Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me. Karen Karbo

      “This will kill my parents. I hope you know that.” Suddenly, he picked up one of the patio chairs and chucked it off the deck. It bounced down the front walk, coming to rest on the sidewalk, beneath the ornamental plums. “They were really looking forward to our having this baby.”

      “I understand, Ward. There’s just one thing. We’re not having this baby. I am.”

      “You said you got an abortion,” said Ward.

      “You did,” said Mary Rose. “I meant that it’s still technically a fetus, not even that. An embryo, really. It’s far from being a baby yet, is what I meant. You jumped to conclusions.”

      Ward looked over the railing as though suddenly interested in the fate of the eight-dollar patio chair. “Let’s just forget this and start the evening over, can we?”

      She let him kiss her. I watched though the doorway.

      I’m not convinced that Mary Rose wanted to forget about any of it. I think what she really wanted at that moment was to call a time-out. She wanted the gestation of the He-bean to freeze so that she could think things over. But in making the choice to have the child, Mary Rose had sacrificed time-outs forever. Next to gravity, bearing a child is the modern world’s last unalterable fact. Marriages are easily dissolved, morality readily ignored, laws circumvented; an operation can be had to give a boy a vagina or a girl a penis. A fetus cares not whether its mother and father have argued; it cares not that you have lost your job, that the economy has collapsed, that you have been stricken with the flu. On it comes.

      I’m guessing, but I imagine it was the knowledge that on or about June 12, Mary Rose would be having Ward’s baby, or so she thought, that urged Mary Rose to give Ward the benefit of the doubt. Lynne or no Lynne.

      Either that, or she was a fool. Strike that. Who am I to talk?