Fertile

→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 35: FALL/WINTER 2025

All modern breeds of chicken are descended from the red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia. In the wild, these birds lay eggs seasonally, typically producing a brood in spring. For thousands of years, humans have selectively bred chickens to create prolific egg layers. 

On a muggy afternoon in late summer I tuck a still wet pregnancy test into my purse and race twenty minutes up the freeway to surprise my husband at work. He’s alone in the greenhouse, tending to the lupines, when I walk in with the plastic stick hidden behind my back. He smiles at me knowingly, my flushed, grinning face exposing my secret before I’ve said a word. We have been married for three months and feel like the world is ours.

In the days and months and years that follow, I compulsively take photos of my pregnancy tests. Collections of faint blue and pink lines positioned neatly on windowsills and porcelain sinks; eight tests arranged in a row one by one. I bolt awake in the morning, anxious to pee on another strip, and to make sure the line is darkening.

“This is my first time experiencing the rush of a public announcement, how buoyantly the word pregnant floats in the air when the room is filled with hope, when the people hearing it don’t know the complexities that accompany this news. ”

In my most recent pregnancy, on a pandemic-delayed honeymoon to Portugal and Morocco, we take pictures of ourselves with test in hand, lying on the grass of a public park in Lisbon. We spend the afternoon relaxing in the sun and eating Magnum bars, writing postcards to our friends. On my mother’s card we sign, “We can’t wait to get back and see you, all three of us.” After watching the pregnancy test turn positive in the bathroom of a Portuguese hostel, I begin telling anyone I want. I will never see these people again, so I can be carefree, sharing my news with zeal. In Marrakech, the ladies in my cooking class congratulate me wildly, peppering me with questions about plans, due dates, pregnancy symptoms. I return to my husband glowing. “I forgot that when most people announce their pregnancy the audience is overjoyed.” This is my first time experiencing the rush of a public announcement, how buoyantly the word pregnant floats in the air when the room is filled with hope, when the people hearing it don’t know the complexities that accompany this news. 

After that day, I tell every stranger I meet. The Berber man carving wooden toys at the market, the newly divorced Australian woman sleeping in our dorm-style hostel. At the end of the trip, before flying home through Portugal, we roam the streets of Porto with the rest of the city, bonking strangers on the head with rubber mallets, celebrating a holiday we don’t quite understand. We eat grilled pork sandwiches and dance to live music on the blacktop of an elementary school, and as the warm June night stretches on we never tire of hitting each other on the head with our squeaky plastic hammers. At one point, my husband catches my eye and bonks my belly with glee. “Bom São João!” he shouts. It is the happiest pregnancy I’ve ever had. 

Taking the eggs from the nests of chickens before they hatch encourages hens to continue to lay. Through this practice of egg removal, humans have interfered with the natural process of evolution to create a species that lays eggs continuously, regardless of procreation. In fact, most modern chickens will spend their entire life laying eggs and never hatch a single chick. 

Between the bookends of those pregnancies are the rest of them, now blurring together. Some more frightening or traumatic, others almost unremarkable. All of them quietly documented in my camera reel, tethering our first two years of marriage to perpetual loss. 

There is the photo of my bare legs in the shower, streaked with rivulets of blood. Toilet bowls dyed deep red. My hand for reference next to a blood clot the size of a banana that falls out of me one morning, two weeks after my baby died. The series of photos, collected over a week, capturing a large plastic deli container as it slowly fills with more and more blood: my makeshift attempt to measure how much I’m losing. I watch the level rise. I send pictures to my mother and my friend, the two physicians in my life who look after me from afar. I empty my menstrual cup into the container over and over, stunned by the ceaselessness, my body’s vast well. I am spellbound by the blood, how thick and dark and warm it is. How beautiful. How very much there is. Sometimes I let it run through my fingers as I dump it into the container. Once, I fight an overwhelming urge to lift the container to my lips and drink it all back down. It is all I have left of my baby. Instead, I put the lid back on and store it under the sink, unable to flush it but not sure what else to do. A week later the blood begins to smell, and I ask my husband to pour it out. Somewhere on the farm, a plant is thriving with the nutrients my body made for a baby that never took a breath of air.

Modern hens start laying eggs between eighteen and twenty-two weeks of life. At this point they begin to lay an egg roughly every twenty-six hours, resulting in almost an egg a day. They can continue at this rate of laying for twelve to eighteen months. 

I become pregnant for the fourth time less than a month after my third miscarriage. I am thirty-one years old, still new to the world of recurrent pregnancy loss, my heart tender and open enough to tell all of my friends immediately. Though they react with excitement, the tenor of their support is cautious. I hear it in their voices when we speak on the phone: the gentle reserve underneath their congratulations. It makes me doubt myself, and I feel foolish for being unable to keep a secret for even a day. At six weeks we go to the doctor and see the blurry gray dot on the screen. It’s almost comical how unlike a baby it looks, for how much like a baby it seems. My husband squeezes my hand as the technician points out the blinking light, our baby’s tiny heartbeat. The hope that I’ve been suppressing begins to well up inside me and seep into the fissures of my heart, and I allow myself to believe in this baby for just a day before I start to bleed again. 

