Family, Fate, and Fortune Tellers: Navigating Romantic Relationships When You Just Want a Baby
I didn’t know, anymore, how to date like a normal person—how to give a potential relationship the space to grow into the family I dreamt of.
This isMy Future, My Fertility, a column in whichKarissa Chenwrestles with her questions about fertility, motherhood, and future-planning after thirty-five.
easy
can’t
shouldn’t This probably isn’t true anyway.
practical
feelingDo you want children, soon? Do you want to get married, soon? Are you financially stable enough so that we could raise a family together, soon?
moreIf it turns out any of your answers are “no,” what am I even doing here?
usme.
. The future you want is the future I want, too. The worries you have are my worries to share. You are not aloneWe’ll figure this out together.
as soon as possible
because
quite right
person
can
Karissa Chen's fiction and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Gulf Coast, PEN America, Guernica, and Longreads. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan in 2015-16 and received a 2019 Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and is a proud Fellow of both Kundiman and VONA/Voices. She currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief at Hyphen and a Contributing Fiction Editor at Catapult. She is working on a novel.
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The desire to be a mother is now something that lingers inside of me, an omnipresent hunger.
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When My Marriage Ended, I Learned to Relish the Space I Was Given
Being left behind is not a disadvantage. It is an opportunity to grow and an opportunity to live life on my own terms.