Eat, Play, Love

Eat.

I have video footage of my baby crying while nursing my left tit because I have almost no milk. She had better luck on the right, but not much. I won't go into the details of how awful breastfeeding has been, but suffice it to say that it's been both physically and emotionally painful for both me and my kid.

Now at 5 months, she's almost exclusively formula fed. I have one last bottle of breast milk left, and I think I'll cry when I feed it to her. The few successful breastfeedings were profoundly sweet. In those moments, I felt like a mom. But still, quitting will be a relief. But also sad. But also a relief.

Play.

The truth is that I don't know how to interact with infants. Don't get me wrong: I took great care of her and held her almost constantly when she was teeny tiny, but infants are incredibly stupid, and playing with an infant isn't much different from playing with a bale of hay. You get about as much reciprocity: no eye contact and none of that cuddling that you imagine happens between mother and child. I tried to play with her as best I could, but really she was just a lot of noise and shitty diapers.

This changed over the last couple of months, and the 5-month mark was a special turning point. She laughs freely now, and it's easy to get her to smile. We spend a lot of time dancing around and roughhousing; she likes getting thrown in the air, getting tickled, and when I fling her upside-down. Sometimes our games make her throw up, but bales of hay don't throw up, so we're moving in the right direction. And I'm having fun.

Love.

For these and other reasons (hello, 5 hours of sleep!), parenting has gotten easier, but to be honest, there remains a bit of discord in our relationship: I'm not sure if I'm fully bonded with my kid, and I can't help but feel that it's because of the egg donation thing.

I don't know how parental love is supposed to feel, and maybe this is it. You hear about rainbows and unicorns popping out of women's vaginas together with their spawn, and all that came with my baby was blood and slime, so it's hard for me to tell.

It's possible that this emotional barrier is just a part of my psychology because of my broken upbringing. My childhood had a good bit of neglect and some physical abuse, so I might feel this way no matter how my child came about. I tried to flesh it out in therapy, but when I asked my therapist why I was feeling this lack of connection, she said that the why didn't matter and that I just needed to work on increasing my capacity for intimacy. (Intimacy issues? That's real original, Therapy. You fucking whore.)

I do really like spending time with the kid, but as often as not, I look at her like I'm not sure who she is. But maybe that's normal. Or maybe it's not. What the hell do I know? I still can't believe that the hospital let me take her home, to be honest. I mean, they don't even know me.

Hell. I don't know me.

Archetype Casting

For 2012, I had three new year's resolutions: to do more crosswords, to breathe, and to focus more on integrity than on goal-setting. I only succeeded insofar as I'm still breathing.

Because I tend to fail wildly at at these annual vows, you'd think I'd consider setting a lower bar, but that's not how I roll. Case in point: for 2013, I resolved to become a different person.

But unlike with crosswords, in this I have some experience. Back in the summer of 2009, when it became clear that I wasn't easily going to become a mother, I decided to become the opposite of a mother. I decided to become a whore.

It started with an anonymous twitter profile where I wrote clever little quips with sexual twists, and it developed into a WordPress blog for original erotic short stories. By the end of 9 months, I had 1500 followers and made regular appearances on Favstar's Tweets of the Day - the Twitterverse's gold medals. I was an e-slutty sensation.

The accolades didn't stop there, though. I also got several sexual propositions, a marriage proposal, and about a dozen nude photos of men who wanted me to know just how much they cared. Eventually I got tired of pretending to be a single 20-something who was always searching for the next big thing between my legs, so just as quickly as she was born, I tweeted one final RIP tweet and shut her down.

For that short time, however, I'd transformed myself into a different archetype of womanhood -- well, as much as was possible for someone who was married, monogamous, and nearing middle age. Through her, I was a sexually-liberated model of femininity, and even though the character was virtual, her personality influenced several aspects of my real life: my wardrobe choices were edgier, I lost those last 10 pounds, and my sex life became more lively. She was good for me.

The best part of the character, though, was that she allowed me to escape from living the life of a woman who only wanted to be a mom. I've seen it over and over again with infertile women, and it's a story I know too well: we put our lives on hold while making choices that revolve around what we think will be the quickest route to motherhood. In the meantime, all the rest of ourselves - all the other parts of our identity with potential to be fulfilled - just whither away within us. When the struggle takes years, it gets ugly.

So this year I resolve to be a different person once again, only now I'm choosing a whole new archetype: the female warrior. Or, in modern parlance, I plan to become a professionally successful woman.

Until recently, my career has been in non-profit program management, which is really just a professionalization of motherhood, and thus one of the reasons why I don't want to do it anymore -- the other reason being the non-profit part. Beginning last summer, though, I started working with a career counselor with whom I discovered what seems like a great new career direction for me: public relations.

