The Last Try

My husband and I first met our reproductive endocrinologist (RE) on a cool, weakly lit March afternoon. He sat behind a large desk with a tropical fish tank that spanned the length and height of the wall behind him. I’d come straight from a class and was wearing a jean skirt and leather boots because I needed him to know how sexy and alive I felt. Only in pregnancy is thirty-five considered “geriatric.” At thirty-three, I was still fertile and open to possibilities. Unlike those other women in the waiting room, I wasn’t desperate. I didn’t really need him. I would portray an image of strength. My voice wouldn’t crack, I wouldn’t cry. 

Sitting there, I realized I found the doctor attractive. Short, compact and muscular, he pulsed with a sexual energy, as if he could compact the world’s energy in his hands and BOOM, produce a baby. He could definitely help us.

He started with a long series of questions about my health history and our fertility struggles. I did most of the talking with Scott adding details here and there. Each time I spoke, the RE seemed a little impatient, as if he’d heard it all before. He wanted to know how long we’d been trying to have a baby (three and a half years), how old I was when we started trying (twenty-nine), how long it had taken to achieve the first pregnancy (about a year) and then, the second (another year). I tried to focus on what he was saying instead of the brightly colored fish that swam behind his head.

“And the first pregnancy ended—?” He paused. “I’m sorry. I have to ask,” he said. 

I was glad for his sensitivity, but that didn’t make it easier.

“About seven weeks,” I said. No matter how often I went over these losses, I was surprised by the depth of emotion that still pooled beneath the surface. Strange details, a secret history. The bathroom I stopped at after teaching my class on the morning the bleeding had started, the old, ugly yellow tiles on the floor at my feet, the shuttle I’d taken up the hill to the parking lot and how sure I was that the student who got on after me could see the pain and fear on my face. 

No matter how often I went over these losses, I was surprised by the depth of emotion that still pooled beneath the surface.

“And what happened then?” he said, gently. 

I told him how I’d called the doctor’s office and a nurse had suggested rest. How the bleeding had continued and I’d ended up in the ER because I didn’t know how painful a miscarriage would be. I said I’d had a fever and threw up. I didn’t say how the doctor in the ER had put his hand on my leg and said he understood how hard it was, or how I’d appreciated that tenderness. 

I looked around the room and tried to focus on the facts. Paper, fluorescent lights, folders, desk, black dress shoes poking out from underneath the desk.

I told him we’d started trying again a few months later and that I’d gotten pregnant for the second time about eight months after that. I said that for two years I’d gone to acupuncture, watched my diet, tried to relax, gone to yoga, tried not to worry, tried to forget how important this all was. I wanted him to see I’d been so, so good.

 “And the second pregnancy—what happened then?” 

He looked up and pushed a box of tissues toward me. 

“I’m sorry, but this is important.”

“We were so happy when we heard a heartbeat at the first ultrasound around eight weeks,” I began. 

Scott squeezed my hand. 

“I’d been really nauseated the entire time. Then, right around the twelve-week mark, the nausea disappeared. I thought it was normal.” 

I pulled a tissue from the box and wiped at my nose. 

“We had the second ultrasound in the thirteenth week,” I continued. “We went in thinking everything was fine. That we made it through. But then there was no heartbeat.” 

That one sentence conveyed so little about the actual moment. It seemed my clear-eyed strength could not save me from the sudden flood of memories: the OB’s cold instruments and her magenta dress, the way the air had suddenly flattened when she said she couldn’t find a heartbeat. How I’d thought she was wrong at first, that she was mistaken or talking to someone else, how her eyes had filled with tears. 

It wasn’t this doctor’s job to care about all that. I held my breath, afraid that if I breathed, it would all come rushing out. 

“I’m sorry,” he said again, softly. 

We went through the rest quickly. The D & C after the second miscarriage to see if we could determine what had gone wrong and how the tests were inconclusive, and then, later, more remedies, tests and procedures. 

