Escaping "should haves" and a reunion

I’m so overloaded with work, managing our new financial reality, and catching up on all the things that fell behind between the trip out east for Pop-pop’s funeral and the subsequent brutal non-Covid cold I caught en route home. I’ve hardly had a moment to digest this past week’s news. And news it’s been.

But maybe yesterday’s reunion with Anya, 8 years in the making, was a way to start processing. After all, she and I dove headfirst into all the “should have” life plans we’ve been throwing out the window since last we met. She turned in her “should haves” of stable wife, stable job, and fully paid mortgage for a new home, a fresh start, and a journey towards a career of passions sewn together. And I’m abandoning my “should haves” to chase a chaotic, validating experience where I’ll be raising fake twins birthed by some other extraordinary women while I juggle my unique path to parenthood and my role as the longest-tenured woman at an Elon Musk company, the world leader in neurotech, as a newly minted member of my dream team - next gen applications. I get to stay true to myself and the core knowledge that birth is not meant to be a part of my journey as a human. I know it to my core, the same way some people know they’ve been born into the wrong body. The concept of hosting another human inside of me would feel like my body’s ultimate betrayal. Maybe that makes me a little bit trans; I don’t know and I don’t really care. I feel right in my skin.

Clockwise from left: 1. a long-overdue reunion with one of my favorite sorority sisters, Anya. We're both traveling down our own uniquely unplanned paths, and I love it for us. I cannot wait to hear what adventures she'll have traversed by next we meet. 2. A little image I spotted today right when I needed it. 3. Me tonight after work, in the studio where I feel most comfortable in my own skin. I don't think this is what nearly-middle-aged nearly-a-mom (knock on wood) is supposed to look like, but I can't imagine it any other way.

I feel guilty for not being what I think I should be. I feel guilty to our future children for not being willing to sacrifice myself for them, the way so many other mothers would and do. Or as Nicolas says, I’m going to be a great dad.

I’m giving them what I can without losing myself. I’m trying to give them the childhood I wish I could have had, one with a built-in opposite-gender live-in bestie (I hope), someone like my childhood best friend Perri or my same-aged cousin Ryan. Inevitably it’s a childhood they’ll one day resent me for creating, but it’s the best I know to give.

So, about that news: we now know who those women will be, those incredible women who are going to bring our babies into this world. We met and picked them both this past week, and they picked us back. Holy crap. I feel such a debt of gratitude to them for giving me this chance at the kind of motherhood that will work for me, a second chance after we failed with James, a chance for something even better. I don’t feel I deserve this. I feel guilty for not for not telling them why we’re working with them. I wonder if they’d care; if they’d view me as a monster, the sort of monster I sometimes fear myself to be. What sort of mother knows profoundly that she will not host her own baby inside of her? Me, that’s who. I want to love them, I want to care for them, but I want to retain my own bodily integrity. And if I were a man, I wouldn’t have to wrestle with an ounce of guilt over this - there wouldn’t be a choice. There’d just be the basic biology of it all. But I never wanted a uterus. I still don’t.

What a luxury it is to have this privilege. How extraordinary that Neuralink has gifted me the means to take this exceptional life path and fate brought me a husband who’s willing to walk it with me. Of course, I also feel guilty about the privilege that goes with this journey. How very many exceptionally hard-working people will never get to enjoy the choices I have? I’m sorry the world cannot gift everyone the chance to live so luxuriously, so authentically. I cannot believe that I get to choose how many babies, and roughly when, and which biological sex - that I get to sculpt a family of my dreams that will never again conform to any more of my plans once those babies enter this world, just like any proper family, but this is a family that Nico and I are making profoundly on our terms. I don’t know why I got this lucky.

I’m working on letting go of guilt. Letting go of “should haves”. Loving myself for the crazy path I’m letting myself take, the one Nico’s letting me take without even needing to forgive me though somehow I still feel I need to forgive myself. It’s not easy.