Impossible Wants

One reason that I really loved Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth is that it inadvertently explains infertility. Maybe not inadvertently—I know nothing about Roth and perhaps she struggled with infertility—but I’m assuming inadvertently. This post contains zero spoilers for the book.

Chosen Ones has a bunch of “primary sources” that you wade through explaining how magic works. They’re tucked between sections of the plot, and you need to read them to understand what is happening in the story. On page 170, there is an excerpt from a fictional book about magic:

However, I would argue that while intent is a component of a magical act, and certainly a significant one, it is not the essence of what distinguishes a magical act from a mundane one. Any man with a hammer can intend to hit a nail—that itself is not magic, and a siphon is no hammer. Instead, it is the argument of this text that the essence of a magical act is what a person wants. Or, to be more specific, what a person wants that is not easily achieved with the realm of the mundane. Desiring that a nail sink into a board is a want, but it is not magic. Wanting the boards to hold together with no nail at all—that is magic. In other words, for something to be magic, it must be an impossible want.

The excerpt continues on page 365:

What, then, is a desire? We may begin by stating what it is not. A desire is not a whim. It is not an idle wish concocted on a sunny afternoon. A desire is a profound want, a deep and abiding craving that cannot be denied. It is for this reason that it is impossible to force someone to perform an act of magic one does not truly wish to do. The magic requires desire, and a desire cannot be threatened or manipulated into being.

That is how infertility felt to me. Like “a deep and abiding craving that cannot be denied.” That desire to build a family couldn’t be forced into being by someone else. But just as it couldn’t be forced into being, it also couldn’t be forced out of existence because of circumstances or obstacles. It couldn’t even be forced out of existence when we finished actively family building.

Building a family beyond the two of us felt like an impossible want. It was almost entirely outside my control. I could set up circumstances where it could happen, but month after month it didn’t. And when it did, it wasn’t an accomplishment; the result of a hammer hitting a nail and a nail behaving as it should after a hammer hits it. It was outside the “realm of the mundane.”

And maybe that is why infertility is so hard to resolve. Why it still lingers even after you’re finished engaging in the act of family building. It sticks with you because it is something deeper than intent. It is an impossible want that cannot be denied, and it changes you once you’ve experienced it.