A literary novel in progress.

In the fictional metropolis of Varma, obsessed with self-improvement, ambition, and endless choice, an anthropologist has spent years building the right life.

The right career.

The right apartment.

The right friends.

The right future.

Then she becomes pregnant.

What happens when the next thing on the list is alive? As motherhood approaches, the systems she once navigated with confidence begin to feel fragile. Her body refuses negotiation. Friendships shift. Work loses its clarity. Even the identities she once moved toward so confidently become harder to inhabit.

OXYTOCIN is a literary novel about what happens when the fantasy of self-authorship meets the limits of being human. Through one woman’s experience, it exposes a culture that encourages us to optimize not only our bodies and futures, but our identities, relationships, and happiness itself.

Has becoming turned into optimizing, leaving little room to be?

And if connection, pleasure, and belonging are already written into us, why do so many of us spend our lives rehearsing them?

Excerpt:

It came early to me that I don’t like children. Or maybe that was a lie. I just never found them cute or sweet. Quite the contrary—I was indifferent to them. When I was in elementary school, all my friends had baby dolls. They were feeding them and lulling them, changing imaginary diapers. 

I liked to play horses. Supposedly riding a horse. Running in fields, feeling the long dry grass scraping my naked calves. They hated it. They wanted to be mothers, with husbands and Sunday barbecues. Even their Bellas had kids. Not all of them, of course. Some wanted to be doctors and teachers. Astronauts.

Only me, I didn’t know what I wanted to be. 

And I was bored, but I needed friends. So, I compromised. I was a bit ashamed, too, now that I’m thinking about it. 

Lonely with no siblings. 

I usually told my mom that I was bored and the answer was: chess. Or math equations. Or reading literature. But I didn’t want to. I did play chess with her after dinner, but when I was bored my body had this energy. 

I felt my legs restless. They wanted to move. My chest buzzed. I just wanted to run and climb. I didn’t want to think. It always happened at the wrong time. Usually during siesta, when I wanted Maria to come over and play with me. But my mom didn’t like Maria that much. Or maybe she tolerated her because she got some As. Everything that she wanted me to do had to do with my brain. But the brain wasn’t her only concern. She woke before work, did aerobics in front of the television, and drank vanilla diet shakes from a tall plastic cup. I sat at the kitchen table, dead tired, scooping cereal into my mouth and watching her.

“Discipline is a virtue,” she told me, sweat trickling down her forehead. My mother had lived in Lyranne for years, but her Varman accent never left her. She tried to round the vowels the way my father and I did, but they always sprang back into place.

Then she sipped coffee, reading articles and essays, discussing them with my father, who smoked even though he was a doctor. The balcony door was always open. The curtains breathed with the sea breeze while cigarette smoke curled lazily toward the ceiling. 

 He solved the newspaper crossword in ink. Never in pencil. “If you know something, you know it,” he said. “If you don’t, leave it blank.” I used to search for the right word so I could impress him. According to my mother, he had also been a chess champion.

Maria didn’t like chess or equations or literature. 

She liked to be pregnant or a priest. It made sense. She already had three siblings, and her mom was pregnant with the fourth, and every Sunday they went to church. Whenever Maria’s mother came to pick her up, my father waited for the door to close before muttering, “Religion—the opium of the masses.”

She put her baby doll under my shirt, so I looked pregnant. Then I gave birth and she baptized the baby. She got a small plastic bassinet and filled it up with water, then added some olive oil and started. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. 

My mother squinted her eyes by the door. She was an atheist. 

I was worried about the spilled water on the carpet. During spring and summer we baptized my child in the garden instead, so all good. We placed the bassinet beneath the thick grapevines stretched across the wooden pergola. Maria became very serious, holding the doll under its armpits while she baptized it. Above us, the leaves trembled in the warm breeze, breaking the afternoon sun into dancing patches of light.

The doll changed names every day. One day was a Helen, then a Hector. I grew to like it—Maria liked to come over to my house. My mom always brought us ice cream.

I remember standing by the gate watching her family walk away together. The little ones zigzagged along the pavement, shouting and chasing one another. Maria skipped ahead, then ran back to her mother. Her father scooped up the youngest without breaking the conversation. They seemed to move as one organism.

There was nothing remarkable about it, but I liked observing them. The way their hands flapped with each step, the shrugging of the shoulders. Together. Almost organically, they turned left to the bakery or right toward their home. That was what a family looked like to me. Because my family never went places together. Dad had conferences or he was at his private practice. Mom in her study writing letters to her relatives in Varma. And then we traveled to Varma together, but we were different. Together and alone. They never had a second child. We never talked about it. 

