Without a baby now, my arms are often empty. My life is emptying out of baby things: the bouncer, the swing, the bathtub, the gate, the bottles we recently gave away. Suddenly, or slowly over many individual days, my life has been emptying out. When I sit down to write, I empty out thoughts and ideas inside my head, but then they fill back up.Or, I am overflowing. Things spill out over the edges of my life. The children have too many toys. The house has too many dishes, too many shirts and tiny socks caught in the washer's seal, too many spider webs, too much dirt in the windowsills, too many backpacks and empty sippy cups at the end of the day. Sometimes I think I have too much goodness, if there is such a thing. Too many smiles and tiny bright teeth. Too much laughter at the end of some days when all I want is for the children to fall asleep. I frequently nod off as I am telling a story to my son at bedtime. When he says, “Mama?” I wake up. He is not falling asleep because he is still too full. Often, before bed, while lying on his back, he stretches his arms above his head and holds his straightened legs just above the floor, pressing his hands together, as if in prayer. He's done this since he was baby, but only recently was he able to explain, “I'm making my body tired.”This longing for more—for another baby, a better house, a quieter street, a better system for junk mail, more help with dishes and laundry, more time to write, more money in my paycheck, more contact with friends—confuses me. Do I need more or less? Am I, right now, full or empty?Maybe I'm asking the wrong question.If I describe the yard as full of tomatoes and sunshine, it becomes poetic, but the description is false. Of the two garden beds in our front yard, one is full of dirt and tomatoes but also pill bugs, worms, earwigs, fruit blackening with rot, unripe green tomatoes, and a yellowing squash plant squeezed into a too-small space. The tomatoes heave groundward, their stems heavy with fruit. They go to waste. The yard is full of gravel and bees, the yellowing leaves of the Chinaberry and its stamens and seeds, woody insides of lavender bushes, aphids, black widows, wind, sunshine and car exhaust.Whether I want something different than I already have, maybe, is the question.In Paris, everything was faded and light, and I often felt full and empty at the same time. This was years ago. One morning, a waiter brought me an entire loaf of brioche with a side of butter and raspberry jam. Wow, I said and laughed. I can't eat all of this. But I did. Afterward, we walked in the Luxembourg Gardens and sat under drooping trees while we watched children sailing boats in fountains.The dollar was weak and my husband and I had spent most of our money on a week's stay in a hotel room. Housed an economical distance from city center, we spent a lot of time riding on trains. I watched Parisians get on and off at each stop. When we visited the cheese monger, boulangerie, or wine shop, we mingled with locals, not tourists, which helped me enjoy a delusion that I had traded the reality of my life for this other reality where life went on, indifferent to me.About nine months before that trip I'd been pregnant for the first time, and when I called a friend to share the good news, she'd started crying and told me that she too was pregnant but had feared telling me because she felt bad about my situation. My husband and I had then been trying to have a baby for more than a year. She and her husband hadn't even really been trying, she said, had in fact only begun to talk about having a baby and now she was unexpectedly pregnant. Many of my friends had started families by then, and I'd always remained hopeful. But now, finally having shared good news of my own, I felt empty. My friend was relieved because she didn't have to feel bad about her secret anymore, but when she emptied her good news into me, my good news had emptied out.A few weeks later, the pregnancy began emptying out too. I bled for a week or so until I was totally empty. My friend cried with me, but I was aware that her baby was still inside of her, and mine had become nothing more than air.“At least now you know that you can get pregnant,” everyone said. But I didn't get pregnant again in the remaining months of my friend's pregnancy. She grew fuller and fuller, her pregnant belly forming a contrast to my empty one. My husband and I planned to be in Paris during the week in which my friend was due to give birth because I didn't want to be in the same country, thinking of my baby, when she had hers.In Paris, we sat on benches in parks, sharing bottles of wine and bread and cheese in the dark. We entered cool underground catacombs and touched tombs and human bones. We walked along paths in cemeteries. We both seemed transfixed by death. At the Pére Lachaise cemetery, we walked under trees and contemplated the gravesites of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. I rubbed a statue's bronze penis on a grave marker for good luck. We sat inside stone churches out of the sun. In one, I lit a candle and said a prayer.My friend was upset with me for missing the birth of her baby. I was probably riding an escalator in the Pompidou when she pushed him out. Later, she told me the birth had been quick, almost easy. She was made to birth babies, she said, laughing. For a few years after that, I failed her in other ways too, and eventually we grew apart.When we arrived home, I was pregnant again.In the beginning of that state of affairs, was another state of affairs where I