Falling for Me, page 23
One weekend in Montauk, I watch my friend Vanessa rub her husband, Craig’s, head while talking to other people and hear her say with pride to those who don’t know him, “Have you met my husband, Craig?” The two of them, both successful, bounce between L.A. and New York with sometime stints in Hawaii; they’re living, breathing proof if ever there was any that married life needn’t be dull and predictable.
I observe a couple that live in my neighborhood who walk around holding hands but not talking to each other. Part of me is envious and inspired by them, the other part judgmental and discouraged. Have they run out of things to say? Or do they represent true contentment—companionship without having to utter a word?
I talk to my dad’s stepsister Barbara, who didn’t get married until she was 44, doesn’t have kids, and always seems blissfully happy. “I never wanted to get married but always thought I’d have children,” she tells me. She says that every time she got into a relationship, she’d envision herself crossing a street with the man while a car barreled toward them. “I’d try to visualize if I would be the one to protect us from imminent danger or he would,” she says. “And in my mind, I was always the one who pushed us out of the way.”
Unlike me, Barbara was in a series of long-term relationships but wasn’t ever with someone she missed when he wasn’t around until she met her now-husband, Paul. “With the men before him, it would always be something,” she says. “I’d hate his laugh or that he smoked, or that he draped sweaters over his shoulders. Really what I was saying was that it wasn’t right. People, especially my family, used to tell me that I’d always be single because what I was looking for didn’t exist, but I believed it did. And if I’d accepted what they said and just married whoever was there at the time, without a question I would have ended up divorced.”
Her words feel like a soothing bath. People used to tell me that I’d always be single. If I’d accepted what they said and just married whoever was there at the time, I would have ended up divorced. While for the past few years, a part of me has felt that I’d rather have been married and divorced than just perpetually single—that it would at least make me seem and feel somehow less suspect—I’ve also always known that I’d do anything to avoid ending up divorced the way my parents and grandparents were, and that the reason I was never interested in making that kind of commitment in my 20s is that I wasn’t sure I could spend 40 or so years with the same person. I realize while talking to Barbara, however, that I’ve grown so accustomed to the idea that my single status is all my fault—that I want something that doesn’t exist, that I can’t commit, that I have intimacy issues—it had actually stopped occurring to me that I could still be holding out for the right thing and that my decisions, or nondecisions, were possibly the right ones.
Even though Barbara could have had kids with Paul, she didn’t in the end. “I was enjoying my life and career and for whatever reason, I never got around to it,” she says. Paul had two full-grown children by then and she now feels like she gets all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks of parenting, adding with a laugh that she once saw a bumper sticker that seemed to be very appropriately about her: “If I’d known how great grandchildren were, I would have had them first.” Maybe, I think, I’ll be like Barbara—convinced I want something but perfectly happy without it?
When she and I get off the phone, I log on to Facebook and notice the status update of a guy I just met at a party. It says: My friend in Seville is looking to do an apartment trade with someone in New York for most of the month of August. I read it again: yes, the universe is potentially offering me an opportunity to spend time in a city I loved more than any other I’ve ever visited. The fact that I’m seeing this just after talking to Barbara about accepting my single life feels like a sign. I’m on the path I’m meant to be on. I instantly e-mail the guy, saying that I want to do the trade—that I don’t care what his friend’s place is like or need any more details but just want to commit now, before someone else with a better Manhattan apartment comes along and makes the same offer. He puts me in touch with Raquel, the woman in Seville, and we start making our plans for the following month; I will away all the negative thoughts that are starting to pop up—about how I can’t afford the plane ticket, about how I’ll probably miss a slew of amazing career opportunities if I leave the country for an entire month, and about how lonely I’ll get if I’m on my own for that long.
