A decade after my second son was born I found myself unexpectedly pregnant again.
Will Varner / BuzzFeed
An unsettling thing about e-readers is that you can't easily sense how far along you are in a book — the feel of the object in your hands never changes; there's no tactile shift to signal that one is at the beginning, or midway, or approaching the end. And sometimes life feels like that, too.
We already did everything. That's how it seemed. I'd already grown up, gone to grad school, married, landed a job, had two kids, written some books, and now what? Do the same things again and again until I got too sick or old to do them, and then die? Nothing is new anymore, my grandmother complained at 90. I felt that way at 40.
Still, there's a luxuriousness to being at the midpoint. There's enough experience behind you so that you know who you are — you've made a life — yet there's a sense of plenty still ahead. I'm not in physical pain, I'd tell myself, rushing to the subway. I'm not hooked up to an oxygen tank. I get to do my work and raise my kids and run around this city with my friends. This is the good part.
But this sense of being in the middle, it's tentative, provisional. If I'm my grandmother, who died in her nineties, I'm in the middle of my life; if I'm my mother, who died at 54, I'm closer to the end.
How did we get here so fast, my mother asked, just before she died.
Will Varner / BuzzFeed
We like to think we know where we are along the road, and it's radically disorienting to find oneself at an unanticipated and completely different place on the map. Any disruption in life chronology causes vertigo. For me, instead of the dreaded lurch forward, life looped back. A decade after my second son was born I found myself unexpectedly pregnant again.
It was summertime. I'd returned from a month working in Paris; my husband was happy to see me. Our boys were away at camp and we were alone in the lazy late July light of our blessedly empty apartment. When I think back on it now, that place in time has a kind of mystical, luminous charge; we had no idea we were summoning a new person into our lives.
I'm pregnant. The thought shook me awake in the middle of the night a few weeks later. When an EPT stick confirmed this, my husband and I laughed, shocked and weirdly happy. I began to wait for the miscarriage, which I was sure was coming.
I think you're going to carry this baby to term, the attending said, when anxiety landed me in the ER. We have a heartbeat, I told my husband on the phone from the hospital parking lot.
Should I have this baby? I should at least consider my options. But I couldn't get past the question to imagine what an answer of no would mean. With a new heartbeat inside me I was euphoric, still a part of the pulsing living world.
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