Theric Jepson is one of our favorite fiction writers. We hope you will enjoy his wit and insight in this personal narrative.
The post-op instructions tell me I should be able to go about my normal routines tomorrow. They also say I should be able to return to work in two days. And that more vigorous activity will be possible in a week. Sex is allowed in five days if I feel up to it. The five-inch-thick layer of gauze can come off in two days. I should be able to lift a bag of groceries in three or four. Exercise in a week or two. The full range of human possibility, save one, should return in a couple weeks. If not, call my doctor.
So, to return to that first sentence, the post-op instructions presuppose that my normal routine is lying in bed with a bag of frozen peas on my crotch. It would be more accurate to call that my aspirational routine.
Having one’s genitals dyed orange with iodine, then swathed in blue towels and clamped with metal clamps for maximum visibility and access is one of those things that, when the time arrives, you find you can do. The enormous, burly woman who preps me is generous, dousing my nethers with a gallon or so of stain. We have much to chat about, as I am a high school English teacher and she loved her high school English classes, reading all of Romeo and Juliet the night the first scene was assigned, buying her own copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. The doctor, in his turn, loved Gatsby. He started buying and reading Fitzgerald and had exhausted the complete works before leaving high school.
This is good because the only topics I can think to chat about are a bit too literal. I do learn new words like lumen (not the flashlight word but the inside-anatomical-tubes word) and intraabdominal (not the kind of surgery I’m doing today—mine’s merely intrascrotal), but sometimes the thrill of new vocabulary ain’t enough.
In a way, it’s a lot like visiting the dentist. My wife, Lynsey, and I find dentistry relaxing. Lie back, eyes closed, chatting optional, a professional scraping away. Sure, sometimes it’s uncomfortable, but grabbing onto my pants legs or clenching my toes suffices to get me through. I’m not sure how Lynsey copes. Maybe she falls back onto hypnobirthing—it worked in labor, after all. In this room, however (which is much like a hygienist’s nook), I have no pants and my arms are crossed on my chest. If things get uncomfortable, all I can do is put my feet under their rests and push up.
When it comes to vasectomizing, Dr. Li prefers all three methods of closure. After snipping out a quarter-inch length of each vas, he electrocutes their insides (lumen!) to cauterize (which I could feel just fine, lidocaine or no lidocaine, my body jerking on the table like a B-movie actor being brought back to life), clasps them shut with titanium clips, then folds them over upon themselves, stitching each half to itself.
Then everything gets shoved back in the tiny hole and I get a giant stack of gauze to pad my codpiece for two days. I’m left alone in the room to wipe off some of the orange and get dressed. I’ve never worn a jock strap in my life and, as the tighty-whiteys I bought for some unremembered purpose were unfindable, I put on the tightest-fitting pair of garments I own—a style I haven’t purchased since my mission (since, in my married state, my libido requires no mechanical suppression)—pull them all the way up, roll down the waistband, pull on my pajamas, and take baby steps into my no-more-babies future.
Because I myself am a big baby, it’s only seven hours later that Lynsey feels the need to remind me, for the record, that pushing four humans out of her own tiny hole was worse. This is nothing I deny. In fact, it’s part of the reason I went under the knife today. But! She did have one advantage: I was there, feeding her ice chips and whispering koans about her motherly strength and pushing a tennis ball into the small of her back. I on the other hand was alone with Dr. Li. And sure, he loves Fitzgerald, but still.
I missed her. I wanted her hand—or some part of her—to hold.
We were done having babies a long time ago, Lynsey and I, the youngest of our three boys now seven. We started early so we could have a nice, long, empty-nest period. We filled our tiny house quickly, but since we only had boys, they fit in the one available room, stacked on top of each other. Done.
And, consciously, we were done. Subconsciously however, maybe not. Relying on our own self-discipline was hardly the way to stop at three, after all, but if Lynsey secretly (even to herself) wanted another, who was I . . .
Holding my beloved as she wept, night after night, mourning the existence of this new thing growing inside her, I understood something new about abortion—something new about its potential whys. Because although she dreaded leaving our home, she was also ready to do something with her hours besides care for children. And now this thing inside her had supplanted whatever possible futures she might have crafted.
Not that abortion was ever on the table for us. It wasn’t. And even though Lynsey lurched about motion-sick for eight months, now that child number four is here, we are so glad (even though there’s nowhere to put her).
My current stance on abortion strikes me as exceedingly Mormon, though perhaps a Deseret News poll would disagree. But if we can agree that certain circumstances make abortion morally sound (and the General Handbook, the Church’s official position on all things worth having an official position on, says yea), then abortion should be legal and available, full stop. Consider rape, for instance. Courts move slower than pregnancy, so unless abortion is accessible whenever a woman requires, raped women are de facto forced to carry rapists’ seed to term.
