Behind the (Magic) 8 Ball

Is there time for everything I want to do? (Reply hazy, try again later.)

(I talk a lot about trying to get pregnant in this one. Just flagging in case that’s not what you feel like reading about right now.)

I’ve been plagued by this feeling lately (honestly, since November) that time is running out. This is straightforwardly nuts, since my career in tech is on the rise (despite the years I spent doing a high wire act in start-ups), I have a beautiful kid and a healthy marriage, and the birthday last fall that kicked off this worry was my 40th, not 90th. In what way, you might ask as a sane person, are you running out of time? Time for what?

I am admittedly trash at stopping to smell the flowers, but good grief does our backyard deliver.

Last Thanksgiving, we went around the table and tried to articulate what it feels like to be in our own heads, how our brains work. My husband described his mind as a room with filing cabinets: ordered, accessible. My mother said hers was more like a tree with infinite branches: everything and everyone felt connected at its root. Mine is a watercolor. Intense, maybe a little fuzzy on the details. I’m an imagistic thinker, and the sense of an experience has always been more powerful to me than the facts.

And so there are two images—fuzzy, half-developed Polaroids—that are haunting me. No, that’s too macabre. They’re just sitting with me, like a devil or angel might perch on your shoulder. But they won’t leave.

In one picture, I’m sitting with my family on the couch. We’re watching TV, I think; at least, we’re all looking ahead, so I only have my peripheral vision. I can feel the warmth of Jude curled into my left side, his heavy head burrowing against my chest like it does when he’s getting sleepy. Jason is on my right, his long legs stretched out to rest on the coffee table, his arm curled over my shoulders. And there’s someone on his other side. I don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, but even out of the corner of my eye, I can see a downy fluff of brown hair that matches Jude’s, can see the tiny shape curled into my husband’s side. And the picture, the feeling it gives me, is a sense of rightness, of peace: the pack all together, warm in our burrow. No one is missing.

In the other picture, I’m in a bookstore. It’s a tiny one, an indie, with sunlight flooding over my shoulders onto the crowded wooden table in front of me. I’ve just picked up a hardcover from the stack: it has a vivid cover, electric blues and greens. It’s weighty, heavy in my hand, but I feel carbonated, so light I could lift off. I’m running my thumb over the author’s name, my name, and I’m grateful and proud and feel again that sense of rightness. Like I made it across a big field of mistakes, to who I was always supposed to be.

* * *

They’re pretty common ambitions: have a second child. Publish the novel you’ve been chipping away at for years. I have known that I want these things for most of my life, and for much of that time, it’s been totally okay that they were kind of twinkling off in the distance.

Now all of a sudden, time feels finite.

Part of it is that I’m now measuring time by a person. Before I gave birth, a year or two meant something, but not so much. I could try to place a memory and be off by five years, maybe seven. Now, every week is a leap. A year is the difference between a snuffly toddler and a boychild who asks me, with deep sincerity and perfect diction, “But could you please not say no to me?” Once you start marking the weeks you’ve kept someone alive, I don’t think you can ever go back to a casual relationship with time. Every casting into the future I do, there’s a running corollary: by then, Jude will be…

And, of course, I will be… You can’t be an “older” parent (or perhaps, delightfully, a “geriatric” one) without doing constant arithmetic re: what the numbers will be on any given occasion: when he goes to high school, when he graduates from college, when he’s (gulp) as old as I am now. (Or, rather: probably a more well-adjusted person could, but I have not been able to.) I never felt much of anything about time before, except an expansive gratitude to have so much of it to muck around in. Now I’m counting out all these shadows of my future self—at 50, 60, 70—and wondering what she’ll have done for us.

Oh, and one other thing that I’m sure is totally unrelated and not at all undergirding this: moving back to my hometown and spending much more time with my parents, watching their relationship with Jude deepen into a funny, sweet friendship. Like this Saturday, when 3 seconds had elapsed since the candles had been blown out, and Jude asked with real worry in his high little voice, “Why am I not getting any cake?” and my dad laughed until there were tears in his eyes. On his 80th birthday. Anyway. Not sure why I brought that up.

* * *

My sister in law recommended a device to me, a little gadget that fits onto your phone. You pee on a stick every morning, the app measures your various hormone levels, and then displays its instructions in cheerful colored blobs. Orange = take a breather. Purple = go find your man. It is simple, straightforward, a boon for someone who wants help getting pregnant.

And it is the worst. Now that I have committed to using it, pulled the mysticism of conception down into the world of the App Store, I am addicted. I’m analyzing the arcs of progesterone and estrogen as though I have the faintest idea what they’ll tell me (I do not). Every negative pregnancy test lands me in Reddit forums, a behavior I know creates spikes of anxiety (the copious amounts of coffee I drink while scrolling them in the morning probably doesn’t help? But like, leave a woman her few vices).