A week later, on a sunny October afternoon, a small round sac effortlessly falls out of my body. It’s warm and slippery, and I feel a primal desire to rip through the fleshy walls and cradle what’s nestled inside. I struggle to hold it still long enough in my bloody fingers to open it. With poultry shears I pierce its viscous walls, my own flesh outside of my body, and inside I see it immediately. The tiniest little baby. More animal than human. A seahorse, a naked hatchling fallen from the nest. Both entirely alien and profoundly mine. It lies in my cupped palm, no bigger than a wild berry. “Mom,” I call urgently. “Come look.” She stands beside me in the bathroom, straining her eyes to make sense of what seems so obvious to me. “See?” I say. “The big head, the tiny limb buds?” I watch the moment of recognition wash over her face. “Oh, Julia,” is all she says, throwing her arms around my shoulders. 

“Maybe, I think, the mother birds are so used to this that they never expect to return to a nest holding the same number of eggs as when they left. Perhaps they never count to begin with.”

At twenty-three, before marriage and thoughts of babies, I spend two years as a new teacher in a small village near the Bering Sea. The Yup’ik people who have lived there for millennia still subsist on many traditional foods and practices. In Alaska, I am immersed in a way of life that is wholly different from my Midwestern suburban upbringing. I go ice fishing and ptarmigan hunting, pick wild berries until our gallon pails overflow, and butcher caribou on my kitchen floor. During my first spring in Eek, my closest friend Cik takes me egg hunting. As the snow starts to thaw and the springy sponge of tundra begins to give under our feet again, we traipse out beyond the airport, where the village road ends. We search behind large tufts of grass for nests of swans and geese. As we wander, I ask her how she feels about stealing a mother bird’s eggs from her nest while she’s away. She doesn’t seem disturbed. “We’ve been doing this for thousands of years, you know.” Through the lens of time and tradition, it seems less like thievery and more like a fact of life, another link between the human and the animal world. It is my own belief about the separation between people and the wild that makes this act seem violent. Maybe, I think, the mother birds are so used to this that they never expect to return to a nest holding the same number of eggs as when they left. Perhaps they never count to begin with.

On his way to pick me up from the hospital after the surgery to remove my sixth failed pregnancy, my husband collects our long-awaited delivery of new chickens. A chorus of soft cheeping greets me as I climb gingerly into the truck. We drive down the winding farm driveway in silence and bring in the box holding thirty baby chicks. We carry it to the musty basement, where he has set up an area in the corner, covered in pine shavings. A large red heat lamp is precariously suspended from the ceiling above it with old orange twine. There is already food and water waiting. We kneel on the cold cement floor and begin to take the chicks out one by one. Their feathers are unimaginably soft, the palest yellow. Their cries are faint but shrill, filling the house with their rhythmic, incessant need. We hold each bird in just one hand easily, and use our other hand to force their beaks into the water container before setting them gently down. We do this to every bird, one by one. Once we finish setting them into their new home, we leave them alone. Thirty babies left to fend for themselves in a dark basement far from their mothers. We walk the stairs back up to the living room and their cries grow distant, and once the door is latched behind us we can no longer hear them at all. 

Within a day, chicks begin to wilt. We take turns visiting them in the basement every few hours, and it seems that each time I go to check their water there’s another one drooping, falling behind, stumbling as they collectively run from my grasp and getting trampled by the others. I remark that it seems we’ve gotten a whole batch of runts. The morning after they arrive, one baby bird is already cold and dead, lying flat in the pine shavings. I scoop a withering one into my hands and take it upstairs into the light of the human world. With its tiny body swaddled in my arms, I sit on the living room floor beside an electrical outlet to warm the bundle with a hair dryer. I have no real concept of what temperature the baby should be; I just know that it’s warmer than our drafty farmhouse on a cold day in April. Instinctively, I unwrap the bird from the towel and put her right into my shirt, nestled in my sports bra against my bare chest. Her peeping quiets, although I can’t be sure why, and I rest my back on the couch and switch off the blow-dryer. My head drops down to gaze at this small creature, and I pray that the heat of my body will be enough to save her life. Late that night, she too will die, along with half a dozen more before we find a way to save them.

“You can only suffocate so many embryos with your own blood vessels before you start to believe in your bones that this is what you’re meant to do, what you deserve.”

