The World Deserves My Children by Natasha Leggero

Author:Natasha Leggero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

I. As in Oh Crap! Potty Training by Jamie Glowacki, savior of parents everywhere.

FEAR AND LOVE

“Fear is the parent of cruelty.”

—JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE

I’m not a fearful person. I’ve lived my life making one reckless decision after another. I love travel, drugs, parties, and picking fights with bros, ideally all in one night.

Life to me was about risk. That’s what made it worth living. So how do I today find myself constantly worried about, for example, choking? Before I had a child, I don’t think I thought about choking… ever? I mean, maybe during certain porn but that’s it. I’ve eaten approximately sixty million meals and never worried about choking once. Now I slice grapes into fourths and stare at my daughter’s windpipe as she chews.

We don’t become mothers to stay the same—at least, that’s what my therapist told me. And motherhood has changed me in countless ways. I now always have snacks (sliced, diced, or minced into easily swallowable sizes) in my purse. I’ll never need an alarm clock again. I even know the name of Peppa Pig’s father (Daddy Pig—lazy British writers).

These are big changes. But the biggest change is that I’ve kind of become a scared person. Childbirth may not have turned my pussy giant (thank you, planned C-section!), but motherhood has turned me into a giant pussy.

It started before I even had a kid. I spent three years of my life afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get pregnant.

Anything that anyone on the internet ever said could get you pregnant, I tried. Eat baby bananas, drink whipping cream, eat sticks of butter: tried, tried, tried. I drank some tea that tasted like tree bark that a dog took a shit on. I took weird round pills that an acupuncturist sold me for $85 a bottle. I practiced yoga for fertility, tried reiki for fertility, ate for fertility. Sometimes I would even have sex with my husband for fertility.

I was trying to get pregnant the old-fashioned way (silent missionary with no eye contact), but I also had embryos in a freezer in Westwood. Moshe had “busted” all over my original eggs I had frozen, and we were left with a few Motasha embryos that we were told would be our last resort. (Harvesting reproductive material is my favorite last-minute invasive medical procedure.)

My fertility doctor had strongly discouraged me from using these frozen embryos, however. He said they each had less than a 30 percent chance of working, and although I was already forty-one, I should still try to squeeze everything I could out of my last naturally fertile days. The doctor said to think of those frozen eggs as a savings account and my own eggs as a checking account. In retrospect, I realized what he meant to say was, “Think of your furiously diminishing fertility as a way of helping my checking and savings accounts.”

I got a book that explained you could only get pregnant the exact moment you’re ovulating. It suggested I stick two fingers up my vagina to look for an egg-white consistency.

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