This was a friend’s status update. It jolted me to read it. In fact, I’m not sure how he intended it, but it took me back immediately to this documentary I watched in grad school, Daddy & Papa, about gay couples adopting kids.

Now, I’ve never wanted kids. It predates any realizations about being a homo and in (what then seemed it would forever be) a difficult position w/r/t kids; in fact, it’s one of my few lifelong certainties. I pull a lot of W.C. Fields schtick about not being able to stand the little nose-pickers but the fact is, other than infants (anathema!), I’m just a little awkward with them, don’t usually know what to say to them and, okay, I don’t find them particularly interesting. But there’s no great animosity. Once in a while I like them, if they’re weird and smart.

But you get backed into things sometimes. So for instance I’m watching this documentary and one proud father explains his longing to adopt. He sits there looking at the camera, holding his partner’s hand or some shit, and says “we were just looking at the rest of our lives and thinking, what if it’s just more dinner parties and gallery openings?!” [cue: the saddest music in the world]

I like dinner parties. I don’t have a strong feeling about gallery openings, but I suddenly felt like I’d go to the wall for them. I walked out, indicted and angry about it. This is how I’ve come to be occasionally affiliated with nutcases like the “childfree” set. (If you’re not familiar, these are the people who refer to mothers as “moos” and kids as “crotch droppings,” among other terms. They’re frightful, but I’d be lying if I denied occasionally feeling more closely aligned with them than with the culture of parenting, if only because I know they don’t think of me as some soulless, dinner-party-throwing monster.)

The fact is, yes, you lose a set of guidelines for what you’re supposed to do after you settle into a career if you don’t have kids. And everybody needs new chapters, and I do think a lot of us who don’t have kids, even the ones who emphatically don’t want them, occasionally have a twinge of roadmaplessness.

I think about my parents’ lives: childhood, high school, college, graduate school, first job, first kid, second kid, by the time we were out the door and superficially independent, they were 50. That’s a lot of your life accounted for, given an outline however broad.

What’s the question I’m left with, long past the end of my proscribed outline? It’s the same question as everything else, I guess. Though it’s a bit grand for these glib ditherings, inevitably I think of Grace Paley in a little introduction she wrote, talking about a friend she had met in 1957.

After that we talked and talked for nearly forty years. Then she died. Three days before that, she said slowly, with the delicacy of an unsatisfied person with only a dozen words left, Grace, the real question is — how are we to live our lives?”

Well, my sister finally passed away.  It’s been a long time coming since she had lived with Multiple Sclerosis for 25 years.  This is a photo of her oldest child with my son.  The big kid was adopted into my parents family in 1980.  The little one born into the extended clan in 2004.  The oldest and youngest cousins.  There are 12 more in between.

I like how this photo flips.

It feels like life that way.  One body tumbling into another.  Both caught up in the dizzying mess of it all.

My sister and her ex-husband raised four children.  Two adopted.  Two naturally born.

 Sweet kids, my sister’s four.  A kind of mongeral little family complete in its incompleteness within the larger birth mythology of my Mother’s Family.  I used to take them thrifting at the local thrift temple back in the 90′s.  The four of them worked really hard, and quite sucessfully to stay sane amist the disater of thier mom’s illness and all it’s tragedy.  I was happy to be thier cool uncle.  And I’m happy to be playing that role now.  Sitting here in the shadow of the Wasatch Front.  Contemplating my benedictory words.  On my brother’s 47th birthday.  Days of 47!  “How circular, how strange . . .”

Women with MS probably shouldn’t have children.  It was the ultimate sacrifice for the next generation. 

 Here’s to my sister!  And her sweet raga-muffin kids! (and to her dopey ex-husband, john the beloved smuck. . . ) 

 How circular. How strange.  How much like life.

I started out cavalier about our chances; after all, my mom didn’t go through menopause until she was in her late 50’s, so surely that meant that I’d take after her and be fertile well into my middle age. Looking back, this is so incredibly naive. I found out the hard way that it doesn’t exactly work that way, and in fact she urged me through my 30’s that I should really have a baby sooner rather than later (this all during the time I was with a boyfriend she hated). That wasn’t in the realm of possibility at the time, but I now see what she was getting at.

