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.