THE NEW YORK TIMES LIFE/STYLE When we discovered this Pregnancy was ectopic and at the risk of his life, my husband has vowed never to ask me for children again.
There were 12 years of negotiation. He wanted children; I’m not. When we first met in college, two international students in stunning New York City, I never imagined that a decade later he would be lying in bed next to me and monitoring my breathing in case my fallopian tube ruptured and he needed to hurry me to the emergency room for fear I would die of a hemorrhage.
In my 20s, I didn’t think much about kids other than knowing I didn’t want them, not actively like some do. Growing up in Singapore in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I hated the way people assumed that as a woman I wanted and would have children.
My own family was broke and chaotic, my father ran away when I was 9 leaving us homeless and broke, and my mother was heartbroken, emotionally unavailable and volatile. Deep down I believed that the family caused nothing but pain. There seemed little reward in starting one.
So when after two years of our relationship the young man who would become my husband casually remarked that he had always wanted to be a father, I was stunned.
“I would be ready to have kids in two years,” he said.
“Two years,” I said. “We would be 22 years old.”
Continued after the ad
He stopped and gave me a strange look. Then he said, “Don’t you want children?”
On the surface we had little in common. He was a SwedishLebanese mathematical genius from the uppermiddle class of pastoral Switzerland. I came to college on a hardearned scholarship after growing up in the pressure cooker of Singapore’s public education system, raised by an unhappy mother burdened with my absent father’s debts.
“‘I just don’t feel like we’re here together anymore,’ he told me.” Photo: Brian Rea/The New York Times
I was rigid, ambitious, and cautious, having suppressed my vulnerability and passion to escape my childhood. I came to the US to study economics as my scholarship required me to work for the Singapore sovereign wealth fund for six years after graduation.
He was an irreverent, funny, and kind engineering student who loved beauty in all its forms. He’d also just completed a year of military service, mostly in the Swiss Alps, and he had incredibly perfect abs and long, curly hair.
On cold days, we set off in the dark from Morningside Heights to walk all over New York City, our numb hands clasped. I dragged him to the skating rink at Bryant Park—it was my first time skating, having never seen snow or ice in tropical Singapore—where he, used to skating in the Alps, talked and hugged me , while we spun slow circles between heavy groups of tourists.
He took me on Spaetzle in Alphabet City and I took him on Roti Plata in Flushing. Two young people far from home trying to explain themselves and our past to each other.
Continued after the ad
After graduation we stayed together despite a long distance relationship of almost two years, with him in New York and me in Singapore, then we moved to London for my job in finance, then to Austin, Texas for my post graduate program in creative writing. We got married, bought a house, got a mortgage. My estranged father died, alone and far away, and my husband held me as I fell apart. 12 years passed like this.
We keep talking about children, but we’re anchoring ourselves more and more in our positions. Entering the workforce made me even more suspicious of motherhood, while a decade of corporate work and change made him want family and stability even more.
He didn’t want to convince me to have a child. I didn’t want to convince him of that. So we postpone. He wouldn’t change his mind, I knew that. He had a lot of love to give and she had to go somewhere.
He spoke of teaching a child judo and chess. When I asked him to explain why he wanted a child — just as one would ask someone to explain their fascination with birdwatching, mountaineering, or some other activity that inspires passion in some and confusion in others — he said , he wanted to love and accept our children for what they were, something he felt was not given to him in his own childhood.
In Austin, our lives began to diverge. Before, writing was my secret hobby, and my husband was my first reader, editor, and cheerleader all in one. Now there were my study, social life and work moments. I hung out with other writers, had long conversations about poets my husband didn’t know, books he hadn’t read, people he didn’t know. During the summers, I typically attended workshops and residencies, leaving my husband alone for months during the scorching Texas summers.
“I just don’t feel like we’re still together here,” he told me.
“Of course we are,” I said. Hadn’t we just been given a green card that would finally bring us the stability we’d been working for a decade?
Continued after the ad
When my graduate school ended, I began applying for academic jobs, many of them in rural towns where my husband couldn’t move. We’d figure out what to do, I thought. We had long distance calls before. Maybe he could work remotely.
“When do we stop changing?” he asked. “Why do you keep trying to leave?”
It got me thinking. Of course, for years we avoided the unspoken question of whether we wanted to have children or not.
Then he said: “If you go, I don’t know if I will follow you.”
For the first time I faced the possibility of losing him. I couldn’t ignore the glaring fact that all my husband did for a decade was support my decisions and give up opportunities to be with me. Of course, reciprocity is not a reason to have a child. But what do you do when the person you love the most wants something you can give them?
We relax with contraceptive methods. The chances of conceiving, I thought, were slim, even for couples who tried. I never thought I would actually get pregnant. By then I was, taking one test after another and then stupidly bursting into tears.
After 12 years, I thought I understood how much my husband wanted a family, but I grossly underestimated his desire. In those few days he was happier than I had ever seen him. As for me I was nauseous, depressed and scared. But my husband’s joy began to become contagious. Around the time of our first antenatal appointment, I felt a glimmer of something else. Not exactly happiness, but curiosity, even excitement.
Continued after the ad
Then came the diagnosis of an ectopic pregnancy. The embryo was in my left fallopian tube and needed to be “colonized” before it grew large enough to cause massive internal bleeding. I was given methotrexate, a chemotherapy drug, and after six days of cramps so painful I feared my bowels would leak, the doctor told us the dose hadn’t worked. She would have to give me a second, larger dose. If it failed again, they would have to have surgery to try to remove the fertilized egg; If this did not succeed, the entire fallopian tube would have to be removed. In the meantime we had to hope it didn’t break.
Two weeks of waiting, cramps and blood clots, all with the risk of massive internal bleeding looming over me. However, by the time the second dose of methotrexate kicked in and my husband said he was going to stop this “son thing,” something changed in me.
I thought I knew the recipe for lasting love. We were all about mutual respect for our individual needs, I believed. I figured doing something you didn’t want to do to make someone else happy was the surest path to resentment. But now I understand what my husband knew all those years putting his own desires aside in support of mine—that love changes what we think we want and expands the scope of our desires beyond the realm of the individual.
And it wasn’t entirely true that I didn’t want a child. There were times, for example, when I was listening to my husband talking to himself in the shower, I felt an unbearable, nameless feeling. The desire for more of him, more of us. Going through the ectopic pregnancy together, as awful as it was, just confirmed that for me.
A year and a half later, on a cold November day, we are leaving the Manhattan hospital with our newborn son, their first home just a few blocks down the street from where my husband and I 14 years earlier took our meandering walks with No Destination in sight, just the knowledge that we would return home together. / TRANSLATION LÍVIA BUELONI GONÇALVES
The New York Times Licensing Group All rights reserved. Reproduction of any kind without the written permission of The New York Times is prohibited.