Confession

My son is an only child. My husband is an only child. My mother-in-law is an only child. I am not. I grew up as one of three girls, and our house was busy and loud. If you needed something upstairs and the person who could help you was downstairs, you just yelled for them until they answered back. We were a family of yellers. My husband didn't come from a family of yellers. In fact, his family was the opposite. They didn't talk much at all. At first, I was puzzled. How could anyone get anything done with any expedience if there wasn't the immediacy of yelling?

It was never my goal to have an only child. My sisters were my earliest, closest friends. 'Built-ins,' by Mom and Dad. These two females were individuals who could not and would not ever be replaced in the brain and heart space they occupied with anyone else. We all knew and lived the same early stories. We all came from the same fabric, and I would challenge anyone to find someone else who could roll out even a smattering of the nonsense, wisdom, chaos, and order of what I shared with my sisters.

Of course, we grew up. We married. We made our own families. My middle sister has three kids. My youngest sister has two. I have one, and it wasn't from lack of trying. Hello, infertility. We had sex every other day for five years. When we first married, we had sex strictly for the joy of getting it on. We did it inside, outside, in bathrooms, in closets, on couches, and the usual places. One of the best times was when we stayed in a cabin one of our friends owned. And, of course, it was a 'CABIN IN THE WOODS.' There were no stalkers, and nothing scary happened. In fact, it was quite the opposite. We put a quilt out on the deck—it was just off the bunk room where we slept—(I am here to say that two adults in a twin bed does not make for easy sleeping). It was an unseasonably warm autumn day. The sun blazed, but there was a slight breeze, and our noses were tickled by the pungent tang of fallen leaves. The bees were still buzzing around, confused there weren't many flowers still around to be pollinated. Leaves skittered across the expanse of lawn behind the cabin. We removed our clothes, and I caught a fleeting glimpse of what it had been like to run around outdoors, buck naked, when I was little. This was adult naked, though, and I kept thinking I was going to wind up on the internet or in some sicko's spank bank. It was ridiculous, though, because we were in the middle of nowhere, and the nearest neighbor was about a half mile away. After I quit thinking about being spied on or being bitten by mosquitoes or stung by bees, I lapsed into the tranquility of being in the sun with my lifetime partner, that one fella who will have my heart for eternity, and he's still the best guy I ever dated. At that particular moment, we were having sex just to have sex. No greater goal.

When infertility knocked on our door, sex shifted from recreational to procreational. My husband and I wanted two children. My body, it turned out, didn't want any children. We did all the drugs—pills, shots, suppositories. We did invasive procedures, ultrasounds, and tests. I hung upside down off the side of the bed after we attempted procreation to keep the spunk inside as long as possible to give his little guys a chance to make it to an egg. I checked the fern pattern of my saliva. I took my temperature every morning and graphed it. Finally, I bought 30 ovulation predictors to nail our fertile window. With all the interventions, though, by the time our son was born, I counted in excess of two dozen people having had an up close and personal with my vagina. So incredibly humbling.

When he was two, we started trying for a second baby, and we quickly discovered, we needed to go back for more fertility treatment. The infertility insanity recommenced. I stockpiled ovulation predictors and pregnancy tests. We went for more drugs and procedures. We wanted a second child more than anything. I dreamed of my son having a little brother or sister to play with. I wanted another boy because we already had all the boy 'stuff,' but we would've been thrilled with a boy or a girl, as long as he or she was healthy. I became pregnant only to have a miscarriage a week after I found out. The miscarriage gutted me. However, I can't say if I'm resilient or someone who is simply very task-focused. A miscarriage! This would not stand! We would get down to pound town, make the beast with two backs, get drunk and screw, and even do that beautiful thing where two people who are committed to one another in heart, mind and body would mingle genetic material – every other day. It was a routine. What I learned was this: I could multitask during sex. My husband was intent on shooting his load, and I was focused on meal planning and whether or not I needed to make a run to the grocery to pick up any ingredients. These were the procreational days. Every now and then there might be some recreational sex, but let's face facts: We wanted a baby. It's a freaking job getting another human onto the planet. At least, for us, it was a job. But we were going at it like crazy.

With all the poking, prodding, scanning, and crying in doctors' offices, what we learned was this: another pregnancy would likely be catastrophic because of a genetic blood clotting disorder and a congenital anatomic anomaly. I was missing a big, important blood vessel. We went to a high risk specialist who gave us the names of adoption attorneys. He asked us to leave through the back door because I was hyperventilating from sobbing, and he didn't want me to frighten the other patients in the waiting room.

Even after we were told to stop trying, I still would've rolled the dice. My boss cornered me after I broke the news to her and mentioned taking the gamble. Her response was simple. "Do you want to leave a motherless child?" Of course I didn't, but I didn't want him to be alone either. I wanted the chatter of a home and family like I'd grown up in. To put the nail in the coffin, to hang the do not disturb sign on my uterus, my husband had a vasectomy. It all went well until day 2 of his recovery. He was lying on the couch with a bag of frozen corn resting on his genital area. Anyone who walked into our house during day 1 and early on day 2 would have thought he was recovering from a serious car accident. He was miserable. We heard a very loud bang from outside our house. I thought maybe something had fallen from the sky and hit the ground. Or it could have been a rifle or a firecracker. It was loud, though. My husband jumped off the couch and ran out the front door. I followed behind. Someone had hit our mailbox and driven off. They left a souvenir, though. Their side mirror. I picked it up off the ground, while my infirmed man-child husband chased the hit and run mailbox destroyer down the street. He sprinted barefoot about a half block before he realized the activity was not medically indicated. He limped back to the house to resume his repose on the couch with much amplified moaning and groaning. It's hard for me to have a lot of empathy because he had two little vessels cut. It's not like he pushed a human with a head circumference in the 99+ percentile from an opening smaller than 2-3 fingers. But pain is relative, and he was definitely hurting. Chasing the mailbox murderer down the street probably added 2 weeks to his recovery time.

