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Good Letters

The Pill’s fiftieth anniversary year is an odd occasion for me, the daughter of young parents who stoked their fiery love affair with accidental babies. Despite the pink plastic nautilus of Pills in our mom’s make-up tray, despite the condoms we found when we looted our dad’s sock drawer for impounded Nintendo controllers, my parents got pregnant – again, and again, and again, and each time I received a sister I loved.

My youngest sisters were barely born when I first heard Loretta Lynn sing “One’s on the Way,” her famed childbearing ballad, on a re-run of The Muppet Show. I was entranced by her dark hair and gentle, Glinda-the-Good-Witch sway as she sang to a flock of beady-eyed baby muppets, saying that the Pill might change the world, but:

Here in Topeka, the flies are a buzzin’
The dog is a barkin’ and the floor needs a scrubbin’
One needs a spankin’ and one needs a huggin’
And one’s on the way.

At my first Loretta concert nearly twenty years later, she stood onstage in a spangled purple gown and sang “The Pill,” a more pointed 1975 hit about a woman who bests a husband that prefers her barefoot and pregnant, and—in the woman’s own “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” intimation—finds “the feeling good comes easy now.”

As I child I could sometimes hear my parents make love, and I listened with less embarrassment and more wonder. On warm, quiet afternoons I sometimes stepped into their bedroom to caress the sheer nightgown hanging from my mom’s closet door. When I touched it I was filled with awe at my parents’ secret love for each other, and that it had brought us to life.

I remember too the year my mom insisted that four kids was the limit. In short order, my sisters and I found ourselves listening to my dad’s good natured dinner-table replay of his twilight-dazed vasectomy. Like Loretta, my mom rejoiced at her newfound freedom—but this time, it was freedom from a “foolproof” Pill that had never really worked and a daily birth control regimen that had been her sole responsibility.

Notwithstanding my mom’s disdain or my parents’ ability to defy scientific odds, the Pill seemed like my best bet when I traded a fairly un-tortured chastity for marital relations. It was my pro-choice Southern Baptist grandmother who advised me most carefully on the contraception that kept me child-free until my twenty-ninth year, when I got pregnant on our first try.

For the first forty-eight hours after I saw two pink lines, those three years on the Pill were forgettable: a carefree prelude to a decade of well-planned family life. Then there was pain, and then blood, and then a month of emergency rooms and hospital beds, and a final, midnight surgery to leach the last of an ectopic pregnancy from my womb.

I have those two days of believing: of calling my parents on Christmas Day, of lifting a glass of sparkling cider as my husband’s godmother toasted us around the table where generations of babies have been baptized by the family’s Catholic priests. I have a beautiful, if bitter, memory of carrying a child in my body for a few short weeks and feeling the slow, primal changes in my breasts, womb, and heart.

For whatever reason, I have remained barren for almost three years—about as long a time as I was on the Pill. I wonder if the sorrow I have felt is anything akin to the anguished isolation my mom experienced as a twenty-nine-year-old mother caring for newborn twins, a four-year-old, and a five-year-old. I consider the freedom I chose and I ask myself: would I trade it for the children that I long for?

It’s an odd question for a girl who grew up assuming that if her life followed the refrain of a wistful country song, it would be Loretta’s “Pregnant Again,” and not the Dixie Chick’s IVF-inspired “It’s So Hard When It Doesn’t Come Easy.”

Sometimes I think I have the strength just to wait it out, to prove everybody wrong, as the latter song goes, and prove to myself that those three years were a risk well taken. And sometimes, I only have the strength to mourn.

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