So that's what I'm on my way to doing. I'm taking two PR courses at the local university, and this week I begin a volunteer job that will give me experience in government administration, communications, and public relations. I've also joined a local PR group through which I make it a point to meet with at least one person every week to explore ideas of what I want to do and what it'll take to get me there.

This isn't to say that I'm giving up on becoming a mother; I'm just giving up on needing motherhood to define me while the reality is that it just plain doesn't. I'm done putting my life on hold while I ride the pendulous swing that takes me back and forth between my doctors' optimism and confoundedness. That person no longer gets the lion-share of me.

It's 2013. I am Athena. Hear me roar.

A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Committing Murder

From the start, I had an "unexplained infertility" diagnosis. Or rather an "unexplained infertility, but we think it's an egg issue" diagnosis. As in:

You can't get pregnant on your own, but we think it's an egg issue, so let's introduce the sperm as close to the egg as possible. Four times.

Nope. Inseminations didn't work. What else you got?

Boy, that's strange. But we still think it's an egg issue, so let's do IVF and only use embryos that we know will make babies. Three times.

Hmmm. Wrong again. Is there a Plan D?

Really? It didn't work?? That's shocking, but as a matter of fact, we do have another idea: because we're absolutely certain it's an egg issue, let's use the eggs of some young woman that you don't know, fertilize those, and get you pregnant with embryos that aren't genetically related to you. Two times.

OK. I didn't love it, but I tried it, and still no dice. So, what's next?

Wait, what?? That didn't work?!? I guess that means.... You know, it's kind of a funny thing. Come to think of it, did we say "egg issue?" Because what we really meant is ... well, it's possible that.... It really is funny, if you think about it, but it now appears that you might not have had an egg issue after all. Well, at least not at first, although you certainly do now, because now it's 5 years later, and you're really old. But at this point, -- and when I say funny, what I mean is that you should get ready to laugh because you're totally going to think this is hilarious when I tell you, but -- we now believe it's been a uterine issue the whole time, and you never could carry a pregnancy in the first place.

Yes. Yes, that is funny.

Now, if you wouldn't mind holding my drink while I shoot you...

O, Me of Little Faith

My parents got married in 1970 and divorced in 1980.
Then they got remarried in 1990 and divorced again in 2008.
And then last year, they got re-remarried.

This time it's different, though. This time they're also married to God.

They seem quite happy in their religious re-reunion. They hold hands, and they sprinkle each other's days with compliments and kisses. They talk about the bible, talk about religion, and talk about how sad it is that they'd never talked before about the bible and religion. It's all very sweet.

Revolution #3 on the marriage-go-round could be the one that sticks, but I'm not entirely convinced because my parents have 45 years worth of untherapized shit between them, and I happen to believe more in counseling than in God by a factor of infinity.

Unlike my parents, I am an atheist. To clarify: that's totally, utterly, and completely unlike my parents. In fact, if you were to imagine a continuum of faith that ranges from 1 to 10 (with 1 being a monkey and 10 being Kirk Cameron), then I am a zero, and my parents are Orthodox Jews.

It's safe for me to say that you have no idea how consuming religion can be until you’ve spent a week with Orthodox Jews - very safe for me to say, because you honestly have no idea.

But I'm an atheist, not an asshole, so I've done my best to accept the changes. I deal with their not being able to eat with me at restaurants, I arrange plans around their combined 6 hours a day of prayer, and I ignore the fact that they've started dressing like extras in Fiddler on the Roof. If they're happy, then I'm happy for them.

Happy, that is, until my mother came home from a bris and handed me wine blessed by the rabbi because she believed that my drinking it would get me pregnant. Then I wanted to punch her in her bible.

I drank the wine, but only because the experience made me really need to drink some wine. It didn't get me pregnant, but it did give me some clarity about a boundary that I wanted to set around my parents' faith: when it comes to rituals, there's a line they can't cross, and that line is at my vagina.

Sacred or not, I needed my parents to understand that wine wouldn't make me pregnant. Maybe if I were 16 and had a butterfly tramp stamp pressed against the flatbed of a pick-up truck while the idiot on top of me refused a condom because I could just douche with Mountain Dew, then the wine might serve as a pregnancy aid, but it still wouldn't be the wine that got me pregnant: it would be the egg, the sperm, and the uterus.

One good egg, one good sperm, and one good uterus is what it takes to get pregnant. Nothing else. Nothing.

Not prayer, not optimism, and not crossed-fingers; not astrologers, not psychics, and not hypnotists; not gluten-free diets, not vitamins, and not kale; and definitely not vacations.

