I tried to look up baby fever, but all that came up is information about an infant’s vitals and how to take their temperature. It’s more of an American term, baby fever. In British English, we are more likely to say broody, which comes from hens, but there’s something benign and cosy-sounding about that word. A friend once asked me if I was clucking to mean “do you feel a desire to get pregnant?” I had never heard it before, but again, it was too nice for what I was feeling, which was at times dark and desperate and jealous and mean.
In my memoir, The Year of the Cat, which is published this month, I try to pinpoint that feeling of longing, because it seemed to me that literature had still not fully explored it, perhaps because it can feel so deep and primal and beyond words. In the end, I am forced to resort to Welsh to describe it. I use the word hiraeth, which means to feel longing for a place or a person or a time that feels like home but may never have existed except in your imagination.