“We’ve never had any answers,” I said. 

At the end, he took me in for an ultrasound. As he moved the transducer wand around inside of me, he announced that my uterus looked good—really good.

“Nice, smooth lining here,” he said. And I felt proud and happy, as if I were responsible for my fine-looking uterus, as if it were a sign.

Back in his office, he scratched a few more things into my chart and when he finally spoke, it seemed he wanted me to understand the seriousness of my situation. 

“At 33, with your history of two miscarriages and no pregnancies in the two years, things don’t look great,” he said. 

I stiffened, skeptical. Wasn’t it his job to scare us, to make us believe the only way forward was with his help? 

“But what are our chances of conceiving on our own?” I said. “I mean, considering I’ve gotten pregnant twice already?”

“I’d say between 1-2% each month,” he said. 

That math didn’t compute. I realized I’d been half expecting him to say that we didn’t need his help. That we should just keep trying on our own and eventually it would happen. Fertility treatments were for couples with a diagnosed problem. We didn’t have a diagnosis, which I wanted to believe meant it would eventually just happen. But now I realized this doctor with all his tests and data had the upper hand. He had the precedence of the hundreds of women he’d worked with before me. Numbers don’t lie. Perhaps, he knew my body better than I did.

He said that IUI, or intrauterine insemination, would be a good place to start. Since we’d managed to get pregnant twice already, maybe we just needed a little help, and IUI was cheaper than IVF. He knew neither procedure would be covered by our HMO insurance. I’d start on Clomid to encourage the production of more egg follicles, and we could try a few rounds.

I studied the family portraits that lined the walls above his head. His beloved wife’s hand on his shoulder, their four beautiful children arrayed around them. I saw now that they had procreated in the bloom of youth. His triathlon calves and lush head of hair, her satisfied smile, said all this. I imagined their mansion and pool, the elite private schools for their children and a Porsche parked along their rose-lined driveway. 

I saw now that they had procreated in the bloom of youth.

I thought of our dirty old house and felt a flush of shame. There was the kitchen faucet that sprayed water from the handle and our overgrown lawn. The dusty, unpaved alley, our cheap flooring and windows that leaked whenever it rained. Comparatively, our life decisions suddenly seemed misguided. The way we’d sought meaning over money, our teaching jobs and dreams of art, our sensible shared car with its 150,000 miles. The picnics, camping trips and thrift stores. I saw it all so clearly now. We needed more money, and we needed our youth back. We needed better plans, better hair, better teeth, clean countertops. But it was too late now.

That spring, Scott and I had completed a series of foster-to-adopt classes and an adoption home study, which meant we were almost certified to become foster and adoptive parents with LA County. After three and a half years of trying to get pregnant, it seemed it was time to move on. We’d always agreed that we would adopt if we were unable to conceive. But instead of feeling excitement as we neared the end of our certification process, I’d begun to wonder what if. What if we adopted a child and that journey was full of uncertainty and loss, and what if we encountered special difficulties with our adopted child, would I wonder what might have happened if we’d tried fertility medicine? I didn’t want to live with regrets.

I also couldn’t seem to shake a longing to experience pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, to see what our biological child would look like, whether this imaginary child would have Scott’s sense of humor or endless curiosity, my pessimism or shyness. I have trouble explaining this desire even now, how overpowering it was, and why, instead of waning, it had only intensified over the many years we’d tried and failed to conceive a baby. Maybe it was simply about not getting what I wanted. Maybe it was a compulsion to keep striving for something that always seemed just out of reach, a stubborn belief that my hard work and persistence would be rewarded. Maybe it was simply that I had always pictured myself as a mother someday, or at least having the power to make that choice, and I couldn’t yet accept that my body couldn’t do it.

Before that meeting at the fertility clinic, we’d been planning to spend the summer in Mexico where we would attend language school and travel. After the meeting, we decided to keep our Mexico plan but instead of becoming foster-to-adopt parents upon our return, we’d begin fertility treatments.

