to something more suitable for mothers and their adult-ish daughters—boys.

Jake, yea that Jake—the porno pizza deliveryman of my dreams—and I were “dating.” Turns out the tension was sexual that night we sat on my sofa watching Seinfeld and typing on our laptops. He just really had a lot of work to do. And me, well, you know. I’m a work in progress. Anyway when I told her that formerly “just friends” Jake and I were something more than, she screamed. Like this undulating Amazonian mating call type scream.

“But he doesn’t want to have kids anytime soon, woman,” I said, ripping off her baby Band-Aid.

“How do you know?” she shot back. “Right now, of course not. But laaaater.”

When I told Jake this, he laughed, remembering the time his own mother showed up at his house with a “lap protector” after watching something on the news about how much damage a laptop’s heat can do to a man’s spermies. Maybe things would work out between us, after all. Grandbaby-crazed mothers? Check. He’d found out from Google how much a temporary vasectomy would cost, and I considered the fee nominal.

A month later when I almost broke up with him because he works like a maniac, leaving him precious little time to be obsessed with me, Frances screamed again. This time at me. Said I was being selfish.

We were on opposing teams again, and I should’ve seen it coming. Around Christmastime, my mother’s baby craving became impossible to ignore. My cousin’s oldest son—the first kid I babysat for free—had just had his own son. Right. The baby was the first member of our family’s sixth generation, and apparently the first baby ever. My mother cradled her great-great-nephew, looking down at him—and across the room at me, expectantly.

The next week, it all came out in the open. We were on our way to Gina’s great-grandmother’s house to eat gumbo for good luck in the New Year. Randomly, between radio commercials, Frances admitted that she could not, in all fairness, harass me about having a baby, since she was almost thirty years old when she decided to have me.

“Ma, you know I’ll be twenty-nine in less than a year, right?” I asked, immediately regretting that decision.

“Oh,” she paused. “Right.”

Then, to either shock or silence her, I said it wouldn’t be the end of the world if an alien life form decided not to invade my womb for nine months. It wouldn’t do irreparable damage to my self-worth or anything. “Lots of women are childless, and somehow they find a way to go on,” I said. We rode the rest of the way talking about everything but the ten-pound hypothetical baby in the backseat. I thought the issue was tabled until she announced, unsolicited, at Gina’s great-grandmother’s dining table that she’d never have her own grandchildren—ever.

“Do you know what Lena said in the car…?” Gina and I thought it wise to hide in the kitchen.

If you’ve ever been to a wedding, funeral, or father-daughter purity ball, then you’ve sat—perhaps teary-eyed—through John Mayer’s “Daughters,” basically the sound track of every Lifetime movie in existence. It’s about how some girl got so messed up by her parents that now she can’t truly love the man standing on her steps with his heart in his hand or whatever.

The last two lines of the hook are something like a eulogy: “Girls become lovers, who turn into mothers. So mothers, be good to your daughters, too.” Why not “girls become lovers who turn into…” something other than mothers? First ladies, maybe. Whatever, I get that it’s hard to rhyme and be politically correct, but since when did the act of becoming a mother become the last rite of passage between a mother and a daughter? As if handing down the ability to procreate is somehow confirmation of a mother’s love, or perhaps a job well done.

Funny, Stella’s definition of womanhood is also tied to work. Having broken up with Eric for real this time, she says she’s good on “pushing a baby out of my body like a damn animal. I’m a professional.” Adrienne thinks because she’s a lawyer she has to have a baby “like two years ago,” but admits she’d go bat shit if she were ever to actually be with child.

Gina just wants cash. Her dad, Carl, gave all the women who qualified $50 for Mother’s Day last year. Much like her womb, Gina’s card was empty.

“When I complained that he was incentivizing pregnancy, he gave me sixteen cents