One good egg. One good sperm. And one good uterus. That's it.

And as luck would have it, I've got six good eggs and six good sperm in the form of six good embryos on ice. At least the embryos looked good before they were frozen, so odds are high that they're still good now.

As far as the uterus goes, that's currently in development. Injectibles started last Monday, my period is on its way, and we've got 4+ weeks of blood draws and ultrasounds before my transfer on October 18th.

But a good uterus is not a sure thing. Goodness means over 7mm of lining, a trilaminar pattern, and hormone levels high enough to make me cry when the pickle jar won't pry loose. Those are quite a lot of variables, and the truth is that I'm a bit nervous because I've struggled with one or another of these issues during most of my previous cycles.

Statistical odds are on my side, though, and I'm hopeful that donor cycle two will yield me baby number one. So, wish me luck, dear friends. And, ... um, ... if you're so inclined, then maybe say a prayer for me, too.

Fall from Grace

My grandmother was a woman of grace. She bore 11 children in a 2-bedroom home, cared for her husband through a decade of Alzheimer's, and lost her eyesight near the end of her life, and the only time I ever heard her complain was when I mixed the fruit salad with my hand instead of a spoon.



It actually wasn't until I was a teenager that I realized she'd had 11 children. Before that, I only knew my mom to have 9 siblings, but in poring through old pictures with my grandmother, I came across a photo of half a dozen pint-sized aunts and uncles sandwiching a toddler who I didn't recognize, and when I asked her about the mystery child, all she said was, "He was a boy." "What boy?" "A boy that was."

That was it. No yearning. No grief. Not an ounce of longing for the boy that was. Just a graceful nod to what is.

Now it would be romantic of me to imagine that my grandmother was inspired by some Buddhist philosophy of non-attachment on the path toward liberation from suffering, but closer to the truth would be to admit that she was - like most third-world women knocked-up at 15 by men twice their age - repressed. But I don't care. I still admire it. Her style was so elegantly dignified that nearly 20 years after her death, I remain haunted by the ease with which she could raise her chin, inhale a single breath, and turn her head toward whatever direction lay acceptance.

I am not this way. Unlike my grandmother, when I'm confronted by grief, I curl up into a ball of despair and wallow in my want. My donor egg IVF cycle fails, and I sob a small mountain of tissues until it peaks at an elevation that mirrors the depth of my sadness, and then I cry some more for shame that I could want anything so profoundly.

But that's the irony of the thing and the part I'm most ashamed of: I don't even really want a donor egg child; I'm only chasing this ghost because it's the next thing to hope for. So not only do I long, but I long for something that I want and don't want in equal measure. Desperation for a broken paddle in an ocean storm.

Was she stronger than me, my grandmother? Was she smarter? Wiser? Braver? Or was it instead that she gritted her teeth because she knew that her armor would crumble under the weight of a single tear? Whatever her secret, I yearn for that most of all because right now I'm lost in this canyon that divides what can't be with what might, and the vastness between the two is causing my trans-generational fall from grace to echo with an ever-fierce and violent crash.

In the meantime, I ask myself and I wonder, but nothing comes. There are no answers. No truths to be revealed. Just the occasional whoosh of my want as it flails about without composure. And the waiting. Always more waiting. Waiting for peace, waiting for my period, waiting for the bundle of something that could end up being joy.

Or perhaps just waiting for the crash. That might be good for me, too.

Forty Vignettes

I turn 40 next week.

I remember my mother when she was 40. I was 18, so it's not hard to recall. She still turned heads with her beauty and sexy stylishness, but 40 was when she started to seem old to me. Her skin especially. Her hands were softer, almost rubbery. I remember pinching her elbows and counting how long it would take for the skin to bounce back. Sometimes it took a full two seconds.

"Look how old your skin is," I would tell her.
"I know," she'd say. "I'm very old."

My elbow skin takes less than a second to bounce back, which makes me luckier than her, I suppose. On the other hand, my mother was still fertile at 40. I know she was fertile because the summer before I went away to college, my dad told me that she had become pregnant, had an abortion, and had her tubes tied.

She was too old for a baby.

~~~

In 40 days, I begin Delestrogen injections for my donor egg cycle.

In related news, I learned that my donor works at a gardening store, which is why May is the earliest that she can travel for the retrieval. March and April are very busy months for her at the nursery.

There's a critical timeline for sowing seeds, and Spring only lasts so long.

~~~

There are 40 women on the PVED Spring 2012 thread who are cycling with donor eggs around the same time as me.

