science of us

Are My Hormones Me?

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

Photo: Andrew Ostrovsky/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Photo: Andrew Ostrovsky/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Photo: Andrew Ostrovsky/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Every so often I go preoccupied with having a baby. With pregnancy, with motherhood, with all things reproduction. Sometimes information technology seems to align with ovulation, sometimes not. Sometimes it arrives like a storm and leaves just as suddenly. Lately it'southward been lingering, a constant simmer that occasionally tips into boiling. It's never been like this before, simply perchance it's an historic period thing (I'm 36), maybe it came from getting sober and feeling behind, maybe information technology's all the baby pictures I see on Instagram.

Until recently, my understanding of hormones fabricated me want to blame this feeling on them, or credit it to them, or something like that. It was then new and overwhelming, I figured something chemical must be happening. The feeling is almost similar being on a drug, or beingness drunk — but similar being on "motherhood" instead of cocaine. Or having "pregnancy glasses" instead of beer goggles. But unlike being on a drug, the feeling is hard to ignominy subsequently the fact.

At their simplest, hormones are tiny molecules released within the body 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 also secrete hormones.) In Greek, "hormone" means "setting in motion," and these signaling molecules travel in the bloodstream from the gland to wherever information technology is they're headed, to pass on a directive. They're messengers, essentially, conveying instructions for organs throughout the body. One time they arrive at their destination, they typically demark to the target organ, which absorbs their message and behaves appropriately. (I call up of hormones as similar niggling students rushing through the hallways of a school, clutching a presentation under their arm, prepare to deliver a terminal project.)

Hormones are disquisitional for most aspects of man function, including concrete growth, puberty, hunger, metabolism, sexual function, and reproduction. Also 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 system is chosen the endocrine system, and common disorders of the endocrine system include obesity, diabetes, and thyroid diseases. Hormones seemingly control everything, in other words, and I'd started to envision them equally little particles floating around my body, conveying banners that said, "Accept a baby!!!" It was interesting, and then, to acquire that I basically had it all wrong.

While the urgent desire to have a child in 1's late 30s and early 40s is "as real as the day is long," said Dr. David Keefe, chair of NYU Langone's Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, "I'm not convinced it's hormonal." Instead, he said, the feeling is likely "existential." He noted, in fact, that there'south "really not much" that happens to women during this time hormonally: "There's a consistent, gradual decline in women's fertility around this time," Keefe said, "only if you expect at the hormonal profiles, at that place's really non much that occurs."

Some other OB/GYN, Dr. Mary Jane Minkin, of Yale, told me the same thing: "To the all-time of my knowledge," 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 become older — with a decline in overall estrogen and progesterone levels — but that doesn't lead to whatsoever biological urges that I know of." She noted that at that place is, instead, "a sociological issue," namely that "educated women oft know that their fertility diminishes with age, and then many practice therefore feel an urge to conceive." But this is "driven by the encephalon and not particularly hormonal," she emphasized.

Peradventure I shouldn't have been so surprised, but 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 every bit well as the ability. Just there is no reliable fertility test; measuring things like AMH or follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) are "substantially ineffective," as Keefe put it, at predicting a adult female'southward fertility status. To exist fair, KindBody has acknowledged this. Still, I'd been nether the impression that measuring my own fertility should exist equally easy as giving a biological sample, running numbers, and getting some kind of readout. "Unfortunately there is no good hormonal indicator of one's fertility," Keefe told me. "Then women are left to imagine. To fear. And that'south when the sense of urgency, nearly panic, can sometimes set in."

It was both freeing and frustrating to exist delivered back to the understanding that fertility is largely a mystery. The idea that wanting to have a kid isn't hormonal but existential — logical, rational — began to unloosen something within me. (I Googled what existential means, as well, to make sure I knew what we were talking about: "Concerned with beingness" is the general definition. Worried about the meaning of life, how to be, and what to practice.)

Since the fertility window begins to shut for women sooner than it does for men, whether to have children is an existential question that women must typically face up at a younger historic period, as Keefe noted. (He described this every bit one of life's "great injustices.") In his words, the closing of the fertility window is "a time to reconcile" — a fourth dimension to be honest with oneself well-nigh what 1 really wants, whatever that might be. Reproduction is "kind of at the core of our sense of who we are," he said, "and so at some signal we're forced to come to terms with it." It'south not a time of "panicking," equally he put it, but "at the aforementioned time, information technology'south not a time of putting one's 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 equally if I were their puppet (conveying that "accept 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 desire to have a baby. At first I didn't know what to say, and I was embarrassed. I desire to be meaning, I said, to become around being pregnant and googling pregnancy stuff, doing the "nesting" thing, nurturing a little creature as it grows. Eating, sitting. And then I also imagine holding a baby in my arms, against my chest, murmuring to information technology, nursing. I take vague ideas near intimacy, quietness, and warmth. What it might experience like to love and intendance for something — someone — in that manner. To open my life permanently. To create a new family with another person, to embody hope and unity.

It was interesting and sort of uncomfortable, initially, to learn that the impulse toward this is existential rather than hormonal — active rather than passive, essentially. Something I'm choosing rather than something that's happening to me. Accepting it felt like dropping a pretense: This is what I want, this is who I am. I'grand not a helpless pinball, or at least not entirely.

Are My Hormones Me?