We’d thought one last fling before adopting a child would be fun, but we were also hoping, I think, that I might get pregnant while we were away. Maybe in Mexico it would be possible to forget about getting pregnant, which many of my friends and family still believed was the answer. Just relax, they said, which was more than a little annoying –it felt impossible. I couldn’t forget how badly I wanted a baby after three years of trying for one. I felt as though they were reducing a real medical problem to an issue of positive thinking, essentially blaming me for my failure. The problem was, I so easily fell into the same magical thinking too. 

---

For four weeks, Scott and I studied Spanish and lived with a host family in the city of Oaxaca. After class each day in the afternoon heat, we wandered the cobblestone streets. In the town zócalo, a teacher’s strike was playing out. Soldiers rode around in the backs of pickup trucks, their guns pointed out toward the sidewalks where we walked. We stopped at bookstores and museums. We sat under trees. We ate tlayudas and tacos on the street. We went to the annual Guelaguetza arts festival and were delighted when Lila Downs took a seat in front of us.

After the month was over, we travelled to the Yucatan. In Tulum, we stayed at a small hotel and caught taxis to the beach. We waded into the turquoise water and slept under the shade of a palapa. The heat was all-consuming. In the afternoons, moody clouds gathered overhead while parrots, parakeets, Yucatan jays and blue-crowned Motmots called out from the jungle. Sometimes, lightning and thunder broke across the sky and then rain fell in great torrents like waterfalls. 

A small soaking pool sat in the middle of the courtyard at our hotel. The pool had smooth concrete walls, white tile and an arbor with a vine of flowers for shade. We’d sit there in the afternoons, usually just the two of us, ordering drinks from the bar and watching the other guests. The hotel was half-empty in the middle of hurricane season, and I felt empty too—empty and aimless, but also, free. I sat close to Scott in the cool water, book in one hand, my other resting on his muscular thigh or grazing his swim trunks. When we returned to our room, we were hungry, sick with lust and love. Afterward, I’d feel salty and ironed-out lying next to him under the fan, still heavy with need. I realized I didn’t care about babies anymore. The rest of my life, I decided, I just wanted to feel this way. I wanted pleasure, not pain. I wanted to be in my body and fully in the world.

I wanted pleasure, not pain. I wanted to be in my body and fully in the world.

At dusk, we trekked to town, mud splattered across our calves from the wet streets. I wore dresses that came off easily. We played cards and drank beer, cracking jokes and people-watching in hot, humid bars. We gossiped and practiced our Spanish, and forbade each other from speaking of children. We’d spent years trying to conceive a baby, years that now felt wasted. Away from home, I saw the possibility of forward momentum. Yes, there was a melancholy in my life that wasn’t there before, but here, my sadness took on an exquisitely breakable quality like pain that becomes pleasure, like exoskeletons crushed to sand. Outside of me somehow.

But when the summer ended, we came home to our regular lives. I still was not pregnant. My best friend was about to give birth to her second child, and I helped throw a baby shower for her. I’d started thinking about getting pregnant when she gave birth to her first child, and now four years later, she was having her second. The familiar longing returned. I wanted to know what my friends and coworkers knew, what my sister, mother and cousins knew. It was inexplicable, this biological pining, an unshakeable baby fever. 

I was also newly hopeful. I now had a secret weapon that my friends knew nothing about. Baby showers were difficult. I always felt like an outsider as I listened to the incessant talk of breastfeeding and childbirth, sleepless nights and teething toddlers. But now I had science and technology on my side. Surely, my turn was coming. 

---

A package of medical supplies arrived sometime that fall after three failed IUI’s and we’d made the decision to move on to IVF. When I unpacked it all, my medications consumed half of our kitchen table. There were bandages, alcohol swabs, sharps, a sharps container, syringes, folic acid and baby aspirin. There were vials of Menopur for injections that would hopefully stimulate extra egg follicles, boxes of Endometrin and Estrace to strengthen the lining of the uterus. The side effects, I noticed, were all the same: breast tenderness, headache, nausea, irritability and drowsiness. They were also signs of pregnancy, which meant, I realized, that I’d be obsessing over whether treatments were working or if it was simply the hormones. 

