When my best friend told me she was pregnant, I started to cry. And not exactly tears of joy. The night before, we had celebrated her birthday in a decadent cocktail bar in the old city. One of her guests, a childhood friend and recent
mother, gave her a case filled with pregnancy tests. She wouldn’t be needing them anymore and my friend had always wanted to have a baby. Now it was her turn. Ha, ha. Sure, one day.
When the party ended, A. went home by herself. Moved by a strange intuition, she took a test. “Are you awake?,” she wrote. I said yes and instantly received an image: a test with two red lines. Positive. “There’s no way, it’s expired,” I wrote back. A. didn’t seem convinced by my theory but didn’t discard it outright. “We’ll go to the drugstore tomorrow,” I said, and went to sleep.
That day we had agreed to co-work at A.’s place, i.e., to keep each other company while we each worked on our own things. On my way there, I found myself relishing the prospect of spending the morning on her balcony, chatting and chain-smoking next to the dehydrated potted plants. A.’s hypothetical pregnancy was the funniest talking point I could think of, not to mention the put-on of being given a bunch of expired pregnancy tests.
A. and I had often discussed motherhood. I was fascinated by how much our opposing positions resembled the plot of a romcom. At 31, she had known for a long time that she wanted to have children. To her, the life of travel and excess had lost its sheen. She had simply had enough of all that and wanted to move on to the next stage. I (37) had grown under the scrutiny of an overprotective father and had never felt a clear desire to be a mother – it was something I wanted on a theorical level, always far-removed from the present. Besides, I was then belatedly enjoying the excesses of youth.
When I got to A.’s apartment, the door was ajar. That was strange. I walked into the living room and found her sitting on a chair with a look of surprise: she was pregnant. At that moment, neither of us moved. We didn’t say anything, either. With my coat still buttoned up to my chin and my backpack on my shoulder, I burst into tears. It was the wailing of a little girl, a prodigal tantrum that seemed to come from somewhere far away, even if that didn’t make any sense. I hastened to apologize, drying my face with my hands – “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s gotten into me” –, but my tears didn’t stop flowing. “You’re so sad!” was all A. managed to say.
And that was it. We spent half the morning brooding in awkward silence; she, on the sofa looking at her phone, and I, typing at the table with my back turned to her. While A. texted the baby’s father, who was abroad at the time, I was adamant about working as I had initially planned to do. Later, A. went down to the street, and I stayed in her apartment finishing up my task, biting my lip and sniffling as quietly as I could, trying to smother the urge to cry. My best friend had just told me she was going to have a baby and I hadn’t even hugged her.
***
When I left her house, I felt devastated. And terribly ashamed of making such a show of my devastation. What was wrong with me? Where was this fathomless grief coming from? Whence the endless tears? And what about my spoilt brat reaction? Weren’t friends meant to always be there for one another, to stick together through thick and thin? And who was this question aimed at? Her or me?
Lately, when I’m too dazed to write on my phone, I record a voice note. It’s the only way I know how to articulate what I feel at a gut level, the only way left to think – to write – without filters or perfectionist tics. This is a transcript of the audio I recorded after I left A.’s building and crossed the street:
“I would prefer A. not to have this baby. For several reasons. The first is that I want her for myself. I want to live adventures with her, travel with her, I want to do a thousand things with her, that was my life’s plan [...] Now all that is about to change, and I am going to miss her. The other reason is that… her motherhood makes me think about my non-motherhood. I can’t help comparing myself [...] I’m sad. I sense I’m going to lose her and become one of those cowardly people who sit on a bench and watch life pass them by all while thinking themselves so brave. Because that’s how she conceives of her motherhood: as an act of rebellion, because nowadays it makes more sense not to have children at her age, even at mine. But she is going to be a young mother, she is going to do it, she is going to follow her heart’s desire no matter what they say. I don’t know whether I’m a rebel or a perfect product of my age, an obedient girl who thinks herself a rebel and only thinks about her own survival, her creative legacy and enjoying life. What does it mean that she has the courage to have this baby, to follow her heart’s desire? Can my bravery to not be a mother at 37 be compared to her bravery to be one despite the lurch? Do I not have that desire because I simply don’t have it or is it because I have learnt to be afraid of motherhood and see it as an atomic bomb that razes everything around it? I think this is going to fuck with my head.”
