Ann Friedman - Plot Twist

Starting this week, deep into Season 41 of my life and Season 10 of this newsletter, I’m taking three months off. Because I am about to have a baby.
 
Not a book baby, a human baby. One that I have grown inside my own body.
 
The internet suggested I “tell my employer” sometime around Week 26, which was back in August. One of the many great things about self-employment is that my employer has known for a lot longer than that. Though, in a way, you are all my employers, too. And here I am notifying you at the last possible moment. I wasn’t really ready to tell you before now.
 
I won’t be writing newsletter in real time until March, but you will continue to find it in your inbox every Friday. I’ll be sending you a long essay I’ve written (which will unfold, serialized, over the course of 10 weeks) about the bodily odyssey I’ve been on this year, and the ambivalence and uncertainty of this chapter of my own adulthood. Then we’ll segue into a few weeks of fantastic essays from other writers.
 
The past 15 months have been a reckoning. Every few weeks, I have been reminded of how little control I have, how meaningless my plans are, how strange it is to have a corporeal form. My recent history has involved (spoiler alert!): a totally unplanned pregnancy that coincided with the leaked Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe; a miscarriage that necessitated a D&C; rushing my partner to the emergency room after an accident; another positive pregnancy test (this one less-whoops but still its own kind of surprise); some deep examination of my long-held identity as a childfree person; getting hit by a car while I was walking across the street; recovering from head trauma; and, now, impending parenthood. Plus a few other challenges, just for good measure.
 
The serialized essay that follows is mostly a real-time account, and I’ve resisted the urge to polish it too much. Though I’m sure the buff of hindsight would make the story both cleaner and easier, it felt important to capture the ambivalence and chaos as it was happening. In these words, my gaze is turned inward instead of outward, which is very different from how I normally try to write, and I hope you read it with a million caveats about my personal privilege and myopia. I won’t be closely monitoring my inbox during my time away, but I’m excited to take a risk and share something so personal with you.
 
I love that this newsletter is a place where I can be vulnerable. Thanks for subscribing, for reading, and, especially, for supporting my experimentation in life and in writing. We’ll be back to our normal format in March.
 

Call it my year of rest and indecision.
 
On the long list of privileges that define my life, here’s an important one: I’ve spent most of it in certainty. I have been annoyingly, cloyingly, clear about which direction I need to point myself in. And, mostly, I’ve been able to head in that direction. This has given me a false sense of agency and the laughable idea that I direct my own fate. And so the uncertainty of the past year has cut me to the quick.
 
I’ve learned that a primary way I cope with adversity is answering the question, What story am I telling myself about this? To someone outside of my thick skull, this might seem obvious. “You’re a writer,” you might say, looking at me with eyebrows raised. But this year the challenges came fast, one after another, before I’d managed to figure out what story to tell myself about the previous lil crisis. I am still playing catch-up.
 
I have a story I’m telling myself now. It isn’t about a woman getting what she always wanted, or having to accept the fact that she won’t. It’s not a story about clarity or sureness or dogged pursuit. It’s not about recovery and resilience. I can tell you—after many therapy sessions and lots of personal reflection and countless conversations with friends—that this is a story about a year spent in the wide, cold gulf between known and unknown.
 
Let’s go back to how it started:
 
It’s June 2022. Yes, ok, this is more than a calendar year ago. But emotionally, June 2022 is when this year of mine began.
 
I am driving out of town, north of Los Angeles, with two of my dearest friends in the world. Josh, who I have known since high-school art class, is in the passenger seat. Sarah, his college best friend who for 10 years has been a cornerstone of my life in LA, is in the back seat. It is Josh’s 40th birthday, and we are headed out of town for two days of wine tasting. Yes, we are listening to the Sideways score. This functions as both a winking joke about middle age and a pleasantly jazzy road-trip soundtrack. As Sarah and I settle into our hotel room, I tell her I think my period is getting more irregular with age. I’m feeling crampy but am not bleeding yet, despite being almost two weeks late.
 
Later we drive the dappled roads between wineries and sip and snack and laugh and chat. One night, after a full bottle of red, we power up a little bluetooth speaker and the three of us dance in the hotel room. Bouncing around braless in a t-shirt, I notice my tits hurt.
 
Hmm, I think.
 
Hmmmmmm.
 
The next morning, before I even lift my head from the pillow, I pull my phone close to my face and open my period tracker app. I realize my cycle is not, in fact, getting more irregular with age. It is quite regular. Except for this particular period, which is very, very late.
 
As I drive to CVS, the morning is still draped in a cool fog. I devise a story that I will tell the clerk, who will surely take one look at the grays sprouting from my hairline and then shift their gaze to the pregnancy test in my hand, then smirk at me. I’ll say that I am buying the test for a troubled teen. For me?! Oh goodness, no! Why would I, a middle-aged woman who has staked a large portion of her identity on being childfree, need a pregnancy test for myself? Ha-ha! I am funky eyewear, not under-eye bags. I send extravagant presents, I don’t wipe asses. I am an auntie, not a mother.
 
The CVS clerk pays me no attention whatsoever.
 
Back at the hotel, I pee on the plastic stick and get in the shower. And when I get out, still dripping, the stick says “YES +” in its little window. I half-wrap myself in a small, scratchy hotel towel and show the test to Sarah without comment, laughing in the vaguely horsey tone I emit when something is inappropriate but I am too shocked to have any other reaction. Sarah makes her rapid exit, offering to come back with a pastry and a coffee. I call my partner Will.
 
“Oh no,” he says. In the little Facetime frame, he puts a palm to his forehead. “Oh no. Oh no, no, no.”
 
This reaction makes it seem like he is suggesting a clear course of action, but I know better because I feel the same way. Those oh nos are not a firm dismissal of parenthood, but an expression of dread about a now-impending decision.
 
Oh no. We have to decide.
 
I am on the record, publicly and personally, as a “no.” That much is true. Once a gynecologist asked me, “Is having children part of your plan?” And I loved the question so much. It did not require me to declare a forever stance on parenthood, only to describe the plan. And the plan did not include gestating or raising children of my own. Not a priority. Not on the roadmap.

A few years later, when I crossed the emotional rubicon of whatever age is continually cited as the fertility dropoff (was it 36? I legit cannot remember now), Will and I talked about it in earnest. We ran in circles, the conversation wearing into a rut that neither of us felt motivated to steer out of. If one of us really wanted kids, the other would go along. But neither cared that much. We were happy. The tradeoffs were too huge, the desire too small. We decided not to decide. Or rather, not to try. We chose not to choose.
 
Now: “Yes +.” We have a choice to make. And a deadline for making it.
 
This was Part 1 of a 10-part serialized essay. Next week, Part 2: No Country for Undecided Women. I’m on leave until early March.

"While I crawl into the unknown, cover me. I'm going hunting for mysteries." -Björk