One benefit of reaching forty is self-knowledge, and boy did I know this would happen. I don’t know how to hold things loosely. I was on the fence about having a second kid for so long because I knew the moment I decided we should, it would turn into a consuming quest. It has been like this my whole life: if something is not for me, I can easily admire it in others and be so chill about my own lack. Athletic ability? Being a good cook? Love that for you, I probably won’t get there. But if I truly want something, and I think it’s within my power to get there…oh, fuck. Something deep in the recesses of my brain creaks awake, and there is no telling this thing to chill out and “see what happens.” It is constantly on, always reviewing the data, wondering if there’s another route, spinning, calculating.¹ This is helpful when you want to, say, take the LSAT. Less so, here.

And the reason I don’t just throw the colored-blob-app away is: we do need to act quickly. I need help, here. Anne Hathaway and Natalie Portman might be examples of what’s possible, but I think they probably arrived at their current (gorgeous) state by doing a lot more than having a few glasses of wine. If we want another kid, the reality is that our window is closing. It would be wrong to count myself out now, but also incorrect to act as though we have all the time in the world. We don’t.

* * *

When I am not moonlighting as a fake fertility specialist, I am writing a book. Or, I am trying to write a book, but my writing time keeps tripping over and falling into other buckets: mainly, my day job. Someone very kind helped me get my foot in the door, and now this company is paying me to be an executive and expecting me (a mere child!) to act like one.

I am deeply grateful to have this job. I’ve been broke for long stretches as an adult, and I’d rather not revisit the era where I had to check my online balance surreptitiously before heading in to meet a friend for lunch. Our economy is not the work of a stable genius, I don’t want to put the full burden of being the breadwinner back on my husband who shouldered it for years, and hey—didn’t I just say I wanted another kid? Those are rumored to be kind of expensive.

But.

I have always wanted to write instead. “Instead” of whatever else I was doing, which has been many things: being a lawyer, running start-ups. The difference is that the desire used to have a comfortable pattern in my body, like a dog turning around a few times before settling down to sleep. I could, if not ignore it, pet it a little and tell it I’d be back later. But that comfort is gone now, and the want feels more animal. I am craving alone time to pull words out of myself, I’m irritable when interrupted. (I’ve never actually bitten anyone, but the year’s not over.)

And I think it’s because, as doors start to close in mid-life, I am realizing: I might not get this. Even though writing has been one of the most important through lines in my life, the practice that brings me the most joy, I might not manage to make it my work without some pretty Herculean efforts in the margins of a life that is already very full. It’s that part that matters (to me): that I make it “my work,” that I can check Writer off the list of things that are true about myself. And I don’t see an offramp from my current situation into one in which I kiss my kid goodbye at the preschool door and then sit down to make art. If anything, I am driving in the opposite direction: trying to save for a house, for retirement, maybe another kid. All things that require me to double down at work so there’s more money. Less time.

* * *

Look: it’ll shake out however it does. We’ll have another kid or we won’t, and both paths will have patches of unanticipated beauty and grief. And there’s no biological clock on a debut. I can’t see my hands in the Polaroid; who knows, maybe they’re covered in age spots. Maybe it’s a fake cover my grandchildren stuck on someone else’s book because Nana just wouldn’t shut up about her novel.

If I’m honest, I know that I’m having this conversation with myself because, these days, my own wants and needs are sublimated. They should be. In this season of having a very young child, I am not the most important person in my home. But the (temporary) compression of your self, having to ration smaller slices of your desires and ambition, can take you from the reality of wishing for more room right now to the story that there isn’t any time.

And the truth is: there is always as much time as there ever was, minus—in a few hours—today. And this thrashing I’m doing, this obsessing over what might not happen, doesn’t change that. It only weakens me, saps the muscle I need for the work that stands between who I am now and the woman in those Polaroids. Because it is always two kinds of work, this process of moving forward through your life: effort and appreciation. Do what you can to climb the next mountain, and give thanks on your hands and knees for the summit you’ve reached.

So I will say to myself: plot a scene instead of scrolling. Read back your work, and think maybe it is getting better (even if it’s not). Call a real doctor. Go to therapy. This sense of scarcity, of time slipping through my fingers, only comes when I back away from the actual work to climb a tree and stare at the horizon. And, sure, you have to do that sometimes; that long distance vision is how I spot those Polaroids that tell me where I’m going. But then good grief, girl, climb back down into the flowers. Everything you have and hold dear today was once a blurry image, too. Focus.

1. Otherwise I am lovely to be around, just saying.