During my period of planning this solo journey and observing couples in action, I suddenly start encountering all these people who are miserable with the path they’ve chosen—and they make me increasingly grateful for the fact that I’m not shackled down by an oppressive relationship and have the freedom to take off for a month. A friend of a friend tells me how lucky I am to be single because her husband is emotionally abusive and she dreams of the day she can get away from him. A married guy I know confides in me that he doesn’t think marriage works—that it only made sense when we only lived to be around 40. An acquaintance who I always assumed was a single mom because I never heard her talk about a husband mentions a guy one day; when I ask her who he is, she says, “My husband” with an eye roll before telling me that while she doesn’t love him, she’s grateful to him for giving her a child.
When I was younger, it had never occurred to me that I might enter my prime childbirth years and not have some sort of a plan for kids in the works. But during these past few years of smiling, waving, and cooing at other women’s babies, part of me accepted the fact that my body was maturing faster than my emotional state and I realized I was open to the idea of adoption—that the goal was to raise a child and not necessarily have it come from my womb.
I’ve always been an impulsive decision-maker. Rather than looking, then jumping, I just jump. As I call the airline to book my plane ticket, I wonder, is this my problem with romance? Because I don’t weigh the pros and cons, don’t really assess how good a choice I’m making, but instead allow myself to be led by some inner whim, do I always put myself in situations that will end up later causing me to get hurt? But at the same time, this just feels right. “I need a ticket from JFK to Seville, Spain,” I hear myself say.
Project Helen has forced me to become clear about my life—to really see what I have and what I want without hiding any of the less-than-palatable truths from myself. And with this greater clarity has come even more enthusiasm about the idea of adopting. I’m always coming up with new reasons why I might not want to go through pregnancy and delivery: the nausea, a state that makes me feel like I literally may be dying and need to be hospitalized; the hormonal mood swings, a terrifying thought to someone who can find herself crippled by emotions under normal circumstances; the body destruction. The notion of being able to save a child who might otherwise grow up under less-than-ideal circumstances has also become increasingly appealing. Still, I know that I’m also telling myself these things in order to cushion the increasingly likely news that it really may be too late for me by the time I feel truly ready.
Of course, pregnancy is hardly the only daunting aspect of the process. As a lifelong commitment-phobe, I can’t help but wonder how I’ll handle the one commitment you can never get out of. There’s no telling your kid things got too serious too fast or suddenly realizing he or she isn’t the one that you want. I tell myself that I won’t make any of the mistakes my parents did, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t wreak havoc on tiny psyches in altogether original ways. Surely I won’t laugh when my child cries but what if I do something equally—or more—damaging?
And what if I get one of those undeniably nightmarish kids? Walking down the street the other day, I saw and heard a little boy wailing in a way that I can only describe as sounding like he was begging to be despised. As I got closer, I noticed that his mother seemed to be doing everything she could to comfort him, but he simply refused to allow her to help. What if I got one of those—and was then stuck with him for the rest of my life? Even worse, what if my mothering skills were so poor that I took what would have been a perfectly delightful child and then turned him into one of the shrieking monsters? I think about how hard I am on the people I’ve hired over the years to help me with accounting, my Web site and various other work projects. With them, I tend to be impatient, demanding, and ever ready to point out errors—essentially, I expect perfection at every turn and am utterly disappointed when I don’t get it. Of course, I’m kind and grateful when all goes well, but still, is this what I’m going to be like when my child makes mistakes? How, in other words, does the aggressive, demanding career woman I’ve become mesh with the mommy who kisses boo-boos?
