Stella

“Mamí, what is it?”

I hand my iPad, second phone, and paperwork to my executive assistant and motion for him to go ahead without me. “I’m about to go into an important meeting,” I whisper into my cell phone as I step into the hallway while Todd, my assistant, is already halfway to the conference room.

It’s a little after 4 p.m. and the offices of Spitzberg and Co., the hedge fund where I’ve worked for the last four years, are usually as quiet as church when trading closes. I don’t want anybody overhearing a personal conversation.

“It’s Tina.”

The tone of my mother’s voice brings my feet to a sudden stop. “You’re freaking me out. Is she okay?”

“Will called.” Then a pause that tells me I’m not going to like whatever she’s about to say next. “They had to rush her to the hospital. She had another miscarriage.”

“Oh God.” Heart lodged in throat, stomach dropping, I glance around and find a few people watching me, their faces only vaguely familiar. Not surprising since I’ve never been the type to hang out at the proverbial water cooler. Or, as it happens at Spitzberg and Co., the espresso machine. Their curious expressions pull me out of my daze. “Do you have a number for the hospital?”

“There’s more––they had to perform a hysterectomy,” she says in Spanish, her mother tongue and the language she always reverts back to whenever she gets overly emotional. “Stella––”

My mother’s voice sounds underwater, drowned out by the thousand random thoughts misfiring in my head. I stumble into an empty office adjacent to the hall and collapse in a chair. My arms are spaghetti, shaking, barely capable of holding the phone to my ear.

“I’ve gotta go. I’ll talk to you after my meeting,” I mumble, ending the call before she can get another word in.

I’m not sure how long I sit in that empty office, catatonic and staring at the darkened screen of my cell phone, trying to figure out what to say that doesn’t sound patronizing under the circumstances. Every word I contemplate rings hollow and trite.

What I do know is by the time I gather the courage to make the most difficult call of my life, the sun has already set and every cubicle on our floor is empty. All that remains is the sound of my breath and the blood rushing in my ears. The phone rings twice before my cousin’s husband picks up.

“Hi, Will…how is she?”

* * *

“I’m having a baby,” I casually announce, my eyes directed at my mother over the rim of the Starbucks cup I’m clutching with both hands. It’s to save me from fidgeting because what I really want to do is drop the mic and run out of the room. But I’m not about to do that. Not when I’ve spent the past ten days coaching myself into having this conversation.

One phone call. That’s all it took to alter the course of my life forever, a course that had been meticulously planned since I was twelve.

Not that it’s completely out of left field. I’ve always wanted a baby, always pictured myself sometime in the nebulous future having one, strong emphasis on the words nebulous future because it wasn’t supposed to happen for another three years.

It must also be said that I never pictured a man, any man, standing next to me––the problematic part of the baby equation I had yet to work out––which is probably why, for all intents and purposes, this baby was an abstract concept until that phone call.

My cousin, Tina, has always been my role model. Top of her class at Fordham Law. Promising career at the FBI. Adoring husband who also works at the FBI. Watching those two champion each other would make even the most hardened cynic believe that you really can have it all.

Then, out of the blue last year, she gave up her career to start a family. She said she’d been feeling the urge for a long time, that she could no longer ignore it when she started losing joy in her work. What she hadn’t told me until recently was that she’d been trying for a while and had already suffered a miscarriage, which she was convinced had been caused by the stress of juggling her career and personal life.

I knew plenty of women who were doing both successfully, but I wasn’t going to argue if those were her beliefs. That road was littered with landmines that could very well blow up in my face, so I kept my opinions to myself.

In the end, it didn’t matter. A year after the first miscarriage she was forced to have the hysterectomy, taking the choice out of her hands. And if there’s one thing harder than having to make a tough choice, it’s having no choice at all.

A few days after the dreaded phone call, I drove to D.C. and listened to her not cry, not rant and rave at the injustice of it all, but calmly state that it was her indecision, her fear of what it said about her as a modern career woman that robbed her of the chance of having a baby.

“Don’t wait, Stel.” Sunken in and glazed over, her eyes were barely recognizable. “Buy the china you said was too expensive, take that trip to Bhutan to see that monastery you told me about, and don’t wait for a man to have a baby…don’t end up like me,” she said with enough desperation in her voice to scare the crap out of me.

This was a woman that once took a bullet in the line of duty. Desperation was a foreign word to her. So, yes, I was rattled.

