I really hated being pregnant.

I can say this four years after the fact, with a twinge of embarassment, knowing that there are so many women that struggle to conceive, that want nothing more than to brew a new life inside of them.  But I’d be dishonest if I said that I was a glowing, radiant pregnant lady.  The fact is: I was a cantankerous, beligerent, swollen and crotchety preggo, counting down the days until I could just. Get. The. Baby. Out of me.

Part of it was vanity: I’d been slim almost my whole life and my ballooning body parts simultaneously horrified and astonished me.  I didn’t expect the back fat, the swollen feet, the giant hips.  Superficially again, I was disgruntled that men no longer even glanced my way: I felt asexual and totally unsexy.  And finally: I was uncomfortable: gaseous, nauseous, and perpetually headachy.

But.  The moment of my son’s entrance into the world has etched itself into my brain and soul and there has never been a more profound, beautiful, perfect moment in my life.  Suddenly, my heart was outside my body and I felt a love so perfect, sharp and exquisite that it made me gasp, crumpled me, reduced me to overflow capacity with joy.  And in the almost-four years since, I’ve realized that there is nothing more important to my being, than my daily joy, than the fact that I am my son’s Mom.  I’m now forgetting the drudgery of pregnancy.  I’m thinking more about whether I want to have more kids.

***

I am hurtling toward my mid thirties, and realizing with uncomfortable clarity that each day, my fertility declines.  I’m in a fresh relationship, one that is bursting with promise.  If I’m honest, and if you read me elsewhere, you’ll know that I am pretty sure that the man I am with now might be man I end up with.  I’ve fallen pretty hard.

We talk a lot, about everything, and even though we’re only a month and a half into our relationship, the subject of kids has come up, randomly.

People tell us we look alike, my new man and I, and so we were talking lightly one night about whether our potential offspring would look like us, too.  My tone, I think, was blase, but my heart was racing.  Crap: this is no longer an obscure “maybe one day…”   It’s now a real possibility.

And the other day, when my monthly cycle arrived with its prompt efficacy, he jokingly made a remark: “No little munchkins, then.”

“No,”I laughed, and though the chances of that physically were very remote, and though I want nothing less than to be pregnant right now, I sighed a little inwardly.  I only have a few years left of fertility: if I am going to have another baby, I’d better do it in the next three years or so.

My boyfriend has been married and divorced, but he doesn’t have kids, and I can’t imagine denying him that, if it’s what he wants.  But if I do ever have another child, my own son will be at least 6 or 7 years old - and his sibling would be a half-one, and the rammifications of both of those make me sweat a little.

Plus - there’s my career in corporate digital ad sales -  I love it, and I don’t want to pause it when I feel like I’m on my way up, immersed in a career I love.  And really - my cut off is age 37.  I don’t want to try and have babies after that.  I was tired with a newborn at the age of 30 - how much harder would it be seven years later, with a seven year old used to seven years of exclusive attention?

I wonder - do you have a “cutoff” age for additional children? Do you agonize about this as much as I have been?

My phone vibrates on my desk, and a picture of my son on a mossy tree stump lights up the display.  It’s my ex, my son’s Father, calling.

“Hello?” I say warily, bringing the receiver to my ear.  My friends all tell me they know immediately when Nolan’s father calls, they say a wary tiredness overtakes my voice.  I’m working on that. “Hi!” I try again.

“I’m going away next weekend,”he informs me,”Friday, back Sunday night.”

“Oh,”I say,”Well, OK.”

But it’s not like he was asking my permission.  He was informing me: he’s going away for the weekend so I’d better swap out any plans I may have had: I’ll now have our son for the weekend.

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I sat at the desk near the front entrance to my small, mildly dilapidated little home. The late winter sun was harsh and unrelenting and hurt my eyeballs from the outside in.  I remember: the dust on my computer monitor, the piles of tear-stained kleenexes littering the top of my desk.  Paper in disarray and files scattered, a two-day old plate of untouched toast near the monitor.

“You’re not coming home, ever, are you?”

I’d whispered it into the phone but I already knew the answer and though I had asked him to leave, though I needed time, I wasn’t sure that I was ready for the consequences of the inevitable permanent divide.

“I don’t know.  No, I don’t think so.”

I thought about our son: not even 2 years old.  I thought about the past four years: Amsterdam, concerts, beer nights and snowboarding.  I thought about the shrill fighting, alcohol, money, responsibility, pettiness.  I thought about myself: at 30 years old, a single Mom, disengaged, struggling.  A statistic.

Two years ago I’d been engaged to a beautiful man, a baby growing inside me.  Outwardly we were so happy: young, employed, laughing.  The fragility of that glass castle amazed me, and I remember putting my head down on the paper, the tissue, the hardness of the desk, to cry.

***

I worried about my son, of course, about the adjustment to a one-parent home, about a life with a half-time Dad.  But I also stressed about my future.  I foresaw in my bitter glass ball: chinchillas, maybe a few birds, a puffy pink housecoat and a grimy abode.  Maybe, I thought, I’d get lucky and one of my friends would end up solo too, in older age, and we could cook each other feta cheese and pickle sandwiches and lie about the fact that our butts had dissolved into dimpled pancakes.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about men.  I didn’t want to feel the pain of heartbreak ever again and the thought of it being my son and I for the next 30 years was all right for me.  Painful.  But all right.

But as the years dripped on - one, two - I started to “see” men again.  I started to miss their companionship, humor, and unabashed appreciation for soft clothes and a homemade meal.   But I really believed that I was a pariah - that my son was a breathing indication of the fact that I’d had successful (not to mention unprotected) sex with another man.  What man wants to see that, every time he looks at his woman?  I understood that biologically, and intrinsically.  It made me wistful.

***

I’ve now been juggling work, dating, and my son for over a year and a half.  What I have discovered is this: a child is not necessarily “baggage” to the right man.  In fact: Nolan’s presence in my life has negated the necessity for me to weed out the bad eggs.  Men who are willing to take me on must be willing to take my son on, too - and it serves as an automatic filter, of sorts.

I am attracting a different kind of man these days than I used to - better and kinder and I think my son is the reason.  These men don’t see my son as a manifestation of another man - but rather as a sweeter, more naive extension of me.  The good ones - the awesome one I’m with now - is as eager to be liked by my son as he is by me.

It amazes me that our darkest days often represent the beginning of the pivotal climb to the brightest ones. 

I used to fancy myself as a bit of a world traveller.  I’ve trekked deep into the hills of Northern Thailand to learn about rural tribes.  I’ve negotiated solo train trips from Portugal back up to the Netherlands.  I’ve delighted in the lights of Paris, the unexpected beauty of Budapest, the history of Dublin.  I used to believe firmly that when I became staid, placid in my home - that was the time that I really needed to travel.  From the ages of 22 through 29, I experienced and learned from the people of more than 30 countries.  From the age of 29 to now, I’ve only traveled to the United States.  For work.

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