Introducing Bad Eggs: a new diary series about fertility and me trying (and failing) to get pregnant
My uterus has been very dramatic lately. How is this going to end?
Bad Eggs is an ongoing personal diary of my experiences with fertility, sex, pregnancy, loss, and grappling with all the big, complicated questions that come up when you’re trying to create a human life. Subscribe to follow along.
If you’d asked me six months ago if I would ever write a column about my attempts to have a second baby roughly a decade after having my first, I would’ve said, “wow, what a highly specific question,” and also a firm “no.” I was fresh off of my 2nd miscarriage in less than a year (or 3rd, depending on how you define “miscarriage”—more on that soon) and as far as I was concerned, the fertility project was shutting down for good. I was throwing out the ovulation tests and thinking about when my husband should get a vasectomy—I was genuinely, completely done trying to get pregnant. The question of whether or not there was another kid floating around out there, waiting to come through my body and hang out on earth—a question we had started asking a year earlier—had been asked and answered, and had run me into the ground in the process. In every way you can measure a person’s ability to endure, I was bottomed out.
That was six months ago. Today, I’m not so sure, about any of it. Was my strong, certain feeling that I was done trying to have another baby a true moment of clarity after a long, sad, scary year of trying—or was it a knee-jerk reaction to loss, the same way someone might swear off dating in the immediate aftermath of a breakup? I still don’t know. As with most things, I could argue both sides. As with most things, I’ve been driving myself crazy arguing both sides.
And that’s why this series is happening. You would think that 18 months of diligently trying to have a baby is a clear indication of my certainty about wanting to have a baby, but it’s not actually that simple. And I’m starting to believe that it’s not that simple for a lot of people. It seems more and more obvious to me that there’s a deeper and more complicated thing going on with a lot of people who are trying to get pregnant: we both desire it and fear it; want it and don’t want it; pursue it and doubt that we should be. And along the way, the whole experience—whatever it ends up entailing—challenges so many parts of our lives.
While I’m still in the middle of it, I thought it would be interesting to write about it in real-time, as it’s happening, as I’m jumping from one strong feeling to another about the whole thing.
While I’m not new to being a mom, I am new to this entire season of proactively trying to get pregnant. When I got pregnant with my son, I was 24 and certainly not trying to make that happen. The fact was (is), I’ve always been ambivalent about having kids. I’d had an abortion 4 years earlier, and it was great. When I got pregnant with my son, I made and ultimately canceled three abortion appointments—having my uterus scraped clean was my instinctive response to pregnancy (fair, in my opinion) and I’ll probably never be able to articulate why exactly I changed my mind and allowed that particular situation to evolve into a whole person. In the decade since he was born, I’ve had one more abortion, two miscarriages (for very wanted pregnancies), and two chemical pregnancies (which I guess were also technically miscarriages, just with a slightly more metal name).
The last miscarriage was in August 2022, and the last chemical pregnancy was *checks watch* a few weeks ago. Like I said, this is an actively unfolding situation. This series is an invitation into the trenches.
My uterus, forever fertile as hell, has suddenly become teflon for fertilized eggs—and dealing with it over the last 18 months (and really, the last 25 years since it started bleeding and subsequently fucking up my vibe) has made me think about the whole issue of procreation in more depth than I ever imagined I would. Maybe it’s all the free time I had curled up on the couch for weeks in a postpartum panic state after a miscarriage; maybe it’s some new state of enlightenment brought on by the meditative practice of charting my basal body temperature every morning at 6am—who knows. But I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of hormones and a lot of hormones disguised as thoughts, wrapped in fear, coated in horniness, weighted by exhaustion. It’s a blast.
A non-exhaustive list of questions that have been on my mind throughout this process, that I’ll talk about in this series:
Why do I want to have another kid?
Do I even really want another kid or is the urge that looks like a desire for more kids actually something else entirely? Am I just bored? Am I procrastinating on working through my bullshit hangups that prevent me from living my best life?
Do I really want another baby or am I just sad that my suddenly middle school-aged child will never be a baby again?
Did I use up all my good eggs back in my 20s? Can my shriveled 36-year-old eggs even create a human at this point? Is worrying about the “quality” of baby that my old-ass eggs can make, like, low-key eugenicist of me?
Why do people call it a “biological clock” when it’s much more like an uncontrollable, irrational death drive that overpowers your common sense and makes you want to impale yourself on a ripe dick even if you like your life exactly as it is, and are, in fact, terrified of the change a new baby would bring? But it’s literally all you want to do???
Is this biological hunger for another baby actually some deeper level of knowing what I really want, beyond the shit I want superficially that might be harder to have if I also have more kids? Or is it the biological death drive—life’s insatiable longing for itself—that’s threatening to divert me off a more unencumbered course where I would be happier?
My kid is almost 11 years old—do I want to start over, or do I want to enjoy the ever-increasing degrees of freedom and time I’m starting to get back?
In terms of potential medical interventions and fertility support, what am I willing to do? And if I’m not willing to do anything in order to have a baby, does that mean I don’t want one badly enough to even be trying at all?
This series could truly only take the form of a sort of diary because this is still all something I’m actively going through. I’m learning all the time about how my body was thrown into a kind of mourning state after my miscarriage last year, and what I’m supposed to do up here on the surface of my life to honor that mourning enough for it to stop short-circuiting my body. I’m weighing the choice to try again against the very real possibility that my brain will melt and leak out of my eye sockets if I have to experience becoming a vessel of death one more time. I’m realizing that there are so many ways in which the reality of death—crushing, immediate, inescapable—can dawn on a person for the first time, and questioning how anyone is supposed to carry on living once it does. I’m thinking about sex and partnership in completely new and weird ways. I’m watching my living son grow up all at once, every day, and I’m floored by the immensity of my love for him and the power of my connection to him, so strong and consuming that it makes me both thrilled for the idea that it could happen again and also horrified by that idea. And that’s all in my head on, like, any given Tuesday. It’s arguably too much life to hold in my body, let alone my mind. So maybe this series will just be a much-needed release valve.
If this were a movie, it would end with me, at long last, after many trials and challenges, ending up with a baby. But the truth is, this story could end in a lot of different ways, and I really have no idea at this point. I guess we’ll find out together.