![]() Does that make me a victim of patriarchy? I don’t think so. Before I knew if I even wanted kids, I knew I’d name the baby Audrey if it were a girl and James if it were a boy. Before I knew if I even wanted to get married, I knew I wanted an empire waistline dress and a pavé diamond band. This was the kind of stuff Jenny Han ( The Summer I Turned Pretty, anyone?) and Taylor Swift (see: this iconic 2012 fan MV for “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My)”) taught me to want. The silliest hypothetical that we’ve talked about is the one where we laugh on the villa porch after a long day, gossip over a glass of something sparkling, and place bets on whether this will finally be the summer our children fall in love and we become in-laws-that is, a proper family at last. I care very much what color the kitchen cabinets are painted, whether we pick the city brownstone or rural farmhouse, whether Cam and I will live close enough to one another to take turns babysitting or if we’ll have to resort to organizing family trips every summer, where we might push our kids together out to sea in boats and purposely hang back on family beach walks to watch them bump shoulders in the distance ahead. For me, there’s a weird dissonance that comes with being gay and not interested in having kids, yet unable (unwilling?) to shake off what feels like a deeply primal, deeply feminine urge to stockpile domestic artifacts of the future. We curate scattered Pinterest boards for our future weddings, Notes app entries full of baby names, and Zillow listings of astronomically priced vintage New York apartments. K : Cam and I are chronically future-oriented people, and also exactly who we once used to make fun of, rolling our eyes in the sixth-grade cafeteria to disguise our envy and shame: mushy-gushy, bona fide girly-girls. She posted about it on WeChat afterward, sweetly captioning it: “beautiful day in Austin, date with the girls❣️.” And I can easily see Kelly and myself doing that one day, too, with each other, our Audrey / James / Oliver / Evie, or the best friends from our dinner parties. Last weekend, my mom came to visit me in Austin. (Definitely not reliving that 7 am trip to CVS ever again.) When I bring the two closer together, I will be ready. Somewhere between then and now, I realized the dissonance between the love and the babies I dreamed about growing up and the one I am now scared for. And in high school, I helped my best friend pick out a vintage blue-sapphire diamond ring with her then-boyfriend (of course, they broke up a few months into college). In 8th grade, I Pinned my first “I do” photos in the back of the school library, where I would skip class and sneak into as if it was contraband. When I don’t, and it gets bad, I wonder if everyone would have been more at peace if I was a boy (I almost would have been, if the gods had listened to my grandparents’ prayers and my dad’s prophesied name). She tells me I should stay home, make sure the door is locked and the stove is off, and call her when I’m not busy. I’ve written before about the ghosts of my mom’s past and how much I hate it when she sends me those horrific news articles of girls getting kidnapped, assaulted, and sold to unspeakable places where unspeakable things are done to them. Most of the time, I think about how hard it is for women to think for themselves while caring for, and being expected to care for, another human being, how it is even harder for their daughters to exist in this space-of feeling like you’re tearing your mother away from her life and wanting to close the gap but never fully being able to. How to laugh forever.” We admire their writing, but words couldn’t save them from drowning at sea, losing their breath at poisoned gas, and passing along a thousand sadnesses to their daughters. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. Talk to my poems, and talk to your heart-I’m in both,” when Adrienne Rich said, “Poetry was where I lived as no one’s mother, where I existed as myself,” when Virginia Woolf said, “We think back through our mothers if we are women,” when Amy Tan said, “Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. I often think back to when Anne Sexton said, “Be your own woman. Truthfully, history has not been kind to women writers. A boy would be more distant, inheriting the mother’s love for beautiful things and beautiful words but not the burden of being, well, a girl. She would do the same with a daughter, I’m sure of it, but I fear the danger that comes with this level of closeness, showing its teeth every time her daughter falls for the wrong boy or stares in the mirror for too long. They would go to museums together on rainy days, and she would hand off her dog-eared, underlined copy of The Goldfinch -a most prized possession-when she feels like he’s ready.
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