science of us

Are My Hormones Me?

I want a infant. 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 frequently I become preoccupied with having a infant. 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 every bit suddenly. Lately it's been lingering, a constant simmer that occasionally tips into boiling. It's never been like this before, but perhaps it's an historic period thing (I'm 36), maybe it came from getting sober and feeling backside, possibly it'south all the infant 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 like that. It was then new and overwhelming, I figured something chemical must be happening. The feeling is almost like being on a drug, or being boozer — but like being on "motherhood" instead of cocaine. Or having "pregnancy glasses" instead of beer goggles. But unlike being on a drug, the feeling is difficult to discredit after the fact.

At their simplest, hormones are tiny molecules released inside the body by glands and other organs. (And glands are clusters of cells that make and secrete things — for instance, in that location's the thyroid and adrenal glands, and the ovaries and the pancreas, which likewise secrete hormones.) In Greek, "hormone" ways "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, carrying instructions for organs throughout the body. In one case they get in at their destination, they typically demark to the target organ, which absorbs their message and behaves accordingly. (I think of hormones every bit like piffling students rushing through the hallways of a school, clutching a presentation under their arm, ready to deliver a final project.)

Hormones are critical for most aspects of human office, including physical 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 called 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, carrying banners that said, "Take a infant!!!" It was interesting, then, to learn that I basically had it all wrong.

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

Another OB/GYN, Dr. Mary Jane Minkin, of Yale, told me the aforementioned thing: "To the best of my cognition," she said, "there isn't a hormonal surge leading to an urge to conceive [during this phase of life]. There is some more than hormonal variability as we get older — with a decline in overall estrogen and progesterone levels — but that doesn't lead to any biological urges that I know of." She noted that at that place is, instead, "a sociological issue," namely that "educated women ofttimes know that their fertility diminishes with age, and and so many exercise therefore feel an urge to excogitate." But this is "driven by the brain and not particularly 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 practise with fertility — with the urge to excogitate as well as the power. But at that place is no reliable fertility examination; measuring things like AMH or follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) are "essentially ineffective," equally Keefe put it, at predicting a adult female'due south fertility status. To exist fair, KindBody has best-selling this. Still, I'd been under 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 in that location is no practiced hormonal indicator of 1'southward fertility," Keefe told me. "So women are left to imagine. To fright. And that's when the sense of urgency, most panic, can sometimes set in."

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

Since the fertility window begins to close 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, as Keefe noted. (He described this as one of life'due south "peachy injustices.") In his words, the endmost of the fertility window is "a time to reconcile" — a fourth dimension to be honest with oneself about 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 so at some bespeak nosotros're forced to come to terms with information technology." It'southward not a fourth dimension of "panicking," as he put information technology, just "at the same time, it'due south non a time of putting ane's head in the soil to avoid having to worry." My visuals of the little internal particles floating around in my blood, unbidden, dictating my desires as if I were their puppet (carrying that "have a babe" 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 infant. At first I didn't know what to say, and I was embarrassed. I want to be significant, I said, to go around being significant and googling pregnancy stuff, doing the "nesting" affair, nurturing a little creature as it grows. Eating, sitting. And so I too imagine property a baby in my arms, against my breast, murmuring to information technology, nursing. I accept vague ideas about intimacy, quietness, and warmth. What information technology might feel similar to love and care for something — someone — in that way. To open my life permanently. To create a new family with another person, to embody promise and unity.

Information technology was interesting and sort of uncomfortable, initially, to larn that the impulse toward this is existential rather than hormonal — agile rather than passive, essentially. Something I'm choosing rather than something that'southward happening to me. Accepting it felt like dropping a pretense: This is what I want, this is who I am. I'm non a helpless pinball, or at least non entirely.

Are My Hormones Me?