The Time Traveler's Wife

This excerpt is such a wonderful, real account of how it feels to long for a baby. I remember feeling just like this, it was a feeling that ate me up, that enveloped me. Nothing else mattered apart from conceiving that baby, my baby, the baby who ended up being Otis. Perhaps there are other, better, passages about this same thing, but this is the one I noticed, the one that spoke to me in my post-longing, post-conception, post-pregnancy, post-baby life:

"I was simply not thinking about a lot of important stuff because I was completely drunk with the notion of having a baby: a baby that looked sort of like Henry, black hair and those intense eyes and maybe very pale like me and smelled like milk and talcum powder and skin, a sort of dumpling baby, gurgling and laughing at everyday stuff, a monkey baby, a small cooing sort of baby. I would dream about babies...

I suddenly began to see babies everywhere; a sneezing red-haired girl in a sunbonnet at the A&P, a tiny staring Chinese boy, son of the owners in the Golden Wok (home of wonderful vegetarian egg rolls); a sleeping, almost bald baby at a Batman movie. In a fitting room at JCPenney a very trusting woman actually let me hold her three-month old daughter; it was all I could do to continue sitting in that pink-beige vinyl chair and not spring up and run madly away hugging that tiny soft being to my breasts.

My body wanted a baby. I felt empty and I wanted to be full. I wanted someone to love who would stay: stay and be there, always. And I wanted Henry to be in this child, so that when he was gone he wouldn't be entirely gone..."