A little less than seven years ago, I spent my final day as a fully autonomous individual. Unbeknownst to me, New Year’s Eve 2018 was the last day I would exist as a creature whose body works only to keep herself alive.

The following morning, I hosted a brunch and undertook a plan to stop drinking—for the month, at least. It was not the first nor would it be the last time I’d try to wrangle what was increasingly evident to me as a problem, the one that I had sought all my life to avoid.

But this time was different. At the start of 2019, I aimed to put a stop to alcohol consumption not only for the usual reasons—to gain clarity and lose weight, and to reassure myself that things hadn’t really gotten That Bad—but also because I wanted to get pregnant.

Henry and I, newly married, had already tried a few times, to no evident avail. But on that morning, as I sat around a table cracking jokes and chain-peeling clementines, something unseen was afoot within—a single diploid cell beginning its perilous journey down a river banked with peristaltic cilia delivering it along the current to safety.

As I was soon to learn, this was the egg to watch: there was something inconceivably special about this one; something that transcended everything I had ever known.

***

Pregnancy, the state I now sought, was a condition I had spent nearly my entire life avoiding and fearing. I had been an only child for the first ten years of my life, shuffled back and forth between my divorced parents’ crosstown dwellings. I’d pined for a sibling and, like many only children, invented a few of my own. I spoke to them at night, when I couldn’t sleep, tracing my fingers along the silvery shimmers embedded in the wallpaper of my dad’s basement rental apartment.

But early in that eleventh year, my mom fell pregnant for a second time. Ever her most steadfast confidante, I was let in on the news before almost anyone else, perhaps even my stepdad. The prospect of another baby filled my mom with a deep well of anxiety—over money, spousal support, an endless horizon of domestic labor—and I absorbed it all, nevertheless holding close my special, desperate longing for a sibling. I accompanied my mother to every midwife’s appointment; read What to Expect When You’re Expecting cover to cover; rattled off factoids about lanugo, vernix, and meconium; dreamt of baby brothers born in cowboy hats and bright orange sneakers. “My mom is now 5 months pregnant,” read the very first entry in my blue Animalia journal, dated March 28, 1994. “It’s fun to listen to the baby kick and move. There are disadvantages, though,” I added. “Like my mom being cranky all the time and sleeping all the time are just a few.”

In August, at the close of the foretold forty weeks, my mother’s due date came and went. Five days later, the pangs of labor descended, and for the next thirty-six hours, she keened and moaned between our living room, the bathroom, and her bed. I longed for a task, an assignment, some way to be helpful, but there was nothing to do. So on the first day, as we waited, the midwives took me out to pizza. That night, I barely slept, convening with my stepdad for a cry in the shelter of my attic room at three in the morning. Three hours later, I was awoken by a blood-curdling scream that shockwaved up the wall next to my pillow.

I padded down the stairs and discovered my mother, surrounded by midwives, her brow beaded with sweat, writhing in the middle of her plastic-wrapped king bed. Her shrieks had been occasioned by a junior midwife’s failed attempts to pop her water, using a long pointed implement my mom later compared to a demonic crochet hook, which she jabbed up through my mother’s cervix.

The screaming had roused Pauline, the senior midwife, who came from the baby’s appointed bedroom to finish the job. By the time I arrived, things were finally moving along. I grabbed our point-and-shoot and stood at the foot of the bed, aiming up my mom’s legs as her attendants lay wet cloths upon her forehead and offered their wrists to her fearsome grip.

After I don’t know how long, a solid form appeared at the focal point of my frame. It was covered in a white, waxy substance (so this was vernix!), its delicate curls matted and darkened by a sheen of blood and amniotic fluid. I snapped a few photos and shouted out. “I can see the head!”

My mother, skeptical of the encouragements cooing forth from the adults haloing her, took strength from this excited exclamation of a child, her child, the oddly serious girl who would never lie about such a thing.

She began now to push in earnest. The wet and blood-bathed form surfaced and receded through several more contractions, like an untethered buoy bobbing on a wave, the water washing it a little closer with every surge of the tide. Suddenly, a whole head appeared, all the way to the ears, and began to slide out, shoulders buckling effortlessly as a tiny, slippery body emerged like magic into the midwife’s arms.

