When Did I Get Like This? Read online

  There were other clues. My period was several days late. And after buying every kind of pregnancy test the drugstore had, I also had a drawer full of double lines and plus signs and tiny digital smiley faces. Every time I went to the bathroom, I indulged in another eight-dollar test, waited for three minutes to make sure it was also positive, then stashed it in my night table drawer with all the others, amidst the hand cream and the dried-up pens.

  After I collected about seven of these tests, I pulled them all out, arranged them on the unmade bed, and examined them as a group in the afternoon sunlight. Their results were increasingly and decisively positive. Weren’t they? Was I imagining it? After eighteen months of fear that I would never be a mother, after everything my husband, David, and I had been through, was I wishing all these positives into existence?

  No. Taken as a group, their results were undeniable. Even so, David had stopped looking at them. He said he was going to wait until I got tested at the fertility clinic; only then could we know for sure. But since it was a holiday weekend, we had waited for three days before I had finally gone for blood work at seven o’clock that morning. Now we had to wait until “end of business day” for the results. David was at work, and I was home “writing,” so what was I to do but obsess? I gathered up the tests and returned them to their hiding place in the night table. Throwing them away would have been unthinkable. Until I could know for sure, they were my only comfort: a drawer full of things I had urinated on.

  I went out for a walk, trying to make the minutes go faster, resisting the urge to log on to my online infertility message board for the fourth time that day. Over the last year, I had become closer to the women who posted there, like debbymom2B and wantingbabyinkansas, than to the people I knew in real life. Only these women could understand what I was going through; only these women, like me, didn’t want to talk about anything else. Ever. Not even David had such singularity of focus. When I had asked the group if anyone ever heard of seven false-positive home pregnancy tests in a row, they all bubbled over with excitement, telling me “a plus is a plus: )!!!” and asking me to sprinkle them with “**baby dust**,” which is infertility-chat-room-speak for sharing your good fortune. But their enthusiasm seemed premature; it wasn’t official yet, and I didn’t want to jinx anything. I had resolved to stay away.

  I walked until it was 4:30 P.M., as in “going on 5:00,” which I felt was roughly equivalent to “end of business day,” which is when my doctor’s office said they would call. I hadn’t given the office my cell phone number. This seemed like the kind of call one needed to receive at home, alone, without the threat of disruption from a dropped call or some Starbucks espresso machine screeching in the background. But when I returned to our apartment, my answering machine was blinking. They had already called. I took a deep breath and pressed play.

  “Hellothisisthefertilitycentercalling,” a bored nurse’s voice staccatoed at top speed. “Your bloods came back with an HCG of seventy-six point five and a progesterone level of thirteen. We will be looking for those numbers to double in the next forty-eight hours.” She hung up without further ado. Clearly, she had a lot of messages to leave that afternoon. I stood there staring at the machine. “Well, what the hell does that mean?” I asked. The machine beeped twice, noncommittally.

  I called my friend Heather. Heather was my one friend from the message board who had also become a friend in real life. She and I had bonded over our “unexplained” infertility, which is the particularly frustrating diagnosis you receive when you can’t get pregnant and no one can tell you why. Slowly and shyly, we had made the unlikely crossover from virtual friends to real ones, and now Heather had made an even more unlikely crossover, into the land of the pregnant. She was now four months along and, as a recent graduate from the ranks of the barren, was an expert on late-afternoon calls from the fertility clinic. I played her the message over the phone. “Those are really good numbers!” Heather cooed encouragingly, like the kindergarten teacher she was. “They’re high, but not too high.”

  “What happens if they’re too high?” I asked. I didn’t know that was something I was supposed to worry about.

  “Well. That could mean multiples.”

  “Twins?”

  “…or more,” she said.

  “Well, that would be fine!” I said.

  “No, of course,” she said. “It’s just that really high-order multiples can have…you know…complications. One baby is all you need.”

  Heather was right about that. All I needed was one. All I needed was what I had, which was hormone numbers that were moderately high, and that needed to double, in a moderately elevated sort of way, over the next two days. After all the disappointment, the tests, the waiting, this was very good news. I should have been hooting and hollering and jumping around my apartment. I should have been running down to the lobby of my building, kissing Pablo the afternoon doorman, and then dancing on top of the taxicabs on West End Avenue. I did none of these things. Why? Because the message, although it was from a trained professional, although it was the official confirmation we had been seeking, was missing two things: the words “pregnant” and “congratulations.”

  When David got home from work, I took his hand and led him down the hallway to my tiny office. Squished in the corner next to my desk, I played him the message and watched his angular face for a reaction. His eyes narrowed. “Play it again,” he said. I did. The vein on David’s forehead started to throb. “She doesn’t sound like it’s good news,” he said.

  “She’s maintaining professional detachment,” I countered.

  We played the message another dozen times, parsing the nurse’s words carefully. Was she not saying “congratulations” because the numbers weren’t that good after all? Was she not saying “pregnant” because I really wasn’t? We knew that miscarriage rates were higher for assisted pregnancies. For a fertility clinic, throwing positivity around was risky business. Maybe they were right to hedge their bets.

