My wife’s body is transforming. The changes have been subtle, of course; that’s how it starts. But they’re there. When I wrap my arm around her waist in the darkness of two in the morning, our neighboring mockingbird serenading us from the holly tree outside, she’s rounder but not softer. I am culpable in this. After all, I am half the reason she’s pregnant.
When we married a few years ago, it was the first time for both of us. Older than most of our friends when they had married, neither of us wanted a large event. Instead, we opted for a sight-unseen boutique bed & breakfast in the Texas hill country with ten guests. The hill country itself is so poorly defined, it’s best understood by what it isn’t: it’s not the coast; it’s not west Texas; it’s not the panhandle; it doesn’t quite include Austin; and it’s definitely not close to Dallas. So it came as little surprise that the B&B we selected for our pseudo-elopement was similarly nebulous.
Spawn of an eclectic mind influenced by trips to Southern Europe, the inn gave off strong Spaghetti Western vibes. There was an adobe “church” with a bell tower and an underground grotto suitable for swimming just off the nave. Inside the “bridal suite” was a photograph of Abraham Lincoln and a framed photocopy of the “Gettysburg Address.” In the corner was a bathtub so large and connected to such weak plumbing that filling it with hot water was impossible.
As fate would have it after the ceremony and dinner, we were so tired that neither the allure of a lukewarm soak, nor the watchful eyes of Honest Abe, nor 19th-century oration was enough to put us in the mood. So, instead of doing anything that might result in a child, we went right to sleep.
Early in our marriage, we joked about having a kid, for sure. We imagined what it would be like. We even came up with potential names. Actually having a kid, though, lay somewhere in the fuzzy future of “one day, we will….”
Nature, it turns out, abhors idle dreaming. If we both had been twenty when we married, it wouldn’t have been a problem. Even with waiting a few years, our chance of conceiving within a given year would’ve been north of 80 percent. But by the time we did start trying, our chances had dropped to an even fifty-fifty. Not awful, but the likelihood thereafter only falls precipitously toward zero.
The average woman will see her rate of abnormal eggs increase three-fold throughout her thirties. By her mid-forties, though still dealing with the discomfort of menstruation, nine out of ten eggs likely will not lead to a viable pregnancy. Considering you get one shot a month, those are stiff odds to face. Then there were the genetic issues that might arise from what the medical establishment has so sensitively termed a pregnancy where the woman is thirty-five or older: “geriatric.” In her early twenties, a woman’s chance of having a baby with Down syndrome, for example, is 1:1200. At my wife’s age, that chance increases to 1:125.
This, a world distilled down to neat probabilities, forced me to question how much I had missed in health class and biology. I recalled being taught that anytime you have sex, there was a chance of pregnancy. Perhaps this was a product of a conservative, Texas education. After all, if your religious belief holds that even a virgin can conceive, then actual sex must seem infinitely risky. My wife, equally as ignorant, began to figure things out for herself.
Couples serious about getting pregnant will time their attempts based on a semi-mysterious ovulation “window,” a short period each month when one egg can be fertilized. The most traditional method is to calculate a standard number of days after a woman’s last period and use that as the peak fertility time. Early on, we timed our attempts based on this easy, but not terribly accurate, method. Every period, then, was no longer just a monthly annoyance but a disappointment, proof of failure, and a nudge closer to that fertility precipice.
My wife decided to up her game and began reading ovulation test strips with the intensity of a water dowser. These strips measured her hormone levels in real-time, revealing an ovulation window with much more scientific rigor than anything available to couples just a few decades ago. Within a couple of months, she was pregnant. What would the future hold for us now?
When I was in those hazy, early years of high school, I wanted to be a doctor. The closest I ever came to practicing medicine was the year I spent in Medical Explorers, an organization that gave those with acne and little driving experience the opportunity to shadow doctors and nurses. As it happened, this included a video that I was not ready to see.
Dr. Peacock, a radiologist and sponsor of the organization, gathered us into a meeting room one evening. On the television screen was a great mess of hair. I should note that every milestone that could happen in one’s life has happened to me later than almost anyone I know. So I was unaware that I was looking at an extreme close-up of a woman’s vagina head-on, as it were. The ones I had seen were either cartoonish drawings in a health class textbook (the usefulness to my adult self, painfully wanting) or highly airbrushed photos. None were from the angle of that video camera, and they certainly did not have that amount of hair. How I learned that I was indeed looking at a vagina, then, was quite simple: a baby’s head suddenly—and to me quite shockingly—emerged.
Nature has found many creative ways of reproducing itself. Some of those ways, like the cara cara orange, are quite delicious. A mutant, the cara cara exists today out of luck, chance. Someone in a Venezuelan orchard in the 1970s happened to find this strange fruit on an otherwise perfectly normal Washington naval tree. They cultivated it and brought the pinkish-yellow fruit to market. Like the discovery of penicillin, it was a complete accident and may have gone unnoticed if not for the efforts of one careful observer.
Other manners of reproduction are insidiously well-planned. The Brazilian fungus ophiocordyceps unilateralis, for example, commandeers an ant’s body and forces it to climb about ten inches into the air where it then shoots a spore out of the “zombie” ant’s head. It’s so repulsive, the organism has become part of the plot in some post-apocalyptic novels and games.
Human reproduction is somewhere in the wide gulf between those extremes, but I’ve found an element of body horror in the whole business. When I hold my wife at night, a being grows inside her, feeding off her for nutrients. This tiny life form’s genetic material has even entered her bloodstream where it floats freely and, thanks to “modern science”—a strongly relative term—can even be isolated and analyzed.