It was her regret that changed everything. Tina’s regret was my undoing. What I saw stamped on her face brought to light a fear I could feel down to the bone.

In finance we call it an inflection point, a change in direction on a trading chart, where the curvature alters from concave to convex or vice versa.

Note the symbolism. A sign? Maybe.

Regardless, the clock was ticking. And when I say ticking, I mean it felt like Father Time had strapped a belt of C-4 explosive around my waist that was ready to detonate at any moment and blow my ovaries to smithereens, in turn rendering me barren and alone for all eternity.

Note that time is a man. And not just a man, he’s a father. Coincidence? I think not.

Across the small kitchen table, my mother glances up from the NY Times crossword puzzle, a staple of her Sunday mornings. Filled with suspicion, her dark almond-shaped eyes meet my blue-green ones, the ones that are the exact same shade as my twin brother’s. The eyes gifted to us by our father. Actually, strike that, our sperm donor. You can hardly call a man that made only brief appearances in your life a father.

“You’re pregnant?” the enforcer asks in her lilting Spanish accent. Even though she sounds only mildly curious, her eyes narrow.

I managed to put myself through college, earned an MBA from Harvard while juggling two jobs, and make decisions that risk millions of dollars on a daily basis and my mother’s stare can still make me run for cover.

“Not yet, but I’m working on it.”

When I don’t elaborate, does my mother jump into an interrogation? No, not her style. Instead, she pushes the horn-rimmed reading glasses that have slipped down her slender nose back up, and waits me out. One minute turns into two, two into three.

“I’m going to be thirty-four in a few months,” I say with a note of exasperation I didn’t expect to hear in my own voice. “I don’t want to wind up….” Childless? Alone? Clinging to my career for comfort and safety? “I don’t want to waste any more time. Look at what happened to Tina.”

My mother’s eyes widen. “Tina could have died if she didn’t start bleeding. That tumor was aggressive. It was God’s will that she live.”

God’s will…I don’t think Tina sees it that way.

“I’ve made up my mind.”

“And how are you having a baby with no husband?”

“It’s 2018. I need sperm, not a husband. You know I have no intention of ever getting married so you might as well put that argument to bed once and for all.”

It defines logic in every way but Mercedes Donovan is a hardcore romantic. My hardworking, never complaining, stalwart of a mother is a romantic. You would think life would’ve cured her of that affliction a long time ago.

My father drove trucks for a living. He would leave for weeks on end, come home for a few days and disappear again. Over the years, the time he was gone seemed to stretch longer and longer, and his time home shorter.

Whenever my mother could get him on the phone, which was rarely, he would make excuses about why he wasn’t coming home, and why he hadn’t sent any money. I suspect he was supporting other women and possibly other kids with it. I’ll never know for sure though.

After surviving that experience you would think she’d never mention the word marriage ever again. Alas, no. She still holds out hope that I’ll find a “nice man and settle down.” For both our sakes she needs to stop watching the Hallmark Channel.

“Sperm?” Both her expression and tone disgusted, there’s no doubt about how she feels. “You are going to one of those sperm places?”

“Sperm bank. It’s not a sperm place. And I’d rather not. I’m hoping to get Jeff to agree to do this with me.”

“Hmm.” An uptick of a dark shapely eyebrow. The disgust has turned into displeasure. Which is no surprise since she was never a Jeff fan. “Have you spoken to him?”

“Not yet.”

She exhales loudly. “Have you told your brother?”

“I haven’t heard from him in a week.”

My brother is an Army Ranger. Alex has always had a restless, wandering heart. He enlisted right after high school, much to my mother’s chagrin, and never looked back.

“He’ll be back at the end of the month. Maybe you should wait to make this kind of decision.”

I mean…really? My already overdeveloped eye roll muscles get another workout. “I don’t need my brother’s permission to make choices about my life.”

“Stubborn as a goat,” she mutters under her breath in Spanish while shaking out her newspaper. “No romance, no love. Who does that?” This is delivered in English and loud enough for the heavens to hear.

I do, that’s who. Though I refrain from verbally sparring with her knowing she’ll only dig in.

“When are you doing this?” There’s challenge in her voice. She’s trying to figure out how much time she has to avert this ship.

“As soon as I speak to Jeff, or find a more suitable candidate to be the father.”

Her face bunches up, then comes to rest. More muttering to herself. Shaking her head, she goes back to reading her paper.

That went better than expected.