You should know – so you understand this – that my children are now aged 16, 18 and 20.
Like many women who came of age in the seventies – when we believed we’d crack the glass ceiling and pass the Equal Rights Amendment – I considered my fertility absolutely under my control. Birth control was easily available, as were abortions. Pregnancy was a choice, one I didn’t think I’d ever make. I liked my independence.
In fact, I liked living alone better than I liked any of the men I dated. Nearing thirty, I accepted my single and childless fate. Then, I met Tim, proving even feminists are vulnerable to romantic love. After two years of intense negotiation – what other couples, I believe, experience as courtship – we entered into a marriage contract that, among other things, guaranteed me a room of my own.
I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have had children if Tim hadn’t so dearly desired them. And right up to the thirty-ninth week of my first-ever pregnancy, I was focused on what was happening to my body – to me. After all, even in OUR BODIES, OUR SELVES, which was the bible of female sexuality for women like me, natural childbirth trumped all.
All through that pregnancy, I read any number of books that explained what was happening inside me, and that advised me how to manage all the symptoms of this grand flowering. In addition to fetal development and prenatal nutrition, I read volumes about parturition – the blessed event.
And despite the advice favoring home births, I planned on giving birth at Grace Cottage, Vermont’s smallest; nevertheless, I still intended to have the spiritual, out-of-body, pain- and drug-free, natural experience these books described as the ne plus ultra of the female experience. I never once read a book about what came next.
Then, a week before my first baby was born, I made my weekly stop at the bank. As I closed the car door and waddled across the street, I wondered how, exactly, was I going to manage this simple task after the baby was born. Would I leave it in the car and run in to make my deposit? If so, would I lock the car door with the baby inside? Or would I have to bring the baby in with me? Suddenly – finally – and just in the nick of time – having a baby was no longer just about me.
Thank you.