We did it all: fertility specialists, acupuncture, herbs, dietary changes, charting, exercise, no exercise, surgery, IUI, IVF. I read all the books about fertility and getting pregnant, and pinned my hopes on the women who said that it could be done after 40 and that the doctors are wrong. But four and a half years and two miscarriages later, we were still standing at the station. We had run as fast as we could, but still we missed the train.

Not only is this whole process heartbreaking, frustrating, and all-consuming; successful or not, it’s exceedingly expensive. To date we’ve probably spent somewhere around $50,000 trying to have a baby. (Don’t ask me where we got that kind of money; I’m not exactly sure. We’re far from rich). Some people spend more. Sometimes it seems that we literally flushed all of our money down the toilet. The fertility industry deals in hope, and quite often it’s false. Before we embarked on our second IVF, I grilled my doctor about the reality of our situation. “How many 44 year old women have you treated that have had successful pregnancies with IVFs?” I asked her. She was hesistant. She explained that while there was a small chance for me at 44, there was almost no chance at 45 or later. Even knowing that I was playing a shell game, I had to try one more time. I was hooked in to that tiny hope that I would get lucky.

It’s been six months since that last IVF, and since then I’ve turned 45 and have finally come to the realization that it ain’t gonna happen, at least not the way I always heard it should be. We still have options, though, and for that I’m grateful. We are now looking for an egg donor – something that 30 years ago would not have been an option. It’s taken us a long time to wrap our heads around the idea that if we successfully have a child going this route, that it won’t be my dna that gets passed along. We mourned this reality for quite a while, but just in the past few weeks I’ve begun to see this as a positive thing.

I mean, how many people get to pick the traits that their child will have? You can pick your partner, and hopefully the things that you find attractive in him or her will also be things that you would like to see passed down to your child. This is one of the big reasons that I wanted to have a child with The Fella – he’s wonderful, kind, handsome, intelligent, funny – the list goes on. There are a few traits of my own that I would have liked to pass on to my kid – olive skin, musical ability, (supposed) smarts – but quite a few that I would gladly jettison. Family health history? Terrible eyesight? See ya! Short stature? Big nose? Adios! Klutziness, absent-mindedness? Don’t let the door hit you on your way out!

So now begins the process of choosing the baby-momma, as it were. There are hundreds of agencies with cloying names like “Family Creations” and “Conceptual Options” that deal in a different kind of hope: the egg-trade, plying young women desperate for money to older women desperate for their last chance at motherhood. Each agency has a searchable database of women between the ages of 20-30 that have already been vetted (to a certain extent) and who will gladly go through a month of discomfort in exchange for $5-$8,000 (for pain and suffering; you can’t legally buy human body parts in the U.S.).

Looking for an egg donor is very much like online dating, (and I find it somewhat ironic that I met The Fella online as well – my life is very post-modern). The better agencies have the girls fill out extensive questionnaires about their family health history, their childhood, their hobbies, how they’ve done in school, their aspirations, and even their reasons for donating (as if that really matters). There are pictures of the women as adults and as children, and sometimes they post pictures of their own children, if they have any. With each profile, I find myself going through small stages of hope and disappointment; very often the ones with the physical traits I’m looking for don’t necessarily have the right talents or education, or vice-versa, but occasionally I’ll find someone who is exactly what I’m looking for, and then I’m madly in love and making plans before we’ve even met – imagining long walks on the beach, talking for hours in a cafe, making her mix tapes…. Invariably, those girls are already spoken for, so unless I want to wait another six months before they are available again, I have to move along.

In the course of this process I can’t help but feel just a little bit lecherous. In my mind’s eye I’ve become this gnarled old crone beckoning young girls to my gingerbread house. Recently we went to an in-store at a local record store which brought a throng of 20-something hipsters, with whom we stood in line for a half hour waiting to be let in. I found myself greedily eyeing the young women standing in front of us, sizing up their height, weight, figures, skin, hair, and listening in on their conversations to see if they were intelligent. I asked myself if one of these girls could be the one. Everywhere I go, in fact, I notice young women in a way that I never have before.

