Oocyte Incompetence — Over, Easy
Would you feel differently about me if I wanted to have children?
His pause told me everything; before he could parse out, I think so? I knew. It was more telling than the way he’d wheezed, I'm excited to see you too, dread of my visit dripping from his voice. In less than a week, I was supposed to fly out for a long weekend together. We’d been dating long distance for six months and everything seemed to be going well. He mentioned via text the previous night that he’d call to explain his ‘situation’ in the morning. I’d understood his situation as ‘needing a ride to the dentist’ while I was in town; he’d just received the bad luck news of an impending root canal. I didn’t anticipate his ‘situation’ would entail phrases such as my love has plateaued and I just need to rip off the Band-Aid.
Fraught feelings tumbled out as I spoke my piece: He’d made me feel unwanted, kept me distant from his family, would never wholly welcome me into his life. He should have been honest, broken things off far sooner. I didn't blame him a bit for wanting kids.
All true: how could I blame someone for obeying the biological imperative that I lack?
I never thought it would be hard to meet a man who didn't want children. In a sure shortcoming of my own gendered thinking, I assumed progeny were generally desired by women and an acquiescence by partners who agreed because it was socially expected, was just what you do. Growing up in Ohio, I was subjected to ‘once you meet the right man’ thinking. My high school best friend is also consciously childless; although we no longer speak, I wonder if she remembers rolling her eyes at me at seventeen when I proclaimed I’d never reproduce.
To their credit, my parents never once doubted my convictions. At age five, I declared independence from motherhood. Even as a girl who dressed and dandled her dolls far later than most, there was no craving for an infant, no evolving list of names. Babies never quickened anything in me, no croon or coo. When I read a study on elective childlessness and realized there was likely just some unzipped mRNA in my genetic tangles, I was relieved. I was not bad. I was not broken.
But I was, apparently, going to be alone.
Most of my close friends are men. We co-parented one another through broken hearts and benders, the vagaries of our twenties. Many are now fathers, and their partners seem surprised at how deeply their kids attach themselves to me. They quickly entrust their tiny hands to mine, fingers dug trenchant in my palm to give me tours of their rooms. It seems reasonable that these children are drawn to the same qualities their parents loved when getting to know me: I am affable, a good listener. Deeply empathetic, interested in pyramids and the satisfying snap of a crayon crushed between your fingers when coloring too hard. Always down for a manicure, glitter slopped and outside the cuticles; a lover of kittens and popsicles and generalized chaos, occasionally underhanded in my water balloon fight tactics. The issue has never been a dislike of children, although I’m never sorry to hand them back to their rightful wranglers when the time comes. Many people tell me I’d make a great mother. I’ve dated men with children and am likely to do so again, have no fear of possible step parenthood. The nurture’s never been the issue. It’s simply that there’s never been a twinge of desire to create them myself.
Probably the closest I came was with a man who was practically a child himself when he died. Twenty-two when he succumbed to his addictions, overdosing in my Queens apartment while I slept fifteen feet away. He wanted children, but we planned to marry, start a restaurant, build a life around our shared passion; a life demanding enough that it would make far more sense not to have them.
He swore he didn’t mind giving up kids for me. But you can never truly trust an addict. They love to tell you they'll give up everything. His genuine desires were tamped down by his reliance on heroin. Had he emerged clear eyed from his opioid fog, I don’t believe we would have stayed together. He was too beautiful, too charming, when he was actually himself. There would've been other women, and after our likely separation a different partnership, perhaps one with a more accommodating womb.
Still, the first time I menstruated after his death, sitting in the bathroom where I found his body I called my mother, sobbing. It was just under a month since he’d died and I was slow crawling back to myself. I’d been packing for his memorial, anxious about the dress I’d chosen. Was there too much cleavage for his grandparents? Would his friends, ten years my junior, see the clinging fabric and think, it makes more sense now, that he was with her at her age. Deep from the shameful fret reducible to will my dead boyfriend’s friends think I’m hot, there came the judder of cramps. Then tackiness on my thighs, crumpling inward, hearing myself repeatedly choke out But I don’t want them, I never wanted them, and the lull of my mother’s murmur, I know and I know and I know.
