Bringing in Finn (18 page)

Instead of lessening our desire, the loss had intensified it, and continued to; the depth of the pain acted as some kind of bellows that increased the fire of our longing.

I sought out a new yoga studio, where I didn't know anyone who would ask me about the pregnancy. I found a teacher I liked. One day I arrived to find the class had been changed to a prenatal workshop. Several chatty women in various stages of pregnancy greeted each other and began setting up props by their mats.

I looked around at the lululemon-clad mommies-to-be, in their cheerful blue and cranberry tops stretched wide over baby bumps, and fully believed that all of these women had effortlessly conceived and would have these children.
Everyone
else had children whenever they wanted,
easily.
Even though one in six U.S. births is helped by some kind of fertility treatment, and somewhere around 136,000 adoptions take place every year in the United States, I felt I was the only one who had struggled, who would not carry a baby to term, who wouldn't get the joy of raising a child. The hurt inside me felt so great I thought I might implode.

“You're welcome to stay.” I turned to find the instructor, a wide-hipped woman with hazel eyes, pointing to an available place on the floor. “I can adapt the class for a mixed group.” I could imagine no scenario in which I would choose to stay for a prenatal yoga class. But the day had turned blustery and overcast, and I felt too tired to walk to the car. “Fine,” I said, huffing toward my mat. “I'll stay.”

 

I'd taken to
running away from the phone when it rang.

“It's someone else calling to tell me they're pregnant,” I'd say to Bill if he brought the phone to me, pushing it away from my body with my hands.

“Not everyone is pregnant right now,” Bill said.

It felt like they were. In the same week, Kaitlin, Amanda, and my childhood friend Heather had all called to inform me they'd entered their second trimester. I felt simultaneously happy and emotionally impaled. A part of me wished that I could hide until I felt better or we had a baby of our own.

It seemed that anytime I arrived at the gym, mothers and pregnant women were working out en masse. I would pick the line in the grocery store where a woman with a baby or small children were practicing words.

“Are you jealous or envious?” Eleanor asked me in a session. “Jealousy is not wanting them to have what they have. Envy is wanting it, too.”

“Both,” I said, hating myself for the ugliness of it. “Jealous of strangers, envious of friends,” I confessed.

In October, I flew to D.C. to my parents' house for the wedding of a friend of the family. My mother had retired in September, and we spent Friday having lunch and shopping in Georgetown. It had been only a few weeks since her retirement, but she'd changed. She
seemed more vibrant. She arrived at the airport to pick me up wearing a green sweater and dark jeans that flattered her shape.

“I've been going to the gym five days a week,” she said. “Dad and I are taking a cooking class at the Smithsonian.” Preretirement, she had worked sixty to seventy hours a week, ingesting Diet Coke and bags of pretzels at her desk, wearing navy blue or black suits or boxy Jones of New York separates.

“I'm calling her my trophy wife,” my dad said. In a gesture I'd never seen before, he twirled my mother around the living room, holding one of her arms in the air and putting his other on the small of her back. My parents had always been affectionate, but my father had never seemed interested in appearances. His interests were his spiritual pursuits and sports, basketball and tennis.

“Retirement is working for you guys,” I said, laughing.

“I don't know why I'm able to get healthy now. I've made plenty of attempts in the past,” my mother said.

I felt joy seeing her be able to devote time to herself. It was something my sisters and I had always wanted for her.

“You look great, Mom,” I said.

The night of the wedding, I felt broken again from a day spent seeing people's babies and explaining to extended family friends that no, I was not pregnant anymore.

 

By January, with
the turn of the New Year, I felt physically stronger and was enthusiastic to make it to May, when we could do IVF again. I had begun to believe we could have a baby again, and I would act accordingly. The success rates for pregnancies with a cerclage were still 60 and 80 percent. Gambling had never appealed to me, and it occurred to me that if I carried the baby, we would be doing exactly that with our child's life. But even still, Bill and I were on board to try again.

