scientific discipline of us

Are My Hormones Me?

I want a baby. Or exercise my hormones want a baby?

Photo: Andrew Ostrovsky/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Photograph: Andrew Ostrovsky/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Photograph: Andrew Ostrovsky/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Every so often I get preoccupied with having a baby. With pregnancy, with motherhood, with all things reproduction. Sometimes it seems to align with ovulation, sometimes not. Sometimes information technology arrives similar a storm and leaves just equally suddenly. Lately it's been lingering, a abiding simmer that occasionally tips into boiling. It's never been like this earlier, but possibly it's an age thing (I'grand 36), perchance it came from getting sober and feeling behind, mayhap it's all the babe pictures I see on Instagram.

Until recently, my understanding of hormones made me desire to blame this feeling on them, or credit it to them, or something similar that. Information technology was so new and overwhelming, I figured something chemical must be happening. The feeling is almost like being on a drug, or being drunk — simply similar existence on "motherhood" instead of cocaine. Or having "pregnancy glasses" instead of beer goggles. But dissimilar existence on a drug, the feeling is difficult to discredit after the fact.

At their simplest, hormones are tiny molecules released inside the torso by glands and other organs. (And glands are clusters of cells that make and secrete things — for case, at that place's the thyroid and adrenal glands, and the ovaries and the pancreas, which besides secrete hormones.) In Greek, "hormone" means "setting in movement," and these signaling molecules travel in the bloodstream from the gland to wherever it is they're headed, to pass on a directive. They're messengers, essentially, carrying instructions for organs throughout the torso. One time they arrive at their destination, they typically demark to the target organ, which absorbs their message and behaves accordingly. (I call up of hormones as like little students rushing through the hallways of a school, clutching a presentation nether their arm, set up to deliver a final project.)

Hormones are critical for about aspects of human function, including physical growth, puberty, hunger, metabolism, sexual role, and reproduction. Likewise sleep, menses, lactation, stress, and mood, among many others. Some well-known hormones include insulin, adrenaline, oxytocin, estrogen, testosterone, and cortisol. (And some less-well-known ones, for instance, are calcitonin, glucagon, and orexin.) The overall hormone-and-gland organization is called the endocrine system, and common disorders of the endocrine system include obesity, diabetes, and thyroid diseases. Hormones seemingly command everything, in other words, and I'd started to envision them every bit little particles floating effectually my body, carrying banners that said, "Accept a baby!!!" It was interesting, then, to learn that I basically had it all wrong.

While the urgent desire to have a child in one'due south tardily 30s and early on 40s is "every bit real every bit the day is long," said Dr. David Keefe, chair of NYU Langone's Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, "I'chiliad not convinced it's hormonal." Instead, he said, the feeling is probable "existential." He noted, in fact, that there's "really non much" that happens to women during this time hormonally: "At that place's a consistent, gradual decline in women'south fertility around this time," Keefe said, "only if yous look at the hormonal profiles, there's really not much that occurs."

Another OB/GYN, Dr. Mary Jane Minkin, of Yale, told me the aforementioned thing: "To the best of my noesis," she said, "there isn't a hormonal surge leading to an urge to conceive [during this phase of life]. There is some more hormonal variability as we go older — with a pass up in overall estrogen and progesterone levels — but that doesn't lead to any biological urges that I know of." She noted that in that location is, instead, "a sociological consequence," namely that "educated women oft know that their fertility diminishes with age, and then many practice therefore feel an urge to conceive." Merely this is "driven by the brain and not peculiarly hormonal," she emphasized.

Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised, just I was. Given the popularity of companies like KindBody, which offers anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) testing, it seemed to me that hormones must have everything to do with fertility — with the urge to conceive equally well every bit the ability. But in that location is no reliable fertility test; measuring things like AMH or follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) are "essentially ineffective," equally Keefe put it, at predicting a woman's fertility status. To be fair, KindBody has best-selling this. Still, I'd been nether the impression that measuring my own fertility should be as like shooting fish in a barrel as giving a biological sample, running numbers, and getting some kind of readout. "Unfortunately at that place is no good hormonal indicator of one's fertility," Keefe told me. "And then women are left to imagine. To fear. And that's when the sense of urgency, almost panic, tin sometimes prepare in."

It was both freeing and frustrating to be delivered back to the understanding that fertility is largely a mystery. The thought that wanting to take a child isn't hormonal only existential — logical, rational — began to unloosen something within me. (I Googled what existential means, too, to make sure I knew what we were talking near: "Concerned with existence" is the general definition. Worried almost the pregnant of life, how to be, and what to do.)

Since the fertility window begins to shut for women sooner than it does for men, whether to accept children is an existential question that women must typically face at a younger age, every bit Keefe noted. (He described this equally ane of life's "neat injustices.") In his words, the closing of the fertility window is "a time to reconcile" — a time to be honest with oneself near what one really wants, whatever that might be. Reproduction is "kind of at the core of our sense of who we are," he said, "and then at some point nosotros're forced to come to terms with it." Information technology's not a fourth dimension of "panicking," as he put it, but "at the same time, it's not a fourth dimension of putting one'southward caput in the soil to avoid having to worry." My visuals of the little internal particles floating effectually in my blood, unbidden, dictating my desires as if I were their puppet (conveying that "have a baby" imprint), began to dissipate.

While I was working on this story, a younger friend asked me to describe what it felt like to want to have a baby. At kickoff I didn't know what to say, and I was embarrassed. I desire to be meaning, I said, to get around being pregnant and googling pregnancy stuff, doing the "nesting" thing, nurturing a little creature every bit it grows. Eating, sitting. And then I also imagine holding a baby in my arms, against my chest, murmuring to it, nursing. I have vague ideas about intimacy, quietness, and warmth. What it might experience like to dearest and care for something — someone — in that way. To open my life permanently. To create a new family unit with some other person, to embody promise and unity.

It was interesting and sort of uncomfortable, initially, to larn that the impulse toward this is existential rather than hormonal — active rather than passive, substantially. Something I'm choosing rather than something that's happening to me. Accepting it felt like dropping a pretense: This is what I desire, this is who I am. I'm non a helpless pinball, or at to the lowest degree non entirely.

Are My Hormones Me?