I've been one woman or another for a while now, enough to know I shouldn't get too precious about my period, or act like it's some astonishingly brain-breaking thing if you were previously a man. As Elaine, I apparently found it less trying than J.T. had, enough so that after the first time, I could be prepared and not complain too much; as Magda, I was post-menopausal; and as Zee, I have to admit that the cramping was pretty bad in the first couple months, but ironically, being an Inn person gave me a bit of a leg up on a lot of women: I knew it wasn't this painful for everyone, so I made an appointment with my gynecologist and got a prescription for something to make them less intense. It would have been nice to get into one of the typical viagra trials - apparently the same way that dilating your veins helps blood flow to your dick to get it hard can also help blood flow out to your vag without backing up and causing pain! - but it's not that bad. Would have been funny if that's how i wound up on that particular medication, though.
The point is, I recently got put on some new meds, and I've been even more aware of what's going on down there than usual lately. I've been told to expect my period to be a little irregular for a few months, so I wasn't immediately worried about being a couple days late. Eventually, I bought a test.
I'm not pregnant, thankfully - the way a watched pot never boils, I had my period two days after the test - but it was the first time that I really had to consider the possibility. I'm not particularly anxious to be a mother, but I don't think that's got anything to do with starting out as a man. I've seen how completely being a mom has become part of Penny's and Krystle's lives, for instance, and there's a former guy at a the regular Changeling meet-up who is actuality kind of fretting about potential infertility. She's just a few years older than me (both since we were born and the ages in our current passports), so maybe my biological clock will start making more noise soon. Which isn't to say I'm averse to having a child or would have immediately made an appointment at a clinic to terminate the pregnancy if test was positive; I think I probably would have kept it and enjoyed being a parent. But then there's the matter of the father.
That's Cory - we've been meeting up fairly frequently since Krystle/Mackenzie started college and the weather turned cold enough that folks weren't looking to patronize a hot dog food truck, and he's seemed to be very much at loose ends about what to do with his spare time sense. So he'll wind up taking the Downeaster to Boston, I'd head north, we'd meet up, and we've ended up in each other's beds a few times rather than try to plan too much around the relatively few trains or finding parking.
It's kind of funny for me to be on this side of an age-gap relationship now, after being with J.T. as Magda for as long as I was, and a lot of my friends and co-workers scratch their heads when they bump into me with a white man twice my age as we're out on the town. There's really no explaining that he gets me a lot better than most people I meet - not only have we literally both been the same person at times, but that red-haired college freshman daughter of his has actually been two Black women roughly my age, and he's been very good about learning from them rather than trying to force them to match their appearance. Eventually, they see him being pretty cool about the things I love and knowing more than you'd think to look at him, and shrug. We're weird, but we work.
I probably wouldn't hesitate for long if he asked me to marry him, even beyond how I'm on my fourth identity because I am way too romantic for my own good. But raising a child with him? I mean, I'm pretty sure he'd be a good father, even though he didn't really have to be a dad to Elaine & Krystle, just seeing him with kids buying hot dogs, and it's not like anybody knows what they're doing when they become parents. Working moms could probably have many worse partners than patient semi-retired men who are pretty spry despite being in their sixties during those early years. But Cory'd be 83 when a child born today graduates from high school, and that number's not going down.
So, we're both kind of relieved that I'm not pregnant. But in a way, it just kicks a question we hadn't really considered down the road a bit, and makes it harder to deal with if it should come up.
-Daryl/Zee
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