FOR YEARS I SAID by Kate Angus
I want to die, and what I meant was:
– I’m tired.
– I’m sad.
– I can’t believe I did not get that job, that book contract, that idolized beloved’s heart to put in my black messenger bag and walk away with.
– I hate this particular body, but there is a version I can imagine loving.
– I don’t want to live in any body of any kind.
– There is some fundamental inexplicable way in which I am a failure.
Sometimes I really meant: I want to sleep for six months or a year or I would like to eat ripe Northern Michigan cherries or I should sip hot mint tea so my mouth is a cave of two sensations while Bach’s cello suites ache through the radio.
Or I meant: Can I sit on a white and blue striped towel on the beach while I watch my two children swimming in the ocean? A boy and a girl, touslehaired.
I never meant death.
I meant:
All these feelings.
My feelings are little children on a playground when I think of them now. Swinging on the swing set; rappelling across the monkey bars. Sorrow in a blue baseball cap. Joy in a shirt embossed with a tiger. Roar.
My feelings are my only children.
* * *
How is this not a diary? What are these words supposed to do? I tell you the tender green leaves rustled in the wind, thick as water, a wave- sound, and yes the trees are an ocean in the sky outside my second- floor window.
* * *
When I was younger, everything I wrote was about yearning: different lives to wake up in, a future like a closet full of shiny new shoes. A closed closet door now.
* * *
My father was born in 1935. He was 40 when I was born; my mother was 35. I am ten years older than she was when she birthed me, five years older than my father when he first cradled me in his arms.
All my ancestors die in me every day. All my beloved’s ancestors die in me also.
* * *
The Book of Judges claims Abimelech sowed Shechem, his capital, with salt after he put down a rebellion there against him.
The Roman general Acipio Aemilianus plowed Carthage with salt after sacking it during the Third Punic War.
The Duke of Aveiro’s palace in Lisbon was taken apart stone by stone and his garden salted so no more greenery or flowers could grow after he took part in a plot to assassinate King Joseph I.
When I search for “who sowed fields with salt?” the Internet replies with a series of other questions:
Is Carthage still salted?
Who salted the fields?
Who salted the land?
Who salted the earth in the Bible?
* * *
Who sowed my womb with salt? Why am I a barren field? Every month, when the basal body thermometer and my cervical fluid tells us, and after I have peed on a paper wand and two thick lines appear like magic, we fuck for four days straight. Whether or not we even want to.
It’s been five years and still no baby.
* * *
“After 42,” another childless friend says, “the likelihood of getting pregnant naturally is basically zero.”
* * *
One friend spent 80K on IVF and now has two children. A friend of a friend and her husband spent 120K and have none. Someone else I know and her now- ex- husband used a surrogate in another state and I dare not imagine that price tag.
* * *
What we did try: fertility acupuncture, fertility self- hypnosis, meditation, royal jelly, maca powder (for him and for her), sea buckthorn, sardines, chasteberry, nettle tea, ubiquinol, a liquid concoction that tastes like hay steeped in alcohol, a particular type of French lubricant I inject into my nether regions with a plastic syringe, torso self-massage.
* * *
I could try to pay for egg retrieval or egg donation or IVF. Some money I’ve saved sits in my account. But if the fertility treatment works, what money would be left to take care of the baby? Adjuncting pays so little; my partner is three years sporadically employed.
If I become pregnant naturally, we would be broke, but at least then we could feel like it was meant to happen.
And what if we spend the money we meant to retire on trying to conceive and every month I still bleed?
* * *
I first wrote that entire section in the past tense, as if we’d already made our decision and were long past it. Maybe we have. Time makes the decisions if we don’t.
I revise it again to change the tense to make it still seem possible. Past tense, present, future: my choice. None of this gives me any power to make a baby happen outside of this page.
* * *
A child pushes a doll in a baby carriage down the street. No, she pushes a kitten dressed up like a doll. Furry little ears, little gray tail.
“I love you,” I say to the family dog. “You are my furry baby.”
His tongue lolls, his eyes are full of boundless love.
He is my parents’ dog. “No,” I continue, “you are my furry little brother.”
* * *
My tooth hurts. My back hurts. My legs are too tight. My bones carry too much weight. My migraines incapacitate me for days at a time. How could I ever carry a baby to term, how could we ever take care of children?
* * *
“I grow old . . . I grow old.
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
Prufrock and his unattainable women. Not everything is about babies, Kate; not every poem a mirror in which you can see yourself.
* * *
I water the plants. I scrub the tiled floor of the kitchen until it gleams like the hull of a glamorous sci- fi space station. I cook elaborate meals for my parents: cassoulet, duck confit, bo ssam where the pork is wrapped in green lettuce tender as sweet laughter.
I carry the dog with his wounded leg up and down the stairs to recover. I massage my beloved’s tight shoulders.
Not every story wraps up with a happy ending.
I want a child. We have no child. Don’t tell me all the many other ways to mother.
Kate Angus’s non- fiction work has appeared in The Atlantic Online’s “Object Lessons” series, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review, and American Literary Review. She is also the author of the poetry collection So Late to the Party (Negative Capability Books, 2016).