  Finally, David said, “Ame, I gotta say, I think they’re telling us not to get too excited yet.” And then, although I had no more confidence than he did, I ripped him a new one. “What do you mean?” I shrieked. “Can you just be happy? This is good news what is the matter with you!” Then I burst into tears and locked myself in the bathroom because he was not over the moon with joy. (That, in and of itself, should have been a reassuring sign of my hormones in overload. If only we had noticed.)

  What I was really upset about was that this was not how it was supposed to go. When you share this exciting news with your husband, he is supposed to be thrilled, and you are supposed to be the one who gets to tell him. Everyone knows that. Everyone’s heard the adorable stories of choked-up daddies-to-be and memories that last a lifetime. Over the past several years—all my adult life, really—I had eagerly consumed what TV, magazines, and obsessedwithbabies.com had to say on this matter, and by this time I had in my head a sizable compendium of this knowledge: What to Expect When You Tell Your Husband You’re Expecting.

  Telling your husband he is going to be a father will be one of the happiest moments of his life—and yours! The remembrance of the look on his face, the tears in his eyes, will stay with you forever. So why not take that extra step to make this momentous announcement even more special? Try these ideas:

  Serve him baby-back ribs and baby carrots for dinner, and Baby Ruths for dessert! Then ask him if he noticed a theme…

  How about telling him you’ve left something in the oven, and leaving a little bun for him to discover?

  Ask him to fold the laundry for a change, and hide a tiny pair of baby socks in the basket!

  Take him back to where he popped the question. Hand him a bracelet box with your pregnancy test inside, and ask, “Will you be a daddy?”

  This all haunted me as I sniffled to myself on the bathroom floor. I would never serve David baby-back ribs for several reasons, not the least of which was that I wouldn’t begin to know how to prepare them. But I also knew that our babies—and who knew if we could even have more than one, if we could even have this one—would never be surprises. They would always be hard-won.

  I was wrong about that. I would indeed one day tell my husband “I’m pregnant!” and watch his jaw drop and his eyes open wide. The vein on his forehead would throb in a good way. I would shock him, and I would be shocked myself. And in the end, I wouldn’t do anything to amp up the announcement. I would not wait until I had ordered an I’M A BIG BROTHER! T-shirt for Connor or until I could decoupage David’s bedside lamp with my ultrasound photos. In the end, I would just come out and tell him the moment he walked in from work. Even so, it is a moment I will never forget.

  I wish I could go back and tell myself that day would come. I wish I could have seen then that I would sit here and write while my third baby was down the hall loudly protesting her morning nap. I could have let that moment, hovering over the answering machine with my husband, be what it was—not what I had imagined or hoped for, but something wonderful nonetheless.

  Instead, there we were, with the good news we had prayed for but were too scared to celebrate, let alone share with anyone else. I was dying to tell my mother, but somehow breaking the big news with “Our human chorionic gonadotropin number is making our reproductive endocrinologist cautiously optimistic!” seemed like it would dampen some of her excitement. Both David’s folks and mine had been high school sweethearts, and all of them were parents by the age of twenty-four. My mother could literally not have conceived me any sooner: I was born nine months and one day after their wedding. Not being able to get pregnant was just not part of their frame of reference. In their day, either you could have children or you couldn’t. There was no gray area of surgeries, and spun sperm, and self-administered
ovulation induction. Wanting and praying was supposed to be enough, and if it wasn’t, you needed to accept God’s will. I knew my mother thought what I was doing was not how it was supposed to be; I was supposed to get pregnant without the meddling of modern science. But from where I stood, I couldn’t. Since I couldn’t make her feel better about that, and she couldn’t make me feel better about that, I didn’t tell her anything yet. I just waited. I was getting good at it.

  Three days later, I went back to the fertility clinic for more 7:00 A.M. blood work. That afternoon, I got another phone call. This time, I was waiting by the phone to receive it.

  NURSE: Goodafternoonyournumberslookgood.

  You will need to return in a week for another test.

  Haveapleasantafternoon.

  Heather had coached me that when the nurse called, I should casually alert her as to the depth of my assisted reproduction knowledge. And not let her hang up.

  ME: Wait. I mean—when you say the numbers look good…has my HCG doubled?

  NURSE: Yes. It has.

  ME: So…that’s good?

  NURSE: It is.

  Pause.

  ME: Is it…very good?

  NURSE: We can presume that the embryo is doing well…

  My stomach did a little flip. She said “embryo”!

  NURSE:…but viability cannot be determined for several more weeks.

  Nurse Rapidamente two, me zero. In other words: don’t paint the nursery just yet.

  To be realistic, I was only four and a half weeks pregnant. Since a pregnancy is aged from the first day of your last period, not from the actual day of conception, I had an embryo that was really only two and a half weeks old. Crumb sized. Most women at this stage would have no idea they even were pregnant. When my mother was pregnant with me, it dawned on her that she had missed her period when she was about six weeks along. (She was still writing thank-you notes for all their wedding gifts, so maybe she was a bit distracted.) She looked up an obstetrician in the phone book, and they gave her an appointment to come in. Two months later. She just did her thing, and by the time her pregnancy was official, she was already wearing smock tops.

