“Now, we’re using your eggs,” Dr. Waller points his pen at Dashiell. “Am I right?”

Dashiell nods. I feel that Dashiell is probably biting back a “Yes, sir.” Dashiell talks like someone from another era. He’s so polite, it’s like he’s fucking with you, but he’s not. Once a car almost hit us, and he yelped, “Criminy!”

“’Criminy?’” I repeated for blocks. It was more of a surprise than almost getting run down. “When your life flashes before your eyes, that is the word that just comes out? ‘Criminy?’” Dashiell could say nothing in her defense, just blush a charming shade of pink and smile.

“Well, that should not be a problem, then,” Dr. Waller smiles at Dashiell. “You should have a lot of eggs.” Incidentally, no one is calling Dashiell Dashiell here. She is going by the name on her insurance and all her IDs: Anne. I never thought I’d have any feelings about Dashiell’s old name, as it just seemed very ill suited for her, but now when I have to use it -- in a situation like this, or around her mom -- I find myself completely smitten with it. Now that she’s Dashiell, the name Anne seems especially tender. I get melty knowing she’s Dashiell but has this other secret name. Or maybe Dashiell is the secret name?

I can spin out on this dreamy philosophizing about my beloved’s enigmatic gender, but we’re not here for that. We’re here to learn how babies are made. When they’re made in clinics.

The longhaired, 15-year-old, non-les resident breaks it down for us, drawing it out on paper while she speaks. She’s a little tentative. She tells us that Dashiell will be given medication to stimulate the ovaries.

The resident stammers, and Dr. Waller takes over. “What we’ll see on your ultrasound today isn’t the eggs, because the eggs are too small, right? You can’t see them. What we see is the fluid the eggs are living inside. You’ll have a bunch of them in there, but then each month one outgrows the rest, and that’s the egg that gets ovulated. And that one egg suppresses the rest of them. They just die.”

Wait a second! This is big information! The whole narrative around conception is always about that one sperm: the mighty, hardy, fastest, luckiest sperm that outraces all the other sperm and grabs onto the long blond weave of the Rapunzel egg just sitting passively in her castle and, BAM, it totally bores into her and knocks her up! All the activity is on the man-side. This half-assed factoid has laid the foundation of a millennia of misogyny, casting men as active go-getters and women as passive and fragile.

How is it that I am forty-one years old and I am just now learning that there is a race to the death happening inside my body every month? That some intense Alpha Egg is growing silently inside of me, indistinguishable from all the others until one day she just surges, stealing all the space and energy from the other nests, buffing up to make the trip down the fallopian highway?