Dear Yin

Dear “Yin,”

They told me all about you, but they didn’t really know.

They called you the holy grail of femininity: receptive, soft, still, quiet.

What they meant, what they still mean, is: stop being so much.

The first time I really think about you is CD12 (cycle day). I’m sitting in a serene office in Pacific Heights with my new fertility acupuncturist. With kind green eyes and a soft, lilting voice, she assures me that my labs look good. I’m fertile, she says, and she’ll help harmonize my hormones to optimize success. She speaks in calming tones about luteal phases and uterine lining and the conversation between my pituitary gland and my ovaries, and something deep in me begins to stir—as if a forgotten rhythm is rising, the dance of life itself, and I’m just starting to remember it. Later I will know, but not yet.

And, she says urgently, leaning in so close I can practically feel her breath, you need to be in your Yin.

I ask her what that means. I’ve only known you as half of that black-and-white symbol—the one stuck on the back of VW vans or dangling from silver necklace chains.

She tells me you are feminine and paints the picture: fuzzy blankets, slow mornings, herbal tea in a ceramic mug. You move gently and let life come to you.

Something in me resists—as if my body knows this isn’t right—but I find myself wanting it anyway. No clawing desire, no grueling effort. I want to be in my yin, Yin. It all sounds so good, I forget to ask who decided this is what femininity is supposed to look like.

I’m escorted out with instructions: no gluten, no dairy, no running. Eat more red meat. Do less. Rest more. Make space for a baby. I try to negotiate the running—it’s how I breathe, Yin, I don’t know how I’ll stop—but she asks what’s more important: three miles a day or having a baby? I capitulate. I buy a ridiculously overpriced moonstone crystal from her glass case because she tells me it will help me embody you. I know it’s probably silly, but I want to believe.

I go home and put the crystal on my nightstand. I’ll think of you every time I attempt—and fail—to skip a temperature reading or initiate mechanical, boring, make-a-baby sex. The moonstone won’t judge me, Yin. And somehow, I know you won’t either.

It’s CD6 and the astrologer talks about you, too. I know he’s talking about you before he even names you. This time, it doesn’t feel like encouragement. It feels like a revelation. Because now you are the answer, Yin. And if you are the answer, then I’ve been the problem, which means I can work out the solution.

I’m actually surprised you’re not pregnant already, the astrologer says in his thick German accent. I perk up immediately. He’s world-renowned, and I’ve only gotten this session because someone canceled at the last minute. But—but, he says, interrupting himself, scanning my chart. Here. Your New York side. Your Yang. She’s making this a project. But this isn’t a project.

He says my desire to become a mother is part of my soul’s evolution—that I’m being called to shift from the businesswoman, the achiever, into my feminine. My Hawaii.

Motherhood can’t be a project, he says.

My fingers fly across the keyboard, transcribing.

Then he finishes, with a line I will carry like an incantation: The flower blooms when the flower blooms.

I absorb his words like a thirsty sponge. I hate them. I want them to be true.

I can be chill! I can be calm. I can be Hawaii. Maybe we should go to Hawaii! I start looking at flights.

And for a few hours, I’m buoyed by belief. I believe him. I believe in you, Yin—the one they made up.

I light a candle, take a bath, and picture my body and spirit softening. I actually do all that, Yin. Because I think maybe this is the thing I’ve been missing—not action or supplements or science. My feminine.

But it doesn’t last. Because while the bath is nice, and the candle fills the bathroom with a dreamy gardenia, I’m thinking of a study I need to read, a vitamin I need to order—and it’s CD6, which means we should be having lots of sex this week.

The Chinese say in order to throw a rock forward you should move backwards, the astrologer told me. We might achieve things in more efficient ways, but the quality of it has no blessing.

English isn’t his first language, but it sounded perfect anyway.

The quality of it has no blessing.

I get out of the bath, overheated now and conflicted.

That night, I imagine myself at the gate of my life, my arms outstretched, waiting. I try to find my power there, in this place of prescribed stillness, this alleged place of blessings.

In that place, I am not running or striving or pushing or cajoling or nagging or screaming or crying. I am not ordering antioxidants before the world wakes up, or calling the doctor’s office three times when no one calls back.

But what am I doing, Yin? Where am I there?

I can see only an outline of myself, as if all of my insides have been hollowed out. The wanting, the ambition, the hunger have vanished.

Where is the 29-year-old me at Forty Carrots in Midtown, telling a friend between bites of frozen yogurt that if I had to choose between a big career or a family—family, I’d choose family. The words fill my mouth before my friend finishes asking. Every cell in my body knows. Because for me, it isn’t even really a question.

Where is the 35-year-old me, walking down Chestnut Street with the kind of ache only a not-yet-mother knows—the one swallowed whole at the sight of a stroller?

It’s as though the whole tapestry of my being—all of the colors of my desire, my pain, my effort, my memories, my feelings, my Self, have been erased, and in her place stands this hushed, mellow, incense-scented woman with flowy clothes and bangley bracelets.

What I’m saying is, there is a woman at that gate, Yin, but she is not me.

Suddenly, I want to call the astrologer back and ask him about the flower.

