Quotable Quotes: Sunday Morning Pillow Talk

Sometime between dawn and bagels...

Me: I know we aren't supposed to, but I think we should have sex.
N: Don't write checks your pussy can't cash.
Me: Fair enough. Want to do a crossword?
N: Sure.

This is the least fun way to make a baby. Ever.

My Biological Clock Has One Hand Clapping. Sometimes.

So, I got caught in an undertow of grief the other day. I could try to defend myself by saying that I freaked out because my estrogen level is 2500 instead of the normal 150, but I'd rather just accept the fact that I freaked out because I freaked out.

Today is a good day, though, due mostly to my trying to keep in mind the following four things:

One. All donors are going to present themselves in a "buy me" kind of light, and this is something I should have anticipated. Instead I took my donor's profile at its word and developed expectations about her that later turned out to be untrue, and I realize now that this is one reason why intended parents (my husband included) don't want to meet their donors. But it's always been important to me that my future children have the choice of knowing their genetic parent, and despite the fact that I don't love my donor, I still think that meeting her was the brave and right thing to do. I have no regrets on that count.

Two. All breeding is a crapshoot, and there's no reason for me to think that my eggs would have produced better children than my donor's eggs will. So what if my donor is heavier than she said she was, that she's more photogenic than she is beautiful, and that she isn't brilliant. Women are born with 1 million eggs. Men produce over 400 billion sperm over their lifetimes. This means that N and my donor can breed a possible 400,000,000,000,000,000 different types of people. Right now thirteen of these four hundred quadrillion exist in the form of zygotes that are developing at my clinic's embryology lab. All I can do is hope that they're relatively good ones.

Three. Nurture over nature is a mantra that floats around on PVED quite a lot. That and epigenetics, which is the study that looks at the extent to which people's brain, body, and character are formed by elements other than genetic code. The other day, I posted my emotional crisis on PVED, and a dozen lovely PVEDers rallied around me saying things like, "My child is exactly like me in ways that I can't begin to explain. Don't worry too much about the donor. Your child will be yours." OK, PVED. I believe you. And I love you.

Four. When I first got into this infertility thing, I adopted a mantra:

My biological clock has one hand clapping.

This philosophy was meant to serve as an inspiration and reminder that this is first and foremost a process of self-reflection. Moreover, my success at the end of this experience wouldn't be a child but rather an awareness of who I am in the context of this challenge. This meant releasing expectations, accepting outcomes, and embracing my world as it was.

Over the past 5 years, I've failed to live up to my mantra more than I've succeeded. I still have hopes and expectations, and I don't always do the amount of reflective work that I should. My biological clock just isn't as Zen as I wish it was.

But in the wake of being bowled over by grief at the start of the week, I've tried my best to re-remember this philosophy. I've seen my brilliant therapist twice, I've let myself feel vulnerable around my friends and e-quaintances (yes, you!), and I've had such rich and sweet conversations with N that I've managed to fall in love with him all over again - yet again.

So, yes, I had a freak-out a few days ago because despite my best efforts, sometimes my biological clock goes cuckoo. But sometimes my biological clock actually does have one hand clapping, and today is a good day.

Donor Down

Our donor fell through.

A woman who I've been thinking about for weeks and whom I've been affectionately calling #4889 has left us.

The clinic gave us two reasons. The first was that they discovered that she has a medical issue that is exacerbated by hormones, so she can't cycle (although they allowed her to finish her first). The other reason is that the staff doesn't want to work with her again because she's a bitch. Both seem reasonable.

Oddly, I miss her quite a lot. It's amazing how much of a bond is formed with a woman whom I was never going to meet. I'd been thinking so affectionately of her because she was going to be the gen-mom of my kids, and this made me love her in some way. Not quite as a friend, and not quite as family. It was something else.

When I got the news, I called N whose response was, "Good. Now we can choose a donor who's willing to have an open relationship."

I love him.

Un(en)titled

I don’t deserve this.

I don’t deserve my infertility or the years I spent struggling with the most complex grief I’ve ever known. God knows, there are worse tragedies in the world, but there’s something about the pain of infertility that is deepened by its inherently enduring hopefulness. It forbids you to let go. I spent over 4 years living in monthly anticipation that something good would happen. “Don’t give up,” it said. “There’s still one more thing to try.” So I hung on. And on. And on. And I didn’t deserve that.

I also didn't deserve my generous and loving family, the education I've had, or the summer camps I went to when I was young. I don’t deserve a nice house, the means to travel, or to eat out when I want. I don’t deserve a husband who is willing to work as hard as I am at making our relationship beautiful, nor do I deserve access to the therapy that helped us get here. I don’t deserve my above average intelligence, my great health, or a face that still gets me carded at 39. I don’t deserve a lifetime of good relationships, loads of dear friends, and (in case I haven’t mentioned) my incredible family.

I didn’t deserve any of these things because deservedness has nothing to do it. You get what you get. Some things are good; some things aren’t. That’s just the way it is.

It’s a simple truth, but it didn’t occur to me until now: I'm not entitled to fertility. Being unable to conceive at 35 was a stroke of bad luck, but considering the context of the rest of my life, it seems pretty fair. I am absurdly privileged, and there is no reason that I should be able to have children on top of all the embarrassing number of advantages that I've had – advantages for which I was never even been especially grateful.

Until infertility. Infertility mocked my expectations. After my first failed IVF, infertility made me stand in line behind a pregnant woman while I bought cat food. Infertility flooded my Facebook feed with chubby cheeks and onesies while I was bled out a miscarriage. It ridiculed my grief and was indifferent to my tears. It made me want and didn’t let me get. Infertility humbled me.

I didn’t deserve infertility, but it taught me to recognize and appreciate all the privileges I never earned. I am grateful for how it’s changed me, but I still won't say that I’m grateful for infertility itself, because for fuck’s sake, it hasn’t changed me that much.

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.

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.