AT WAR WITH MY OVARIES
Cindy Maddera
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Remember when I said that everyone was pregnant? Well, we've reached the point were those babies are actually being born. Charlotte came months ago and she's this lovely drooly round squishy goodness of a baby. She makes the most wonderful faces and she's going to be so mad at us when she turns into a teenager for some of those faces we captured on (digital) film. Too bad Charlotte. You've been born into a framily of jokers and hilarity and dang if you don't make the perfect faces for meming. You can thank us all now for helping you develop the greatest sense of humor. After Charlotte, one of my coworkers had her baby. We had a month to ooh and awe over the picture she emailed to everyone before it was finally Jeff and his wife's turn. I was standing in line at IKEA Saturday when Jeff sent me a text with a picture of their newest member of the family, a perfect little girl born at 11:03 that morning. I promptly burst into tears.
And then my ovaries and my brain had the big baby debate. My ovaries would say that women my age have babies all the time. It's true. The CDC has a report on pregnancy rates for 2009 showing a decrease in pregnancies for woman under thirty while pregnancies increased significantly for women thirty and over. All the report is saying is that women are waiting until later in life to have kids. This isn't news. Women and their partners are just making a decision to wait a little bit on the whole kid thing until the woman is established comfortably in her career and they are financially stable enough to support another human being. Except my brain knows that even though pregnancies are up for this age group, fertility is down. The ideal age for pregnancy is really in the late teens, early twenties. Your eggs have the least possible genetic mutations and chromosome realign correctly during cell division. Your body can carry and deliver a baby easier at this age too. Your joints are more elastic for expanding and you have a faster recovery time. Except most women I know usually don't hear their biological clock ticking until they're at least thirty. Our bodies are a Catch 22.
My ovaries can at times violently tell my brain that yes we can totally do this at our age. "At our age". (Like I'm really all that old. I am not old in the grand scheme of life.) Those ovaries will say "Hey! you eat your leafy greens and do yoga. Your body can totally do this without blinking an eye." Thank God my brain is so much smarter than this because my brain knows that my body has to make it through more than the act of carrying a baby inside me and delivering that baby. This body then has to care for that baby. There's five years or more of picking up, carting around, opening doors with feet, being used as a personal jungle gym, being used as a personal trampoline, chasing after (which requires running) and you get the idea. Maybe the load gets a little lighter after the five years, but then comes the carpool lanes and the running to soccer games and the rushing to scouts and the trotting to dance classes. Things might slow down once the kid is driving, but that only brings along the damage of stress caused by worrying about that kid driving and being where they're supposed to be when they're supposed to be there.
So yeah, my ovaries may kick me heard enough to make me cry at times, but my brain is wise enough to brush those tears away and move forward in that check out line.