Once you find the girl of your dreams, be prepared to plop down another small fortune: we might well spend the equivalent of what we’ve already forked out on fertility treatments in the last 4 years in one shot. So in addition to dealing with the grief of our past failures and potential of future ones, we have to wrap our brains around spending the equivalent of another down payment on a house, and still there’s no guarantee that I’ll become or remain pregnant.

I’d like to say that looks and other things don’t matter to me, but they do. I’ve spoken to a few people who have gone through this process, and amazingly, many say that looks don’t matter; they just want a healthy baby, and of course I want a healthy baby more than anything. Still, It’s odd to think that in a way you are replacing yourself when you have a child, but in this case, I’d like to replace myself with a slightly better version – I mean, why settle for the 3G when you can get the 4G? Of course I’d like my kid to be taller, smarter, more talented, more focused – the list goes on, and on. The question of “nature vs. nurture” has begun to loom large for us. It seems like athleticism is something you’re born with (I am decidedly not athletic), but what about non-visible traits? Is intelligence inherited, or can genius be cultivated? Could a child that would have done horribly in school or ended up in a gang become a highly successful doctor/lawyer/teacher/clothing designer/golfer/rockstar given the right circumstances? Everybody has these expectations and hopes for his or her kids, but when you actually have a certain amount of control over the situation, the choices are daunting. It’s so hard to tell, even with the amount of information you’re given, what a woman is really like without meeting her and spending time with her; online profiles are still very two-dimensional. Some women will agree to meet you before you commit to egg donation, but others, understandably, want to remain anonymous.

And even if we do find a woman who has all the perfect traits, we still don’t know what we’re gonna get. DNA can be sneaky. And I’ve learned through all of this that not only do you not always get what you want, you can hardly ever get what you expect. All we can do is try to choose the best route and hope we get on the train this time. So let me ask myself: Am I feeling lucky, punk?

I could end now and leave the impression of Super-Mama-Walton-Cleaver-Real-Housewives-of-Pleasantville. In truth, this was not an effort of selfless maternal affection. The start of my endeavor was timed precisely with my son buying a plane ticket to spend spring break away this year, with friends, in another state called “I make my own decisions with my own money.” With every stitch I am counting the days he has been gone since going to college and the days to come when he will be gone entirely. I am managing my complex emotions like some anti-Fate, trying to reverse his destiny, willing him back so we can reweave the threads into a pattern I can recognize. And control. And cling to.

It is knotty work facilitating the transition of a modern human from child to adult. In the old days, a parent just married them off or gave them a few acres of farm. They stayed close to home. There wasn’t much to negotiate. Now there are so many options and voices; my son is a literal kid in a virtual candy store of majors, internships, job opportunities, love interests, apartments, limitless markers of maturity. He races headlong into the future and I stand on the sidelines biting my nails. I am proud of this bold man and his trajectory that seems a path toward success and independence and mostly, I lead cheers of encouragment. But not all the time. I harbor the smallest doubts and reluctance: “relax, live in the present” or “you/we need more time” or “really, you just did/think/said . . . what?” These often go unspoken or unheard. So I knit a scarf.

Ironically, I will mail this package and then drive to the airport to pick up my parents. They are visiting for the weekend. I wonder how many of my scarf thoughts have crossed their minds over the years. In Pandora’s Barbie Dream House they expected I would make lasagna and wear mascara and lead the PTA. My husband would want his shirts pressed and ask me to make him a sandwich. And my children would be Eagle Scouts and know baseball stats. In Pandora’s Real Life Troll Cave, I work all time and my husband makes soufflé and my children rush home from Speech Competitions to watch the SAG Awards. I am not, nor are any of my siblings, living the lives my parents might have imagined.  

In the card aisle at Walgreen’s, Valentine’s Day is about the love you choose and how you choose to assert it. This year I am considering ways to love when the only choice seems less “Be mine” and more “Be your self.” Trust is a risky message, hard to sum up on a paper heart, harder yet to give away. So I am sending a scarf. Because all I can do is keep him warm in his adventures. And leave a long trail of yarn, just in case.

