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To love a thing means wanting it to live.
[confucious]

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Do you want a baby? It's the question everyone asks when you're thirty-one, and married, and working with pregnant women. They all want to know what it will be like- labor, birth, feeling the curve of that small back inside and then outside yourself- and I feel like a fraud sometimes answering their questions, the same way a priest must feel when someone asks them what happens after you die.

So they ask me to describe labor, and I do my best, and they ask me if I have kids, and I say no, and the younger women helpfully tell me I'm not too old, yet, but I am kind of circling the drain here, and seriously, I should get a move on if I do, in fact, want a baby, which, by the way, do I?

I was at our sister clinic in Salem a year ago, to cover for a coworker, and I decided to walk from work to the Salvation Army during my lunch break. They were pretty close together so that sunny afternoon I went, weaving my way through a patchwork of parking lots and sweating clean through my scrubs.

I was flipping through outfit after outfit on hangers, when suddenly, there was a small child's jumper. It was completely unique, almost certainly handmade. Yellow fabric that was puckered, gently and expertly, at the knees and armpits, striped through with bright colors. A zipper was drawn up the front. It was without gender, defying utility or explanation, and so inappropriate for anything a baby or child was likely to be doing that it somehow crossed to the other side and became suitable for any possible occasion. It was like Joseph's coat of many colors, but if Joseph wore a onesie, and was utterly without shame, which from what I know it sounds like he was.

It was never a question of whether I would buy it. I was almost to the register before I halfheartedly ran through the obligatory list in my head whether any of our friends were even pregnant at the time. No one was, but it didn't matter. This was for my child, I knew. It was $1.99. I whipped out my wallet with a flourish, and then scrambled for change when the clerk told me she couldn't accept a debit card for such a low amount.

At home, I carefully folded it and placed it high in the closet, where my husband wouldn't see it. I wanted to surprise him with it when, or if, we had a baby. Surprised, he certainly will be. It is a statement piece.

I was at a breastfeeding conference last summer in Washington state. I drove up barefoot and humming, my hand out the window, grateful to be driving a long distance by myself for the first time in what felt like a long time. I stayed with a talkative old woman who kept llamas on her five acres of property. She had a friendly old Labrador who would keep me company in my room and despite being older than dirt was somehow able to catch and eat with relish the flies that snuck in around the screen window.

During the first day at the conference, I settled in with my water bottle, my notebook, my sweater. I was made for conferences. They're like being back in school, which I miss more as an adult than I would have believed possible at any point in my childhood. I like listening to people explain the world while I take notes. I like nodding emphatically and giving encouraging smiles when they look my direction. I have to limit myself to asking no more than three questions before lunch, and just three more after lunch.

I dropped my sweater, and leaned down to pick it up, and in a bizarre hallucinogenic experience that I have never had happen before or since, the pile of nubby cloth became a baby. As I rose with my sweater slung in the crook of my elbow, it suddenly transformed into a small fuzzy head, the smooth burnished pink of her skin. I could smell her, an actual baby, in my arms. And then in the next instant it became a sweater again, which was such a relief and a disappointment at the same time that I had to walk outside to the bathroom and splash water on my forearms and on my face.

Watch out, the oxytocin's flowing! the presenter was saying as I walked back in the room. Everyone laughed but me. The shock wore off but the feel of a daughter in my arms did not.

The old woman I was staying with had had a daughter. She had died by suicide a few years before, after struggling with her demons for a lifetime. It's hard now, the woman said, and it was harder when she was alive. But I would do it again, just to see her one more time.

I sit here early in the morning in our house, the rain filling the gutters and sounding like the burbling of a coffee machine, and think about how having a child will probably be one of the worst things that has ever happened to me and I want them anyway. They would be one of the best things too, of course, but in my experience it's prudent to start with the worst part and see if you're still in the game after that. And, it turns out I am.

I guess I'll be the same thing to them. And after all, what is having a child other than deciding that you're okay with being the best and the worst thing to ever happen to someone else? This is the only definition of family that has ever held true in my life.

I had a dream once, years ago. In the dream, I knew that I was absolutely, unequivocally wanted. I remember almost nothing else about it. There was a boy, I think he was blonde. There were empty bleachers and a golden afternoon. But the thing that I knew for certain in the dream and for those few sunlit minutes after I woke up was that I didn't have to be any other way than I was.

Do you want a baby?

Yes. If I can make them feel that way, even just for an afternoon.

You're not too old, yet, a self-satisfied firecracker of a teenage girl told me at the end of the winter, snuggling down comfortably in the glider in my office. Her hands cupped her belly as she turned inward, stayed in the protected glow that I see so often on the faces of pregnant women. But you should decide. 

I nodded, and smiled, and thought of the bright yellow jumper folded on the very top shelf, of our best and worst thing, preparing to be.