He talked of teaching a child judo and chess. He had too much love to give and nowhere for it to go. He did not want to convince me to have a child. Entering the work force made me even more wary of motherhood, while a decade of corporate work and moving made him want family and stability even more. We kept talking about children but grew more entrenched in our positions. My estranged father died, alone and far away, and my husband held me as I fell apart. We got married, bought a house, got a mortgage. Two young people far from home, trying to explain ourselves and our pasts to each other.Īfter graduating, we stayed together despite almost two years of long distance, with him in New York and me in Singapore, then we moved to London for my finance job, then to Austin, Texas, for my graduate program in creative writing. He took me to eat spaetzle in Alphabet City, and I took him for roti prata in Flushing.
I dragged him to the ice-skating rink in Bryant Park - my first time skating, never having seen snow or ice in tropical Singapore - where he, accustomed to skating in the Alps, humored me, holding me up as we made slow circles amid lumbering knots of tourists. On cold days, we would set off in the dark from Morningside Heights to walk all over New York City, numb hands clasped tight. There seemed little reward for forming one of my own. Deep down I believed that family caused nothing but pain. My own family had been broken and chaotic, my father absconding when I was 9, leaving us homeless and bankrupt, and my mother heartbroken, emotionally unavailable and volatile. Growing up in Singapore in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I hated the way people assumed that because I was a woman I wanted and would have children.
When we met in college, two foreign students in dizzying New York City for the first time, I never thought that a decade later, he would be lying next to me in bed monitoring my breathing in case my fallopian tube ruptured and he had to rush me to the emergency room, afraid I would hemorrhage to death.Īt 20, I hadn’t given much thought to children except to know that I didn’t want them, not actively, as some do. When we found out the pregnancy was ectopic and life-threatening, my husband vowed to never ask me to have children again.
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