Grandmother Births Granddaughters after Eating Wild Mushrooms (or Receiving Fertility Treatments)
November 15, 2008 by Julia King · Leave a Comment
Imagine a world in which a woman gives birth to her own triplet granddaughters. I know. Run-of-the-mill already. Wake me up when a man gives birth to his triplet grandparents. That’s a real story.
Oh, the complexity.
What drives a family to such … I don’t know… exertion? What makes three presumably sane people grab nature and twist it into intractable knots?
15 years ago my body birthed one child and mysteriously halted production. I have a beautiful spitfire of a daughter who loves egg sandwiches and hiking in the woods and has an unnatural aversion to the sound of harmonicas. There was a time when I ached to have another just like her; but looking into her gold-specked eyes I know I’d have to be greedy to require more than one miracle.
All of us together in the child-production-and-rearing years, my sisters wanted me to “do” something, to take up arms in the War for Babies. Because in America we’re always supposed to be “doing” something about everything… weight loss, face-lift, lawn replacement, breast enlargement.
“Just do something little,” they said (so loaning me their uteruses never actually came up). But I didn’t know what “little” meant. There was a line somewhere that I knew I shouldn’t cross but it was so fuzzy it was almost impossible to see. And on the way to that line were a million stops, a million places to rationalize away convictions.
A strong proponent of population control, my social worker sister bent her rules regarding fertility medicine because she loves me. But I was unwilling to bend mine.
There are still moments in the dark-blue hours past midnight when I think far into my daughter’s future, the one where I no longer exist, and wonder if I should have tried harder, longer – not for me, but for her.
But in the light of day things are clearer: Life offers few guarantees, and there is even something to be gained (wisdom to name it) from deprivation or loss. I know, too, that even under the best circumstances fertility is fleeting; every woman must eventually bid it farewell. My time just came sooner than most.
