It is deep summer, hot and thick, and I am making new life, new eggs. I am making them all the time — while I sleep, or try to, in my tiered kingdom of pillows; while I walk to the subway to get to work; while I sit at my desk waiting for the moment I can walk out to get a lunchtime milkshake; while I stand at the kitchen counter, making Carla Lalli Music’s Spicy-Tangy Green Beans and Tofu. After a first trimester of bagels and lemonade and feeling sorry for myself, tofu is all I want to eat now. By the time the new school year starts for my three children, I will have created all the eggs my fourth child will have her whole life, between two and four million of them.

I sit on a stool pulled up to the counter, hand on my belly, grating ginger, making millions of oocytes. There is no time I am more aware of creation than when I cook dinner. Potential in the fridge, on the cutting board, dropping into the pan, onto the plate. I can, I am, making my own happiness. The day I make this dish for the first time, after my children are in bed, is the day I learn that I am, inside me, developing a uterus, fallopian tubes, eggs. These immature oocytes will remain in my child’s body for more than a decade, some of them longer — decades longer, in meiotic arrest, awaiting their fate.

Time, the world, will spin on, fly by, as she comes into consciousness. She will taste her first strawberry, her first movie theater popcorn. I think of my other children with their raucous desires, the lives they are now able to say they want. Before they were born, they were pure potential to me. But now: One has only ever wanted to be a babysitter for a living. Another wants two dogs and to live in a house where he cannot see another house. The third wants to learn to cook so that one day she can have me and my wife over for dinner.

A year ago, I thought my eggs were in arrest, like the ones inside the fetus I am now gestating. I stood in this same kitchen the evening I had my fertility consult, cooking dinner. That night, I believed in time working for me: Many of the eggs I’d been born with lay in wait. Each month, one follicle would divide into two — a daughter cell, which would become an ovum, and a polar body, which had no further potential. But soon after, the doctor told me that my eggs were nearly all gone.

Now, when I feel the baby moving as I stand in the kitchen waiting for the rice to finish cooking, I think about all the ways my own body has disappointed me. Creation, reproduction, was supposed to be my inheritance, my potential; I, too, was once a daughter cell. In the end, the baby inside me did not come from my egg but from her mother’s. She is a new kind of baby to me: a joint effort, joint creation. Part of me is hung up on the body she will have, the one I am making, but I don’t want to map my own disappointment onto her. I must make space for her like I have for the others, space for everything she might desire in life: a house of her own, full of light; a nighttime bike ride through town; a plate of tofu, a new recipe, served steaming hot and at just the right moment. Space for everything I don’t know, can’t predict, about this child. I have never made, never held, someone like her.