, that wouldn’t seem so scary at all. That would be just fine, too.