The tail end of the childbearing years can be a mixed bag of emotions. Stymied by the idea of parents being outnumbered by children, most of my friends stopped at two, although some still looked wistfully at babies passing on the street. Some of my friends found themselves outnumbered not by choice but happenstance. One of my friends bittersweetly indulged in her only daughter, grappling with her husband’s “one and done” attitude, then as her daughter went off to school, she decided to return to school for her PhD. A year before her dissertation defense, she found herself (unexpectedly) pregnant again. Another friend was told she needed a hysterectomy, and although she “knew” she was done having children, she couldn’t bear the thought of no longer having the choice to change her mind. Yet when I visited my midwife after the birth of our son, our second and (what I was positive would be) our last child, she asked what I would be doing about birth control. I joked wryly that if anyone else needed my uterus, they could have it, because I was retiring from childbearing. She cocked her head and said, “You’ve carried the weight of pregnancy prevention for the last 20 years. It can be his turn now.” I shrugged her off, mumbling something about how abstinence made the issue moot, anyway.
Still, taking a lesson from our friends who unwittingly found themselves having a third they hadn’t totally planned for, my ex and I (then, still married but also talking about divorce) started talking about vasectomy. He was predictably hesitant, having heard all the horror stories and rumors about the pain (nothing a bag of peas and a couple of Motrin couldn’t alleviate), the effect it would have on his penis function (none), and, more importantly, if he even needed to bother (see above conversation I’d had with my midwife).
Any woman who’s tried to convince her husband that vasectomy is the logical (and best) way to ensure they didn’t follow in the Duggars’ footsteps knows: it’s not an easy task. Trying to convince a soon-to-be ex-husband? Now, that takes some rhetoric. I was well aware that this wasn’t a decision I could make for him nor one that he needed to be making for me; however, he was (begrudgingly) used to me making all of the big decisions. And yet, even if we hadn’t been standing on the precipice of divorce, this wasn’t a decision I could make for him. Still, he kept asking me what he should do. I recognized that what he was really asking me was whether our marriage was going to make it; not being able to admit that it wasn’t but also not willing to make a promise I couldn’t keep, I did the only thing I knew how to do in this situation: I deflected.
I reminded him that he’d always been afraid of getting girls pregnant, that he had a really good track record of getting girls (at least, me) pregnant (once unintentionally; twice on purpose), and that we could barely afford the two kids we already had. What if he started dating and knocked a girl up? Did he want to be responsible for more children? Could he afford to be? I reminded him, this was just as much about him, if not more, than it was about me; true, I didn’t want to have any more children with him, but did he want to be having any more children, period?
We were both in a blissful period, despite our marital strife, of enjoying the freedom that older children allowed us to have. I had found time to train for three half marathons and one full one, a full-time training commitment that required hours away from home. He had returned to mountain biking, discovered downhill, and the time we spent on the road and away from home (and also, away from each other) had increased exponentially. I had thrown myself back into my career, started pursuing advanced certifications, and taking on additional roles that meant longer hours. Another baby would put a serious crimp in our lifestyles–that much we were still on the same page about.
Although it seemed like a poignant conversation at the time, neither of us had a clue what dating in our 40s was going to look like. Perhaps it was shortsighted of us to assume that we wouldn’t meet other divorcees who had children from previous marriages, or date women younger than us who might still want to have kids. When one of the first women my ex dated expressed her interest in having children of her own, his interest in her fizzled. Yet just a few months later, he was dating a woman with two young children. I not-so-secretly gloated, believing that given age and the stereotypes about gay women that abound, there was little chance I’d end up with a woman who wanted more children than the two I brought with me, albeit part time. In fact, I naively wondered if having two children would be a deterrent–and it was, for some, but not for the reason I thought. Instead, some gay women wanted nothing to do with me once they knew I, or more so my children, came with a father (e.g. man) attached, albeit on a long lead line.
Having lived in a heteronormative marital bubble for the past 10+ years, I was ignorant of just how many women were having children without husbands or partners. The closest I had come was when one of my best friends decided to freeze her eggs; not finding the right man to have children with and also not quite in a position to have them on her own, she wanted to preserve the hope that she would one day carry her own children. Somehow, though, it never even crossed my mind that I would meet a lesbian in her late 30s or early 40s who had kids, and I sure as hell hadn’t figured on meeting someone who wanted to actually carry a baby. And yet, when the first woman I fell in love with told me she might want to have a baby of her own, I swooned. Drunk in love, I imagined rubbing her pregnant belly like Aladdin coaxing the genie out of his lamp, coaching her through birth better than any doula could.
As it so happened, maybe I wasn’t as close to wrapping up the childbearing years as I thought I was.
It’s an interesting quandary to find myself in, having been the one to give up my body for 10+ months (or 2+ years, if considering breastfeeding)(or 6+ years, if factoring in having two children). Here I was, convinced I was done with the infant/toddler years, reveling in the new freedom I had with two older children (and a 50/50 parenting plan). I had time for friends, for work, for myself, and still time left over for dating, which had felt like a luxury but was one I was looking forward to affording. And yet, at the slightest suggestion that I could play a role in raising another baby, all of my excitement in the freedom of watching my fledglings fly a little farther from the nest each day was replaced by an intense desire to support another woman who wanted to experience pregnancy and motherhood.
Perhaps that’s why I was meant to meet a smart, sexy, drop-dead gorgeous woman who loved the outdoors, relished life, smiled copiously, and wanted to (in fact, was actively trying to) have a child of her own. Suddenly, I felt every joke I’d made about my ex dating a woman with two young children come back to slap me in the face. Maybe it wasn’t so easy to decide what our family was going to look like post-divorce after all. Maybe my kids were going to get the baby they kept begging me for (and two other siblings they hadn’t) after all. Maybe it’s not so easy to plan the future as it had seemed so many years ago when my ex and I thought vasectomy was the last major decision we’d have to make regarding adding more children to our family. Maybe family planning means planning for the unexpected after all.
(mostly) full disclosure 