Out of these 40 women, several have cycled in the past. Some were successful, and some weren't. Many have gone through the whole donor egg process only to end up with a negative pregnancy test. A few women had positives but then miscarried as late as 15 weeks. Two women gave birth around 25 weeks, held their babies for a few days, and then watched them die.

40 women on the thread means 40 stories of infertility. 40 versions of grief and loss. 40 shades of hope that no one hopes for.

We're 40 women cycling through a medical procedure with a 50% success rate, which means that 20 of us will fall on the wrong side of the odds. And as it happens, the first woman in our group transferred two embryos last week, and her pregnancy test came back yesterday. It was negative.

1 down. 39 to go.

~~~

40 is the number of dollars this cycle costs - that is, if you take that number, put a comma after it, and then add three zeros.

I don't know how we managed to throw that kind of money together, and I don't have a back-up plan for what to do if this doesn't work. I just can't think about it.

Someone on PVED recently asked if anyone is afraid that their donor egg cycle won't work.

Um ... yes.

Baby Blue

I went into all this infertility stuff with a wide-open heart. N and I had just gotten back together after being separated for a year, and - being more in love than ever - I felt armed and ready for a little hoop jumping. Not even just ready: when I realized that getting pregnant would require medical treatments, I was oddly excited.

Maybe it was the lessons we'd gained from therapy; I had thought that we were such a healthy couple when we first got together, and it turned out we were as damaged as any other. But we dealt with it. We worked hard. We cried, reflected, and made ourselves as vulnerable as can be, and then we came through the other side with a closeness that I didn't know was possible.

So what if we needed blood tests and hormone checks? I didn't even mind ovarian examinations, as long as I was waxed. And providing sperm samples satisfied whatever public sex fantasies we may have had, so that part was actually kinda fun - especially that we would always go to breakfast afterwards. It was all totally cool because these hoops would just make us more prepared parents.

I was wholly optimistic. In point of fact, I'd registered for this blog in 2007, but I never wrote a single post because I thought, "Well, I'm about to get pregnant, so blogging about my experience would be disrespectful to women who were really infertile."

My Zen lasted about 2.5 years.

In 2010, it started to occur to me: this actually might not happen. I might really be infertile. And that's when I started to get a little testy. Moody. Grumpy. Depressed. Despondent. Devastated. Even (and I find the words hard to type) kind of suicidal.

Which was weird because to be honest, I was kind of disgusted by women who were dramatic about their infertility. "Oh, my god. I can't get pregnant. I should just kill myself." Dude, seriously? It's a three step process: face the facts, grieve, and move on.

Well, yes, but that second step is a bitch.

Merlin

When I was 22, I got my own apartment, and I desperately wanted to mark this maturity with a meaningful acquisition.

I would get a kitten.

Like any dedicated Women's Studies major, I planned to get a girl kitten. She would have long, gray hair, and be gentle, and have soft paws that never showed their claws. I would call her Serena or Gaia or something similarly vaginally-inspired. And I would be her mother.

A week later, I got her, but because she kind of fell into my life, she had her imperfections: she was orange instead of gray, and she had short-hair instead of long. And two days after living together, her balls dropped.

And with that, Persephone became Merlin.



The gender adjustment was short, and I fell completely in love with him. I had never lived with a cat before, but I knew he was special. He made real eye contact with me. He listened when I talked. He slept with me every night, his nose against my cheek. We watched the movie Babe together from opening to end credits, four eyes glued to our 19-inch TV. It was all very romantic.

Merlin and I had been living together for 1 year when I bought him a mouse to kill. I had weighed the pros and cons heavily because I was a strict vegetarian, but I didn't think he'd ever caught anything on his own, so I figured giving him a mouse would boost his self-esteem. That, I felt, was my responsibility as his mother.

This turned out to be a very bad idea.

Merlin tortured that mouse mercilessly. The little rodent was tossed in the air and batted to the ground over and over, his poor soul punishingly wrung out of him bit by bit. After three hours of terror, the mouse finally died, at which point Merlin continued to play with his lifeless body for another two hours. And then he ate him.

Self-esteem was obviously not a problem.

This was the first of many animals that Merlin would torture, kill, and eat. Mice, squirrels, rats -- he loved them all, but his favorite was birds. I'm not sure if this was because of the challenge of catching them (I mean, seriously, how do you catch something that flies?), or because they were delicious (think of very small free-range chickens). To me, he was a sweet, loving boy, but there was no question, Merlin was a carnivorous beast.

Merlin and I had been living together for 5 years when I got married. Throughout our relationship ("our" meaning mine and Merlin's, of course) we had several others come in and out of our lives -- a boyfriend or two, other cats, a dog, a husband -- but no matter who the others were, it was clear to everyone that shared our roof which was the primary relationship of the household. I was his mother, and he was my boy, and that was that.

Merlin and I had been living together for 15 years when he was eaten by a coyote on my 38th birthday. At the end of a two-day search, I found his tail and tufts of his hair in the yard of a house across the street. Later the neighbor found more of him: a paw, his collar, some other parts. "He was licked pretty clean," my neighbor said. "I buried what was left, which wasn't much."

I didn't know that coyotes lived in the creek across the way, but I figure Merlin did. With all the critters he'd hunted, killed, and eaten, my boy was an integrated part of the local animal community. Merlin knew the risks, and he chose to roam among them, but I still really, truly, deeply hate those fucking coyotes.