would be staring at a dead baby on an ultrasound a few months later. But I couldn't see that then. Instead, my clothes grew tighter. I felt empty and hungry all the time, but my growing midsection looked overly full. I stopped sleeping. Though I was filling up, I was terrified of being emptied out.When I saw the dead baby on the ultrasound, I realized that although I'd felt pregnant, it was a false fullness.At the end of the summer, my husband and I went camping near the Kern river with some friends. At night, tarantulas ambled down dirt paths, illuminated by our flashlights. In the afternoon, we walked up a dusty road to a stream that trickled over smooth rocks, forming a gentle water slide. I went down the stream once, bumping a little as I went. When I splashed into the shallow pool of water at the bottom of the slide, I felt happy and afraid. Happy because I believed for a moment that things would work out, and afraid because I feared they wouldn't.For a long time, I tried to determine the cause of death, even though medicine could not.Advice-giving makes people feel in control, as if it would be possible for them to retain some control in the same circumstance. Advice explains the unexplainable. Much of the advice I received about getting pregnant involved suggestions about how to empty myself in order to be filled, a paradox evoking the impression of spiritual truth. It was suggested that I was too full of fear, plans, regret, a desire for control. Or that I was too full of the wrong chemicals, foods or drinks, vitamins, minerals, hormones. Other advice indicated that I was too empty. That I needed more variety, less single-minded focus. That once I emptied myself of the desire for a baby, I would create the right amount of emptiness in which to conceive a baby. Or, that in my sadness my life had been emptied of things that once made it full of meaning, and that sad emptiness was what prevented a baby from taking hold.But whether I saw myself as full or empty, nothing seemed to work.“It may never turn into anything,” my dermatologist said after the results of a biopsied mole came back as atypical. “But I think we should remove it.” Suddenly, I knew that in order to have a baby, I had to empty my skin of the mole. At the time, my husband and I were five months into fertility treatments but were between IVF cycles. My reproductive endocrinologist said that if removing the mole put my mind at ease, it would be a good idea.When I arrived at the doctor's office for the procedure, I saw that I would have the same surgeon who had performed the same procedure on me one year earlier. Pale and portly, he had a shiny head, glasses, and a red beard. He was a loquacious fellow. During the first procedure, he had spoken to me about his first wife who had died of cancer twenty years earlier. He said I reminded him of her. Being that the purpose of my visit had been to cut away a potentially cancerous growth, the comparison had been unsettling.But in my HMO plan, finding a different surgeon would be difficult. It would mean finding a new dermatologist, getting a referral, scheduling an appointment, and a new surgery date. That would mean months of waiting, in which time I hoped to become pregnant. A woman I'd recently met at an infertility support group had recently found a tiny mole on her leg that turned out to be a melanoma. Thank God, I wasn't pregnant at the time, she said.The mole was located near my clavicle, so the surgeon asked me to remove my sweater. I was wearing a black tank top underneath, and without my sweater, I felt cold in the operating room. I looked up, past his meaty face, to the acoustic ceiling tiles.“Are you sure you want to do this?” he said, touching the mole with one finger. He told me I had a beautiful neck and chest. The delicate skin where the mole was located would likely form a scar. His compliment made me uncomfortable, but even more so, his impromptu medical advice. He said he knew my dermatologist, and he'd known her father, who'd also been a dermatologist, and she was being overly zealous about the mole removal thing. “This mole might turn into something years from now, but most likely it won't do anything,” he said.When I finally convinced him that I did want the surgery, he put on his mask and pulled out a long needle filled with anesthesia. The injection didn't hurt, but I felt afraid when he reached for the knife. I sat very still and tried to not cry. I felt the pressure of the scalpel and his heavy hand as it rested on my breastbone.As he worked, he spoke again of his dead wife. I didn't remind him that I'd been his patient before because I didn't want to upset him as he took a knife to my chest. But as he cut into my skin, I worried that I was somehow becoming his first wife, that his words, which I could not prevent, gave him power over me. By conflating us in his mind, was her spirit seeping into me, infecting me with her bad luck? Was his talk a curse that entered me through the skin he cut open? Perhaps he was emptying me of something I didn't want but filling me up with something else I didn't want.When I left the office and the anesthesia began to wear off, I felt heavier, not lighter. I decided I would never see him again. I would file a complaint. Still, I felt weighted down. The thing I really wanted, a baby, was not inside of me, and the mole that maybe I wanted to keep after all, was gone.My skin began to throb, a place near my heart but not in it.Much later, when I became a foster mom, to a baby we would end up adopting, a friend asked me why I