  I knew it probably wasn’t healthy to be aware of this potential baby as soon as its cells started dividing. It did, however, give me the opportunity to be incredibly vigilant. After spending several days reading every book at Barnes and Noble and exhausting every search engine term for protecting a nascent embryo, I understood that one truly could not be too vigilant.

  Safeguarding your pregnancy is particularly important at this vulnerable time. Shun any activity that might prevent implantation in your uterus from occurring.

  No alcohol.

  No caffeine.

  Drink plenty of water.

  Do not overconsume water. Too much fluid can be detrimental.

  No exercise, except for walking.

  No swimming. Chlorine can be toxic.

  Avoid hair dye and nail polish because of unsafe fumes.

  Avoid lifting, stooping, or twisting from the torso.

  Wear loose clothing so as not to constrict the ovaries.

  If you have to travel, ensure that it will not be over bumpy roads.

  Keep social contacts to a minimum.

  Avoid standing for long periods of time.

  Avoid sitting for long periods of time.

  No standing, no sitting. Got it. Wait, there was one more:

  Above all, avoid stress. It can cause a chemical reaction that may lead to miscarriage. Try to relax!

  As if.

  Now, honestly. If the human race were really this fragile, we would never have survived the Paleolithic Era. But I wasn’t taking any chances. I reclined on the couch as much as possible, feet carefully elevated above my heart. I stopped meeting David at the door with a kiss when he came home from work, because that would have meant re-creating the exact angles of my seven throw-pillow props. I was on self-imposed couch rest, overdosing on A Baby Story, willing my uterine lining to thicken.

  The preventive measures seemed all the more important because there were no proactive ones, nothing I could do to make the pregnancy more viable. You can’t do headstands or drink wheatgrass tonics to make your hormone levels stay high. They either will or they won’t. After everything I had gone through, this was still something I had trouble accepting: my body was independent of my will. I could freebase folic acid all day long, but in the end, it was up to my uterus, not me.

  When you can do nothing except not do, the forbearance is all you have. Avoidance is your talisman. Abstaining from tuna salad is the only proof that something is happening. You don’t look pregnant. You don’t feel pregnant. You can’t talk about being pregnant. I missed my friends on the message board, but I couldn’t go back there now. In their eyes, I was an alumna, and it would have been unseemly to stick around. But I couldn’t move to, say, the “First Trimester Friedas!” board, because I wasn’t yet entitled. The next time I went for an ultrasound, I might find that the embryo had become a “blighted ovum.” I would have stopped being pregnant without even knowing it.

  Even the ultrasounds, after the first dozen, became less reassuring. The technician would lubricate her improbably large wand with ice-cold gel and put it inside me. Then we would both watch the gray clouds float across the screen. After a few moments, dull as dishwater for her and heart-pounding for me, the technician would mumble, “I can confirm the presence of the yolk sac,” or “I can just make out the fetal pole. See?” But I couldn’t see. To me, it was like looking at one of those photos of the Virgin Mary appearing in a tree or a tortilla. If I really looked hard, I could maybe kind of make out a lump of something, but to be honest, it didn’t look like much of anything. I had to take their word for it.

  Then my breasts started to feel sore. And I kept getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. And five days later, someone started eating a hot dog next to me on the subway, and the ketchup smell was so overwhelming I thought I was going to be sick. When I got home, I yelled down the hall to David, “Guess what! I almost vomited on the 1 train!” and he was as thrilled as I was. Nearly vomiting was nearly tangible. These symptoms could have just as easily been caused by the extremely unpleasant progesterone suppositories I was putting into service each evening. Still, the nausea was Something; and if Something was happening inside me, would it still be jinxing things if we allowed ourselves one moment of hope?

  By now, it had been almost three weeks since I took the fistful of pregnancy tests that remained in my night table drawer. We still hadn’t told our parents, but at this point, that seemed cruel and unusual punishment for all involved. Our parents knew nothing more than that we had undergone a “procedure,” but even with that bare-bones disclosure, they would think we must have heard something by now. I pictured my mother, her mind returning to us each night as she cleared the supper dishes, afraid to ask, dying to know.

  So we took the two-hour drive to Scranton that weekend, and sat David’s parents, then mine, down at their kitchen tables. “So,” David began to his parents. Not one for displays of vulnerability, he was suddenly shy. “So. We have news.” David’s mother saw the smile stealing onto his face and started jumping around her kitchen. “I knew it, I knew it! Yes! Yes!” she shouted. Although her enthusiasm was tempered when we actually told her our news—which was more of a “You can’t tell anyone this, but we sort of kind of hope that maybe” announcement—seeing her that sure, that excited, even for a moment, made it all a little bit more real.

  My parents were more measured in their reaction. After my father had told me six months earlier that if I could only relax, it would all be fine, he had learned to keep his mouth shut. He was in a foreign land. All of us were. “We’ll know more soon,” I promised them. “We will pray for you,” my mother said. Then we just sat there, holding our breath together. Which, in the end, was all we really needed anyway. We were tired of waiting alone. And if my mother wanted to say a few novenas in the meantime, well, that certainly couldn’t hurt.