Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another - Hardcover

A 1999 National Magazine Award nominee, Lauren Slater has a master’s degree in psychology from Harvard University and a doctorate from Boston University. Her work was chosen for the Best American Essays/Most Notable Essays volumes of 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. Her previous book, Lying, was chosen by Entertainment Weekly as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2000. Slater lives with her family in Massachusetts.

PROGESTERONE

You can hold it in your hand. You can define it, a multipronged sex steroid with an exacting beauty and a mission inscripted in its code. If you peered closely, and if you had, on top of that, excellent eyesight, you could see progesterone, its molecular pattern like a series of tiny tiles forming a ring. The tiles are weightless, and yet indescribably weighty. They are not glass, or clay; they are not granite, and certainly not cement, but they are indescribably weighty, planetary almost, as heavy as the moon, as certain sucks of air that bring down planes and birth big winds, progesterone. Respect it, as a hormone, as a physical force, for it is, she is, the primary chemical of pregnancy—pro-gestation—she is heat.

The first symptom of pregnancy, days before the store-bought test turns its colors, is heat. Under the influence of progesterone your body’s temperature edges up as much as one degree. In a body built for homeostasis, that degree is significant. Raise the earth’s temperature a simple single degree and the tarmac will melt, the seas swell. Similarly, raise the body’s temperature just this tiny increment and it will mean one of two important possibilities. You are fighting an infection. You are building a baby.

Which has, just this minute, slipped down the piping of the fallopian tubes and is burrowing into the uterus. At this point, the baby is very small, smaller than the hormone which sustains it.

The baby is a few, marvelous cells, and very unstable. A simple glitch and it will bleed out your openings. Progesterone, on the other hand, is solid. Its cells, like tiny tiles, strong as a suck of wind; it brings the baby down.

The strange thing is, progesterone is so similar to testosterone in its excellent design and yet so different in its spirit.

Progesterone is undeniably female. It is, or she is, made not of protein, like the peptide hormones are, but of fat. Many molecular structures in our body are held together by protein, but the sex steroid progesterone is held together at its core by cholesterol, so maybe, in your hand, it has a Crisco quality; maybe it casts not a shadow but a shine.

Like the neurotransmitters—serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, which send chemical signals to the brain with a da da dum—progesterone tells your brain—da dum, da dum—to build up the endometrium in the uterus. In this sense, progesterone is not a minimalist hormone. It leans toward excess, toward velvet, toward a thickening of the blood. Under its spell, the womb’s endometrial mat goes from a thin brown covering to a thick crimson pile, a wild, expensive carpet, bedding fit for a king. No amount of money could buy a mattress with the thickness, the precision, the pure comfort that progesterone produces; here is where you started your first perfect sleep. Shhh. Every night, when we lie down, we remember this, our original bed. Shhh. Quiet now. Your period is late. Maybe, inside of you, you can hear her coming.