was still feeling sad. “You have a baby. You're a mother now,” she said. Her logic was solid, and I couldn't explain how real the emptiness felt.Recently, I saw a fertility specialist. It's been years since those lost babies, and though I have two adopted children of my own now, and a very full life, I was hoping for answers. The specialist had a soft voice and long hair. When I told her my story, she asked questions and we both cried a few times. We spoke for two hours, cramming nearly ten years of history into a single visit.She said that in the years since my last round of IVF, there had been new discoveries, including a test that could more accurately evaluate ovarian reserve. If the numbers were low, it would mean the quality and supply of eggs was probably low. New advances also meant that if we wanted to try again, we could transfer more mature embryos and test them for abnormalities. This meant the chance of success might be higher, even though I was older. At the end of the two hours, she recommended an ultrasound to look at my uterus and ovaries, and I felt hopeful.As she looked at my insides projected on the ultrasound screen, she said everything looked good. “Here are your antral follicles,” she said, and I felt the familiar, uncomfortable pressure of the wand against my ovaries. Her breast pressed against my leg, and she seemed motherly then. She spoke to me slowly, as if addressing a terminally ill patient. “You have two follicles here. And one on the other side.” She measured them and called out numbers to a nurse. Then, she grew quiet. “For a woman your age, I'd expect to see six or more follicles on each side. This probably indicates a problem in egg quality.” She paused. “Seeing this, I wouldn't recommend IVF, unless you use donor eggs. I'm sorry,” she said. She looked at me and her eyes, like mine, filled with tears.For ten years, tests had indicated that everything was normal even though my body continued to behave abnormally. This diagnosis would explain the two miscarriages (bad eggs), my inability to get pregnant again as I moved farther into my 30s (bad eggs), the failed IVF's despite perfect-looking embryos (bad eggs).Now I finally understood there was an invisible snag none of us could see.Maybe my bad eggs had caused normal periods each month, resulted in two pregnancies, formed embryos that floated in petri dishes like iridescent nests. The bad eggs I was full of had made my body empty and had been hiding inside me all along. In all likelihood, I was born with bad eggs I had always thought good. My mother's body had knit them into me. Or perhaps my body had made those bad eggs.Suddenly, there was a new presence inside of me, even though I felt the same way I'd always felt. The new knowledge about my microscopic eggs was heavy, but I was also full of a new emptiness that, in some ways, was lightening me.For months after that visit, I kept thinking that even though my ovaries were crammed with bad eggs, perhaps there were still some good ones in there. My chances of getting pregnant were not zero, the specialist had said. But, the diagnosis came anti-climactically years after I had been trying to get pregnant, when I had two children and a very full life.One Friday afternoon shortly after that visit with the specialist, a chance came to fill up the emptiness for which I had seen the specialist.A social worker called me to say there was a new baby who needed a home, and she thought for various important reasons that our family would be a good fit. Because of the brief moment in which we considered saying yes to the baby, in which I had imagined how full my life would be with this new thing in it, I felt even emptier after I hung up the phone. Even when my son and I went swimming later, and he hung on to my neck and pushed hard off my legs to swim to the wall, though not as much or as hard as he used to when we first started swimming together, even then, I still felt empty. I was not hungry when we got home even though I was not full, and after I ate dinner, I still did not feel full, but I also did not feel hungry. That night, both children suddenly became sick. I tucked them in, touching their hair and foreheads. I felt empty because I had rejected something that would have made my life full to the point of overflowing. And now a new emptiness was in my old life.The next day my son had an asthma attack. Since it was Saturday, my husband took him to urgent care, and urgent care sent him to the ER. I came to the hospital a few hours later to relieve my husband, and he left to relieve the babysitter whom I had called to stay with our daughter while she napped. Driving to the hospital, I thought about my son dying and wondered how I would keep on living after that, and I thought about it until I couldn't take it anymore, until the imaginary life I was living in my head became unbearable. But then I got to the hospital, and my son was there, very much alive and cranky. I squeezed onto the bed next to him, so close I could smell his sweat. He looked too small for the bed. His chest was still heaving, but he wanted to play. He showed me a toy car my husband had bought him at the gift shop and got mad when I turned the volume down on the TV. Then my real life returned, and I felt full again.That is, the thing I had said no to became smaller once I had almost lost my son and then got him back again.A few weeks earlier, I had felt simultaneously full and empty when I brought dinner to a friend with a new baby. The day was hot, and the baby was wearing a onesie with green