Michelle Tea - Knocking Myself Up: A Memoir of My (In)Fertility

W hen I started telling the people around me that I was going to get myself pregnant, they reacted in a variety of ways, and not always as expected. My two best friends, with whom I have a very codefriendent relationship, were skeptical. You cant just go and put the baby in the other room when you want to have sex, Tali said wryly, an apparent comment on my amorous lifestyle. Tali and I have been friends since the nineties, when we were both drunken poets slurring into the mic at open-mic events. Now that we were older, and sober, Talis approach to life had become more grounded and cautious, and she was unafraid to offer her strong opinions, peppered as they were with a dark and honest humor.

I was uncertain how to respond to my dear friends readof course I understood that the baby would have to come before my libido, but, really, why couldnt I tuck the baby in the other room when I wanted to have sex? That sounded reasonable. Tali tried another angle: You like to take off and go to Paris. I was becoming a bit enchanted with my life as seen through my friends eyes. Who was this jet-setting tart? But I hadnt been to Paris in years, and anyway, wouldnt I want to take my little bohemian baby traveling abroad? Wouldnt I want to teach them French by immersion in the cafs of the Bastille? In fact, maybe I would want to actually give birth in Paris, gifting my bb with dual citizenship in an elegant, socialist country and treating myself to a free, socialist hospital birth! Tali saw that her warnings were having the opposite effect and sighed in resignation, offering one more deterrent: But you love your life.

This made me pause: I do love my life, I thought to myself. I lived by myself in a spacious San Francisco apartment I could miraculously afford with the income I patched together running a literary nonprofit, writing books and essays, and reading tarot cards. My apartment building was old and gray, but in a dignified way, like Iris Apfel. The staircase had a polished wood banister, and the lobby was lined with mirrors, so you could get your Last Lewks in before you pushed open the heavy glass door and went out onto the wind tunnel that is Page Street.

Landing there seemed like a miracle in and of itself; not least because my inbred money scarcity almost pushed me to turn my back on it. The fact that the rent was seriously under market valuethis, during the legendary San Francisco era of the Tech Bro!did not even register to me. All I saw was that it was more money than Id ever spent on housing, and I balked, fear of having to come up with more money per month setting my stomach churning. Thankfully, some friends who, while they may be similarly blinded by their own survival fears, can at least see it plain and clear when manifesting in another. That entire apartment literally costs two hundred dollars more a month than what youre paying to live in a converted living room in a flat with twentysomethings who keep mistaking their cocaine panic for heart attacks and calling the fire department, Tali lectured sternly. You should move.

San Francisco is a city of neighborhoods, but this latest spot I found myself in, my charmed apartment, seemed to be in a liminal space. Id lived in a few different San Francisco neighborhoodsmostly the Mission, which I watched go from a neighborhood of Latinx families, Salvadoran restaurants, street hookers, and dykes to a neighborhood of white tech workers, pastry shops selling deconstructed confections, electric scooters, and yoga moms. For years I lived in North Beach, worried the throngs of tourists would drive me mad, but I was ultimately delighted to be residing in a spot that so many people, from all around the world, wanted to visit. The air smelled like rosemary focaccia, and my local bookstore was City Lights, where the elderly Lawrence Ferlinghetti (RIP) was often in residence, being interviewed by European film crews. Id also lived in Bernal Heights, both at the foggy top of the hill, where condensation would drift beneath the back door and fill the kitchen with clouds, and at the bottom, where the jagged singsong of drunkards doing karaoke at Naps provided a quirky soundtrack to my life. My new neighborhood was a no-mans-land that wasnt quite the grungy Lower Haight and wasnt quite Hayes Valley. It was a lovely spot that allowed me to walk most anywhere, or hop on a lumbering orange bus if it was rainy or I was lazy.