A birthday wish
“What would you like for your 40th birthday?” my husband of eight months asked.
“A vasectomy.”
He had expected something he could wrap.
I’ll give Andrew credit. He didn’t try to bribe me with a spa retreat and the promise to think about it. A few weeks later, my 46-year-old spouse lay sprawled on the couch, feet elevated and a bag of frozen peas on his crotch.
The night before the procedure, Andrew and I talked over dinner. He was concerned about recovering from having what he described as a red-hot poker shoved into his scrotum. Could he fly to his conference next week? How soon could he be back playing ball? Children, or lack thereof, were not part of his concerns.
As he fretted about his testicles, I cried into my green curry, wondering if no longer wanting children made me a bad person.
Contemplating the past
I lay awake late into the night. I poked my abdomen, feeling for my ovaries, which still churned out eggs at their customary rate. How could they continue to function so religiously when the desire to reproduce had evaporated? After years of wanting children, the maternal urge had died and was likely bothering some other poor woman. But now guilt replaced desire. While I didn’t question the vasectomy, I compulsively relived the choices that had brought me to this point.
When I permed my hair and headed off to university, I was no different from my girlfriends. Together we lugged books across campus, our fluffy curls a weightless counterbalance to the heavy workload. But after graduation, while I was backpacking through Europe, they began to marry. While I studied theatre in London, my best friend from high school gave birth to her first baby. There was plenty of time for that later.
Upon returning home, I met someone. We were going to get married and have three kids. We had even picked out the names. My bookshelves bulged with parenting books. Again, there was no rush. But after eight years of escalating arguments and aborted engagements, neither marriage nor children transpired. I was single and in my mid-thirties — a bad combination. The men no longer lined up like they had at university. They were married or bitterly divorced. Those who expressed interest were out for casual sex. I went without a serious date for five years. How could I find a man, form a relationship, get married and have children before it was too late? Everything revolved around finding the right person.
