Someone Else's Dream

I am not a fifteen year old girl living in a remote rural village part. Nor was I part of a generation of women who were sent to college by parents expecting tuition dollars to also result in M-R-S degrees. I no longer participate in any spiritual tradition that advises women are like children, better seen and not heard, preferably kept at home.

Twenty years ago my mother was told “not to worry” about her high school final exams because she was getting married. Her husband, the son of a well known government clerk in Madras, India, would look after everything.

I’m not my mother. I didn’t get married at seventeen, but at twenty seven. I didn’t live in one house until adulthood, shielded from external windows and the passerby on the street, but wearing sleeveless shirts and shorts across three countries on two continents.

Yet, for all our differences, and my generation’s “advances”, I remain plagued by questions of whether or not I’m having, have had, or even want to have, children. I have never been one to back down from a fight – real or perceived – and I certainly do not like being told what to do unless someone is explaining the rules of a new board game.

To be fair, more than just the South Asian element has been badgering me to discover the rationale behind my delay of maternal luminosity. Everyone: white, Latino, Asian, friends, relatives, even strangers, find my intentions of conversational interest. Since my improbable marriage, it has been open season for questions about my maternal predilections.

At twenty seven, a converted Christian, Indian, Ph.D. student, working in the Middle East, I seemed an unlikely candidate to participate in the ethnic ritual of adulthood: marriage. Resigned forever to be a ‘girl’, so introduced as the unmarried cousin at all future family events, I was happy in having chosen my own road.

But then, the miraculous happened. I met someone in the middle of the Arabian desert. Someone who liked adventure and travel – the items my father most objected to in the matrimonial ad they placed for me in INDIA ABROAD – someone who shared Asian respect for family, home, and hard work.

We got married, to the delighted disbelief of both our families.

There was Bhangra, and Lao slow dancing, samosas and egg rolls, toasts and laughter, tears and sighs of relief. And then there were questions.

“You have baby?” Mr. Yong, our taxi driver during a trip to Malaysia, asks while we standing waiting for my husband, who has conveniently escaped to the restroom.

I shake my head and smile. I like Mr. Yong and have had a few chuckles at his expense – I keep mis-remembering his name as Mr. Wong, shaking my head in amazement at his serpentine waist – so my reflexive guard does not immediately pop up.

“Newly married?” he continues. If his smile at my nod to the affirmative is any indication, this seems to be an acceptable reason.

“Anyway, your baby look good when it born. But don’t wait too long.”

Mr. Yong is, I realize, a Chinese man living in the multiethnic island town of Penang. He must understand the world can no longer be split exclusively on racial lines since he is daily surrounded by Muslim Malays, Hindu Indians, and Buddhist Chinese as well as their descendents who have mixed up these combinations.

Therefore Mr. Yong isn’t worried about the obvious discrepancy that my husband is Thai American and I’m South Asian. Oh no. This is an outmoded argument that national identity is paramount in marital harmony. Mr. Yong is worried I might be too old to have a baby.
This man we have known for the entirety of one day is concerned about the viability of my ovaries.

“Why are you so militant?” my friend asks me during one of our quick lunches, as we munch on croissants and samosas outside the mini mart near the university where we both work. We sit on the warm concrete step of the veranda, unable to persuade the proprietor to provide us with chairs.

“Militant?” I repeat, blinking.

“Well yeah. Every time that subject comes up, all I hear is irritation.”

I squint at her in the afternoon sunlight.

“Why is it anyone else’s business? If I lived in a hut in Africa and had no birth control, okay. What is the point of being modern if nothing changes?”

If people can still ask what your “plan” is - as though they are the ones hosting this sentient being with you, changing endless diapers, waiting up all night for the teenager to stumble home - then I wonder what exactly modern society has changed for women.

“Yeah, sure,” she said, “But how do you really feel about kids?”

I had no real answer for her, only more questions. Where will any of the inquisitive well wishers be when the screaming and throwing and “I hate you” or “you’re grounded,” fill my book filled house?

Who will give us a night off so we can remember why we thought starting a family was a good idea?

Mr. Yong? The women in my book club? My colleagues at work? All of whom seem so interested in our fertility at this moment, will they help wipe applesauce out of my hair?

