The Infertility Itch

I never understood the women so desperate for babies
willing to turn their bodies into spawning grounds
human puppy mills sitting out children by the unnatural handful.

I scoffed.  I shook my head at the idea that any woman
any sane person would need to breed with that recklessness
premeditated abandon based on religion or hormones
whatever the reason, ludicrous and extreme.

Then the losses piled up.  Most were faceless clumps
cells arranged like clustered fruit, tiny false starts
chromosomal anomalies too poorly written to live.

The last, hopefully the last, not just the latest:

I knew the moment its small form appeared on screen
it had no spark, no fluttering movement to bespeak life
its body still; silent, it had stopped three weeks before
and I had gone on, trying not to hope and hoping anyway
while it died quietly alone in the thundering whisper
the tide in my uterus pulled by my satellite heart.

She was normal, the tests spat the words at me
my doctor holding out the results like an offering
not realizing the comfort I had taken from the idea
that they had all been genetic misfires, failures
of their parents' code to weave together.

Female, 46 chromosomes, no abnormalities detected
one line that cut me, burned me with guilt
and then the barrage of tests to see why I failed
to protect and nurture life within me the way women should.

I've successfully bred before; my daughter thrives
she sings through my days and questions everything.
She asks me often for more children, she is lonely
and I fear I have waited too long and the disease
haunting the women of my family has taken my chance.

So I itch at myself, worrying at my bones or my genes
cursing my body for things it can't willingly deny
taking the pills, conforming to regimens and diets
waiting for news, pausing at the threshold of my soul
to wonder when I became the sort of woman
who cries at baby pictures and is consumed by conception.