Elizabeth, meanwhile, is handling her pregnancy with more grace and ease than I have when not pregnant. She’s hired a baby nurse to help her in the beginning, has done every bit of research possible, and talks casually about potential ways to make the transition easier—having her family come to town to pitch in or renting a place in the Hamptons for one of the first few months in order to escape the city’s heat and crowds. If she’s terrified and overwhelmed, she’s doing a damn good job of hiding it. But I still don’t feel remotely convinced that single parenting is for me. I’ve tried to picture myself in my apartment with a newborn and then an infant and then a child, imagined the Single Mothers by Choice meetings, thought about the concept of hiring a babysitter so I can go on a date, and the entire scenario chills me. No matter how often I hear about celebrities who land the guy after adopting a kid (Angelina Jolie, Calista Flockhart, and Michelle Pfeiffer, not that I’m obsessively keeping track), I just can’t imagine it for myself. That isn’t to say that I never will; for the past year or two, I’ve thought that maybe when my career seems more secure or I feel the clock ticking to the point that I can’t hear anything else, I’ll welcome the idea. But one day when I’m in a cab with Elizabeth and noticing that pregnancy has only made her prettier—her protruding belly is adorable, her hair has grown long and luscious, and her face has blessedly stayed the same size—I wonder if that day will ever come. What if instead I wake up one day to find it’s too late, that the possibility of motherhood has swept me by while I was staring into another unavailable man’s pretty eyes?
I decide to make an appointment with my gynecologist.
A chipper woman, Dr. Graham is thrilled when I mention that I want to talk babies. I remember when she broached the topic last year how quickly I shut her down because I didn’t want to talk about something that still felt so out of reach. This time, however, I’m enthusiastic. I tell her that I’m interested in finding out how fertile I am and she says she thinks that’s a wonderful idea. She’s not nearly as discouraging as I expect her to be—she’s full of stories about patients in their 40s and beyond who have gotten pregnant and gives me the general impression that if this is something I want, it’s well within the realm of possibilities.
Still, she does press the idea of my doing artificial insemination now. I explain that I’m just not interested in single motherhood at this point but tell her I want to find out about the possibility of freezing my eggs. What I’d learned about the process already was somewhat discouraging—both in terms of how many babies have been born that way and how expensive the process was—but I’m still open to the idea. She nods and writes down the name of a fertility doctor.
There’s a nervous vibe in the air when I walk into the Upper East Side fertility clinic. Women, only one with a man by her side, frantically scan their phones or flip magazine pages without appearing to take in a single word. The waiting room is bright green: the walls seem to scream fertile. Are all fertility clinic waiting rooms painted this shade?
I continue to scan the crowd: it’s affluent and I spy a lot of wedding rings. We’re all probably the same age but I feel a lot younger and I get the sense that everyone else knows exactly what they’re doing here while I’m still not sure. I’m just checking out my options, I plan to say if anyone asks, but no one looks like they will. We make the people sitting in regular doctor’s waiting rooms, where some may potentially be waiting to find out if they have fatal diseases, seem comparatively peaceful. Whenever a woman’s name is called, she jumps up; when it’s the one who has the man with her, she forgets all about him as she follows the nurse to a room down the hall. He trails behind, looking confused by the fact that he’s become an afterthought.
Once she’s gone, I look around again and determine that this isn’t the sort of environment that welcomes conversation. I’m guessing that’s because anything we could possibly talk about would feel too invasive for a chat with a stranger; we have too many unanswered questions to be able to handle any more. As we stare at but don’t read magazines, Beyoncé sings in the background.
Eventually I’m led back to an examination room, where I change into a gown and am given an ultrasound. The nurse, who has a heavy but difficult-to-place accent, shows me my uterus on the machine. “It looks how a uterus should look,” she says.
“Well, that’s good.” I grin. “Certainly better than not looking how a uterus should look.”
She gives me a thin smile; the fertility clinic is clearly no place for levity. “You’re going to have to keep coming back and having it measured,” she says.
“Really?” I ask. “I just want to check my fertility. Why would I come back?”
“The doctor will explain it to you,” she says brusquely and leaves the room.
Another woman enters, inserts a needle into my arm, and starts taking my blood. “Is this your first cycle with us?” she asks.