On January 14, I took a shower before bed and turned up the water extra hot, languishing in the heat and steam. I bent to fill a washcloth with a shower gel and noticed my nipples were erect, and that despite the heat they were sore. A stream of white jettisoned out from my right breast. I put my hands to the nipple, concerned I had some kind of infection. The liquid was creamy and opaque. I raised my hand to just under my eye, where I could examine the liquid in the light. I stared for a moment, trying to remain objective. It was breast milk.

I ran into the bedroom, trying to keep enough of it in my hands to show Bill. Dripping water onto the carpet, I extended my palm. “Do you see this! Look!”

Another thought came, so I went to the folder we'd kept of the twins' ultrasound photos and doctors' notes. A paper from our first appointment with Dr. Baker confirmed it: January 14 was the twins' original due date.

I told Dr. Baker about the incident at my follow-up appointment the next week, fascinated to hear what she would make of the amazing mind-body connection.

“There are so many things we cannot medically explain,” she said, and changed the subject.

Her examination confirmed that my uterus had healed completely and we were clear to begin IVF again in the spring. “Just one embryo at a time though, Sara,” she said. Bill and I had come to the same conclusion, based on our own research. I'd also discovered that the term “incompetent cervix” did not apply in the case of multiples.

“So, it was more of an incompetent diagnosis,” I joked when I told Eleanor what I'd discovered.

“It's a punishing name,” she said. “I support you in relinquishing it.”

 

The team at
RMI welcomed us like family when we went for our next appointment.

“We want this for you now more than ever!” Tracey said, engulfing me in a hug. Dr. Colaum mapped out a new plan based on transferring one embryo. She added baby aspirin to offset the chance of blood clots (which can cause miscarriage) and Viagra to plump the uterine lining.

“Women can take Viagra?” I asked, feeling afraid of what effects the infamous medication might have on my body.

“You'll be fine,” Dr. Colaum said. “You'll insert three to four suppositories a day to increase the likelihood of implantation. If we're going one embryo at a time, we're going to use every possible resource.”

I warmed under Dr. Colaum's enthusiasm. My body felt receptive and strong. This time, when UPS delivered the medications from Braun, I ran to the truck to sign and carried the box inside myself.

The day of our pregnancy test, Tracey said she would call us by 3:00 PM. I waited next to my phone like a loaded spring.

“I'm so sorry, Sara,” she said when she called. “You're not pregnant this time.”

“It's okay,” I said, feeling a need to reassure her.

We took the requisite two months off between cycles and did our next cycle in June.

The day of the pregnancy test, Rachel called. Bill had worked from home that afternoon, and we both felt hopeful.

The phone rang at 2:00 PM. When I saw the RMI number come up on my phone, I didn't have a positive feeling.

“It doesn't look good, Sar,” Rachel said. “Your HCG level is a three.”

Bill and I spent the weekend trying to talk ourselves through the disappointment.

“I understand statistically it's a 33 percent chance. But I still think we will be pregnant every time,” he said.

Statistics meant little to my emotions. After a negative pregnancy test, fears swarmed like locusts.
What if we never get pregnant again? What if something else is wrong with my body?
The “no” ripped the scab off the wound, exposing grief that was still close to the surface. It erupted like a rash.

“I saw a woman slap her child in the checkout line, and I actually thought about taking her baby,” Bill said when he returned from the grocery store one evening. “I stood there thinking,
You don't deserve children. If you don't treat that baby with love, I'll take it.”

I brought my hands to his forehead and rubbed his temples.

“I'm losing it,” he said, leaning back into me.

 

A week later,
we continued to feel low.

We were open to the idea of adoption and had discussed the option many times. But once we'd confirmed we had all the necessary parts to have children ourselves—good eggs and sperm, a healthy uterus—we felt called to continue, at least for now. On Tuesday after I got my period, we called Dr. Colaum's and signed on for an August cycle.

