Quantum Egg
For the two weeks or so between possible conception and your period, you’re both pregnant and not-pregnant. Pregnancy is so unbelievably transformative — it’ll be the wildest thing to ever happen to you physically and it will change almost every other aspect of your life. From the moment you know, you’ll think about yourself and your future differently. But you can’t claim that beatific state yet. You don’t know. Should you have another glass of wine? Are you responsible merely for yourself or do your small decisions now have weight and consequences? Is your body synonymous with you, the way it’s been since you first contemplated your existence, or is it becoming something more?
You don’t know. Some women have said they can “feel it” when they’re pregnant, but you’re pretty sure that’s bullshit. Still. Shouldn’t you know what’s going on in your own body? Inside should be what’s closest, what’s easiest to know, but it can seem so far away. You need the intrusion of outside to know inside. Pregnancy tests or fertility tests rung up at shiny Walgreens or doctors and the whole medical establishment, that great infrastructure that takes your insides and makes them basically public domain. I’m lucky to have not dealt much with hospitals and the rest, but I know others who have, and the body becomes another job — so much paperwork, so many people involved, calendars and email attachments and new words to Google. So much work to get at what’s inside.
I submit to magical thinking. I bargain with a God I don’t believe in as I bike over the Williamsburg bridge. When something is unknown, when there’s nothing you can do, it feels like you can will it into being. “Manifest,” as people say all the time now. But the flip side of manifesting your desires is that when the desired doesn’t occur, you blame yourself. I didn’t want it enough. I waited too long. I’m irresponsible. I’m unhealthy. I haven’t taken care of my body. Dark thoughts, rooted in millennia of culture that valued or blamed women for their childbearing. Assigning this one impossible power to us when most real powers were denied.
I’m breaking the rules by writing about this, by the way. Unlike pregnancy, it’s not an acceptable conversation topic. The body a black box of uncertainty, nested inside another black box of taboo. It exists only in hushed one-on-one conversations in which you discover, say, that a good friend has been jabbing her stomach with a huge needle every morning. Or simply that others are walking around operating as functioning humans while keeping at bay this mix of uncertainty, hope, fear, and desire that threatens your ability to function. You can’t talk to your parents about it because they’ll become over-invested. You can’t talk to your partner about it because you’d rather not increase his, you know, performance anxiety. You can’t talk to most of your friends, at least mine, because they’re nihilists who think it’s irresponsible to create new life on a dying planet. You can’t talk to your coworkers because your work could fire you, which would be illegal, but still. I’m doing all those things right now, so we’ll see what happens.
The feeling of existing with two possible futures inside you at once is intensely uncomfortable. Like so many uncomfortable states, there’s no real remedy but to wait it out as calmly as possible. I marvel at the women who have been trying to get pregnant for years. How do they handle the stress? And the disappointment every month. Once again, I find myself approaching a period in life that so many before me have handled with grace that I was completely unaware of. I’m not a mother yet, but I feel a kinship with everyone who is or has wanted to be. Changed by our desire, however our bodies reflect it.