Books

It's too late, I'm sorry, but your ovaries are a shriveled mass of cells that have more in common with a raisin (not even the good raisins...at 35, I bet mine look like those hardened ones that stick to the bottom tab of the Sunmaid raisin box). You wanted kids? Sucks to be you, you should have started back when you were 14. Oh...and the media is sorry that they led you astray these past few years, promising the existence of endless fertility through stories about various celebrity wonder twins without even whispering the term donor gametes.

When I was a teen, I took over half the basement of our house and turned it into my bedroom. There were many benefits to this situation, but the crowning glory was a pair of ceiling-level bookshelves that ran the entire width of the room. I had them filled to the brim with books. Most of those books were fiction, and inside them lived some of the best role models I ever had.

With little risk of being wrong, I'll say, "Most women have an issue with their mothers." They may not have a big Oprah-show-worthy issue with Mom, maybe not even a priest or therapist-worthy issue, possibly not even a sleepless-night irritation, but somewhere deep in her soul, a woman has some kind of matter about mother that pricks her with questions: What does my mother's womanhood teach me or not teach me, and what does my mother's womanhood say about my womanhood?

When I was in college trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I dabbled in writing.  I wanted to be a writer, but I was afraid to be a writer.  Afraid to make mistakes, afraid to show my work, afraid to put anything down on paper that might expose too much of who I was. Then I read the mystery novel Reflex, by Dick Francis.

Bookseller recently put out the long list for their Oddest Title Prize (the short list goes up on February 19th which is when public voting commences) and nestled between Briefs for the Reading Room and Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich is a book titled Budgeting for Infertility.