Ms. Conception

I stick a thermometer in my mouth and hold it there for four minutes. It isn’t the right kind of thermometer, the kind with big numbers and each degree marked separately so it is easy to read. I hadn’t gone so far as to invest in a new thermometer. I just pulled out the one I had in the medicine chest. I didn’t invest in graph paper either. I just drew crude uneven lines across a page. Not exactly the precise measurements of science. But then I wasn’t sick. I was just trying to figure out if and when I was ovulating. If I was ovulating, I needed sperm.

“Hello, Tom?”

“Hi.”

“Listen. I know you want to be a father.”

“In principle.”

Tom had been talking about his theoretical desire for children for the ten years I’d known him – the first of those ten years actually as my boyfriend.

“I want to be a mother. You want to do it together?” I sing-songed into the telephone.

There was a pause.

“OK,” he said.

“Really?”

This was easy.

Posted by Linda D. at 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My mind plays the angles, sees the odds. It’s a streetwise mind, a Brooklyn mind, looking for bargains, seeking the best among what’s left. It isn’t a mind that notices potential, so I missed all those years of myself as a sheer beauty. But now, I see it, glimpsed in old photographs or today, in the faces of strutting teenagers on the street.

Oh I had boyfriends, but I never noticed if a man’s gate was open or locked shut. I didn’t recognize troubled hearts and spirits, the kind that can’t grasp and hold. I never said, I see no love here, no babies here. In those fertile years, I didn’t know what to look for and I didn’t ask.

But I am still right in there among the teenagers, single, stupid, vulnerably invulnerable, spinning from steady to steady, dancing a square dance with confused partners that might, if you’re still young and fertile enough, end up in a Virginia reel of DNA. I’m working the angles to keep my dream alive, to plant it, grow it, and make it real. I want to have a baby.

Posted by Linda D. at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)