A Fever You Can't Sweat Out

This week, while traveling in Croatia for a work-slash-play trip, I received an e-mail informing me that a romcom movie script I wrote has been selected as a finalist in the LA International Screenplay Awards!! I immediately started sobbing because to be recognized for writing is something I care more about than I let on (hold for applause and compliments) and whenever I hit send on anything I’ve written, it’s like launching a prayer into the aether and hoping you receive some response… a sign, a whisper, even an out-of-office automatic vacation responder is better than nothing. So to get the notice long after I placed my order with the Universe that somebody had read and enjoyed this script that was born out of an experience from a secretly tumultuous time in my life was everything.

What a time that was. In early 2019, midway through my 36th year, I was struck by the sudden and inexplicable urge to become pregnant. Any woman who has ever declared that she doesn’t want kids has been met with a smug response by some member of the parentarchy to the tune of, “Just you wait- your switch will flip.” The narrow-eyed warning sat dormant in my brain like a sleeper cell until that moment when I became acutely aware of the blinking neon VACANCY sign over my womb.

And so began a quest to uncover whether my desire to turn my uterus into a short-term rental was the result of a biological time bomb, or the fact that I lacked a sense of purpose that parenthood might conveniently fulfill. I read every book on the subject, watched birthing videos as a type of exposure therapy to see if I would crack, started taking prenatal meds just in case, and began asking myself some difficult questions about whether I was actually happy.

On the outside, my life was beautiful. I was in Hawaii with my boyfriend who was directing a movie that was filming there. The emptiness I felt was not confined to the places within my reproductive system… it was all-encompassing. My dreams of being a writer had been shelved, replaced by the desire to be a good partner and confidante— always available, always contributing, devotion at all cost. My aspirations had never provided me with a sense of security, but the dangling carrot of committed love was one I thought I could grasp. And so I tried endlessly, exhausting myself and fighting against the demands of my soul to use my words.

The fixation with my curious need for procreation consumed me to the point I had no choice but to write about it. I thought that if perhaps I could fictionalize my experience, the truth would come out about my subconscious intentions. At the very least, I thought I should give writing a final shot before switching gears. I knew myself well enough to know that parenthood would be a great excuse for me to abandon my career goals completely, so when my boyfriend went off to work in the wee hours of the morning, I set about creating a character whose plight could mirror my own. Much like child-rearing, it was a labor of love that sometimes became an all-out fight for your life.

Writing makes me face myself and all of my demons… my weaknesses and my addictions, my apathy, my wildness that refuses to be contained like a child waging a war against bedtime even though it is so exhausted from the day. Parenting myself through the writing process was ultimately the answer, of course. Laboring over the story (and my creative life as a whole) became the source of fulfillment and purpose I had been seeking all along.

By the midpoint of the script, my baby fever had vanished, replaced by a desire to create something lovely and loving that might one day take on a life of its own. As we speak, we are in the very early stages of optioning the script. If it were a pregnancy, it would be too soon to talk about, and so I will wait to tell you more. But to know that the impulse that hit me like a wave of morning sickness (I can only imagine) was not for nothing is so satisfying.

It took a few years for me to feel ready to share this script with the world. A pregnant pause. Even though it is highly fictionalized, it’s still deeply personal… it shares my DNA after all. What becomes of it is out of my hands, but it has already served its purpose in my life. I can only hope it does the same for someone else.

It’s worth noting that my sister got pregnant with her third and final child right around the time I was struck by baby fever. Which is weird, but it makes me feel like I got to have my cake and eat it too. And that’s what being a childless aunt is all about.