stripes. I watched my friend's husband holding the new baby on his lap while rocking in a wooden chair on the porch. The baby stared at me without crying, and the husband's long fingers encircled the baby's tiny midsection and head. It made me think, as I had often thought recently, that maybe I wanted a new baby too, that my life was empty without one.When I returned home, the sink was still full of dirty dishes, and my children were putting on their shoes. We were rushing to meet some friends at a park where there would be an outdoor concert, and we would sit on a picnic blanket and eat chocolate cookies. I would still feel some leftover emptiness later when we danced in the grass, and when I saw my daughter chasing my son, tripping and laughing as she ran, I would simultaneously feel full again.On the afternoon that the phone call came for the new baby, our foster daughter had been living with us for ten months, and it seemed certain that we would be adopting her. She was two and a half. The important thing the social worker had said was that our foster daughter's biological mother had a new baby, and if we agreed to take the baby there was little chance the baby would be moved to another home because the courts favor keeping biological siblings together, and this meant we would become the adoptive home for the baby if she ended up needing one. Why, I wondered, didn't this call come two years earlier when we had first started trying to adopt a second baby? We had lost two foster babies in between our son and the foster daughter we thought was staying. We had wanted to adopt each time, but those babies had each been reunited with blood relatives through a complicated series of events and circumstances. Two years earlier, this call, this baby, would have been perfect. Now we had two empty places from the lost children and the two children who had stayed.When I mentioned earlier that we said no to the baby, that was an oversimplification for the sake of the story. The more complicated version is that we'd asked for some time to think it over, and the social worker had agreed to give us the weekend. My husband and I had spent the afternoon discussing the possibility of a new baby. A few hours later, another social worker called to say they had placed the baby with another family, the one that had custody of our foster daughter's other biological sibling. We had spent time with this other family, so their taking the new baby meant that our daughter would have the chance to know her sister, for which we were grateful. But because the child welfare services office hadn't called us back to say that circumstances had changed, and they now needed an answer right away, I felt I had unfairly lost my chance to say yes.Before we had our son, my life had felt too empty. We had tried for five years to have a baby, and instead of wanting to give up, it had made me want one even more. When it became clear that we couldn't have one, we decided to adopt one, and then when our son came to us, I felt full to overflowing, like my one life had suddenly multiplied. Every morning I cried from happiness and every night I cried from despair.Because we'd had no time to plan, I kept working for the first five weeks of my son's life, and my husband stayed home. I answered emails with one hand while feeding my son with a bottle on my lap. When I came home late at night from teaching, I wrapped him in receiving blankets and held him on my chest while he slept. Those nights, with his cheek on my chest, I felt full. The weather was cold and rainy then, and at night, I'd listen to gusts of wind in the tall palm trees outside and the heavy rain that blew against the glass behind my head.Some days I put on my shoes and feel suddenly tiny. The other day while standing on a steep hillside, I saw my house from above and realized the red paint made it look like a target. Another day I was out driving and suddenly my own street looked unfamiliar to me. I wondered if it was the same thing looking out from inside my head that had always been there, and whether it is the same kind of thing looking out from inside everyone. Then, just as suddenly, I was me again, back in regular time, inside my body, inside my car, traveling at a safe speed over crosswalks and under green lights.Sometimes I swim laps in an outdoor pool and when I jump in, even on a hot day, the cold water makes my insides seize up. As I begin to swim, my body feels light, like a bag of skin pulling itself over the water.A few weeks later, we were able to meet the baby we almost said yes to. She was tiny and kind of empty-seeming, the way newborns seem made of skin and bones only, somewhat hollow and folded in. Her skin was like thin pie dough. It flaked off her legs and arms, and above her eyebrows, and she had a full head of black hair that was soft and stood up in thick curls like icing on a cake. Her skin was the color of black truffles and her feet like two pink erasers. When I held her near my neck and swayed a little, she fell asleep.I stood with her, barefoot in the grass, feeling simultaneously full and empty. Full because I was imagining we had said yes, but empty because I knew she wasn't mine. I watched my own children running away from me, down a hill to a playground situated on the other side of a little gulch that may once have been full of water. I was standing with the new baby on a hillside that was like the bank of that now empty stream, looking at my children as if they were someone else's children, except that part of my heart was going with them.