But, yeah, we took drastic measures not to have more children. Coming to the reckoning wrecked me. Every time I saw someone with two children, I was jealous. If they had three children, they were crazy for choosing to be outnumbered. If someone had four or more children, I thought they were just plain frivolous, unless they lived on a farm and had to breed their own workforce. I mean, people, we are competing for resources on this earth and having children willy-nilly isn't solving any problems. I saw a news story about some woman who was on drugs and had several children—like maybe a litter. She lived in a hotel, and her two-year old somehow left the hotel room and was found wandering on the interstate. I would've taken better care of that baby. I wanted to call child protective services and tell them to give me that baby. We'd keep him safe. We were doing a good job with our son, and we could do it again. We were smart, responsible people, and we could care for that child and love him or her like nobody's business.

While all this was happening, my cousin (who was two years older than I was) had met a man. She divorced her first husband many years earlier. They had the most beautiful baby girl, who was in kindergarten or something when their marriage ended. Their daughter was like a princess, but not a fairy princess. This child was born to rule the world with love and kindness and intelligence. Her hair was long, white-blond, straight, and thick. Her eyes tipped up just a hair and were a clear bright blue that reminded me of the Hall's Ice Blue throat lozenges. The child was captivating in her looks and demeanor; but on top of that, she was very articulate and rational for her age. She spoke with logic (like a much older human) and fancy (like the perfect child). My cousin and her first husband, I think, had hoped this angel of a child would be the balm and glue to save their marriage. But, a child is a child. Mental illness is mental illness. A doomed marriage plagued by a disease that someone refuses to address cannot be saved by the miracle of life and love that children bring.

My cousin. She still is a WOW. She is indomitable. She could have saved The Titanic from sinking. She would have spotted the iceberg, day or night, and she would have formulated a plan to blow the thing out of the water or arrange an airlift or water vessel convoy to guide that boat through the peril-filled voyage. This girl…woman now…she was and is the shit. After her divorce, years go by, though. She and the princess (who is bright, poised, unaffected, and articulate) are raising each other. And then, my cousin is smitten by a like-minded WOW of a dude. He speaks her language. He, too, is a single parent, the father of a plucky little boy who has an impish grin and mischief in his gaze, but despite all the plans he might be making, chooses the path not taken. My cousin and WOW-guy marry. Our whole family is deliriously happy she has found the yin to her yang, the salt to her pepper, the peanut butter to her jelly. They are so good together.

One summer, maybe six months after my cousin and her intended had tied the knot, they came for a visit. By then, it had been a few years since we'd been told to stop trying to make a baby. And I'd by lying if I didn't say I was bitter. My cousin and I were sitting on the edge of my parents' pool, dangling our feet in the tepid water. She leaned over to me and said, "I don't know if you noticed or not, but I haven't been drinking."

My response was thick-headed and ignorant. Truly. She was 41 or 42 at the time. "You've got to stay hydrated. It'll help you not get constipated."

"No, silly. I'm not drinking alcohol."

I looked at her, stared hard into her eyes.

"We're expecting." Her pronouncement completely gob-smacked me. I could have done that fish out of water thing with my mouth opening and closing and opening and closing with no sound coming out, but I attempted to remain poised for a solitary moment but found it was an impossible task.

And then I was a supreme asshole. "A baby?" Like, maybe she was expecting a delivery from Amazon or J. Crew or some other mail order thing. And to make it worse, I looked her up and down and threw in, "On purpose?"

She was visibly taken aback. Those four words were like an ice pick through both our skulls. They were a wrecking ball to our relationship. I don't think she had an inkling about what we had been going through and all the angst I felt. She couldn't have known how her easily occurring geriatric pregnancy would be difficult for me to be excited about: she was getting the one thing I had wanted so desperately and had pursued with single-minded purpose for years. And now she and her husband had an extra kid…just because they wanted one…and without having to have sex every other day for five years. Completely unfair, but I was also a jerk about the whole thing.

There was a frisson of cold and distance that built between us after this exchange. We got on all right, but things were never the same. Time marches on, though, doesn't it? Our parents became really old, and our children became high schoolers and college graduates, and all of us cousins wanted to tighten the bonds of our family. I had lost an aunt and three uncles—one of the uncles was my cousin's dad. I noticed how my cousin became closer with my sister, and I was jealous. She was supposed to be closest with me. We were the closest in age. Of course, we weren't, apparently, very close in maturity or or emotional intelligence.

There was a family wedding one summer. My cousin and her husband and this extra kid, who was now 17 or 18, and my husband and I traveled to the wedding. It was time for me to own up to being a dick. There were stupid tears, from me, of course, because I could cry like nobody's business. I did a little figurative self-flagellation and pled my case some, but in the end, I apologized. She forgave me but said that I had hurt her. And at the end of the day, we all choose who surrounds us in life. We choose the people who lift us up, who make us feel good. For years, neither one of us was one of those people.

Nowadays, we call each other once or twice a year to catch up a bit, and we're better. We aren't the little girls who stayed up all night sharing secrets during family visits anymore. But, really, who is? However, we end every call with an 'I love you,' because we do.