Choice may be the most sacred principle in our faith’s theology. If something can ever be allowed, how dare you choose for another whether they can or cannot do it? But this isn’t an essay about hot-button political topics, my fluctuating opinions on which no one cares.
Lynsey and I were married when I was barely still twenty-three and she was barely twenty-one. This is what our parents hoped BYU would do for us and, amazingly, it worked. I had no capacity to flirt or date, and thus was doomed to live in small dark rooms scribbling books; Lynsey had no desire whatsoever to get married, and would instead move to Manhattan and wear black and be dangerous. It took some divine intervention to get us inside the Oakland temple and sealed, but that’s another story with another angle on choice. (She’s still a bit peeved at God, if you ask her about it. And who can blame her? Have you met me?)
If we’d met and stayed in Oakland instead of merely wedding there, likely we would have arranged a different time frame—one more in keeping with our Bay Area peers—but being in Provo, we decided three years without kids was our longest morally defensible option. Therefore, after three years, we would start having kids and get them raised and gone before we were old. Three years and five months later, child number one was born. To look at photos, egad, were we young.
We moved home to California and decided to have another baby. Our apartment complex in Lancaster was adjacent to the site of a fatal shooting that occurred the weekend before we moved in. The desert was colorless and smelled bad. We had no neighbors who were neighborly. Lynsey felt like she was in prison, while the school I worked at was designed by a builder of prisons—and felt like it. Our life: as barren as we seemed to be.
When the way opened for us to move to the Bay, we snatched it, and Lynsey had only one period in El Cerrito before child number two was conceived.
Fertility is a confused sign of God’s favor. Mary was so favored she conceived sex-free. Sarah was so favored she was infertile for almost a century. In both cases: magic baby. God loves you.
The arrival of child number two wasn’t the disastrous, caesarian-interrupted labor of our first go-round, but labor is intense regardless, and Lynsey still wanted an experience to match her mental image. And, happily enough, twenty-six months later, the birth of child number three came only a half hour after we arrived at the hospital—a clean, simple, sliding-out awash in joy and motherly success. So while pregnancy number four was miserable, Lynsey did crave the high of giving birth to another child. “You are strong, you are strong,” I said as the contractions hit. “You are a mother.”
“I am a mother.”
“Your body is doing what it was built to do.”
“I am strong. I’ve done this before.”
“You’ve done this before.”
I knew that babies’ genitals are swollen from months in the stew and that foolish fathers often misidentify girls as boys, but I still made that error in the quarter-second I saw our baby before she was taken away so they could double-check her color. Less than a minute later, Lynsey held her on her chest, high on motherdom. It was ten minutes before anyone discovered we thought she was a boy.
A girl. Us? After three boys? Is such a thing even possible?
We wept.
This secondary miracle made the moment even more joyous.
We were told, when numbers two and three were born, not to let older siblings first see their fresh sibling held by their shared mother. Let mom hold the older child as dad introduces baby. It seemed to help. But when the boys arrived from Grandma’s four days later, it hardly seemed to matter which of us held their sister. They said hi to Mom as I brought the baby in from the back room and—it doesn’t matter. Her much older brothers aren’t interested in competing with her for Mom’s love and affection. They’re interested in providing their own love and affection.
We now have an oldest child, a middle child, a youngest child, and an only child—one of each. And by the time she is the age of the youngest, he’ll be her only brother left at home.
As we stopped for lunch on the way home from the hospital today and I was telling Lynsey about having my balls electrocuted, she was generously filled with remorse for not taking prevention upon herself. But that’s nonsense, of course. Snip-snip (correction: snip-snip-snip-snip) (hypercorrection: stab-stab-slice-snip-snip-snip-snip-bzz-clamp-clamp-doublestitch) might take—gasp—two weeks to recover from, but my body has not yet accepted (nor ever will) equal consequences for our reproduction—and it would have been grotesquely unfair to postpartumly douse my beloved in hormones we wouldn’t accept in a cheeseburger or to thrust a strange device into a womb that deserves ennobling retirement after building the four children we now have, one, two, three, and one.
(Incidentally, is three boys and one girl in one bedroom even legal in America? What if you’re a schoolteacher and every square foot costs a thousand dollars? Hhhh. You know what? Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.)
So. Farewell, seed without number. I’ve no doubt we would have loved you. But our house is finite. And another pregnancy might kill us, since we would never kill you.
Theric Jepson wrote the novel Just Julie’s Fine, which Wayfare’s own Lori Forsyth said made both her and her husband laugh so hard as he read it aloud that they could not breathe nor maintain an upright position. Accordingly, this essay is accompanied by a warning that it is not for asthmatics, those with spinal injuries, or the otherwise infirm. “Fertility” was originally commissioned by Holly Welker for her book Revising Eternity: 27 Latter-day Saint Men Reflect on Modern Relationships (University of Illinois Press, 2022). It has been edited slightly for Wayfare.
Featured art: A Bridal Couple from Southern Germany, c. 1470.