I feel the familiar seeping through fabric and go to the bathroom. I’ve had it every month since I was 14, but have never been regular. On the toilet, I pull down my jeans and underwear and see that it has started. I’m wearing new underwear, of course. Dark blue, plain cotton, but new, still. I am 44 years old and look 34, but it doesn’t matter how old I look. My ovaries, my fallopian tubes, my uterus – they are 44 years old. I wonder when it will stop. When I will look at rust-stained panties, perhaps with longing. Will I wish for it again?
My period has always been a nuisance; for years now, a taunt. My few remaining eggs are dying. It doesn’t matter. They stopped working years ago, maybe never worked at all. Despite more than 25 years of enough unprotected sex with men I stopped counting long ago, I have never been pregnant. All those years of active prevention. Pulling out and condoms and the pill and morning after pills. There was never a baby for me.
He didn’t want children. I did. It ended us. Funny now but not really at all. Had we tried even a little, we would have known I was broken inside and it would have been a non-issue. We might still be together. He would not have been an asshole because he would not have had to choose. He might have been selfish about other things. I might have pushed about other things. We would have spent the college fund I had been building for so long on travel and child-unfriendly furniture and sharp sculpture. A townhouse in the city. A sporty car with two seats. I would not be alone.
I look him up on Facebook. It’s been 12 years. He doesn’t even keep his page private. He has a wife. His wife is young. His cover photo is a picture of his wife and baby. I look at all of his pictures of his wife and baby and him and his baby and his wife and him and their baby. I don’t hate the wife. I don’t hate him. I don’t even hate my useless eggs. I throw the stained underwear in the trash.
When I turned 40, I considered artificial insemination. I researched sperm banks. I wanted to choose. I was tired of being chosen by selfish men. The process was too expensive and kicked in my depression when I thought about my inability to pay for child care and, really, how stupid it would be to have a baby so I could leave it with strangers while I worked so many hours.
I still look at the sperm bank site. It’s sort of addictive, shopping for dads. I like 3551. He is a photographer, described as being reflective and outgoing. He shares my basic physical attributes: tall, blue eyes, dark hair, fair skin. He is not open to meeting his child or children when they turn 18, which is fine by me. Looking at dirty magazines and spooging in a cup doesn’t make a guy a parent. He got his $50 or whatever .
I won’t do it. It I’d go crazy taking hormone shots and it probably wouldn’t take and if it did I would be a high risk pregnancy because of my age and I don’t have anyone to help. Too many reasons. Still, I come back to 3551.
It would be a girl, I am certain. If it took. I would do everything right and I would have a daughter and I would name her Sara. A common name, but always my favorite. Simple, graceful, quiet, feminine. Classic. Easy to spell. Unlike all the McKenna’s and Brianne’s and Judson’s these days. Just Sara, like in the Bob Dylan song. “So easy to look at, so hard to define.” She would be what I couldn’t.
She would not be what I couldn’t. Even if I were to get pregnant with 3551’s baby, my final sluggish eggs, waiting around since my teens, would not create my perfect daughter. At 44, I would be an excellent candidate for numerous potentially fatal conditions – pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, cardiomyopathy, placenta previa. Most fertility clinics won’t even let you use your own eggs at my age. So, I would have to shop for eggs, too. I would have to grow a baby that wasn’t mine at all.
Sara would be more likely to be born with birth defects. The body was not meant to carry children at my age. At my age, the likelihood that Sara would be born with Down Syndrome would be one in 30. She would not be the Sara in the Dylan song or the Fleetwood Mac song or the Hall and Oates song. She would be limited in her own quest for romantic love, and would certainly be dissuaded by doctors from having her own children.
My baby and I. So unlucky. I say goodbye to 3551. It is harder to say goodbye to her. I use a tampon from the almost empty box, maybe the last I’ll buy. I put on dark underwear and the same jeans. I am heavy with blood; I am weightless.
Lauren Becker is editor of Corium Magazine. Her work has appeared in Juked, Wigleaf, Best Small Fictions of 2015, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her collection of short fiction, If I Would Leave Myself Behind, was published by Curbside Splendor in 2014.
–Art by Felix Lu