Because now I’m starting to wonder where the line is between pushing and pushy, between being and being too much.

I’ve been doing everything within my control to make a baby. Is that too Type A? Do wishes only get granted to women who act like they don’t care about their wish?

I am exhausting myself. I am exhausted. But not exhausted enough to be like that patchouli woman at the gate who throws her hands in the air just waiting around for a baby to appear in her belly, Yin! Not that exhausted. This part of me is dynamite. One “Relax, Lex” away from detonating.

It’s CD17 and I’m rethinking everything—not just you, Yin, but the whole thing. The “project.” My pursuit. So I pack up my laptop and a snack and walk down Chestnut Street to Peet’s to do some research. While my peppermint tea steeps, I try to make some meaning of this mess. I want to know who you really are. I dig around online, and what I find isn’t new—it’s what the Taoists once said, and what the world wrote over.

I read until my tea is cold. It is illuminating and it is maddening.

Feminine.

I roll the word around my tongue and I feel history rising in my throat.

Generations of women emerge, whose power echoes off the mountains of forgotten journeys, who bled and birthed and sang and screamed and sobbed and danced and walked through fire to get what they want and protect who they love—and maybe sometimes they rested and maybe sometimes they were still, but mostly they were moving—rocking, soothing, feeding, marching, rising, gathering, tending, carrying.

And in their echo, I hear something familiar. A rhythm I never learned but have always known.

That’s you, isn’t it?

Suddenly I don’t feel like I’m researching anymore, I feel like I’m remembering. Like I’m waking up inside a story that’s always been mine.

On the anniversary of my Bat Mitzvah, I put my family on speakerphone as I drive home from the grocery store. It’s drizzly and the taillights ahead blur in blotches of red. A bag tips over in the passenger seat—oranges thud to the floor—as everyone joins the call. When we’ve exchanged hellos, I remind my family of the date and start chanting my Haftorah, an annual tradition.

I’m telling you this, Yin, because I sing about Chana, whose name is mine, and whose story became mine, too, and because, I realize, I have been singing about you.

Way back when, on the bima in the too-religious synagogue with the stale smelling carpet and the siddurim whose spines had long given out, I sang as I do now:

Chana, ein yeledim.

Chana without children.

As I round the corner into my garage, I hear myself sing the familiar words, but it is just now that I really feel them.

The story goes that Chana wanted a child more than anything, but she couldn’t get pregnant. So she took matters into her own hands; she went to the Temple, moved her lips without sound, and asked for what she wanted. Directly to God. No priest, no permission.

I call an old friend, now a rabbi. The rain is coming down harder now, and something in me moves—as if tectonic plates are shifting into place.

Remind me about Chana, I ask my friend as soon as he answers. He loves this kind of call.

Well, he says, slipping into his new rabbinic tone: the rabbis of the Talmud explain that it’s not Abraham or Moses who exemplify prayer, it’s Chana. Her struggle teaches all of us to pray: how to pray, when to pray, what to say. When the priest at the Temple mistakes her for drunk, she defends herself and keeps going. She even negotiates with God, he adds.

I hang up knowing I’m finally on to you.

It is CD21. The sun shines bright—a rarity—and the air is crisp against my cheeks. I feel steady despite the uneven concrete path. I run past a handful of older men and women moving in slow, deliberate unison by the edge of the Marina Green. Their movements are fluid against the sharp colors of the day: purple Pride of Madeira, silver-stained water, actual sky-blue sky. As I pass, I imagine their movements as prayer and feel their blessings on my back. I continue on, relishing the low, dusty percussion of rubber against earth, like a heartbeat.

I know I am not supposed to run, Yin, but I feel more alive than I have in weeks, more myself than I have in recent memory. As I tied my shoes this morning, I couldn’t help but hear my acupuncturist’s voice—judging, sure—but this time I heard mine louder.

Running isn’t my problem, it is my prayer.

I think of myself in the shower this morning, whispering to the maybe-but-probably-not-baby in my belly: Chana’s prayer.

I think of myself rolling the moonstone in my palms: Chana’s prayer.

I think of myself doing all of the things I’m doing—drinking cold smoothies, tracking my ovulation, racing around—despite being told they’re not feminine enough: Chana’s prayer.

And I think of you, Yin. Because now I get it: you are Chana’s prayer.

You are the way my spirit knows, the movement of my body, the lightness of my wonder, the tide pulling in, the seagulls’ song. Yin, now that I think of it, you may be the power of the whole thing.

And the quality of this—the tireless effort, the depth of my despair and my care—is the blessing.

When I get home, I don’t feel guilty for opting out of the fertility-friendly walk. Yin, honestly? I feel fucking fantastic.

I will keep the moonstone for years. It will remind me that the flower blooms when the flower blooms, and—more importantly—that I am the gardener.

When it is time, I will pass it on to another hopeful mom at my daughter’s dance class. I tell her all about you.

About Chana. About the prayer. About what came after.

Chana got pregnant, Yin. So did I.

Alexis Sclamberg is a writer, dating and relationship coach, and former attorney. She is at work on her first memoir, Now You Can See the Moon.