I texted a photo to Scott. I thought this might be the beginning of a series of photos documenting the life of our child. Look! I’d say to our future child. Isn’t it funny this is how you were conceived?

I made the hormone injections Scott’s job because it was something he could physically engage in after all this time. He hated causing me pain, but his discomfort gave me some small pleasure—maybe now he would understand how hard this had been for me. 

One night I had to do the injection myself because I was teaching late and the timing of the shot had to be exact. Ten minutes before class, I unlocked the faculty restroom and entered, glad to find it empty. Inside a stall, I sat with my back against the wall facing the toilet. I removed my supplies from a paper bag and arranged them on a paper towel that I laid on the tile floor: swab, syringe, needle, vial of follicle stimulating hormones. The nurse had shown me how to attach the needle to the syringe, puncture the bladder, turn it upside down and pull the solution into the syringe. I flicked it with my fingertip to remove the air bubbles. I unzipped my pants and pinched an unbruised section of skin on my belly. The bruises didn’t have time to heal between injections, but still, belly was better than thigh—more than once, a jolt of pain had exploded through my leg when Scott had hit a nerve. It wasn’t the idea of pain that bothered me now though. It was my uterus and ovaries somewhere behind the skin, a fear that the needle would reach all the way inside of me. I took another breath and poked my skin with the needle. It bounced off, and a bright dot of blood appeared. I can’t do this, I thought. But not doing it was not an option.

I took another breath. This time I jabbed with more force and like that, the needle slid right in. I laughed out loud as I watched as the fluid disappear under my skin. I’d done it! This one impossible thing that would make other things possible. 

A couple of weeks later, I found myself back in my RE’s office to see how many follicles I’d grown. The more follicles you produce, the better the chances of IVF success. Scott couldn’t get away from work that morning, so my best friend had come with me. When the doctor walked in, I felt suddenly foolish. Grown women shouldn’t need hand-holding, his face seemed to say. I should be able to take things in stride. I should be witty, warm, sensitive, self-aware and mature, possessing the wisdom that comes with age, but also a youthful optimism and energy, all while maintaining my sense of humor. In other words, good. Deserving of motherhood. And yet here I was, weepy and weak, a big baby, with my hand-holding friend.

I tried to decipher the images on the computer screen as he measured each follicle and wrote down numbers in my chart. 

“Well, I don’t see too many,” he said, finally. “I’m surprised. I’d expect to see more for a woman your age.” 

He looked up, saw that I was crying and handed me a tissue. 

“It’s not bad though,” he said. “Fine, really. We have enough to continue.” He paused. “Hey, you have a plan, remember? If this doesn’t work, you’ll adopt.” 

I nodded. But I hated his tone of pity. And I hated how it sounded as if he’d already given up. 

---

IVF makes you feel like you are finally getting close. After months or years of going about it the old-fashioned way, you feel powerful enlisting the help of science. When I was ingesting all those pills, making appointments and preparing syringes, showing up at the clinic several times a week for blood draws or ultrasounds, I felt like I was working toward something. And after the veins in my arms became sore and bruised, and even after the time a nurse who was filling in for the phlebotomist one Sunday morning couldn’t find my vein and stabbed the needle over and over into the crease of my arm, I didn’t give up. I felt grateful to be doing something measurable and exact. 

And yet here I was, weepy and weak, a big baby, with my hand-holding friend.

