Butterfly Net/Photograph Album

I collect my friends' exes. They always break up with the girls that are perfect for me: the pastry chef, the ER doctor, the bookseller with the sweet dog, the cellist with the impossible hair. A dozen more.

I stay with these women, on Facebook and Instagram; I celebrate their joys and mourn their losses. Some of them have stayed with me, too, some of them know more about me now than the men we befriended through. And some I simply haunt from behind the screen. I understand that we occupy different realms, I have to accept that what I hold on to as love might bring them nothing but pain. Maybe. Or maybe they miss me too.

Maybe we attract the people who bring us ones we love. My own husband was originally a friend of a friend, the cool older guy who brought beer to a party. I shrugged him off for the boyfriend I was sure about then, the way you think everything is forever when you're 18. How often we’re just that close when we aim, a millimeter off the mark.

That cool older guy gave me the second love of my life, my baby son, the little person whose gummy smile sparks off fireworks of joy through my brain, my heart, my stomach, he has altered my DNA into a twist of delight. It's hard not to want to see if I can do it again.

Part of me wants a daughter, of course. The size of that part fluctuates, but the size of my window does not. If I want to grow one from my body, I have to figure it out soon. And then, you know, roll the dice. The longer I wait, the longer I roll. 

It seems a flaw in our biology that we should be forced to rush a decision this precious and then you realize: to biology, this is not precious and neither are you, you are a sack of meat cells close to outliving your purpose. Dithering over procreation is probably not a trait biology wants to reward.

I joke that I’ve already achieved the highest goal many cultures ascribe their women: I gave my husband a son. On the first try and everything. But the truth is it felt treasonous, the flood of relief when the nice rep from the genetic testing company called and told me it would be a boy.  

It’s hard to be a girl. I can say this because I know. I’ve had it much easier than most of my double chromosomed compatriots, but I still know. Knowing makes it easier to imagine, sometimes harder to sleep. I do think it’s the reason we’re all so obsessed with true crime, why Law and Order SVU is on its twenty-second season of network broadcasting every angle of horror that can befall woman and child: it's practice. 

We notice what makes us different, we notice what makes us the same, we determine where to walk and what not to say and how not to look and we pretend it makes a difference, like we don't know it’s luck more than anything that keeps you from learning our story some Thursday night. 

And those are just the worst cases. There are a thousand cases in between, a million. Bad things don’t need to happen all at once to add up to tragedy. Being a girl is hard, and that is the convenient truth. 

Men talk about legacy, continuing their line like it's their responsibility to the species. I am cutting my line of women off on both sides and what I'm feeling isn't guilt, it's the nice rep on the phone again, delivering the relief of all my ancestors. 

They took a 3D picture of my son at his final sonogram. 36 weeks, and it was the first day they closed the office to accompanying visitors. When the nurse told me my husband would have to wait in the car, I burst into tears in the waiting room. The tech took pity on me and let him come back and it was like a moon landing, we squinted and turned our heads for minutes and then that wonderful woman showed us our little boy’s face for the very first time. 

It is the same face now, the same profile. It is wild to me, that it could be the same, that it was really him in there the whole time. You can see it in every sonogram picture: the same turn of the nose, the same pout, the puffy cheeks, the chunky feet, the little fists. Him the whole time. Like he was always supposed to be here. Like he always was. Like maybe my choice is already made.

The exes wait on the screen. The postage-stamp collection of women who weren't meant for me, blue-lit trails into futures I didn’t live. Cheryl Strayed has this gorgeous piece about sister ships of your life, those choices you didn’t make. I look at my girls and see all the times I was happy I cancelled my plans.

You know, I had a great-grandmother who didn’t get on the Titanic.

 
And that must be how they see me: just another passenger on the doomed ship they didn’t board. Maybe their tolerance of my continued presence in their lives merely reflects how close they were to drowning.

I visit my girls where they let me. I open their pages at random, updates flutter by like pressed flowers for a digital age. I scroll through their lives late at night, peeking my head in their virtual rooms as far as they’ll allow, checking. And then I leave them.

My baby son sleeps beside me while I do this. His tiny hand rests on my stomach. His chest rises and falls in the blue light. 

The screen goes dark.