Baby Sandwiches

I read three articles today. One was about a miscarriage. One about a successful birth. And another about the loss of a parent months after that successful birth. And I wonder why I’m a bit on edge.

When I read the first essay about miscarrying a child, I couldn’t help but think about my somewhat recent revelations about children. When I was a teenager, I was convinced that getting pregnant was as simple as…making a sandwich. Both are fairly straightforward processes. Both involve following steps. Everyone knows how to do both…at least in theory. At a bare minimum, everyone at least knows the ingredients needed for both babies and sandwiches. There may be different toppings on your sandwich (both the literal and metaphorical sandwich), but overall the end result of both is pretty obvious. I was convinced that people must get pregnant at the drop of a hat, because why else would people accidentally get pregnant? I heard stories of girls getting pregnant after only having made one sandwich. I heard enough accidental sandwich making stories to know that I needed to stay as far away from the bread as possible.

The aforementioned fear of the bread mixed with some other weird ingredients (religious guilt, lack of male suitors, extreme desire to “follow rules”) resulted in me staying as far away from baby making as possible. It wasn’t until college that I got a boyfriend (my now husband) who I would have even considered being the father of my hypothetical children. And still, no sandwiches (back to the religious guilt). Nonetheless, as a married person now, I consider having children much more frequently and with less panic than I did years ago. Soon after we got married, I assumed that whenever I (we) wanted to have a baby, I (we) would just head to the kitchen and poof! A baby would appear.

Eventually, I learned how the female reproductive system actually works. And I started paying attention to all of the young people around me trying to have a child. And I also started watching a lot of “Guiliana and Bill” and I realized that babies are not that easy. I talked to people who miscarried a child and read about people who miscarried a child and knew people who didn’t get pregnant for months and months and months, and I finally started to realize that babies are not like sandwiches. Babies are far too miraculous to come and go on your own time. Babies are my proof that there is something bigger than us playing some role in this world. Babies are scary and permanent and loud and needy and a lot harder to care for than dogs. But there has to be something more to them than that. They must be useful for something; otherwise people would stop having so many of them.

After all of these revelations about babies, I was just about convinced to have one. I have good genes. Cody has good genes. I have wide set hips and a long torso, and my grandmother has always told me that Schrodt women are made for having babies. I was ready to let go of the one thing that allows me some connection to my own youth; I was ready to have a child. Gulp.

Then I went to work. And unfortunately, my students just recently completed a project in my class that requires them to bring a picture of themselves as a baby. As I filtered through pictures of those sweet, innocent, loving babies, I couldn’t help but wonder if their poor parents ever imagined those babies would evolve into the adolescents I deal with on a daily basis. And then I decided that 26 isn’t really that old. And I probably still have plenty of viable eggs left.