Somehow I cannot conjure enthusiasm to introduce a fragile, needy, utterly innocent being into this kind of world. A world where I am coerced, forced, nagged into having him or her.

A deep suspicion tells me it will not stop at one. One baby is not the point of all this posturing. Especially if the first one is a girl. It will not stop at until it is a boy. The production of male heirs by the women of my family and the men they marry is not an easy recipe for success; my mother had two daughters before her precious son, my sister stopped trying for a boy after her third daughter was born.

My father-in-law waited until we sat down in the Thai restaurant, the oblong menus placed in our hands and the waiter was a distance away, tending to other diners, before turning towards me, his eyes glowing. This was the first time we were all seeing each other after his son had proposed to me.

“When will I get to hold my first grandchild?”

For my father-in-law and everyone else, I have a question of my own: When will any of you be satisfied?

It is impossible to really known your own heart when so many other voices are clamoring in your head. But the hours I've been spending at work make me wish for something more than the ephermal events that come and go; just when one is finished successfully, there's another in two weeks. I want a lasting contribution to the world. Up until now that has been my creative work - writing. But now I'm starting to wonder if it could be the enermous responsibility of another person.

Keep it Coming

I was in such a hurry this morning I started an ovulation test and then between getting ready for work, finding the maintenance men to stop the leak in the bathroom, and trying to fight through the dump trucks taking up space on the road to work, I forgot to read the result. By the time I called my husband to read it, it was blank. Oh, well I thought, better get on with the day. Sorry or later I'll find out if this is the month. It turned out to be sooner.

In the midst of a morning that continued coming unglued even after I arrived at the office, yes, you guessed it, Aunt Flow came calling as she has every month since I was eleven. I shouldn't complain since it's only month four that I've been on the pill and we have been 'trying.'

This is such an ironic phrase that I can't fathom because for so much of my life - all of it since that Flow's first visit actually - I've been doing the opposite. Disciplining myself (very badly) as a single not to have sex to avoid getting pregnant and now, trying to have as much as we can so that we will.

I shouldn't complain because one of the first short stories I wrote, "Baby" was about a friend's struggle with infertility. That went on for six years; she now has two boys. The average friend seems to take about a year.

Since I was so adamantly not wanting to have a baby up until now I think this period of uncertainty is God's way of making me realize why I do want it. The past few months I've felt a slight hole in my life: I see now we have room for another person. Whereas I used to give help, love, affection, assistance to anyone who wanted it, I'm now hording all of that energy to myself.

What better place to put all this energy than in a baby?

As my husband said when I called him later, "Guess we'll have to keep it coming."

My friend, who is now pregnant with her second, said, "It gets exhausting."

I imagined that in my story "Baby" from what my friend was telling me.

I hope I don't have to find out just how much so in person.

Taking the Fun Out of the S Word

We all know about the birds and bees; they seem so natural when we're sixteen and full of hormones, ready to share the love we feel through our material bodies.

Then what happens ten years or more later when you're with the one you love for life and suddenly the rush of hormones is absent?

I've read a lot about people who exhaust themselves trying to get pregnant and others who time it just right for the days of the ovulation cycle plus everything in between.

It's a grand irony that if you are sixteen you can get pregant in one go and if you are thirty one you have to plan it. A question for heaven.

Throwing It Out

The October 2009 issue of WOMEN’S HEALTH says that birth control is not clinically proven to cause weight gain. But this hasn’t been my experience; in the three years that I’ve been on it, my face grew unrecognizable and while my arms stayed skinny the rest of me ballooned out. This summer I was away from my husband for five weeks and forgot to pack the birth control.

While it was earlier than I planned to go off, I knew from the stories of friends that it could take a while to get pregnant. The dilemma I had was what to do with the four remaining months supply I had to go through complicated logistics to make sure I had living overseas. Each trip to the US meant I had to check my inventory and since I didn’t have a regular doctor, this meant I had to use various clinics all over the country depending on where my trips took me. Waiting rooms full of people without health insurance were a part of this journey but a discussion for another time.