***
Until not so long ago, when I was inspired or struck by something, I would open a document on my computer and write it down as fast as I could to make sure I didn’t lose a thing. It was like I hurried to place a bucket beneath a magical spring from which water trickles just a few times a year, only that spring was me.
Three years have passed since I last wrote this way. The world keeps inspiring me but I only jot down ideas. I don’t finish texts anymore. I haven’t published a thing. For a long time, I have associated this block to the perfect storm that left me without a father, without a boyfriend and without a job all within a relatively short span of time. All that devastation must have robbed me of the confidence necessary to write.
But time went by, I slowly recovered and my role as a budding writer and journalist never fully returned. I suddenly felt comfortable listening in on the talk of the town from the bleachers. I didn’t think of myself as a victim, either, but as a hermit who whiled away her time recovering from her wounds, whose skin had been thickened by lessons learnt the hard way for the coming apocalypse. I felt like I had been to war and come back with dark glasses and a deadpan expression, with overlapping coats and tangerines in my pockets. Now I see that time in a different light. I might have liked to think of myself as a mysterious vagrant or a vanished supporting actress – “Whatever happened to Alba Muñoz?” –, when really I was nothing more than a modern take on the grieving Mediterranean woman.
During that convalescence I discovered the pleasure of scanning debates from the sidelines. I enjoyed being the voyeur of other people’s braveness or cowardice on social media, reading their texts and comfortably critiquing them from my surplus time for reflection. I kept abreast of all goings-on without receive an ounce of social capital in return, but at no cost whatsoever. There is no doubt that breaking the habit of having to come up with interesting quips and having a digital identity that I liked were doing me good: keeping this distance made me less anxious and provided perspective. However, for a while now I have known that I am merely coming up with excuses. What’s blocking my writing isn’t grief, but something deeper, as if now I were more fearful to open myself up than ever. As if instead of maturing and growing stronger I was somehow shrinking.
What I’m trying to say is that I never imagined I would break my block with a text on motherhood. It’s a subject in which I’ve never been particularly interested. In fact, my only recent contribution to the debate is that for many women motherhood is so far removed from reality that it has become a sexual fantasy. You like a man and fantasize with a hard, round belly, filled with an optimal mix of your DNAs. You relish feeling his fluids inside you because it makes you think of blood and organs and your dangerous – and thrilling – power of reproduction, a power that you are told you have but that deep down feels like a fairy tale, nothing but hearsay.
“Another day of degrading my body by sending emails and filling in spreadsheets when I should have given birth eight times by now.” I think this line, taken from the Stories of a very young Twitter user, addresses exactly this. The girl doesn’t really want to have eight kids, she would simply prefer to have a fulfilling job and feel a deeper connection with her body. Every time I read her jokes on digital-occupational alienation, I get the feeling this young girl has grasped something that many of us only understood later in life: that some women lead lives so far removed from our anatomy – the body understood as the jointed suit of our mental identity – that our instincts are compressed into the biological equivalent of a bong hit every twenty-eight days. Then we orgasm or get our periods and move on.
Obviously, I have tried to sabotage this text. The world doesn’t need another first-person gender-centric essay on a cyclical theme that now happens to be back in vogue (or is it a piece of non-fiction written by a woman about a universal theme?). At any rate, what’s pushing me to write quickly for the first time in three years isn’t some juicy take, but rather – and I’m pretty sure this is a first for me – the need to know what I think, as Joan Didion would have said. But with one difference: this text is not an opinion. It is a decision.
***
Ever since the morning I left A.’s house, life seemed to speed up. My days turned extreme and took on the traits of an action flick. Mad dashes across the city (I was always late because I had been crying or had lost track of time while stuck on a looped thought), dramatic arm wounds (my cat doesn’t handle stress very well) and an overall atmospheric tension that was clearly on the rise. On the one hand there was our friendship, which seemed to be disintegrating before my eyes, and on the other, the sudden need to decide how I wanted to live my life until the day I die.