I am not sure why. My grandmother made them for us as children and they were naked, misshapen monstrosities that we hid under pillows. Perhaps it was because they creeped us out so much that I thought of them. My brother is a horror script writer and has passed on his fascination with all things macabre and disturbing to his otherwise princess perfect daughters. At five and eight, they can sing and speak every word to The Nightmare Before Christmas. The older one dressed as Wednesday from the Addams Family for Halloween. Sock Monkeys – ironically nostalgic with those benign yet sinister grins – the girls would love them.

Before I began, I decided to do some research. Homemade stuffed animals, in particular stuffed monkeys, were all the rage in Victorian England and America. Exotic Africa was a popular theme at the time and inspired homemakers to craft menageries for their children. But it wasn’t until the Depression, when some poor but enterprising wife made a toy out of her husband’s old Rockford Red Heel Socks, that the sock monkey as we know it today was born. The idea caught on and soon a sock monkey (and sock elephant) pattern was printed on the label of every pair of red heeled socks. Recently sock monkeys are making a comeback. You can buy or “adopt” them, depending on how mass produced or exclusive you desire.

I located several pairs of “The Original Rockford” socks and two or three different patterns. My mother also sent me a box of socks and half assembled parts she had saved from my grandmother’s house after she died. I studied the socks, the patterns and the ancient carcasses, determined what I would machine or hand sew and started cutting. By the time I was stitching and stuffing my own monkey appendages, my son started paying attention.

“This is just wrong,” he said, referring to the scattered pieces of monkey all over the table. I ignored him. After each addition, however, he picked up the emerging creature and examined it. He hated the faces. I was insistent that I wanted them as “authentic” as possible to a Depression Era style monkey. “Why eyelashes?” “Because they had eyelashes.” “Why such big smiles?” “Because they had big smiles.” “Why don’t you just make them any way you want?” “Because I want them to be ironically nostalgic.”  

They were sort of intriguing. I made them almost exactly alike except one set of button eyes was a lighter blue than the other. They had no apparent gender. They both had hearts embroidered on their chests.  They were well-made but crafty-folky by design. So traditional, they felt radical, blank slates around which to wrap any external outfit. Their symbolic potential was as fat as their little pot bellies. Before I could make them clothes, my son took pictures of them for a school project on shadows.

I dressed one in a Dora the Explorer flannel nightgown and the other in a flapper dress made from Day of the Dead fabric. I sent off the packages, believing my sock monkey adventure was over.

The next day I received my son’s Christmas list. “What do you mean you want a Hester Prynne sock monkey?” “I want you to make me a Hester Prynne sock monkey.” He had recently read The Scarlett Letter in school. I rolled my eyes.

But set to work. Again with the research, printing illustrations and reading about 17^th century puritan clothing. There must be no Velcro, no elastic, no zippers, only ties and lacing. I looked up color schemes. I found a linen napkin, red felt, a scrap of boiled wool and an antique nautical button. He would get what he asked for and a surprise, a miniature Pearl monkey. My sister, watching me hand sew a tiny two piece dress and chemise, shook her head. “I am not sure who is weirder, you or your son.”

All three recipients opened their gifts on Christmas morning. My eight year old niece loved her monkey adorned in skeleton themed clothing. When my mother asked “why are there skeleton people on it?” my niece tried to be patient. “Because they are Day of the Dead people, Nana.”  The five year old liked hers well enough until it flopped over and the dress hiked up. Then she threw it down, horrified. “Why is there a mouth on its butt?” She would not touch it for several hours.

My son did not gush nor judge, but immediately demanded a monkey from every book he reads in AP Literature. Up next, Huck Finn. Then Gatsby. The rest of the family questioned why Hester was grinning. Shouldn’t she look, you know, a little melancholy being a social pariah and all? I sighed. ”That is the point. She is only Hester Prynne on the outside, underneath, she is always just a sock monkey. Get it?” They did not.