In time, hormones will cause my wife’s cervix to dilate, and her uterus will start contractions. What happens next will be messy. She will either push this being out of her body or it will be cut out surgically. This is an individual whom we will name immediately and, given enough time, will read to, take camping, and see off to college. But that first part, the part that lasts approximately 270 days, sometimes makes me feel as if I’m voyaging on Ridley Scott’s Nostromo waiting for the inevitable.
My wife has an app that gives her a weekly update on how the baby is developing. It offers user-friendly, fruit-size comparisons like “your baby is the size of a strawberry!” Eventually, I suspect the app will offer up cantaloupe and watermelon, though if you ask my wife in a few more months, she will no doubt break with the app’s branding and suggest “Cadillac” and “Yukon.”
I am partially responsible for causing my wife’s intestines to push upward; her stomach to rotate so that it’s nearly parallel with the ground; and, as one website states, “increased ligamental laxity, caused by increased levels of relaxin, [which] contribute[s] to back pain and pubic symphysis dysfunction.” So, too, am I responsible for the shifts in her moods, the strange and sudden disgust she has for foods we’ve consumed happily together for years. (Roasted chicken breast is out. Chick-fil-A is in.)
No one can prepare for this unless they’ve done it before. And she hasn’t. And I haven’t. And nothing makes a partner feel more useful and relevant than his being faced with a problem for nine months, seeing someone he loves in fits of discomfort, and not being able to do much about it.
I am on the outside looking in; it is not my body’s organs, moods, and tastes shifting. Rather, I sit in the great waiting room that is everything outside her body.
Nothing has made me reflect more healthily on the future than knowing I will be a father. Worry, which had dominated much of the first forty years of my life, has been replaced with wonder. And awe.
Several years ago, I wrote an essay in which I envisioned what it would have been like to have a child and become a parent. For some reason, I thought this child would be a girl. “She’d be about five,” I wrote at that time, “with blond hair and a pink scooter. I imagined her zooming around the circle, laughing and smiling.” It was an idea that seemed far away because, at the time, all my friends were having kids of their own. I hadn’t even met my wife. Adrift and alone, I watched as others seemed to accelerate away from me with the peculiar velocity of family: road trips, birthdays, and graduations. When your friends all have kids and you don’t, you can’t help but feel a bit like a third wheel. I believed I would never know what it meant to be a parent, and I had tried to make peace with that. As it has turned out, I won’t have to anymore.
When I wasn’t learning what I should’ve been learning in health class, scientists were learning that some of a fetus’s cell-free DNA exists like flotsam in a mother’s bloodstream. Over the last quarter century, this knowledge has been exploited to the acclamation of soon-to-be parents. A non-invasive procedure can isolate this material and reveal certain genetic issues (like Down syndrome) as well as the sex of the child much sooner than was possible only a few years ago. Given her “geriatric” state (which my wife, needless to say, isn’t interested in my repeating anymore), we wanted to know what we should prepare for. The results we would receive are, unsurprisingly, probabilistic. Just like with gambling, precipitation, and Hillary Clinton’s victory in 2016, there are no guarantees, just a likelihood of the future.
One afternoon, my wife sat in a chair, bared her forearm, and had two vials of blood drawn. Those vials were whisked away to a genetic testing lab in Austin, Texas. We would have to wait about ten restless days for the results.
Humans have never tired of ways of trying to understand the unknown, trying to divine nature’s secrets. The other morning at breakfast at a diner in town, my father mentioned that we were in for a harsh winter, according to some alternative news he has been reading.
“The Farmer’s Almanac tell you that?” I asked.
He nodded and said he had also heard something about reading persimmon seeds in Appalachia.
The seeds of the persimmon are coffee-colored, almond-shaped, and range from the size of a dime to a half dollar. When you slice them open, the embryo inside—ghostly translucent like an X-ray—can appear to the carefully trained observer as either a fork, knife, or spoon. In folklore, these correspond to various forecasts of snowfall and frigid winds. It is the fruit equivalent of tasseography, with equally reliable results. Maybe those persimmon seeds are magic; maybe they’re just seeds. I have my suspicions. But they are at least an attempt to make sense of the future that is unknown to all of us.
A few days ago, a nurse from the gynecologist’s office called. My wife paced around our living room while she waited to hear the results of the clues in her blood. My heart raced and my stomach twisted and turned, but not in the way my wife’s stomach has, of course. I’ve been fortunate enough in my life that this was the first time I had ever received consequential news from any medical personnel. So much of our future was tied to the information on the other end of the line.
“The risk of genetic issues is very low?” My wife repeated the nurse’s words as confirmation so I could hear. “And we’re having a girl?”
My wife’s smile was never so big. I was too shocked to smile. My mind immediately went back to that essay from so long ago. Were the thoughts I had then visions of my future? That doesn’t seem likely, but is the chance non-zero? Can the persimmon seed ever be right? The parallels are as intriguing as her due date: the Ides of March.
In the next twelve months in Dallas, where we live, there will be about 36,000 live births. If everything goes as planned, our child will be one of them. Birth rates around the U.S. have been falling, generally, for the last several years. More women like my wife are having children later. So more couples like us will be going through what we have and will continue to go through. It’s not that we didn’t want to have children earlier. It’s just that, as I’ve already mentioned, I have done everything late in life. My friends have ten years on me.
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a waiting room wading through the last pages of A Confederacy of Dunces. I came to be surrounded by a cabal of women—some pregnant, others decidedly not—who entered, took seats, listened to what was presumably another true-crime podcast, and wondered how I got inside the gynecologist’s office. I suppose that uneasiness for me didn’t matter. On the other side of the door, down a hallway—the end of which I couldn’t see—was my wife, her doctor, and, tucked away in my wife’s body, our daughter.