My objective mind understands the hurt. Shedding that particular cycle of uterine lining meant losing nourishment for the never could be, one more intractable reminder that he was gone. He’d been reduced to ash, yet here was the body that longed so hard for him casting off healthy tissue like an afterthought. What good was fertility to my barren being, if it couldn’t resuscitate me, bring me back to some sort of life beyond perfunctory and deeply alone?
Females are born with millions of oocytes, which die off rapidly before puberty, then in their monthly cadence. Partners are beginning to feel that way too, dropping away, options dwindling as more and more my dating apps are populated with men in their mid-forties who are ‘unsure,’ about children, ‘maybe someday.’ As though their DNA doesn't also deteriorate post thirty-five. As though their appetite for taut twenty-eight-year-old partners is somehow more commendable than my own.
Did I ever tell you about that hippie? My mother asked in her sardonic baritone, a little extra clotted with nicotine, the way it got in her last years. When I was pregnant with you, this hippie woman came up to me and said “you know, if you have daughters, you carried your grandchildren! Daughters are born with all the eggs they'll ever have, isn’t that remarkable?” Can you imagine? Who says that?
So: my mother carried her grandchildren. Did she perhaps want to hold them too? My mother loved babies, loved mothering. Something else I didn’t inherit, like her blue eyes or her weak teeth, or her knack for harmonizing any tune. She never questioned my choice or indicated a longing or disappointment. Now that she’s gone I wonder over the shape of her exit wound; never for a moment has it felt as though my own unborn could fill it.
How can it be that it sometimes feels like everything would be easier if I just wanted to be a mother? The hardest job in the history of the known world, yet some days it seems like my only sure bet, the successful road map to where I want to be: partnered, no longer the fiercely independent woman with her dogs and her rye Manhattans, her wry jokes about the endless delights of being alone. I’m tired of having to remember to pay the gas bill, of deciding what to make for dinner and then doing the dishes, of scrolling endlessly to choose what to watch. I’m grateful for siblings and friends but wish for a different sort of confidante, for genuine partnership. I long to share decisions and burdens and joy. I’ve always understood children wouldn’t salve this, so why do so few people seem to agree? A therapist in New Orleans told me I should “really reconsider my position on the kid thing” if I didn’t want to be alone. She hated most children, she confided, but liked her own. Of all the gambles in my perilous life, I couldn’t fathom a more selfish one.
I’m fortunate that most of my favorite pastimes are easily enjoyed alone; even in relationships, I pursue my interests without companionship. I attend the theatre or opera happily solo, post up at bars for four-course meals as a single diner without a second thought. I’m lucky there’s no anxiety for me: no imaginary ticking clock, no freezers or hormone injections. I share disdain for the practical phrase ‘geriatric pregnancy’ but don’t feel its sting the way friends have had to. I’ll never know the grief that comes of wanting so much to have a child and being unable to do so, or the impossible pain of losing one.
But there are practical concerns. My best friend and I laugh about which of his children will be steely enough to hold power of attorney, honor my DNR. Awkwardly I request the Social Security numbers of my friends’ children. If I am predeceased by my also childless siblings, I can at least offer a leg up to those who are not my legacy.
Shortly after getting dumped my period came early, with such ferocity I briefly feared a miscarriage. Again I found myself on the edge of a tub, now in Brooklyn without my mother to console me. As the torrent subsided, I talked myself down instead: a glitch in my birth control, a perimenopausal flex. There would be no urgent, plaintive call to him, explaining. I could stay the course of no contact. We’d both hopefully get what we wanted someday.
I don’t want them, I’ve never wanted them. This time comfort came as I repeated my mother’s incantation to myself: I know, I know. I know.
-Bryn Grey
A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Bryn Grey (she/her) is a graduate of the Boston University College of Fine Arts and the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Speculative Nonfiction and Chautauqua. Professionally, Bryn works in communications at a Brooklyn based nonprofit which focuses on reducing mass incarceration. She is also proud to serve as a board member of ChamberQUEER, whose mission is to highlight LGBTQ+ voices in contemporary & historical music and to reimagine the classical concert experience as a radically inclusive gathering space & musical community for the 21st century.