~~~

Merlin's death was a blow. It came 3 months after my second failed IVF, and it threw me into a depth of darkness I could never have expected. I wept for hours and days and weeks on end, not just for him, but also for my fertility that I only then started to realize was as lost as he was.

It was apt, I suppose. My time with Merlin marked the chapter of my life that should have seen me become a parent but didn't. He was there for every swallowed birth control pill that kept me from ovulating. He was the water bottle on my belly during my periods that came every 28 days without embryonic interruption. And although I'll never know exactly when it was that my fertility ended (at 34? 32?), I do know that he was with me, sleeping with his nose against my cheek.

And I miss them both every day.



[Merlin ~ April 1995-April 2010]

The Seven Year Itch

The seven-year itch is real.

It doesn't always land at exactly seven years, and men don't always have flings with Marilyn Monroe, but the principle is true.

The theory is that after about 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 years, people in relationships realize two things:

1. That thing my sweetheart does that I used to think was cute is actually really annoying, and
2. That thing I thought I could give up for the sake of my sweetheart, I actually don't want to.

In other words, the maximum amount of time it takes for people blinded by love to regain their vision is a decade.

This tendency impressed me. Not so much that there's a relative universality to it, but rather that people can fake it for that long. And moreover, that we can live together for all that time and never realize how much of our happiness is pretense.

I learned about the seven-year itch a couple months into therapy, which was also a couple months into my break-up with N. Having gotten together in 1996 and split up in 2006, we were pretty much on schedule. This wasn't exactly good news, except that the person telling me about the Itch was a couples' therapist who was -- and please allow me to take a moment to find an accurate adjective without exaggerating ... OK, I'm going to go with -- brilliant.

But she wasn't brilliant because N and I got back together (which we did), or because our relationship is absolutely perfect in every way (which it isn't), or because of her fashion sense (four different shades of burgundy, really?).

What makes our therapist brilliant is her capacity to see through the pretenses that make us itch in the first place: the loss of self where boundaries should be, the defensiveness that replaces compassion, and the sadness underneath the armor. Our therapist makes us see the weak, vulnerable, broken mess that's buried inside ourselves. She makes us wade through the depths of our emotions. She makes us admit the secrets we keep from ourselves. And she makes us love ourselves all the same.

All this gives us something more to offer each other as partners -- something true.

So, here we are, 15 years into a relationship that I humbly call mostly wonderful. Does that mean we've skirted the second round of seven-year-itchiness? I hope so. But if not, then I at least like to think that I've bitch-slapped it a bit.

50 Periods

I didn't want a baby.

It seemed like a lot of work, what with diapers, the not being able to go out to smoky bars, and the mother-in-law who was already telling me how I should dress my daughter. It was nothing I wanted.

This was back in 2000.

I'd been married for year, and my cousin, who was one of my bridesmaids, had just given an all-natural birth to an all-natural baby girl. And she was giddy about it.

So I navel-gazed for a moment, and my uterus winked at me. Sure, it could have been gas, but I like to think that it was my biological clock asking to lend it an ear. "You want a family, don't you?," it ticked. "A kid to share quiet moments with on Sunday mornings?," it tocked. "A way to show-up other moms in supermarket aisles with your superior parenting skills?"

I wasn't exactly convinced, but I was intrigued.

When I discussed it with N, he agreed: he didn't want a baby either. Awesome. But being the smart cookies that we were, we also agreed that (1) we would want children in the future, and (2) the only way to have children in the future was to have babies now. Or at least now-ish.

Thus the plan was hatched: 50 periods.

I don't know how we decided on 50, but 50 was the number we landed on. The deal was that after 50 periods, we would agree to trade contraceptively-induced quiet for playdates and poop.

But planning to want a baby can be tricky, especially when 50 periods is the exact same time that the two of you move across the county without jobs, a car, a home, friends, family, or a plan.

And it's super-duper tricky when your relationship starts to fall apart.