Coming and Becoming

On getting, sex vs. procreation, and trying vs. wanting.

I was three months from finishing a belated bachelor’s degree when one morning, my wife, Hannah, presented me with a wicker basket. Inside was a tarot card from a modified Rider-Waite deck: the Empress, third in the major arcana. Sitting on her throne, the feminine archetype gazed coyly at me, the Venus zodiac resting at her feet.

“What do you think this card means?” Hannah asked.

This was, I should specify, first thing in the morning. I hadn’t had any coffee; I hadn’t brushed my teeth. I assumed that Hannah had drawn the Empress at random, and—put on the spot—I offered an interpretation that sounded reasonable to me, maybe even insightful or clarifying. “I don’t know. Didn’t you talk with your mom yesterday? Maybe it’s something to do with that. You’ve been gently reasserting some boundaries with her?”

When Hannah didn’t respond, I took another stab. “Or, is it to do with work?” Hannah is a massage therapist and shares a space with a few other women. Because they each operate their own individual practices, however, there’s no single person in charge. Predictably, each has a particular way of doing things, and their manners occasionally diverge over such topics as hygiene, medical ethics, and Oregon state law. “Are you communicating better with your officemates?”

Hannah glanced down at the basket and then again at me. “Maybe… But what else could it mean?” Her gaze returned to the basket.

It felt as though Hannah was looking to coax a specific interpretation out of me, a right answer to the question of the card’s ultimate relevance to our lives. I found it strange: we both enjoyed tarot, but neither of us ascribed to them any divinatory powers. I thought of the cards as a kind of hermeneutical prosthesis, an aesthetically-pleasing system of symbols with which one could relate the circumstances of one’s own life to more ostensibly universal archetypes. The Empress was the hero with a thousand faces. There could be no correct interpretation; indeed, this is what gives tarot its wide appeal and low entry floor.

Discouraged and sleep-addled, I looked dumbly at Hannah. “I don’t know. What does it mean to you?”

As coy now as the Empress herself, Hannah took the card from the basket and looked at it. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe like, fertility?” I could tell from her tone that something was supposed to be dawning on me, but nothing was. I looked at the card in her hand, then again at her, expectantly. Finally, she gave the game-over hint: “Maybe like, pregnancy?” She wasn’t looking at the card anymore. I followed her eyes back to the basket, where—without the Empress commanding my attention—I could see what had been there all along: a pink-and-white pregnancy test with a telltale double line.

I would’ve liked to have gotten there faster, to have seen the card and guessed instantly: oh shit, you’re pregnant. Failing that, I’d have liked to have at least not missed the presence of the pregnancy test repeatedly and entirely. But the deck, as it were, was stacked against me. You’ve probably heard of the famous gorilla experiment: a video of six people—half wearing white, the others in black—passing two basketballs back and forth. A dozen participants were instructed to count how many times the players in white passed the ball. But there’s a twist: toward the end of the video, a person in a gorilla suit wanders onto the set. The great ape pauses, mugs for the camera, and exits stage right.

The punchline is that fully half of the participants didn’t notice the gorilla.¹ The original study runs a few variations of the experiment—alternate videos, more complicated tasks—but the general finding holds: we are virtually blind to much in our environments, and we tend not to know what we’re missing.

I was so focused on interpreting the vaguely-mystical Empress—symbolically fecund, pregnant with meaning—that I was blind to the pink-and-white, urine-stained gorilla in the basket.

Trying, wanting, getting

In July of 2021, Hannah and I had been together for seven years and married four. Of course we had talked about starting a family; we both wanted to someday—probably someday soon—but we hadn’t been “trying.” Or at least, we hadn’t considered ourselves to be trying.

There’s a sense in which “are you trying?” is an intrusive, boundary-violating question. Asked by otherwise genteel inlaws or friends, within it is contained the more explicit, somewhat invasive question “are you giving and receiving creampies?” Yikes. Nevertheless, you would probably embarrass—even scandalize—your interlocutor if your response included the word “bareback.” What gives? While it is true that, answered in the affirmative, “trying” implies the mutual adoption by a couple of a particular set of sexual practices, the—and this is important—intimate realities connoted by “trying” are almost always tacit and (hopefully) auxiliary to the query proper. What the aspiring grandmother really wants to know is whether or not your congress is (a) productive and (b) intentional.

Don’t get me wrong—I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally offensive about asking close friends or family members if they’re trying to have kids. It’s just funny when it comes from people who otherwise tend toward prudishness and who—in any other circumstance—would balk, cringe, or be embarrassed by such explicit coital conversation. But what alternative do they have? Regrettably, “are you trying?” cannot be replaced with the less-invasive “do you want kids?”. Both deal with propositional attitudes, but the former solicits more information than the latter. Consider:

1. Jack and Jill want kids.

   When Jill utters “Yes, we want kids”, she is asserting that (a) Jack and Jill hope that Jack and Jill will be relieved of the condition of childlessness at some point. Well, when? She doesn’t say. She may hope to be relieved of this condition tomorrow—the sooner the better!—but she could also expect to enjoy many years of childlessness before becoming a mother. The couple may plan on adopting or using a surrogate; “wanting kids” is broad and fuzzy.