I wondered if my real problem was one of class and race. Were I not a white, middle-class, American woman with a sense that I was entitled to certain things in life, would I have been so surprised by my bad luck? I might have been forced to move on because other options were out of reach. Perhaps it was selfish or emblematic of my privilege that I spent so many years obsessed with having a baby, so much time and money spent chasing something that just wasn’t meant to be. But in the clinic waiting room, I saw a demographic that matched that of my neighborhood in Southern California. It was a racially-diverse group of working- and middle-class women, all of us accompanied by sisters, mothers, aunts and friends, boxes of tissues nearby, our anxious partners staring at the screens on their phones. They were women like me. I realized that the desperation of wanting a baby and being unable to have one is universal, even if solutions are not. 

When the holidays came, we waited for the results of a blood test to see if our first round of IVF had worked. We were in Texas visiting my family, a trip I’d hoped would be a distraction during the two-week wait, which is the period of time between embryo transfer and pregnancy test. Every microsecond of those two weeks had been consumed by doubt and uncertainty, excitement and despair, every twinge a cause for extended analysis. I compared each bodily sensation to what I could remember from my two pregnancies. Were those implantation cramps or period cramps? Was I extra hungry? Were my boobs extra sore?

We were staying with my sister and her husband and though they knew that we were waiting for our IVF results, my parents didn’t know. My parents had driven back to Dallas after Christmas, and I was glad. My mother hadn’t inquired about my fertility treatments since the first time I’d mentioned it, and I didn’t bring it up. I think she viewed it as a private matter, and I felt relieved to not have to talk about it. 

After my first miscarriage, she’d cried softly into the phone. 

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I just don’t understand. None of the women in our family have had trouble getting pregnant.” 

I felt a familiar clenching in my chest, like something twisting or breaking. It was a comment that recalled all the ways she thought I’d failed at womanhood, something I’d heard from her before. I was different from my older sister and different from her. As I was going through puberty, she’d mused out loud, more than once, about why I was so tall and flat-chested, or why I was so sensitive and shy. And now, why I couldn’t have a baby.

After my second miscarriage, she’d asked about the tests we’d had. 

“Did they find out what’s wrong with you?” she’d said over the phone.

Even though I’d learned in adulthood to love all my imperfect body was capable of, to love the pleasure it gave me and others, the experience of going through infertility had revived all my old insecurities, and my mother’s questions hit this raw, tender place. Perhaps my infertility was a sign that my womanhood was flawed, that my mother had been right all along. There was a natural flaw that I couldn’t fix, some innate stubbornness or immaturity, and it was also, somehow, my fault.

My mother was trying to deal with her own shock, I think. She was trying to understand. She wanted me to know she was concerned, that I was loved. But I wanted her to tell me it was going to be okay, that I’d done everything right, that there was nothing wrong with me. That I’d make a great mom someday. I wanted to be mothered. 

On the day of the pregnancy test, I woke up early. Scott and I dressed quickly and drove thirty minutes to a medical clinic that would do blood work on New Year’s Eve. A few hours later, my cell phone rang. I sat down on the bed in my sister’s guestroom and answered it, Scott sitting next to me. 

“I’m sorry, Kathleen,” the nurse said. Suddenly, every piece of bad news I’d ever had blew in all at once, like a crack of thunder. 

That afternoon, we walked for a long time. The suburban streets of my sister’s neighborhood were empty and quiet, and the winter trees looked arthritic in the cold dusk. I shoved my gloved hands into my pockets and wiggled my fingers in the holes of the lining in my coat.

My dictionary tells me that the word pitiful means deserving of or arousing pity, something lamentable or mournful. Despicable, contemptible or miserable. But none of these seem exactly right. I felt pathetic. After five years, my situation had become redundant. I wondered if listening to me had become burdensome. Surely, I was exhausting to my friends and family. A pitiful version of a woman, a faulty link in the ancestral line. But maybe what I hated most was needing everyone so badly.  

That spring brought another failed round of IVF with frozen embryos leftover from the first round, and then a third and final round with fresh embryos. Since money was an issue (i.e., credit card almost maxed out), my cousin, who happened to be in the middle of her own IVF struggle, generously offered me all of her leftover medication. Her excellent health insurance had paid for fertility treatments so she could get more medication. My doctor found a way to work her medication into my protocol and also enrolled me in a study that would help cover the cost of the remaining drugs. He said we’d be more aggressive with the medication on this last round, which would hopefully stimulate more follicles. 

