Have I ever told you I want to have kids?
Like… really want to?
I always heard that women hit their sexual prime in their thirties, but I’m starting to suspect in my case it’s because the baby fever is so extreme I would do Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible level stunts to get semen in me (no stunt double or Scientology required). My body’s perception of its own purpose has narrowed to a pinprick. If I’m not careful, I find an emptiness growing within me that administers pass/fail grading to each of my daily tasks. Baby? No baby? NO BABY?! WHAT DO YOU MEAN NO BABY?!?
But other than when I’m at peak ovulation (when I need to be chained up like a werewolf at the full moon so I don’t tackle my Dom to the ground to extract His bodily fluids) I know that now is not The Time to start trying. The Time is close (I hope) but not this month. Not next month. Not the one after.
Movies and TV never prepared me for how physical this desire is. I thought Baby Fever looked like placing a contemplative hand over your heart when you see particularly cute baby clothes in a store window. In my case, and from what I hear from many others, it overcomes you in the body. There’s an emptiness and an accompanying horniness that feel utterly at odds. Sick, even. In my life prior to the baby fever, my experience of physical want was mainly related to sex (for my own pleasure, not with a pointed purpose) and carbohydrates. Sex followed by a croissant is and always will be my personal holy grail. But those hungers were purely physical, manageable with easy fixes like… sex and carbohydrates. This is more ineffable. More like longing.
But it’s not the longing that characterized my twenties, the ennui of measuring yourself against what you have and have done (not a lot) and what you’d like to attain. The things that sit across that gulf are often material, measured in numbers on a paycheck, a lease, or contacts in your phone. A job you’re proud to share with others (and for which you’re paid a living wage). A Spanish-style apartment with built in bookshelves and outdoor space (still waiting on that one). Friends who read your writing and know all the best Shoppy Shops in your neighborhood (hi guys!).
Next to baby fever, that kind of longing looks like child’s play. Baby fever is physical, spiritual, emotional. Not only have all these levers been pushed to the limit, but the handles have broken off, shooting sparks and smoke all over the control room of my brain while my Inside-Out style team runs frantically in circles spraying the hose of a fire extinguisher in all directions. It’s kind of a lot to have going on as you’re waiting in line at the pharmacy, or washing your car, or trying to write your weekly Substack piece.
This is not to discount love. Love has been my only training ground for the consuming, almost teenaged yearning that comes on when I touch a baby’s foot, or see one in Whole Foods. Just yesterday, I was in the Nice Cheese area of my local grocery store and an attractive young dad rounded the corner with his one-year-old in the top level of the shopping cart. As she gripped the handle and tried to stand, he slowed and let her do it. I watched out of the corner of my eye as she got to her feet, then looked around and quietly said “whoa.” She looked at me. Mt heart flipped. The dad and I exchanged a smile. I bought some extra Nice Cheese and had a cry in my car.
Because it’s not just about unnerving empty horniness and swooning feelings of infatuation. Baby Fever has deep tendrils of grief. Of missing a person who isn’t here yet but whose fingers I can feel pressing against the veil from wherever they are now. When I arrive early to yoga and bump into the prenatal class in the lobby (pun intended), I feel closer to that veil than ever. The tears are instant. It’s a long distance relationship between worlds.
In July I spent three days with my cousin’s eleven-month-old baby. One evening, between his second nap and his bedtime, he spent about forty minutes on my lap, temporarily postponing his important work of rattling the fireplace cover and putting sticks in his mouth. He made faces, he reached softly for my hair, he lunged inwards with a guttural growl to hug me around my neck. Once he’d wrung himself out, we sat together looking out over the alpine view from the cabin we were all sharing. His little voice tested out syllables in the steady wind as his foot pushed constantly against my fingers. He was nestled in my lap, a warm little cannonball resting on my empty uterus, playing innocently with the lid of a Nalgene bottle as tears streamed down my face out of sight. As the wind rocked the evergreen trees above us, trees I played under when I was a baby myself, the circle of life bore down on me and bound my wrists.
Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts about this shift that precedes motherhood:
In the midst of all this, we started to talk about getting pregnant. Whenever anyone asked me why I wanted to have a baby, I had no answer. But the muteness of the desire stood in inverse proportion to its size. I had felt the desire before, but in recent years I had given it up, or rather, I had given it over. And now here we were. Wanting, as so many want, the time to be right. But I was older now and less patient; I could already see that give it over would need to turn into go get it, and soon. When and how would we attempt it, how much mourning would there be if we turned away, what if we called and no baby spirit came.
The only analogue I have to spending this time wanting a baby and being so scared that things won’t pan out as I desire is being in tight and unrelenting bondage while trying to forget about an itch that has just arisen on your calf. Straining against your present condition does nothing to assuage the itch, thinking about it only spreads the feeling over your whole body. Once a week or so, I present the “what ifs” and worst case scenarios that drum their fingers at the edges of my consciousness to my Dom, and just as he tries to scratch the itch when I’m tied up, his patient words only go so far in finding the source.
The other day I said to my Dom that this time we’re spending knowing we want a baby but not taking the leap feels like that heart-pounding moment from my childhood when I, as an anxious kid in an unstable family, would get up on the diving board at our local pool and freeze. My pigeon toes turned in, dripping cold, I was suddenly utterly alone, solely responsible for swimming my little body out of the deep end. I’d peer over the diving board for what felt like an eternity, pins and needles overcoming my whole tiny form, watching the water ripple beneath, knowing I needed to just jump.
To this he responded that we’re not on the diving board.
We’re the pool.
So now in moments of grief and worry and excitement and nerves, I try to calm all of that and focus on watching our little baby spirit up on the diving board, lifejacket secured, waiting to jump to us. I tread water, remembering I’m a stronger swimmer now, knowing I can keep certain waters calm, trusting that when the time is right, the spirit will come, and I will patiently teach them how to swim.
This is a fantastic piece of writing.
I’m thinking of something astrologer Maeg Keane said during a recent talk on desire and this current Venus retrograde which was, “It takes a lot of courage to wait while you want.” What a rich time to feel out the want, though. Beautiful work, as always.