I could feel the daylight intensifying outside; the summer heat baking the windows. I had to get up to go to my day job, a commute to a windowless grey cubicle a few blocks from the assault of tourists and neon in Times Square. But I couldn’t move. Any minute now, Dave would wake up. But something else was there in bed with us. I called it the Baby Want. Once the Baby Want had taken hold a year ago, it couldn’t be unwanted. It wouldn’t be dismissed. The Baby Want was a prickling and swelling along the nape of my neck, my hands, my breasts – as though my skin was unpeeling from my bones, straining to get at something that wasn’t there. It became stronger with each passing day, with each month as my last good eggs suicided.

My declining fertility had started out as a faint ringing in my ears in my twenties – a sound that would stop as soon as you tried to listen too closely. In my early thirties, it had become like those church bells across the street that woke you briefly on a hungover Sunday morning. At thirty-five, it was a honking car alarm that would jerk me out of sleep in the middle of the night while I pulled my pillow over my ears. Now, at thirty-seven, my fertility was a constant moan, like a grief-stricken whale. It said: You’re running out of time.

I secretly scrolled the internet to find out how and why my body had become possessed. I found a paper by a Finnish sociologist, Anna Rotkirch, who’d researched the longing for a baby by putting a call out in the national paper for women to write to her. She received more than one hundred letters describing what the Finnish called ‘baby fever’. They listed overwhelming symptoms: a ‘painful longing in my whole being’, being plagued with ‘anxiety or sorrow’ or feeling like ‘a mere empty shell of skin’. The baby fever, Rotkirch found, could be a long-held desire or strike suddenly and surprisingly, like lightning, and was caused by a number of things such as previous pregnancies, falling in love (tick), aging (tick) and seeing your friends get pregnant and have children (tick)…

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