This essay is behind the paywall because it’s very personal; I don’t feel safe putting it out there for just anyone to read. Paying subscriptions are 20% off until my birthday on February 2nd. Here is the sale to sign up!
All I want for my birthday is for you to read my essay.
I will be donating half of all new subscription revenue generated by this post to Reproductive Freedom for All. Thank you for supporting my work and for supporting abortion rights.
*
In the summer of 2021, I went to get something from the fridge and the smell of leftover Chinese takeout made me retch. I turned and vomited into the sink.
When the test confirmed I was pregnant, I burst into tears.
*
That summer, my three kids were ten, five, and almost two. That was the summer the world began to open up after fourteen months of COVID lockdown. Our year of online school had recently finished, adults were getting vaccinated, and people were, tentatively, starting to see each other again. It felt like what we had endured was finally coming to an end.
During lockdown, we saw no one indoors except our babysitter, Annie. We hired her six months into the pandemic, and she came for about twenty hours a week to watch Mickey, our baby, and help Ginger, who did TK on Zoom for ninety minutes every morning. (Our son Bean did fourth grade on Zoom—six hours a day for most of the year—in our downstairs office.) Before we hired Annie, I only had very early mornings and evenings to work. I remember, the first time she came to watch the kids, I locked myself in my bedroom and did word puzzles for over an hour. I felt stoned on my solitude.
*
Mickey, our third child, was sort of a surprise—I say “sort of” because although he wasn’t planned, we weren’t being especially careful either. We knew we wanted three kids in the end. We longed for a big, loud family.
Well, now we had that big, loud family. It was (and remains) really chaotic at our house, especially after COVID hit and no one could go anywhere. We were lucky—a lot of times, it was comforting: we took long hikes in our canyon neighborhood and watched movies on the couch as I nursed the baby. I’d admire the older kids’ massive forts and I’d cuddle my youngest as long as I wanted. We were safe and we were together.
Sometimes, though, it was too much. Sometimes, the noise felt intolerable, as did the tangle of personalities and needs. There was (and is) so much fighting. The messes, the stuff, the laundry, the tears. Sometimes, perhaps during a particularly protracted bedtime, Patrick and I would look at each other across the room and widen our eyes, as if to say, “What have we done?”
I find the phrase our family is complete too cheesy to bear, but it’s what I felt when I held Mickey for the first time, the hormones blissing me out, this little vernix-encrusted creature calm against my chest. It was like he was waiting in the wings, and now he was on stage, and the show could begin.
And what a lively, complicated, interesting, exhausting, beautiful show it was turning out to be.
*
Mickey was born in August of 2019. That fall, Patrick scheduled his vasectomy.
To get a vasectomy at Kaiser, you need to get a referral from your GP, and then you have be interviewed over the phone by a nurse, who asks why you want to have this medical procedure. After that, you have to watch an informational video online. After that, you are required to go, in person, to the doctor’s office to sign an agreement that you viewed and understood the video. This last appointment is only available for about two hours a day, and only on certain days. After that, they give you an appointment for your vasectomy—weeks and weeks away.
It took months to get Patrick’s vasectomy on the books.
And then, because it was scheduled for late March 2020, it was canceled. By the time a nurse called about rescheduling it, we were deep into pandemic life. We could only laugh. Get a vasectomy now? We were barely getting our work done; the kids needed us every second of the day; there was the COVID exposure risk to consider. No thanks. Maybe later.
Of course, this posed a problem: we didn’t have a dependable method of birth control. Or we did. Kind of.