Mama Tried

When I found out I was pregnant last May, I commenced a program of reading. I needed to know what was coming. During the six months that I had been trying, I had avoided stories about pregnancy and small children at all costs. If a TV show introduced a pregnancy plotline, I switched it off. If somebody recommended a book tangentially connected to motherhood, I made a point to quickly forget the title. When I saw acquaintances on Instagram post birth announcements, I muted their activity. The more other people were becoming pregnant and having babies, the more pregnancy began to seem like a finite resource, one that may well not extend its rewards to me. (I’d left it until thirty-five, my thyroid didn’t work, I drank too much in my twenties, hadn’t earned it, etc.) I constructed for myself a provisional world where I could keep trying without losing hope that one day, on the other side of a luteal cycle, I, too, would get what I wanted. By the time the positive test result materialized, I had been living in a narrative dead zone.