***

At first, of course, I did not know I was pregnant. I’d had false alarms in the months before, so I knew not to trust my own aberrant self-perceptions. But about three weeks in to the new year, I awoke with a strange, gnawing anxiety gathering at the edges of my insides. I was used to corrosive fixations, but this was an oddly anchorless worry, tied to nothing concrete, nothing even abstract. I simply felt in my body a sense of unbounded disquiet that, versed as I was in unease, I had never experienced before.

Three weeks in, before I was supposed to, I caved and took a pregnancy test. It was a Saturday, and I was alone in the apartment. The tests were left over from the month before, when they had all read negative. I sat down on our toilet and peed onto the pink-tipped applicator, which conjured up perversely nostalgic memories of Lik-a-Stix coated in Fun Dip. It was never clear to me how much or how long the pee shoud flow, but at some point I stopped.

A few moments—seconds!—later, it was revealed. Someone else was home. Someone small, and unknown. I was here, but also there.

A creature lived in me.

***

Witnessing the miracle of my sister’s birth pushed me across a precipice I was neither ready for nor even aware of. There was something primordially terrifying about the intensity of my mother’s pain. It had driven her to a distant, hysterical place—one in which her spirit was frantically unmoored from her physicality—and in which I existed only at the margins. I experienced a terrible, utter estrangement—later, I would learn that this was merely the cold, alienating isolation of adulthood. My mother was mortal, she could not help me, she couldn’t even help herself. I was on my own. Though I still looked and acted like a child, I had undergone a spiritual molting, casting off the dead skin of girlhood, and entering a world sheared of the parental buttresses and pilasters I was used to.

I loved my sister dearly, but in truth her timing was awful. She was born the week before I started sixth grade, my last year of elementary school. The last good year. At home, I was neglected in the usual way of an older sibling, but worse, I was actively watching it happen. I had done so much research and had so many opinions, and nobody wanted any of them. Each bit of guidance I offered up was met with an “It’s none of your business, Ryann,” or an “I’m the mother, Ryann,” or a “When you have a child, Ryann, you can raise it however you want.” I was too old and too capable to obtain the provisions lavished upon my sister, and yet nobody wanted any of what I was selling either.

The following year, I entered junior high school and experienced a fracturing of self that I have yet to recover from. Previously comprehensible social circles split and re-aggregated in ways I couldn’t understand and was even less capable of penetrating. I had been bemusedly tolerated in elementary school, but now I was at best ignored, worse scoffed at or scorned. I was awkward and ugly, but I was obsessed with cracking the code of social acceptance. To my great torment, I never could solve the cipher.

My sister, two and still breastfeeding, spent all day with my mom, accompanying her to cleaning jobs at the ranch homes of our city’s upper-middle class. At night, she fell asleep in the bed between her parents—a discrete unit from which I was excluded. Her unused bedroom became a guest room. Sometimes I napped there after school. By the end of the day, my mom was tired and touched out. There was little time or energy for my miseries, which threatened to consume me.

When my two closest friends dumped me—by greeting card—at the end of the year for being “annoying,” I fell into a dark hole. I started binging Holocaust memoirs and filling notebooks with maudlin prose poems and half-finished screenplays about unpopular girls who wanted to be invited to parties.

***

By high school, I had reasonably reconstituted myself. Through one particularly fortuitous friendship, I rediscovered myself as a person with authentic interests and an intrinsic personality. I took a job at a hippy grocery store and learned that the world was more fun for freaks and weirdos. Then, one day, a cashier named Katrina told me that a fellow bagger had referred to me as “cute,“ and within seconds, the next five years of my life melted away to desperate heart-rending infatuation. The only requitement I achieved came about a year in, with a kiss that he bestowed upon me the day before I left the country for half a year.

The year my sister was born, I requested curricula for the rest of my public school years, sent away for an information packet from the CDC, and charted my life, course by course, for the next 17 years. The plan laid out the trajectory of an MD—premed, med school, clinical rotation, residency—at which point I would begin a career as a researcher at the CDC (on the Level 3—out of 4—diseases, because insane as I was, I was still afraid of Ebola). During my residency, which I would undertake in my 29th year, I would have a child. Nowhere in there was a plan to find a partner or even take maternity leave from my new doctor job. Just: “Age 28: Have child.”

