Little Labors

A friend who is not a close friend

A friend who is not a close friend was trying to get pregnant, via in vitro fertilization, on her own. She had health issues that led doctors to tell her that her chances were low. I didn’t know whether to ask or not ask how it was going. I didn’t ask. Then she informed me and others, via e-mail, that she was six weeks pregnant, happily. I’m not very good with time, with noting where I am in it, or how much of it has passed, but time proceeded and I began to accumulate anxiety about still not having heard of a birth. I woke from a dream one night, a straightforward dream, in which I learned that she had lost the baby. I felt sure I had had a vision. But in real life she hadn’t lost the baby. Three days later I received an e-mail announcing that the baby had been born. The announcement came on the same day as one of the more important rulings in favor of gay marriage.

This friend was not the only woman I knew who had decided to have a baby on her own. Within the span of a single year, five women I knew had deliberately had babies on their own, without a partner, or in one case, with a partner who was a friend who wanted to be involved, though there was no romantic connection. Prior to these five women I had known only one woman who had had a baby on her own, deliberately. This was an older cousin of mine, and for her it had been such a remarkable decision that no one had thought it appropriate to remark upon it, and one of the only reasons the awkwardness around her had gone away was because at nearly eight months the baby had died inside the womb, and then, though she was over forty, she became pregnant again, and the second time around, the baby was carried to term, and the then radicalness of her decision paled against joy and relief. Now it seems there are many more varieties of “normal” family.