Caeli Widger - Mother of Invention

VivversOC: what do yr docs say about your AG?

LindsEE!: pretty much nothing why?

Stoph1: my health ins is too shitty for me to goto the doctor unless im literally dying

Xavey: mine says its just cosmetic and I can ignore it unless it starts bothering me somehow like “itching or throbbing”

LindsEE!: just threw up in my mouth thanks

VivversOC: my doc says the same, don’t you think it’s weird they aren’t more curious?

LindsEE!: weird why?

Stoph1: paranoid much?

VivversOC: like we are total medical anomalies and our docs aren’t even interested?

LindsEE!: why would they care, don’t they just want to be done and go golfing?

Xavey: idk, I agree w/ Viv I think it’s kinda weird.

VivversOC: thanx, Xave. At least someone listens to me.

LindsEE!: VIV!!! don’t be so sensitive! ♥

2021

When I fell asleep last night, it wasn’t there,” said Kate, her face filling the screen of Tessa’s phone, “and when I woke up this morning, it was.”

On the morning of her Weldon Influencers speech, Tessa was sitting at The Buzz, a café in the Henrietta Steiner Center for Student Life, the heart of the six-hundred-acre campus. At 9:00 a.m. on a Sunday, the café was completely empty but for the tattooed barista who’d made Tessa’s latte, now wearing earbuds and glued to her phone behind the coffee bar, oblivious to Tessa’s video chat with Kate. Dawn had hardly broken in California, but Kate had been up since 5:00 a.m., she told Tessa, woken by the sensation that her body had something it could not wait to tell her.

The news: overnight, Kate’s bump had arrived.

“It’s not just a paunch, which would be entirely plausible,” Kate was saying. “Since I’m essentially living on pastries. But no. It’s a firm, bona fide bump.”

“Show me,” said Tessa.

Kate hopped off her bed, pushed up her shirt, and angled her phone toward her midsection. Tessa drew the phone closer to her eyes, her throat tightening as she focused on the image: just seventeen days pregnant and sure enough, Kate’s belly rose in a pretty sine curve.

“Wow” was all Tessa could manage.

Kate raised the phone back to her face. “Right? It’s so utterly crazy, and yet I’m calm. It just feels right, like something that’s supposed to be happening.”

“What about the itching? And the nausea?”

Kate shrugged. “Since we started taking NauseAway, I don’t feel queasy at all. And just like you said, the exhaustion went away. The salve totally helped the itching. I feel pretty incredible. Luke brought in a prenatal yogi for us yesterday morning, and LaTonya and I had such an amazing session with her.”

“No Gwen?”

“No Gwen. Yoga’s not her thing. No surprise there.”

“She is who she is. We need to support her.”

“LaTonya’s great, though. Such a strong person. I’m so grateful to have her here.”

“ You’re such a strong person.”

“You always say that.”

“Because it’s true,” said Tessa.

Seeing Kate gave her an intense urge to be back at Seahorse. But she was scheduled to deliver “The New Frontiers of Choice” in just an hour and a half, and she wanted some time to stroll the campus before reporting to the steps of Phipps Tower, where she would speak to hundreds of undergraduates beneath a canopy of red oak trees with a carillon of bells overhead.

“I should go,” she said, reluctantly.

“We miss you,” said Kate. “Especially me. Hurry back.” She blew a kiss to the screen.

“Three days,” said Tessa, returning the gesture.

Outside, Tessa breathed in the cool air, rinsed clean from yesterday’s rain, and marveled again at the loveliness of the lush campus. Just thirteen miles from Boston, Weldon was its own private world of Gothic buildings, grand old trees, sweeping lawns, and a private lake. Tessa followed a footpath from the Steiner Center toward the trail that led around Lake Nabaw. Newly bloomed dogwoods quivered in the breeze.

As she walked along the lake, her urge to be back at the Seahorse Center dissipated. Weldon had always had a grounding effect on her: the beauty of the campus combined with the presence of two thousand women living together—thinking, working, moving the world forward. The place was an inspiration. She thought of her days as a Weldon student, recalling the sense of continual awakening, of beginning to understand that the world offered a drastically different experience for women than it did for men. She remembered the late nights in her cramped dorm room in Pomeroy Hall, drinking cheap boxed wine with her friends, discussing how they might, someday, make the world a better, gentler, more equitable place for everyone. Back then, Tessa’s friends all had “radical” ideas, most of which would never emerge from the walls of the dorm. The majority of Tessa’s classmates graduated and went on to succeed in ways that were admirable but also conventional: they became lawyers and journalists, bankers and doctors, corporate big shots. Policy makers and professors. Some went into tech, though usually to the high-profile establishment companies, the Googles and LikeMes of the world. They settled down with partners from other elite colleges and then had children, usually two. They worked and achieved, worked and achieved, but few of them were interesting to Tessa. This was not to say they weren’t changing the world; in small ways, many of them were. But they’d played it safe.

Tessa had never been interested in playing it safe. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t stayed in close touch with her friends from Weldon. Perhaps it was why, improbably, she currently felt a stronger kinship with the women of Cohort One than she did with any of her fellow alumnae. LaTonya, Kate, and Gwen did not merely talk about taking risks; they took them.

Tessa sat down on a log beside the lake and turned her face to the sun, closing her eyes. She thought of Peter, who was certainly much different from the Harvard and MIT grads her classmates had married. More solid, more genuine. In the world, instead of hovering smugly above it. A pang of missing him gripped her and she opened her eyes, blinking in the bright sun. Farther up the lakeshore, she spotted a line of goslings trailing their mother goose, like an illustration from a children’s book. They reminded her, somehow, of the Cohort, and she smiled to herself. Her phone pinged and she saw a new message from Peter, as if he’d sensed her missing him. It was a photo of him hanging on to the face of a sheer rock wall, grinning at the camera. Tessa brushed her lips to the screen, wishing he could be there with her right now, beside Lake Nabaw. That he could stand on the green lawn in front of Phipps Tower and listen to Tessa explain the new frontiers of choice. Perhaps if he could be there, in the midst of so many passionate young women, he could come to understand her better.

But Peter was in Oregon, and Tessa’s speech was slated to begin in half an hour. She stood up from the log, brushed off her black trousers, and stepped back onto the footpath.

2021

“You know what cracks me up?” Vivian asked Wayne. “Imagining you as a baby.”

“You can tell I was an unusually ugly baby? I thought I’d grown out of it.”