When you are 37, any honest attempt at introspection on the subject of motherhood is inevitably pierced by two taut hooks. The obvious one is the looming end of your fertility, and the less obvious one is the cruel arbitrariness of the same. A year before then, my gynecologist told me something I didn’t know. After assessing the health of my ovaries – “In prime condition. Right now, you would get pregnant at the first go” –, she asked me if I wanted to have children. I told her that not at the moment and then she mentioned egg freezing. She did so while subtly looking away, gathering the papers on her desk, with an automatism or projected naturalness I associated with a certain degree of compassion. She told me it was an option “for women who haven’t made up their minds” and handed me a leaflet. I asked her why I should consider freezing my eggs if my ovaries were so youthful, and she said – this time with overt compassion – that this vitality ends when you least expect it. Apparently, women are born with a predetermined number of quality eggs we will produce throughout our life, and when they run out – without prior symptom or warning – we start to put out the bad ones. So, my action flick now had a ticking bomb scenario: something bad could happen at any time, if it hadn’t done so already.
To add some SFX into the mix, that was the time when two good movies about motherhoods premiered in cinemas (The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Happening, based on the novel by Annie Ernaux), which brought with them a deluge of round-table discussions and podcasts with guests of varying ages laying bare their souls. No matter whether you want to be a mother or already are one, the debates on procreation are so complex and link up to so many different factors that they are now interesting on a philosophical level. Modern motherhood and non-motherhood conform a private and collective puzzle that is reaching truly metaphysical heights – the sense in procreating in the face of the planet’s destruction or other possible ways of forming communities; the inherently hopeful impulse that drives human reproduction – and bring together in a single agora young girls and women of a certain age.
It was apparent that this time I couldn’t escape. So far, it had been easy for me to keep questions of progeny at bay – to go on living in peace all I needed were my sexual fantasies and to talk about it every now and then with my mother or A. – but the fact that I was now pursued by all these real witnesses and doubts, and that A. would give birth in just a few months, required I take things one step further, as if my stillness were not a valid position but a childish, ambivalent and cowardly attitude. A. made me feel like a teenager with graying hair who plays on the street while paying no heed to the calls from her building, asking her over and over what she wants for dessert. I was deliberately ignoring the noise of the world, dodging my responsibility to take a stance.
Any action film worth its salt has an unexpected twist at the end, an additional plot point that makes you catch your breath until the credits roll. It was at that point that an SMS reached my phone, a reminder from the gynecologist’s clinic: time for my yearly check-up.
***
Before coming to a decision – before finishing this text – I went through several stages. The first was anger at finding myself suddenly pulled into this quagmire when I had until then been happy and self-content. It isn’t fair that men don’t have to face this dilemma. I thought we should have a Ministry of Infertility, an institution that forces vasectomies on men in their early forties so they would share the unease of knowing they have limited time to form a biological family. Beside spinning demagogical thoughts, I also developed conspiracy theories. If I had been born with a finite number of good eggs (the ovarian reserve) and we have the means to count them, then why couldn’t I know how much time I had left? Why couldn’t they give me a more or less precise date so I could make an informed decision? Because that’s not in their interests, of course, that only concerns women. Beyond the plausibility of a sexist and capitalist confabulation, one thing was certain: a growing number of women are putting off their motherhood because of external factors, then a growing number of women decide to pour their savings and those of their families into the fertility industry.
The next stage I went through was one of trying to rationally analyze my situation. The success rate of oocyte cryopreservation (in other words, the number of women who successfully become mothers after thawing), is about 20% in women over 35. That’s a very low percentage, but enough to feed the market of desperation born from wanting to finally enjoy that eternally postponed motherhood, and to bring a new prevention market into the world. Until egg freezing in your early twenties is not socially established as a family expense as common as investing in dentistry, we will forever talk about freezing with limited guarantees and in terms of “just in case”, under a perversely simple premise: if you can afford it, it would be absurd not to. Then it will be a weight off your mind.