But I did not grow more follicles and after laboratory fertilization, we ended up with four embryos, exactly the same number as the first round. The doctor scheduled my last transfer at 5:00 a.m. on a Sunday to fit it in around a triathlon he had later that morning. My acupuncturist, who’d seen me every week for two years and had listened to me on some of my hardest days, agreed to meet us at the clinic at that early hour. The acupuncture treatment would cost another $400 hundred dollars, but since it had been proven to increase IVF odds, it seemed worth it.

I felt pathetic. After five years, my situation had become redundant.

The office suite was quiet and dark when we arrived, and a nurse led us to the transfer room. The acupuncturist put on some drumming music I liked and gently began tapping needles into my skin. One between my eyes and another on the top of my skull, which were my favorite points because of the intense and immediate release of pressure in my head, like steam from a vent. She placed a few needles on each leg near my shins and knees. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe.

Afterward, Scott came back in the room. The three of us cracked jokes about the doctor showing up in running shorts with sweatbands on his wrists and forehead. Scott made increasingly ludicrous suggestions about the doctor’s potential attire and what else he might demand of his staff at 5 a.m. It felt good to laugh. I was optimistic: we had four good embryos, and I felt healthy and hopeful.

The doctor came in looking spry and healthy and shook each of our hands in turn. At our first embryo transfer, his question about whether we wanted to transfer one or two embryos had surprised us. It was not a question Scott and I had discussed and for a moment, we’d felt triumphant. Not only would I get pregnant, I’d have twins! This time, sobered by experience, we said we wanted to use all four embryos. 

I lay back on the table, and the doctor threaded the catheter through my cervix. I felt a slight fluttering sensation when he released the embryos into my uterus and then, it was over. Compared to other treatments and tests I’d undergone to become pregnant, this was the gentlest. I felt almost nothing. No passion, no pain. I tried to enjoy it. I was a receptacle, an empty room, a vessel. Afterward, we followed protocol and waited for twenty minutes. I remained lying down on the table and Scott held my hand. We were quiet.

When I can no longer write about this, I spend the morning going over my old charts, and I begin to see myself the way I suspect my RE saw me. I become a patient, a body, a problem, columns of numbers in a chart. White blood cell count, red blood cell count, hemoglobin, hematocrit, MCV, MCH, MCHC, RDW, platelet count, absolute neutrophils, lymphocytes, basophils. I read his terse, practical notes from our first meeting: infertility, SAB x 2 SAB, discussed treatment option, Plan 01 +/- IUI, Heparin in pregnancy. 

It’s my experience he recorded there but devoid of all emotion. If only it could have been so straightforward, if only I could have been an efficient machine, scientific, neutral and predictable. But I see the intangibles in between the lines of my chart. His desire to make my dreams come true, my own emotions and embodied experience, and the grand, existential mystery of conception. 

In the old files, I also find a computer printout of our embryos in pyrotechnic color. Colored in aqua, hot pink, red and yellow, they looked like bulbous, tropical fruits. My first round of IVF had produced just four viable embryos. Some women get as many as eight or nine. Embryos are graded on a scale of one to four, four being the highest. The grade is based on how many cells have developed by day three and how distinct the cells look, i.e. whether the edges show fragmentation. A “perfect” day three embryo has eight cells, no fragmentation, and evenly sized cells. I’m not sure what grade mine received, but I knew they weren’t perfect.

When I examine them now, I notice two that look pretty good with six cells each, blooming on top of each other like little chrysanthemums. But even these good ones have smaller blobs breaking free from the main mass. The other two have just four cells and show a lot more fragmentation, little breaks and uneven edges, crevices and dark creases. 

In the old files, I also find a computer printout of our embryos in pyrotechnic color.

