Did you ever have the dream that you’re pregnant? That very real dream, the one you have before you’ve even had sex, but it feels so real that you don’t notice that important fact? I remember that dream, more so I remember waking up from that dream—the cold wash of pure relief. (Do men have a version of this dream?)

After I started having sex, there was the late period. The agonizingly late period, accompanied by panic and then (finally!) the warm wash of pure relief, maybe even tears, as the blood made its entrance.

Then there was a long stretch of a more mature handle on birth control that left me with just the monthly rhythm, surfing through the cycle and the secrets of its language.

And then, like a force of nature, it was time to get pregnant and we did. Not having a cycle every month was quickly and thoroughly overlooked in the face of such an event as waiting for a baby. Because I nursed my daughter for almost two years, my period didn’t come back for at least a year after she was born. But when it did, well, the Chinese call it “gui lai” and it was a real event—a marker of my changing body, changing back.

I had another child and again promptly forgot about menstruating or what it was like to not menstruate. When my “gui lai” came this time, also nearly a year after my son was born, my body sang with it. With two children, my body well knew the reality, not just the fearful dream, of what this meant. I could get pregnant!

And since that fateful day of singing fertility, it has been a game of “maybe/maybe not.” Will we do it all again? Every day brings a different answer.

People will be all over the board, having vastly different experiences of fertility and what their menstrual cycle had meant to them; for me, it surprises me that I don’t fear pregnancy now that I know what it means to go truly sleepless and compromised by the demands of caring for children every day. But in fact, it’s the opposite.

Now every month there is still the waiting, the speculating, sometimes the counting of days, the recounting of possible “slip-ups,” and yet, when at last the question is answered, the blood is here, I am not pregnant, there is no wash of relief anymore. Just a little pit in the stomach, an almost inaudible sigh. Maybe it’s not surprising at all. For me, knowing, really knowing, what it is to get pregnant and have children, it’s not the magic of the menstrual cycle I feel (although that’s there too), it’s the magic of babies that I’ve got my eye on.

by Michelle A.L. Singer