But ideology is often at odds with the flesh. When we feel a physical calling, a desire burning deep down in our gut, it’s hard to appease with principles alone. Unlike other forms of assisted reproduction, egg freezing is sold as a self-care service without many implications. A development akin to laser hair removal or certain surgeries; a new possibility. But what happens when the very existence of said development generates a want you previously didn’t have? In my case, I would have to pay 4,000 euros for a service that would allow me to slightly increase my chances of fulfilling a wish I don’t have, or one that I wouldn’t feel for strongly enough, should it ever raise its head.
Two friends I asked about the matter – one who froze eggs to “buy time” and another who didn’t because it wouldn’t have made much of a difference in her case – told me to not think twice and do it; regretting it later would be worse. In one of the podcasts I listened to back then, a forty-year-old woman who had become a mother with a donated egg described a fluctuating wish: she hadn’t felt like having a baby until the very last moment, when that door was about to close forever.
And so I entered the I-have-the-money stage, which consisted in talking it over with my boyfriend and mother and coming to terms with the idea that in order for the plan to make a modicum of sense I would have to do it asap. But when I pictured myself paying such a vast amount of money, jabbing myself to pump my body full of hormones and opening my legs to have my last few pearly eggs removed, I felt violated. It was like an alienation nested within an alienation: obeying an outside force to “willingly” submit to a medical process for the benefit of an expected though as-of-yet hypothetical yearning I might feel in the not-too-distant future. In short, I felt as if something were colonizing my mind and body.
The last stage I went through, the longest and hardest of them all, was trying to unravel what I want. As if entering a sensory deprivation chamber, I closed my eyes and tried to lower myself into the deepest reaches of my being, where nothing could touch me. Once there, I asked myself: What is it you really want? I then quieted my mind for some seconds and sent it probing through every corner of my body like an elongated ghost before it came back with the most honest answer it could muster. I was happy then, with my younger boyfriend and my new mischievous life, throwing only sidelong glances towards the future. But if I hadn’t met him, would I want to start a family? Was my current lifestyle eclipsing the fact that I was, at the end of the day, a 37-year-old woman?
Maybe it wasn’t a matter of prying a wish from the depths of my being, but of asking myself the right questions about my identity. While it is true that I like my independent lifestyle and still long for future adventures, it is also true that, over time, I have started to resemble my mother and grandmother in certain ways. I could be as punky as I liked, I was also a born carer who could cook up a mean stew and sometimes help her friends just a bit too much because it made her feel good. I could do it with my eyes closed: I know I would adore my baby if I had one. I would fight for it day and night with a knife clenched between by teeth. In short, I was sure I would be a good mother, but would I be happy? Or would I merely feel satisfied and accompanied? Was that the life I was choosing for myself?
A friend who has been a father twice offered to help clarify my thoughts. We reached the conclusions that there was no such thing as a one-hundred-percent good option. My friend said that having children brings into your life a form of love that exceeds all boundaries, one that cannot be defined in words, but it also limits your freedom. In that case, I said, it’s a matter of being honest with myself and choosing the option I think will make me most happy, knowing I will probably one day feel a pang of regret (whether I become a mother or not, at some point I am bound to feel nostalgia towards the path not taken). I just had to prime myself to try to be happy despite the pang. We agreed that it was absurd and even schizophrenic to try to imagine my life without the things that now make it up – my new boyfriend, my happiness – to attain a false and conceptual idea of myself, an identity outside of time.
My friend gave me a book to read. It was a copy of Yerma, by García Lorca, a beautiful edition bound in navy blue leather. I remember avidly reading the play and feeling for the protagonist’s desperation, who try as she might, could not get pregnant. She craves a baby and hates her husband, a lanky, listless man who only thinks about money. I thought my friend was trying to reconcile me with motherhood through poetry, but then I came across a supporting character who grabbed my attention. She was known as Second Girl, and she was speaking to an old woman and the protagonist in the middle of the street.
