I didn’t want a baby. But that must be obvious, what I mean is I had never wanted one. I moved to Lincoln and I got married and my husband got another job and we moved and my husband got a third job, tenure track, and we moved again. I worked in HR. I came home from my job in HR and I cooked dinner for my husband. I cooked dinner for my husband and for his professor friend and for his professor friend’s wife. If I was lucky, the wife wasn’t also in HR. And I wasn’t going to finish my dissertation, this was clear. I wasn’t going to finish my dissertation and publish it, I wasn’t going to be a professor, I wasn’t going to get tenure and go on sabbatical, I wasn’t going to spend three months in Barcelona perfecting my Spanish, doing archival research. (I spoke no Spanish, what research could I be doing in Barcelona, my area was seventeenth-century English plays.) I wasn’t ever even going to live alone. And that’s what I thought about when I thought about what I’d lost by abandoning grad school, by marrying young, by following John from job to job to job: I thought about living alone. I thought about sitting on a porch, on my porch, as evening fell, sitting there with a glass of wine and a book and empty hours ahead of me. So okay my life was going to be suburban, it was going to be upper-middle-class, it was going to be so far up normal’s ass that it came out the other end holding a white picket fence and an American flag. (John’s job was all wrong for this, Marin was all wrong for this, no matter, I was angry, I was on a roll.) So okay it was going to be not only normal but normative. And the normative thing to do, now that we were settled, now that John had accumulated professor friends who came with pregnant professors’ wives, now that every single one of my female coworkers had two at home and was trying for a third, the normative thing to do was have a kid. And I thought that maybe if I chose it, if I told myself I wanted it, if I made the baby an object not quite of desire but certainly of obsession, I might be able to trick myself into liking a life whose comfort I knew even then was so relatively excessive as to be almost criminal. So I told John I wanted a baby and we started trying and even now the part that most surprises me is how long it worked. Probably it was because we had so much trouble; nothing is more desirable than that which is being withheld.