I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when I met him.

It was winter and I was 20.  It was his first day at some terrible restaurant that I’d been working at for a year or two. He was in the solarium going over new hire paperwork or something when I walked in the room.  There were at least 10 other people in that room, but I can’t remember even one of them.  At that moment, he was the only person on the planet.  I remember the shirt he was wearing, the necklace he had on and which side his hair parted to.  I walked into the room, my uterus lept of of me and lunged at him, I rolled that bitch up, shoved her back in and kept walking right out of the room.

I don’t know that he even saw me that day.  I don’t know that he knew my name for months after that, but that was the day I knew that someday, I was going to be a mother.  Not kidding.

It was spring and I was 21 when I first properly met him.  He was enchanting.  He was smarter than anyone I’d ever met, funny, so very very drunk, and he loved his momma.  He’d been an architecture major and I’d been a mechanical engineering major.  In a high school.  Whatever; it counts in my world.  He liked punk and I liked rock.  He drank Newcastle and I drank Tuaca.  He was a competitive swimmer with a body like a rock and I was an anorexic with a body like a bendy straw.  He had a girlfriend and I had a fiance.  So that was that.

Until the day came when I didn’t have a fiance anymore and he didn’t have a girlfriend anymore.

Turns out, my pheromones agreed with his pheromones and I was more or less pregnant at first sight.  What can I say?  The man makes eggs shoot out of me.  Our reproductive systems realized they were in love way before the rest of us did, and before we knew it we’d made this:

It also turned out that golf is the best fertility drug ever manufactured by The Scottish and twice following this:

We ended up with this and this.

We had many, many years when the only thing we managed to do right was make babies.  We had a lot of tears and a lot of hurt and a lot of misery but in the end, we knew that we did one thing absolutely flawlessly.  We didn’t mean to have any of these kids, we didn’t mean to get married, we didn’t mean to meet, we didn’t mean to live in Colorado, we didn’t mean to do almost everything we’ve done since 1995 but we did it all and we made it work and even when it was abysmal, we had this thing, this one amazingly beautiful aspect to our lives together.

We made this.  Together.  Just the two of us.  By accident.  Those three people make me believe in fate.  They make me think that maybe he chose me, and they chose us, that maybe it wasn’t an accident but that we were supposed to have them, that we needed them, that they were a gift the likes of which we didn’t deserve and never expected.

And today we ended the whole thing.

Today we woke up with the possibility of another perfectly beautiful surprise.  We woke up with the possibility of more toes to nibble and more necks to sniff and more fingers to count.  We woke up with the possibility of being parents again.  

Tonight we go to sleep knowing that we will never again hold a flashlight to my stomach so a baby will grab at the light from the inside.  We’ll go to sleep knowing that we’ll never walk our fingers across my stomach while a baby punches our fingertips.  We know that we’ll never crank up The Sex Pistols into a pair of headphones, wrap them around my stomach, and teach a baby that Sid Vicious means ni-night time.  (Totally worked, by the way, and no one had to listen to Mozart for 3/4 of a year.)  Tonight we know we’ll never watch another VHS tape with a video of a needle going into my uterus and a little baby girl’s hand reaching out to grab it in the darkness. Tonight we know that we will never again hold a 7 pound person covered in blood and goop who looks like a feral lizard and smells like, well, blood and goop and feral lizards and think that we’re seeing pure, unadulterated, heavenly beauty.  Tonight we know that there will be no more first smiles or steps or hugs or words or boo boos or spaghetti dinners.  Tonight we go to bed knowing that we laid that boy, who cast a spell on me 14 years ago, out on a table, did really awful things to his brother Darrell and his other brother Darrell and forced-quit the greatest thing we’ve ever done, the thing that spring and chemistry and destiny made sure that we would do.

So this is how fertility dies….with frozen peas.