SECOND GIRL: You'll be calling me crazy, too. That crazy girl, that crazy girl! (She laughs) I'll tell you the only thing I've learned from life: everybody's stuck inside their house doing what they don't like to do. How much better it is out in the streets. Sometimes I go to the arroyo, sometimes I climb up and ring the bells, or again I might just take a drink of anisette.
YERMA: You’re only a child.
SECOND GIRL: Why yes – but I’m not crazy.
Second Girl was a nameless character with a strong personality. She lived in the shadow of the protagonist and in the corners of the town where the action is at, but she was also a self-assured young woman. She seemed to live her life with ease and flair, her head held high.
It wasn’t like me to organize my reproduction in a cold and calculated way, removing all mystery from life. I preferred to try to get pregnant naturally in my forties, get all excited about it and fail rather than put myself in the hands of an industry that would doubtless crush my soul.
It was all starting to make sense in my head, but I was missing something important. I was missing A.
***
We hadn’t seen each other for some time. Our messages were cold and distant. The new and painful scenario was a trench in which I could take cover and defend my position in silence: “You see? Everything’s changed.” Although I couldn’t think of it in these terms on a conscious level, I still felt that A. had betrayed me: she was the one who had strayed.
This image was so bright I couldn’t see its reverse side: that I had drifted away from A. because she was pregnant. I knew that with time I would adapt and love her baby, but I needed space, I told myself, to process this big change.
In one of our scarce interactions, A. told me she intended to go on being herself and not become one of those women who make their motherhood their identity. But soon a new person would come crashing into her life, into our lives, like a demanding and adorable meteor. I was still in the doldrums, paralyzed in the face of an unexpected “abandonment” that reminded me of other unexpected abandonments I had been through. I knew that A. must have been sad over the distance that had grown between us and scared because of the imminent change in her life, but some strange defense mechanism made me imagine she was calm and satisfied. After all, she had always wanted to be a mother and would soon begin her new life, the one she had chosen. And I was making her pay for it.
Friendship is partly falling in love. Especially when your friend is a better version of yourself. A. is the sexy bright young intellectual I would have like to be. I think she sees me as a back-alley philosopher who doles out sound advice and isn’t easily outfoxed. An old hand. When we first me, we instantly clicked. Right off the bat, we started to concoct plans à la Thelma and Louise, set up production companies with spicy names and reclaim, during a brief pandemic journey to a Greek island, the supremacy of the Mediterranean.
When you identify deeply with someone, when someone gets so deep inside you – your interests, your sense of humor, your ambitions –, it hurts when you suddenly can’t understand her. A.’s desire to be a mother was an unbridgeable gap in our perfect union. However, even though I persisted in believing she had changed – I mean, she was the one who had made the sudden, unusual and unconventional move –, I still thought she knew me better than anyone else. In spite of everything, A. continued to be my most loyal mirror, the one who would tell me the truth about myself.
I remember our scarce meetings back then. They were all in places that meant nothing to us: a dismal terrace next to a fleet of parked cars (they served dumplings and A. had to wolf down her fifth meal of the day), a cocktail lounge (we ordered mocktails loaded with sugar) and a noisy bar where, much to A.’s dismay, the deep fryer had stopped working.
It was during one of those meetings that I told A. I was thinking about freezing eggs. And I asked her the same question I had asked a while back, long before all this happened: “Do you think I really don’t want to be a mother or do you think I’m being willfully obtuse because I’m unable to face what admitting I want to be a mother would involve?” “You don’t want to be a mother,” A. answered with her usual speed and certainty, and I just wanted to kiss her. Her reasoning was the same as the first time: she knew me well enough to know that if I wanted something, no matter how much I hated the fact that I wanted it, I couldn’t ignore it. “You would go for it; I’m sure.”
I told A. I was ashamed of my meltdown in her house that first day, when I couldn’t stop crying. I told her, half laughing, that I had been a terrible friend. She was kind enough to tell me she understood my reaction, that at least I had been honest, while many of her acquaintances – who also harbored mixed feelings towards motherhood – weren’t entirely honest when they congratulated her.