2. Jack and Jill are trying to have kids.

   If Jack utters “We’re trying to have kids”, he is asserting not only (a) but also (b): Jack and Jill intend that their intercourse result in conception. Implicit is (c), the tacit acknowledgment that he and Jill are doing it on the regular, to completion, p in the v, BB. Furthermore, he modifies (a), removing the qualifier “at some point” and—basically—answering the “when?” question with “if my lunch break goes well, forty weeks from today.”

Trying entails wanting, but not vice versa.² We want (say) promotions, Steam Decks, and blowjobs, whether or not we intend to acquire them. We don’t want (say) to get fat or develop addictions to sugar and vaping, so the role of intention is just the extent to which we intend to avoid what we do not want. Crucially, trying and wanting are neither necessary nor sufficient for getting. (Plausible in the abstract, this became concrete for me over the course of Hannah’s pregnancy, when I discovered that, for every pound she gained, its duplicate had appeared somehow on my nonpregnant body.) Intuitively, it seems like the only necessary relationship between the wanting-getting-trying conceptual triad is the one that holds between wanting and trying, wherein if one tries at something—trying to obtain, to bring about—by definition, one also wants the object of their trying.

The weekend before Hannah drew the Empress, a friend asked us if we wanted kids. We told her the truth: we had talked a lot about it, both wanted it, but we needed a little more time. Maybe after I went to graduate school, found a career that paid better than waiting tables. Definitely not until we moved out of our apartment into something with more space, perhaps with a yard.³ Little did we know that our inchoate son was already merrily burrowing his way into the lining of Hannah’s uterus—that he was technically in the room with us—and that mere days later, we would be grappling with the new reality on our horizon: becoming parents.

When Hannah and I announced that we were expecting, the bolder of our friends and family would ask some variation of “were you trying?” Asked in the past tense, the calculus fundamentally changes: no longer are the explicit mechanics of what transpired in any serious doubt. Certainly, edge cases exist: broken condoms, vasectomies spontaneously reversing, user error. Generally speaking, though, the past tense eliminates Grandma’s (a) productivity query from the equation. Clearly, life has, uh, found its way. What remains is (b) intentionality: was it, or was it not, an oopsie-daisy?

This is hard to reckon with honestly and coherently in retrospect. Eventually, I plan on writing an essay about the transformative experience of becoming a parent through the lens of philosopher L.A. Paul’s book.⁴

In the meantime, I wonder if it makes any sense to say that Hannah and I wanted to have a baby “someday” but weren’t “trying” when our son was conceived. It was neither purposeful nor accidental, in the same sense that it isn’t exactly suicide when, in a game of Russian Roulette, during the very first round the very first spin of the cylinder just so happens to slow and then stop as the only occupied chamber aligns with a firing pin and… well, you get the picture. The specific odds depend (I guess) on the make of the revolver, but—with a classic six shooter—the odds are 1:6, or the roll of a die. It lacks the single-mindedness of the noose or the razor, but it’s also not, say, getting struck by lightning. Coming inside of someone who probably-isn’t-but-maybe-could-be in her fertile window is like that. It may not signal a conscious intent to impregnate, but the odds were known or at least knowable, accepted by both parties (enthusiastically, as it happened), neither of whom were under duress. The biological impulse that drives that sort of gamble is, I think, teleological, meaning that the act is ends-oriented.⁵ In that sense, we were trying, even if we didn’t know it—even if it was also a little oopsie-daisy.

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1. Daniel J Simons and Christopher F Chabris, “Gorillas in Our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events,” Perception 28, no. 9 (September 1999): 1059–74, https://doi.org/10.1068/p281059.

2. It’s unclear though, whether the more formal “intending that p” entails “wanting that p” in an analogous way. I may intend to go to work tomorrow, but secretly hope that the restaurant burns down in the night, for a power failure to force its closure, or—most plausibly—the emergence of a virulent and deadly new strain of COVID-19 and subsequent mandate that I stay home and collect unemployment.

3. Spoiler: We still live in the apartment. As our son gets older, the ways in which it falls short of the Platonic ideal become increasingly apparent. So, however, do the reasons for which we are grateful to come home to it.

4. I haven’t read it yet, but the idea that we can’t rationally decide to have children is intuitively compelling to me. Rational decision theory requires of its agents an internally-coherent value schedule. Value, in this context, is necessarily subjective—values are values for someone, meaning that value is a property external to the object being valued. But—and here is where I’m guessing—some experiences so totally transform an agent that their pre-transformation value schedules no longer apply post-transformation. Whether you want kids or don’t, the decision to have them leads to such a drastic rescheduling of values that the transformed agent couldn’t have reasoned their way to the very decision that generated the transformation.

5. Is it just me, or is “teleological” kind of a sexy word? At least within the admittedly-niche realm of academic-philosophical dirty talk, “teleological” is a prime candidate for spicing up the bedroom.