False Labor

The moment I lost my fertility I started searching for a baby. At age thirty-one, after almost two decades of chronic pain caused by endometriosis and its little-studied ravages, I had my uterus, my cervix, and one of my ovaries removed. Before then, motherhood had seemed likely but not urgent, as inevitable as growing out of jean shorts, but in the days after my surgery I became keenly obsessed with it. Bedbound and tending to the five small laparoscopic holes in my abdomen, I scrolled through adoption websites as if they were furniture outlets. If I could no longer grow a baby in my womb, I could at least get one elsewhere, and fast. But there were a few obstacles. Some of the sites seemed too Christian to want me; others too back-alley for me to want them. Plus, I could barely move, and I was tapering off opioids, so how was I going to handle a six-week trip to some foreign country to collect the child that I did not doubt was my God-given right? I wasn’t delusional enough...