There are four remain NuvaRings in my refrigerator. And while I’ve been off birth control for four months and have no intention of going back on until we have as yet unconcealed baby, I can’t bring myself to throw them out. I see them in the doorway of the fridge, tucked behind the plastic partition reserved for the butter.
I want to throw it out because I know the doctor’s office won’t issue more than four at a time because they are time sensitive. But I think of the hours I waited in California while my students were attending classes during a cultural exchange – ditto in North Carolina – or the harried visits to D.C. with my husband waiting downstairs impatiently in the car.

I resent the birth control because I feel it was in my life under false pretenses; if it’s taken me four months to get pregnant then were all those convoluted plans over the last three years of my marriage wasted, including the only time I’ve been angry with one of my bridesmaids for not fulfilling an out of state prescription before showing up for the rehearsal dinner?

We’ll see. For now I’m contemplating the radical idea of no more birth control in life. No more pounds (or at least not as many).

This is the Period that Will Not End

Many people warn you that when you go off birth control you might have irregularity in your cycle as your body adjusts back. Since I had only been on the pill for a year and half and the NuvaRing not much longer, I didn’t really expect any changes. Most of my life I’ve stayed out of hospitals, never broken any bones, or had more than the chicken pox, so I take good health for granted (which I know you should not do in this age of rampant cancer). But there it was: my lack of appreciation for the nearly twenty years of regular cycles I’ve had.

July was uneventful, the month I inadvertently went off because I was in Syria and far away from my supply at home in Qatar. When I got home and wasn’t pregnant from my husband’s one week visit, I toyed with the idea of going back on. After all we had talked about October as the time for us to start ‘trying’ as the infamous phrase. This interruption was two months prior to the ‘plan’ which we had agreed on and told the two couples closest to us who were already parents of young ones. But then it happened: I got my period, so there was no real reason to go back on. My body wasn’t as fertile as I had always suspected or my Hindu South Asian parents had feared since adolescence.

A few days of regular behavior, a pause, and then more blood. And more. Into the second week I started to worry; when regular discharge comingled with fibrous tissue I was a little concerned. A few years ago three of my friends all had miscarriages, two of them with their third child. I learned the statistics then: one out of four women has a miscarriage, often without realizing his is happening. They think it’s just a heavier flow – exactly what was happening to me.

My to date excellent health had never sent me to the hospital to check on things many other people would make their first. I kept saying, “If it doesn’t stop tomorrow, I’ll go in.”

And then I realized that it had been fourteen days of this. I got up on Friday morning, the Sunday evivelent in Qatar, and drove myself to the hospital. The male attendant there wanted ot know what I wanted to see the doctor about. Many anywhere else this wouldn’t have been an issue but the fact that I had to wait in the ladies waiting area gave me the subliminal right to refuse him.

“I need to see a doctor,” I repeated three times to his persistent inquires. Finally a female nurse came over to ask me what I wanted checked.

“I’ve had my period for two week straight,” I said.

The nurse and the doctor were both South Asian so we laughed as they ran the tests and let me know that I was not physically or chemically pregnant; I had not, my worst fear, miscarried.

I left the hospital that day and felt sheepish about my previously caviler attitude towards fertility, conception, and parenthood. I did not go back on the birth control.

Mothers Will Talk About Anything

Last March I had food poisoning for the first time in my life. It was the most horrible night of my life; akin to having an alien taking over your body and reject all the food you’ve ever digested, including any remnants on your intestinal wall. Having to watch it all come up was the most frightening experience.

For a few days after the women I knew who were mothers suggested things to ease back into normal dietary practices; they could handle the details of color, texture, frequency I would never had shared with my single friends. I was grateful because bizarrely I had only thrown up once in my life – a non-drinker even through college – and that over two decades ago when I was eight years old.

The camaraderie of mothers extends to talking about conceiving. The same friends whose intrusive questions and jokes annoyed me to no end before I was ready to take on the thought of motherhood were now the ones I turn to for advice on how things go, like how many months it took them to conceive after they stopped birth control, or when to grow concerned about an irregular period.

I feel slightly embarrassed that the same information I now rely on I wouldn’t have had access to if my friends hadn’t gone ahead and bitten the bullet as mothers. I am so glad that there are others to rely on down what feels like the infinites of space although it’s the oldest profession since the start of life.