After my seventh miscarriage, I see a hypnotist. Doctors are as bewildered as I am at this point, and while my husband is on the verge of surrender, my yearning grows more forceful with each loss, the heft of it both propelling me forward and weighing me down. Some mornings I awake breathless, crushed by the weight of my longing. Other days, I spend hours on the computer in a manic frenzy, researching every possible condition, specialist, experimental treatment method. This time, after only coming across articles and forums I’ve already read, I convince myself that the reason I can’t carry a pregnancy to term is that I don’t believe I’m able. Who would blame me? You can only suffocate so many embryos with your own blood vessels before you start to believe in your bones that this is what you’re meant to do, what you deserve. 

With this idea in my mind, I arrive at the hypnotist’s couch before the bleeding from the D & C even stops. The session is short, and I can barely recall anything as I awaken from the trance, but when I call my husband on the way home he says that I sound different. “You sound just like you did the first time we talked on the phone.” I feel lighter, released from the burden of my anguish for one merciful afternoon. If for this and nothing more, it is money well spent. But the next day I’m back to my computer, and the endless search for the missing puzzle piece continues.

The final layer of a chicken’s egg is the shell, which takes about nineteen hours to form. This process occurs in the hen’s body using calcium carbonate. To produce an egg every twenty-six hours, the laying hen’s body has a great need for calcium. The reserves needed for this process are stored in the medullary cavity of her bones, to be converted into calcium in the blood supply and made available for daily shell creation. 

When her dietary calcium intake is insufficient, a hen’s body will leach the mineral from her own bones, beyond the dedicated cavity, to continue to make eggshells. In hens with severe calcium deficiency, the eggshells will grow thinner and weaker with time, but the hen will continue to lay as long as possible, even at times producing opaque, shell-less eggs. 

The voice that tugs at me, telling me to persist in my pursuit, that giving up is never an option, always returns mere days after I lose another pregnancy. For a few brutal hours, I believe I’ve finally reached my limit; there’s only so much suffering one human body can take. I tell myself, my husband, my mother: “I’m done.” I try the words on for size, and each time the fit is constricting. Just imagining that outcome for a day makes me wake in the night. What if? What if the next time was the one that would work? What if there’s just one more test, one more fix, one more pill, that would make it possible? I can’t live with myself until I’ve found out, though as the losses compound it becomes less and less clear what finding out really means. 

“Well, it sure sounds like you’re very fertile!” the Reiki practitioner says after I tell her that I’ve had five miscarriages in the past two years, seven in my life. It strikes me as odd, to tell a desperate woman who can’t seem to hold on to a pregnancy for more than eight weeks, that she’s fertile. Very fertile. So fertile, in fact, that I should feel grateful. After each miscarriage my menstrual cycle has resumed immediately. Never even one day late. My body begins to expel the contents of my uterus, my embryo’s tiny head and tail, and twenty-eight days later it bleeds again. No pause in normal activities, no moment to grieve. So it seems it’s this, my body’s refusal to surrender, its insistence on marching forward unfazed, that qualifies me as fertile. The lack of a crying infant on my breast rendered almost irrelevant. I leave her office, knowing that if this fails me, as all the other treatments have, at least I’ll ovulate like clockwork. My body will grant me the chance to try again. 

After a year and a half of daily laying, a hen’s egg production will begin to decline, at which point she is recognized in the industry as “spent.” The commercial value of spent laying hens is minimal, so they are typically euthanized and processed into protein meal for feed or pet food. Alternatively, some birds are killed once their consistent laying ability tapers off, and simply composted or buried. In backyard broods, if feeding spent hens becomes a burden they may be turned into soups and stews, or other home-cooked meals that can withstand low-quality meat. 

On a dreary Saturday afternoon, a month after my seventh pregnancy ends, I walk outside to visit my husband in the field. He is planting perennial flowers in the long beds where he harvested garlic a month ago. He’s barefoot, shirtless, his hands caked with dirt. We hear squawking in the distance and he catches my eye. “Do you think that’s where they’ve been laying their eggs?” He drops his hoe. I grab his muddied hand, and we walk together toward the edge of the field, hoping to find our missing chickens. We search silently between the trees and the tall grass near the old swings, listening for the small peeps and chirps of new life. We find nothing, and he leaves in a rush to return to the flowers. The first drops of rain are beginning to fall, and he needs to get the plants in the ground before the downpour.

I remain there alone long after he’s left, silently scanning the landscape for signs of life. I imagine eggs hatching in the field or forest, somewhere unbeknownst to us. Waiting for the sounds that don’t come grows unbearable. I head inside as the rain begins to fall. The rooster crows in the distance. 

That spring day in Alaska, our egg hunt proves unsuccessful, and we return home empty-handed. But when we return to Cik’s house we find a single goose egg, gifted to her by a neighbor. It is enormous, as large as a ripe mango. I am astonished at its size. My friend tells me she’ll hard-boil it so we can enjoy it together. As she prepares the meal, I ask what would happen if this egg had a baby bird on the inside, perhaps not fully developed but still recognizable. The thought of cracking open that shell and finding such a sight turns my stomach. She looks at me and smiles. Those eggs are considered a delicacy.