That was one of my first glimpses of A.’s complex situation, all the life-changing transformations she had to deal with while her belly continued to grow at a steady pace. She told me she was afraid that people were leaving her out of their plans, as if they thought she was gone for good. Another day she put into words the thought that captured all the angst and loneliness we had both been going through for weeks: “When someone tells you you’re pregnant, the first thing you think about is yourself.” She had experienced it first-hand long before knowing she was going to be a mother. Someone would tell her the happy news and she would take it like an arrow to her empty womb. This doesn’t only happen to women who want to have children, said A., but also to those who are not sure and even those who have decided not to. Even some men feel this way.
What is it about other people’s motherhood that accuses and betrays us? It constantly demands that we reaffirm we don’t want to make use of this precious power. The precious power has the particularity of removing total control from our lives, a trait that for some makes it even more precious. For others, it is a love that overwhelms and suffocates with only imagining it, that comes unexpectedly and without warning, if it does at all. It is like one of those boxes you have to tick when buying something on the internet: “I don’t want to receive wonderful offers and promotions.” Every time someone tells you they’re pregnant, you have to tick that box – “Continue without using the precious power” – and keep walking a trail overgrown with brambles that scratch at your legs but, though you don’t know where it leads, at least is familiar.
When we first met, A. showed me this one-line story by Lydia Davis. It’s called Double Negative:
At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.
You can want a desire. You can nurture it. You can make your desire your first baby before even having a baby. You can wait for it to be born the first time you give birth.
When we think about the forces of procreation, of the powerful inertia that pushes our existence forward as a species, not doing might be harder than doing.
Desire is a mille-feuille impossible to observe without it crumbling between your fingers. There is no way to know whether it is pure or born from socialization and the influence of the times. You can try to be brutally honest with yourself, but your desire will always be a construction made up of dozens of layers and inaccessible caves, a powerfully simple work of engineering, like motherhood itself.
You cannot clear away the shadows and impurities because your desire is shadow and impurity itself.
There is nothing wrong in trying to find out what you want or whether you really want what you think you want. But at a certain point the search must stop, and that is when you know you are lost. You realize that this new artificially fertilized idea has been knocking about inside you for some time now and is not making itself at home.
I cannot know whether my desire will change, but if it does, I will be the first to know it. Now I know that what I want is never outside, but within. And that silence can be an answer too.
***
I’m now reaching the end of this text and that means that I now know I am not going to freeze my eggs. A. is five months pregnant. She has told me it’s going to be a girl. I have pictured her face and bought her a blue cloth onesie. I have also pictured a booster chair in the backseat of Thelma and Louise’s dusty convertible.
After all this time I have understood that it wasn’t my friend’s pregnancy that made me feel miserable. It was the existence of the freezing industry that made me mistrust myself to the point that I started to question my very identity and the choices I had made over the last few years. In a society transfixed by an overabundance of offers and stimuli, in which certain desires have become paid rights, it’s easy to feel you are losing yourself in a faceless magma and starting to waver, when all it might be is that you are not thinking for yourself.
“I won’t take the ovarian reserve test for the same reason I don’t want to know the day I’ll die.” Those weren’t the exact words I used when talking to my gynecologist, but that was the idea I conveyed. During my yearly check-up, I announced my decision and she nodded defensively: “I just want it to be clear that you have been duly informed of the reality of your situation, because people then come in tears saying no one had told them.”
I left the clinic feeling lighter and with a nervous smile on my lips. I am aware that my decision may seem immature. Many will think I will regret it and that may be so, but I am ready to bear it, at least for now.
My decision not to freeze my eggs – my mistake, if you will – has imbued me with lost strength. I have broken the line of reasoning that connects a preventive service to a sum of money sitting in my bank account. It doesn’t work for me.
What A. has done is to love me and teach me to love her in dissent, to replace the translucent mirror that once stood between us.
What she has done is to freeze my freedom.
What she has done is to tell me that although she would love for me to have a baby and go on walks with our strollers together, she prefers that I be a proud Second Girl whose life is her own, who seldom appears but speaks her mind.
I am writing again, A.
This is my baby and you are its mother.
Translated by Paul Sánchez Keighley
Image by Dana Trippe