Well then, motherhood was a distant thing that I never really questioned, even if my parents often complained that children were too loud whenever one cried in a restaurant or ran through a café. 

“But that’s what people do,” my mom had said once when I asked her. 

“You go to school. Then university. You work. Meet someone. Have kids.” A skeleton of a life.

Thus: of course I would be one in the future. The same feeling you have about marriage, university or getting your driver’s license when you’re a kid. A vague destination of your future self. 

It belonged somewhere ahead of me. Along with studying, traveling, and cultivating my spirit.

An idea. I didn’t know then that this would not remain theoretical.

That a body could decide something else. Or that a body could disrupt what I was supposed to do. The body was a tool after all. I thought. I rule the body.

That a child would enter my life. 

I guess it was the way I grew up. 

And as a young adult, other things were important to me. Like a handbag. 

Understanding. Epigenetics: how meditation, kale juice, and yoga could change my gene expression. 

Affection. Even if I didn’t know what affection was. What affection looks like. Proofs of affection. Is it a selfie kissing under a sunset? Is it holding cocktails cheek to cheek, and then the click? Is it proposing on Vistara?

Adam. 

Any Adam taking me out for thoughtful dates. 

My highlights and fillers. 

The scale. 

Lulemonn tights. 

My therapist. 

My lists and lists, as I used to say. Assessing the day. 

I remember my oldest cousin Marianna, who had a baby when I was ten. She had already become a lawyer; met her husband in the town where she studied. Settled into her life. Then it was time for a baby.

They had come on a Sunday for a BBQ. My father and her husband—who was a pulmonologist—were chatting next to the smoking meat. Their hands delicate, they took turns turning it.

Marianna, my mother and I were at the garden table, preparing the salad. My mother sliced tomatoes while Marianna carried the baby on one hip, talking to her, bouncing him absentmindedly, never once looking down to check if she was doing it right.

I was curious to see the little person. Of course, I’d seen babies before—but I had never touched one. Or smelled one.

The baby was nine months old, chubby, and admittedly cute. The smell of milk, vomit and poo slapped me in the face. But beneath the unpleasantness, I caught something else: a scent of fresh. Of new human.

I touched his sausage-like thigh. My fingers sank into the plushness of his skin—like the cotton balls my mother used to take off her makeup.

“Do you want to hold him?” Marianna asked me. I looked at my mother, who smiled at me encouragingly. 

I didn’t really want to. I was so scared I’d drop him. His palpability, his flexibility—it made me tremendously anxious.

I was suddenly responsible for his existence.

But I did. I held him. 

He was heavier than I thought. I didn’t know babies had density. I stood there, arms stiff, adjusting every few seconds. 

“He’s great,” Marianna said to my mom. “I’m delighted—really happy. I can’t ask for more from my life. He sleeps through the night. And Tasos? He’s great. Takes him so I can have a minute.”

“I’m so happy for you Marianna.” my mother said. 

The baby was kicking and reached his hands toward his mom. I realized the baby wanted Marianna. Loved her, I guess. 

“Don’t move.” Marianna smiled. “I’ll be right back.” She followed my mother into the house. I observed her walking away and how I liked her. I liked the way she walked. Her confidence and her dancing hands when she spoke. I could be her one day, I thought.  

I shifted him slightly, turning him so he faced me, his head wobbling a little—and then our eyes met.

He squealed softly and pressed his open palm against my jaw. His palm was damp and fleshy, and it clung lightly to my cheek. 

And then I felt it. 

The warmth. 

The soft expansion of my chest. 

Melting heartbeats.

It must have been oxytocin. 

It was more than euphoria. A state with no agenda.

I didn’t expect it.

Although I knew that feeling. 

Didn’t I?

My mother. Her cool hand on my feverish forehead. Sometimes when I was with Maria—after we had run fast towards the pine grove, catching our breath, toward the beach. Then lying on the pebbles against each other without needing anything really, just staring the shapes of clouds. Laughing until our stomachs hurt. 

Or when I was reading my favorite book—lying on my bed with the soft blanket while it rained outside. The drops hitting the windows—gently. Consistently. And the dim yellow light outlined the shadow of my face on my book.

I felt this calm but exhilarated state. A deep physical happiness. 

That warm opening in the chest. 

So maybe it wasn’t just about babies. Surely it was not. 

However, that was it. I’ve never held another baby besides mine. Kitties or puppies. I had a canary once, but I freed him on a summer day. 

*All names, brands, and details within the economy of this work are fictional.