At midnight on Friday, August 8, our house phone rang. We didn't answer, assuming it was a wrong number. A few seconds later, Bill's cell phone lit up next to the bed. Dread spread across my stomach like a brushfire. The landline rang again. Bill roused himself, his hair tousled and his face creased with sleep.
Don't make assumptions,
I said to myself, trying to give whatever was on the line the benefit of the doubt.

“My mother's dead,” Bill said, after a pained few seconds. His mouth had gone dry, and the saliva on his lips turned the skin white. He ran to the guest bathroom and threw up. He'd told his stepfather
we'd leave for Omaha in the morning. I stood next to the bed, stunned and cold. Bill walked back and forth to the sink in our bathroom, drinking glass after glass of water. His skin began to look blue, and I wrapped the duvet around his body. For the next few hours, I held him in the bed, stroking his head until he fell into a fitful and exhausted sleep.

My mother drove through the night from Virginia to Nebraska to attend the memorial.

“I know you have so many people to attend to,” she said, surveying the crowd from the back of the chapel. “I'm just here to honor Nancy, to support Bill.”

“It is
beyond
beyond that you came,” Bill told her when he spotted her in the doorway.

“I'm here for you,” she said. “I'm so sorry.”

She stayed in town, nearby with my grandmother, as we helped sort through Nancy's things. When she stopped by the house before she drove back to Virginia, Bill asked if, moving forward, he could call her Mom.

At the end of the month, a tornado came through Chicago, throwing out power lines and flooding the basements on our street. A month later, a pipe broke in my office and sent two feet of water spraying through the walls, requiring that the entire floor and moldings be pulled out and redone.

I'd stopped taking the antianxiety medication in preparation for IVF and had begun having nightmares again. I would get out of bed multiple times a night to check that the front door was locked, that the floors were still dry, that the burners on the stove had not switched themselves on and started a gas fire. Bill said he felt cursed.

Sometimes, though, after my nightly rounds, I would sit in the solarium alcove and talk to the twins in their blue metal urns. Kaitlin had sent me an article about a sect of Judaism that believes
the babies who “do not stay” become intercessors and guides for the children who are to come. I found the same lore in Mexican traditions describing how “the babies that pass through” are given a place of reverence in the family.

We'd installed a water feature next to the twins' urns, and the constant gurgle was soothing. I looked out through the sliding glass doors up at the moon, a slash of light in a cloudless night. The Great Mother was there somewhere, I thought—existing, at least, as part of the collective consciousness, as Jung would say. I ran my fingers over the Y-branch that we'd found on the car after the twins' cremation. The sight of that branch and the way it had come to us motivated me to continue.

Our fourth round of IVF started under a new moon, which was said to be auspicious for new projects. I'd stopped trying to feel for an intuitive knowing about the outcome of the cycle, surrendering myself to the idea that I was not in control. All I could do was take the medication and bring my body to the procedure.

Dr. Colaum transferred one blast. I watched the screen as the blast shot into my womb. My eyes had become more practiced over the past three cycles. This time, I saw the embryo land, a white meteor falling from space.

“It doesn't get any better than that,” Dr. Colaum said with a confident smile.

Nine days later, Tracey and Rachel called together. “You're pregnant, Sara! Your HCG levels look good.”

We called all the grandparents in a round; they rejoiced and expressed having felt parched for good news. My mother and I signed up for BabyCenter again. I did my best to join the excitement, but felt wary and afraid. I told myself I was having a new experience, that I could trust this baby to grow. The bubble of impenetrability was gone, though, and I clenched with every
twinge in my abdomen, squeezed my eyes shut each time I went to the bathroom, terrified to see blood. I worried that the stress and anxiety I was feeling would hurt the baby; pregnancy books and the Internet stressed the importance of being relaxed and joyful in order to have a successful pregnancy.