For the second time in five minutes, I’m confused. I say the same thing I did before, that I just want to check my fertility. She gazes at me oddly—it’s clearly unusual to be here for this—and tells me to go back to the waiting room. I do and from where I sit, I can hear her talking about me to someone I assume is the doctor. “She doesn’t want to get pregnant right now,” she says. Then something I can’t decipher. Then: “That’s why there’s a question mark on her file.”
To my left, a youngish-looking woman smiles at me. Her left hand is hidden and I have a sudden and strong feeling that she might be in the same situation as me: single, relatively ignorant about this entire process, and just hoping to find out about her fertility possibilities. We start chatting and after a few minutes, I ask if this is her first time here.
“Oh, no,” she says, and as she begins raving about her doctor, I see her wedding ring. I don’t catch the doctor’s name but it’s not the one I’m here to see. “He immediately found out all the things that were wrong with me and I got pregnant right away,” she adds with the fervor of a Scientologist, explaining that she’s back for more. I don’t ask what was wrong with her.
When her name is called, she rises and wishes me good luck. Now, I have a problem—an entirely ridiculous problem—with people wishing me good luck; I hear it as patronizing even when I know it’s not meant to be. For all she knows, I have six babies at home so she surely doesn’t mean it in an I-have-kids-and-you-don’t-so-you-need-luck way. “Good luck” in a fertility clinic is probably just what “Break a leg” is in an audition waiting room. I smile and wish her the same.
Soon I’m led into a room to discuss egg freezing with a kind woman who tells me about how it’s done, where the eggs are stored, and happy stories of women who’ve had babies this way. The process of talking to a professional about egg freezing helps me to see that I’m just not interested in putting my eggs on ice. I know that I may be missing my last chance, but a strong part of me believes that everything happens the way it’s meant to and that having eggs scraped out, hoping they survive the process, freezing them, and then going through IVF is defying this faith. I say as much to the kind woman, who looks a bit discouraged by my response but tells me she understands.
Back in the waiting room, I think about people’s decisions to have kids. We’re all sort of conditioned to instinctively feel sorry for the women or couples who don’t become parents—we imagine the emptiness they must feel for never having heard the pitter-patter of little feet or ponder the horror of not having anyone to care for you when you reach old age. And I was certainly one of them. In fact, until I spoke to Barbara—and started thinking about Helen—it had literally never occurred to me that people might be happy with these circumstances.
Yet it seems like so many couples have children because they believe that’s just what you do—the next item on the to-do list—after you get married. I wonder how many of them consider the big picture: everyone seems so focused on the getting-pregnant part, or the having-the-right-stroller part, or the getting-the-kid-into-the-right-preschool part. Do they think about toddler tantrums and teenage sullenness, not to mention the concept of bringing someone into this world and then having to someday watch that person endure stupefying, incapacitating pain that they might not be able to ease? What if that’s more than they can bear? I know how hard it is for me when my mom is depressed. How do people withstand seeing something like that in their kid?
I don’t come to any conclusions before my name is called again. This time, I’m led to see the doctor, a petite, rather adorable woman who gazes at the X-ray of my ovaries and tells me they look good. “There are lots of follicles,” she says encouragingly before letting me know that she’ll call me with my blood test results later.
For some reason, that doesn’t make me nervous; being in the waiting room and feeling entirely clueless about something I should surely know more about shook me but I’m not scared to hear the news. I just believe I’m fertile—an entirely ridiculous statement to make but one that is nonetheless true. When the doctor and I speak later and she says that my FSH—follicle-stimulating hormone—is 8.4 and that this means that I’m fully capable of getting pregnant since below 10 is normal, I’m nevertheless relieved. But I also know that pregnancy is certainly no guarantee—I could still have all kinds of things wrong with me like the woman in the waiting room. Besides, I’m aware of the fact that fertility can be about as fleeting as an unavailable guy’s declarations of love. The doctor confirms as much. “Remember, this could change in a month or two months or six months or 12 months,” she says. “But,” she adds, “usually drastic variations don’t happen overnight.”
