We believe children aren't the future

"It seems so wrong," my mother laments later when I tell her about the pancakes.

To her, our infertility is a cosmic-size iniquity. We grow quiet. We are remembering the futility of arguing with science. At least, I am. She, meanwhile, is measuring the world's injustices. Finding anecdotes with which to petition the Lord.

"I mean, look at Callie" she says. "She's a white cat mother. How can that be right?"

Ah, the white cat women. So many of them in the world. When I was 8 years old, my family moved to a new blue house that had been unoccupied. A white cat had made her home in the basement, delivered a litter and then abandoned the kittens. My mother nursed the tiny creatures with an eyedropper. Callie was like that white cat -- a woman who forgot her children. Left them with a temperamental drunk who probably fed them microwaved pixie sticks for dinner.

By offering up this information about Callie, my mother is trying to negotiate with unseen forces. She mentions how I sing to our golden retriever and plant sunflowers with a squadron of neighbor children, how my husband can play Super Mario with a 6-year-old cousin for hours -- evidence of what she sees as superior humanity and parenting aptitude. Maybe, because of my mother's lawyering, Zeus and his clan will revisit the issue, and transfer Callie's offspring to us?

I try to cheer up my mother. I tell her I'm not a fit parent anyway. In fact, I'm a secret crack whore.

"You're not a crack whore."

"Pregnancy might kick-start a latent mental illness that makes me want to injure small children with forks."

"It won't."

"I would never wake up at 6 a.m."

"You would."

Nothing will pacify her. And so we talk about our prognosis, those embryo-defying topics. My mother finds hope where I see only obstacle. She believes, in her heart of hearts, the place where she believes God exists, that a baby will happen. She dreams of holding our baby.

Me, I can't go there. Hope is unthinkable because hope is a solid. It germinates and becomes a parallel-universe reality, something you can almost touch through the glass. My husband and I hesitate when we talk about babies. Sentences seem unfinished. It's as if we agreed, without saying, that to talk too loudly would conjure a dream that could break. A dream that, lost, could break us. We could summon a loss that would ask to be mourned.

It's much easier to be flip about children. When my husband and I meet people, it usually takes about three seconds after they give us the "you're a great couple" line for them to ask the inevitable question: "Why don't you have kids?" My husband has a pat answer. He says, "We don't believe that children are the future."

The pause that follows reminds me that people don't think anti-kid jokes are funny. These days, it's a form of blasphemy, much like mocking condoms and ridiculing recycling. Either that, or they see the edge of a lie in his eyes; they know that sarcasm usually masks pain, and they don't know how to respond. Laugh? Or flinch?

I know that feeling. Truth is, we do indeed believe children are the future -- just maybe not our future. So saith the gods of fertility, anyway. It's much less painful to give a flip response -- tell people that we were really, truly frightened by "Children of the Village of the Damned" -- than to haul out the dreams deferred, the medical charts and other evidence stacked against us. Low motility? Check. Endometriosis? Yep. Bad karma from a previous life? Certainly.

The sins of our parents? One of my aunts thinks it has something to do with the hormones they fed cows in the '60s. My grandmother felt it just wasn't time yet. Everyone has his or her theory about someone else's infertility. And everyone thinks it's OK to ask.

And we're just kind of ignoring it. Like a messy room that won't clean itself.

Either way -- whether admitting we'd like to cradle a tot but can't, or expressing faux irreverence toward the children of today, tiny Buddhas all -- we're outsiders in a baby-glorifying world, and we comfort ourselves by listening to the silence.

And I want to tell my friend on the phone that the silence she so envies would give her little peace. It is a quiet with its own growing vocabulary, a silence that howls at 4 a.m. I want to tell her about this silence, but I don't say a thing.

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