For the second semester of my junior year of high school, I penciled in a six-month homestay abroad. In the years prior, aching to break free of my teenage anomie, I had sought escape in a romantic fantasyland I called France. The irony was that I had inadvertently planned it for exactly the moment I would finally gain the social acceptance I had yearned for so despairingly. In January 2000, I exchanged my home in Boise, Idaho, for a Swiss-adjacent hamlet with a family of three—dad, mom, and teenage daughter. Impossibly, I had tied myself to an even more distant family unit, one whose utterances I could not even comprehend. The extremity of my foreignness—and theirs—shocked me. I experienced living within an unknown language in a visceral sense: it felt like being encircled by a thick fog. I could not even imagine what the people I passed on the street were thinking. I retreated into myself, curling around my precious sole possession, the English language, and tallying up the days of my self-imposed sentence, crossing each one off at night as I cried myself to sleep.

In the middle of this, I discovered the existence of my body as a repulsive substance. I started compulsively restricting my caloric intake, appending my poetry notebooks with daily food diaries. When I returned from France that summer five or so pounds heavier, the taste of butter still coating the inside of my mouth, I resolved to cut out all animal products. I started eating only fruit for breakfast and took myself on punishing nine-mile runs across wavy-hot desert hillsides. I ate so many carrots that my hands glowed orange, and occasionally I would faint when standing up. I viewed all this, with pride, as a measure of success.

***

In the first weeks of pregnancy, I felt only the unsettling, amorphous anxiety, but soon this was accompanied by nausea as well. With nowhere to put my nerves, I focused them onto my condition: as I had during my mother’s pregnancy, I obsessively researched pregnancy. I read so many online explainers that I came to roll my eyes when bubbly pop-sci writers would joke about the misnomer of a “morning sickness” that could strike at any time of day or night. And yet—still!—nobody even really knew why it happened. This sickness—the most ancient human ailment—had never been deemed important enough for serious inquiry. All we really seemed to know was that it was probably related to hormones in some way, and that it tended to be worse if you were gestating a girl.

By that measure, my nausea was not particularly bad, manageable mostly by consumption of saltines. As a thirty-five-year-old “geriatric,” I qualified for genetic tests that could offer me additional clues about my mystery lodger. Before conception, my Ashkenazi husband and I (a half-breed) had confirmed that we lacked genes for the particularly dire Jewish ailments. With the NIPT (non-invasive prenatal testing) blood test, I now learned that my child carried a Y chromosome. This was discernible because, starting in the eighth week or so of gestation, as the little embryo transitions from a seahorse to a fetus, placental cells begin shedding into the mother’s bloodstream. Among these are fragments of the sex chromosomes. In fact, for months, years after pregnancy, perhaps the rest of my life, my brain would continue to be colonized by little bits of male DNA.

I found pregnancy endlessly fascinating, magical and mysterious and unbelievable—particularly as a thing that could be happening to and by and inside of me. It simply astonished me that this was how new humans were made. I was creating another being, one who was currently of and contiguous with me, but who would someday be almost wholly inaccessible—a person with thoughts and emotions and experiences I would not even be able to imagine, a foreigner. And yet for the moment, he was colonizing me, making me a foreigner to my own body. My abdomen was harboring a tiny penis, feeding it with burrito-nourished blood. Male DNA was coursing through my veins. Day by day I was becoming, as much as any person can be, a curious kind of chimera, a hermaphrodite.

I was bewitched by a phrase I had (mis-)remembered from a college lit. theory course, that woman, carrying within her the ever-present possibility of pregnancy, is “always already other.” I could not remember who may have formulated this idea—was it de Beauvoir, Cixous, Irigaray?—and Google didn’t reward my attempts at permutation. What was the point of saving all those college texts and notebooks if I could not even find this notion—the most essential truth in all of human existence?

***

Once the nausea passed, I encountered within myself an astonishingly pleasurable hunger. My mind quieted, and food, for the first time since puberty, became once again an uncomplicated, beneficent force. I had never tasted anything so wonderful as every meal I consumed while pregnant—each food I ate had the surplus of flavor imparted by well-earned hunger. I ate and ate—gnocchi puttanesca, sugar-dusted waffles, peanut butter on bagels, the unabated miracle of stone fruit—allowing myself a magnificent reprieve from the voice that had always sought to constrict my appetite, and I watched in awe as my body acquired new depths.