"I didn't long for a baby; I longed to be the type of woman who did." ~Meredith Resnick

I didn’t long for a baby who melted into me, who captured my hair between her soft fingers. I longed to be the type of woman who did.

But I was ambivalent about childbirth. And pregnancy. Babies, with their hands like rose petals and their toes like creamy pebbles, were natural. My lack of maternal instinct was not. Secretly, I worried that my lack of desire to have a baby, to be pregnant, to carry a child, indicated something fundamentally wrong with me. That I’d inherited my mother’s ambivalence and transmuted it, that in some odd twist my own maternal gene was tweaked in her womb, forging a disease that could take generations to cure. I was meticulous about birth control, about preparing my Ortho diaphragm, and when I used the foams, creams and jellies, and the doughy sponges that never stayed put. I’d lie in bed and watch Jon don the prophylactics, the Trojans that stuck like glue, wrapped in the knowledge that as two mature, responsible adults who were learning to grow together, we’d know when it was time, when it was right, to grow our family.
Until I went to a baby shower.

If babies were there, I held them, fed them with bottles of expressed breast milk or soy formula that smelled faintly like whey. The babies were always tiny enough to manage with one arm. I felt the new moms watching me, looking me over, trying to figure me out.