On another printout I see the two frozen embryos we used in the second round that were in even worse shape. They look sad and featureless. One is collapsed on one side, like a deflated balloon. Another is wrinkled and lopsided with dark spots like tiny moons circling the main clump. Despite all this, I’m struck by a sense of possibility. For all those years of trying to get pregnant, I’m reminded that we could make embryos. And suddenly, I feel an inexplicable sliver of hope. 

---

It was June when we found out our last round failed. Almost a year had passed since we’d started fertility treatments. In that time, we’d endured six failed treatments between IUI and IVF, and we both knew we’d come to the end. The hormones had made me unbearable to myself and to Scott. We were out of money, patience and emotional reserves. After taking four containers of sharps to the hazardous waste facility and then vacuuming under all the beds, after clearing out the hand-me-down maternity clothes I’d been stuffing in closets for the last five years and throwing out all the extra syringes and empty pill bottles, the house felt empty. School was out, and both of us were off for the summer. With no more IVF appointments or acupuncture, I suddenly had so much free time. 

I’d never wanted to call myself infertile. Infertile meant you’d never have kids. Infertile meant you had a diagnosis. Infertile meant you were incapable of getting pregnant. I’d struggled to accept I was any of those things. But that was what I’d become: broken and imperfect, infertile. Barren.

I felt sad and moved slowly, as if I were swimming underwater. I wandered the rooms of our house, angry and irritable. In the evenings, Scott and I lay wrapped together on the couch watching violent, fantastical TV shows. Vampire shows and detective shows and serial killer shows. I liked feeling a manufactured fear in my chest. I spent hours at the library enjoying the air-conditioning and checking out novels. At night, I stayed up late, stretched out on the couch with my books and a gin and tonic, crying over the plotlines. 

And yet. After all the injections, blood draws and anesthesia, after all the hormones, charting of temperatures, giant pills and bitter Chinese herbs, after all the appointments and scheduling and the years of monitoring of my caffeine, sugar and alcohol intake, there was an immense relief running alongside this sadness. And the depth of this relief surprised me. This period of waiting had been burning me up. Now, the burning would stop. 

I decided to paint a wall in our living room and spent days putting up sample patches of paint: dandelion, tangerine, sky blue, sage. Scott knew to steer clear of this project. Nothing seemed right. I sat on the couch staring at the bright colors, as if there were an answer there. I liked standing at the sink to wash the paintbrushes, and I liked feeling the cool water that ran over the bristles and how the paint flowed out, lighter and lighter, until it was clear. 

After I finally settled on a mushroom color and painted it on, I sat and stared at the new wall. I felt fragile and hollowed out, but there was also a small flutter in my belly. I recognized it as lightness, maybe even joy. I wondered that something as small and pointless as painting a wall could fill me with such a sense of possibility. For years, I’d been at the mercy of a powerful, unknown force. It’d been a long waiting period full of ambiguity. It’d been so long since I felt any sense of agency over my own life. But now I realized I still had choices.

I would not get pregnant, or experience my body being everything for my child.

Even on the question of children. If I even still wanted children, which I wasn’t sure that I did, it wasn’t going to be the way my friends had done it. Instead of panic, I felt a small sense of acceptance at this thought. So my children would not look like me. So I would not give birth. I would not get pregnant, or experience my body being everything for my child. I would live with that grief the rest of my life. Well, so what—so fucking what? The end game had always been parenthood, not getting pregnant. I could still become a parent. I’d always known that, but now I felt it in my body. 

Somehow too, Scott and I had remained partners. We still loved each other. We basically still had everything: our health, our dreams, our home, our jobs, our friends and family, our community. Yes, I’d struggled. Yes, I’d wanted to move toward what I saw as more love and more life. There’d been harrowing detours and blockades, but I could keep moving. 

I had to accept that my body was fragile, infertile and tragic. But I saw it so clearly now: it was also profoundly, and gloriously, alive.