It would take ten years for me to become a mother. It was the worst decade of my life. But now I see that it was also my first experience of how perfect and magical the universe truly is. I have been a mother now for ten years. It seems fitting to honor the story of how it all came to be on Mother's Day.
72 chances.
We were 32, my husband and I, when we decided to start our family. In doing the math, that gave me 72 chances to get pregnant before I turned 38. It was a seemingly endless amount of possibilities.
We wanted a girl most of all. We had already named her Isabella, and hoped with all our might that she would have his curly hair and my brown eyes.
Because I was certain it wouldn't be long before I was pregnant, I turned my focus to how I would surprise Michael with the news. I decided to sing him Danny's Song by Kenny Loggins. It held special meaning to us both. We would drive around in his jeep with the top down on some winding country road on a summer day with no particular place to be and no particular time to return; singing it out loud, unabashedly attempting some harmony around "even though we ain't got money, I'm so in love with you honey..." and I would have to stop singing for the tears that closed my throat. It was the perfect choice.
Infertile.
During an annual exam I mentioned to my ob-gyn that I had stopped taking birth control and that we were trying to get pregnant. She congratulated me and asked how long it had been. "Over a year," I said. She paused, looking over her clipboard and said, "Well if that's the case we need to run some tests to make sure you aren't infertile."
I didn't hear anything after the word "infertile." My ears started ringing -- high pitched and thunderous at the same time. I blurted out "Ok" but I was farthest thing from ok. I imagine it is like any thing you don't want to hear. First comes the denial. Then fear. It's the fear that will get you.
Although the tests were inconclusive, I was given the label "unexplained infertility," and advised that the best way to get pregnant was through medical intervention. And this began what would be eight years of infertility treatments and drugs; and thousands upon thousands of dollars to have a baby.
It's a journey that shakes every belief out of you that you may have had; of being entitled in anyway to a body that works, to insurance that won't fail you, to a medical system that cares and to doctors who have all the answers.
You have no option but to trust the course in front of you, because why pursue it if you aren't going to believe with every fiber of your being, with every wish on a candle, with every silent prayer, with every tearful plea, in its success? It's a game that there is no preparation for but you agree to play anyway to achieve one of the most desired outcomes that two people who love each other want: a baby. To create another human life. To do with our bodies what they were intended to do.
The Cycle.
That's the medical term for it: a cycle. The cycle is vicious. Daily injections and scheduled sex and blood draws and the grand finale of semen into a jar, hyper-spun and cleaned and then injected inside of your uterus with hopes that these super swimmers will find your plethora of jacked-up eggs, collide and stick around to grow as one.
Then you wait for the phone call with the results of your blood test. Even though you have, of course, snuck in two home pregnancy tests, eyes bored onto the strip of paper willing a line to appear and when one does not, convincing yourself that it was too early anyway. The phone call from the nurse is all business, "Sorry. It's negative."
You don't recover easily. As it goes on, you actually don't recover at all, only you don't realize it. Think of a massive drill pounding the earth; it rises higher with new hope each cycle, but crashes deeper down below the surface with each failure.
We averaged six cycles a year for eight years. I had eleven surgeries. Insurance would no longer cover anything below my boobs. Not that they were covering any of these expenses anyway. It was all out of pocket.
I could no longer be in the presence of babies. Most times I would merely tear up, but others I would sob uncontrollably, and I had zero control over it. You were either going to get the woman with tears dropping quietly or a crazy woman crying the ugly cry with snot dripping down her nose. I couldn't walk by a Baby Gap in the mall and I sent "regrets only" to every baby shower I was invited to. Everywhere I looked I saw baby's and baby's saw me, staring right at me, their beautiful innocent eyes looking right through me. Not one of my friends with children understood -- how could they? It was the single most isolating experience of my life.
Slowly, my husband and I drifted apart as if on separate rafts in the ocean riding two different currents. Undetectable at all until we looked up and saw how far apart we actually were.