I’d Call Him Tedros

Recently, I caught up with an old, dear friend from college. Over eggs, biscuits, and lavender matcha, we tried to fill in the blanks of the last twenty-something years.

I told her about my soon-to-be husband — how we’d just celebrated the third anniversary of our first date, and how it still feels quietly surreal, getting to have this kind of love in my forties. She told me about her husband , her second , and the kind of grounded, grown-up love that suits her perfectly.

We both agreed: relationships are work. Hard work. But with the right person, it’s the best kind.

We smiled, sitting in awe of how life can still surprise us.

And then, between bites and stories and soft pauses, the question slipped in:
“So… babies?”

Babies have always made me uneasy. Not holding them, just the idea of having them.

Maybe it started back in first grade, with Robert Valentino. (Yes, that was really his name or at least that’s how I remember it.) He kissed my hand, and I ran home to tell my sister, thrilled and breathless.
Her response?
“You’re gonna get pregnant.”
I cried. Hysterically.

My mom consoled me, told me I’d be okay. But they say our bodies carry cellular trauma. Maybe that was the start.

Or maybe it was something else.

The subject came up with past boyfriends. A few even boldly declared they wanted to have a baby with me. Nothing turned me off faster. Maybe it was them.

I never pictured children without first picturing partnership. And if I’m being honest, before my partner, I didn’t see any of them as people I wanted to build a life with. I had what I’d call a bit of savior syndrome — drawn to brokenness. But they say you’re drawn to what you are.

Maybe, on some subconscious level, I knew we weren’t stable enough to bring a child into this world. So having a child was never an option with them.

Or maybe it wasn’t just them. Maybe it was me. My body.

At thirty-seven, I took a fertility test , the anti-Müllerian hormone test, mostly out of curiosity. The result was low. I shrugged it off at first. But later that night, something in me stung.

It’s strange, wanting the option to say no — not to have the door quietly closed before you even realized it was there.

And now, here I am , forty-three years old, with a partner who has two grown children in their early twenties. After his second, he got a vasectomy. Would I have asked him to reverse it, if we had met sooner?
I’m not sure.
That’s the kind of question life doesn’t answer.

But still — I see him sometimes.
The son I never had.
I’d call him Tedros, honoring my Eritrean roots. Teddy for short.

He’d have deep chocolate skin like his father, and dimples (between his daddy’s two and my one, the probability would be high). He’d be fiercely curious. Kind. A mama’s boy.

He’d listen when it was bedtime and sneak into our bed when Daddy was still watching ESPN highlights in the living room, asking me questions only my child would think to ask like, “What does the moon smell like?”

And even though the odds — between my low fertility and his vasectomy — are less than one percent, I never completely cancel out the possibility.
But I’ve accepted the fate.

It’s strange, isn’t it?
To mourn something you never even knew you wanted.
To feel the edges of a life you might have lived.

Maybe the comfort of impossibility gives me permission to imagine it.
Or maybe it’s revealing a desire I never let myself name.

So when I talk to girlfriends in their forties — women who are still hoping, still trying, still aching — and those who force a smile with the acceptance of being a “dog mom,” I feel a heaviness for them. For what they want. For what they don’t yet know they might not get.

I don’t carry that weight. But I understand it.
And I honor it.

And sometimes, the child who never was lives in your imagination — tender, vivid, fleeting.
Not real, but real enough.
And maybe that’s all I’ll ever get.
And maybe that’s enough.
Or maybe not.