Why couldn’t he fix this? Why couldn’t he make this right?
Assigning fault seemed to be the name of the game these days, pointing fingers, attaching blame. Whose fault was it that we didn’t yet have a baby?
March 11, 1997 Egg Harbor
What I’ve come to learn after being referred to a fertility specialist is that even though I get my period each month with moderate regularity, my body isn’t ovulating correctly, isn’t always ovulating. Anovulation, it’s called, a word I’ve never heard of before but now think about at every waking hour and when I should be asleep. If I’m being honest, this comes as little surprise to me. My body is simply going through the motions, the preparations of the endometrium—the lining of my uterus readying itself to welcome a fertilized egg—and then sloughing off when no egg moves in. It’s not that the egg wasn’t fertilized by Aaron’s sperm. It’s that it simply wasn’t there to begin with.
Today I began my third cycle of Clomid. After months of this, I have no sense of humility left, no modesty. I’ve paraded my private parts for every doctor, nurse and technician in the fertility clinic to see, while all Aaron ever had to do was drop off a sperm sample and endure a simple blood draw. It hardly seems fair. The first month I didn’t ovulate. Last month we upped the dosage and, though Dr. Landry spied two follicles when he performed his ultrasound—forcing the transvaginal ultrasound probe between my legs so that I should rightfully have felt violated and ashamed, but no longer did, sending Aaron and me home with strict orders to have sex—we didn’t get pregnant.
The pills make me weepy all the time, for no apparent reason at all, though having seen the inventory of potential side effects, I consider it a blessing that the only one I’m doomed to endure is the predisposition for crying. I cry at the market; I cry in the car. I cry at home while mopping floors and folding laundry and standing in the doorway to one of the spare bedrooms, wondering if it will ever hold a child, steeling myself for another cycle of Clomid that will likely end again with my monthly flow.
To counter Aaron’s low sperm motility, as it’s called, he’s switched to wearing loose-fitting underpants (I don’t tell Miranda this), and is tasked with finding ways to reduce stress in his life, stress which neither of us knew he had. He now sleeps until after ten o’clock every morning so that we no longer share our day’s coffee on the dock, which is fine anyway seeing as the eternal winter has trapped us indoors and there are no sailboats to be seen on the bay, none until spring. He takes herbal supplements and when the temperatures aren’t too abysmal will go for a walk or a run, so that our days together are mere hours at best. This too is fine, seeing as we don’t have much to talk about anymore, nothing that doesn’t involve the many things the world is reluctant to let us have: strong, capable sperm; regular ovulation; a positive pregnancy test; a baby.
It isn’t that Aaron doesn’t have enough sperm—he does—it’s that what he has doesn’t swim properly and isn’t able to travel the four inches or so to where my egg may or may not be waiting.
In short, we’re both to blame, though there isn’t a moment that I don’t wonder which of us is to blame more and even though I think it’s me, I know it’s me, there is a part of me aggrieved that I’m the only one forced to record my body temperature, to take ovulation tests, to cry in public for no sound reason at all, to travel to the fertility clinic again and again, to be probed so that some doctor or technician can gaze inside me and at my ovaries, while all Aaron has to do is take an herbal supplement from time to time and exercise on occasion.
It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem right.
I’ve come to resent Aaron for this, as I’ve come to resent him for many things.
March 13, 1997 Egg Harbor
I field questions nearly every day about when Aaron and I are going to have a baby, often from my stepmother or Aaron’s mother, calling on the phone when he’s at work, asking not-so-subtly for grandchildren.
When can they expect them? When will there be good news to share?
It’s not that grandchildren are in short supply because they aren’t. Instead it’s that Aaron and I have been married for over two years, and society doesn’t take well to that: two nearly thirty-years-olds, married for over two years without kids, as if there’s something unthinkable about it, something taboo.
Is there something wrong with that?
It feels as if there is.
A married woman of my age without a child is quite the anomaly these days.
I can’t bring myself to say aloud that we’re trying, trying and failing to make a baby because I don’t want pity and I don’t want advice. And so instead I tell Aaron’s mother and my stepmother soon, wishing that my own mother were still alive because hers is the only advice I want and need.
I spend my days waiting. Waiting for Aaron to wake up, waiting for Aaron to leave, waiting for Aaron to get home so I can again close my eyes and sleep. Waiting for a new cycle of Clomid to begin, to ovulate, to make love to Aaron like robots would do, hasty and unfeeling, and then waiting for the negative pregnancy test results, the loyal, trusty blood.
It’s the only thing I can depend on anymore. That sooner or later, my period will come.
March 14, 1997
Egg Harbor
Spring looms on the horizon.
It’s weeks away still, but every now and then a day blooms before me, fifty or sixty degrees and full of sun, so that it’s easier to get through than the endlessly gray winter days.
These rare springlike days I leave the cottage when Aaron is away and head into town. I’ve discovered a dance studio there, completely by chance—I didn’t seek it out—a small single-story cottage on Church Street that tiny ballerinas move in and out of all day.
The first day I spotted the studio, I saw an empty park bench nearby, which was warm and welcoming, set directly in a shaft of sunlight so that even though it was no more than fifty-two degrees outside, I felt snug, my skin warm from the sun’s generous beams.
For nearly an hour I watched the ballerinas, toddlers mainly in leotards with their hair pinned neatly back in buns. Their little voices were happy and high-pitched, like birds, as they clung to their mothers’ hands, coming and going like clockwork, nearly every hour on the hour.
There was one group in particular that caught my eye. A group of sixteen—eight mothers and their daughters—who arrived en masse around noon, a whole bundle of giggly girls with women trailing behind, women who sipped lattes and gossiped while I sat alone on a park bench, feeling sorry for myself, isolated from society because I didn’t fit in. Because I didn’t have a child.
The women were beautiful, every last one of them, which for whatever reason made me feel dirty, self-conscious and ashamed. I smiled as they walked by, but not one looked at me and no one smiled in reply. They wore peasant tops and floaty skirts; cowboy boots; big, baggy sweaters; hobo bags; while me, on the other hand, I sat wrapped up in a sweatshirt of Aaron’s that had faded and shrunk in the wash, feeling alone, bloated, desperate, wanting for a child.
How different I am from those mothers.
I could never be one of them, one of those women who travel in a pack, whispering secrets about their husbands, their children’s nighttime habits, which little ones still wet the bed. All because I didn’t have a child. Because without a child, I had nothing to offer them.
Because I’m nothing, I easily reasoned then, if not a mother.