When I was sixteen my mom took me to an obstetrician because I hadn't gotten my period yet. I'm not sure if I'm remembering correctly but it was either that appointment or one soon after when the young, female doctor told me I would never have children. I felt like someone was squeezing my heart between two fists. I felt, for the first time, a huge crevasse between who I knew myself to be and who the world was telling me I was. Or was not, in this case.
I was a teenager, so it didn't seem to matter too much to this doctor or any of the next practitioners I saw, that I was so upset about the motherhood piece. In fact, I recently found some old medical records in which this doctor noted that there was the possibility of doing a uterine biopsy to find out more but, due to my young age and how far off potential parenthood was, it wasn't necessary to do the test at the time. It pissed me off finding that note but it also really validated how I felt at the time--which was that I was begging someone to care about what mattered to me and they were telling me not to worry about that yet. I sort of want to go back in time and punch that lady.
How do I describe it? I knew at age nine that I would be a mom. I felt it, deep in my insides, in the voice I knew to be me. The voice I listened to when I got teased in middle school--the one that told me that those kids didn't know what they were talking about because I was great. The voice that went along with my nervous stomach twinges that told me I was attempting to do something I wasn't ready for. That voice was ME and it got crushed when I was a sophomore in high school.
I walked through the hallways at school in a daze that year. Feeling unseen. Sad. Furious. Lost. I was in a rage of grief. Then they added synthetic hormones to the mix, I hit puberty in a majorly engineered way and I lost my virginity to my first serious boyfriend less than a year later. When he and I broke up he cautioned me about sex, warning me to keep it special and telling me it was harder not to have it once you'd done it. I scoffed. And then began a decade and a half of promiscuous coupling and a constant angel/devil debate between the voices on my shoulders. Sex was special and should be shared only with someone you loved. Sex felt good and was a way to connect, no need to feel guilty. I flipped and flopped between feeling defiantly proud of my sexuality and how I was using it, and feeling ashamed, cutting off friends who dared question me about any of it. Throughout all of that I thought, often, secretly, hopefully, desperately, that maybe I'd get pregnant. The idea of having a baby with someone I hardly knew didn't phase me--because I was young, because I wasn't a parent and had no idea what I was talking about, and because the yearning to be a mother was so deep, so blinding, that it blotted out all sense.
I got older and pregnancy went from being an idea to being a reality for the women in my life. I sat and listened as friends of mine confided abortions and I ached. Not in judgement but in longing. I stood beside friends as they married and became mothers as I had unprotected sex with my boyfriends and hoped the doctors were wrong.
That's the thing. Way in the beginning, maybe not at sixteen but shortly after, I decided:
"No."
The reality hit me in the face and it was hard not listen to what the doctors and my body, which wasn't doing what it was supposed to, were saying. But part of me, deep deep inside like a seed, dug roots into inhospitable soil and stayed put. I hoped. I decided that I would believe in my body because that was the only thing I could do to help it. Holding on to that belief, that faith, was incredibly difficult.
In 2000 when I was twenty-three I went into acute liver failure and almost died. I spent a month in the hospital and was saved by a liver transplant the day before Thanksgiving, given to me by the family of a sixteen-year-old girl who did die. That's a story for another day. I mention it because it was horrible and painful and scary. But the thing that made me sob curled into a ball a month later was when I went to see the endocrinologist I'd seen as a teenager. He told me I was tripping, that I'd never have kids. OK, he didn't actually say it like that but it was concise and brutal:
"No. With labs like this, there is almost no chance you have any viable eggs."
Not new labs mind you, the same lab work he'd seen years before. No one looked deeper. I wrapped myself tighter around the little seed of hope and I wondered if I'd know when faith crossed over into delusion.
A year later I got my period for the first time at age twenty-four. The gynecologists told me the problem had obviously been my liver and it was probably fixed now, I could probably have kids. The liver people told me it was probably the medication I was taking, and I could probably have kids. They all told me:
"Try to get pregnant and see if it works."
Um. Wasn't there a test or something that could answer the question without possibly producing a child?
Nope.
Not much changed in the ten years that followed. I both tried and didn't not try to get pregnant. I didn't get pregnant. The specter of motherhood hung over everything I did. I thought about quitting my job but then decided the company was so pro-parent that I should stay. I got into, stayed in and ended relationships thinking about parenting with those men, thinking about my age, my complicated medical history and all the strikes against me.
In 2013 when I was thirty-five I got married. We did our first round of IVF two months later. The doctor--the same endocrinologist I'd seen twice before--told me there was a less than 5% chance it would work. He recommended using donor eggs. We pressed forward with my own eggs. I wandered in a heart-aching fog not unlike the one in my sophomore in high school. I realized I'd been holding onto this seed of hope for twenty years, in the face of many, many voices telling me:
"No."
"No."
"Maybe."
"Probably not."
"No."
Bringing that hope to the surface was the scariest thing I've ever done. I felt like I was out in the world with a raw, gaping hole in my chest. I like to keep my heart safe. I had never wanted something with all of my heart and actually gone for it. Never, not once. Too scary. Too vulnerable. Too much. It took my breath away to step into this new place. I cracked myself open and fear and pain came pouring in as we went through the steps to try to make babies. I was so, so scared.
My therapist told me to hold my hope in one hand and my fear in the other. That I didn't need to get rid of the fear, but I didn't need to allow it to take over, to smash the hope down. So that's what I tried to do. It was really really hard.
In 2013, the day before Thanksgiving, I peed on a stick with my husband next to me in the bathroom and we watched as it immediately showed a negative result.
The next morning I sat at the computer and wrote without pause for an hour, writing a version of this story and weeping as I said good-bye to this dream I'd held onto for so many years.I felt empty. I knew we wouldn't do IVF again--I'm not sure why I knew that because we'd never discussed it. I just felt it. It was time to move on to the next thing, whatever that was. I leaned back in my chair when I finished and our grey, mostly outside-dwelling cat leaped onto my lap and then onto the keyboard, erasing everything with a quick paw. Oof! Ha! At that point what can you even do but laugh and walk away in disbelief, disgust, bewilderment.
Four days later I went to get a blood test, a mandatory part of finishing the IVF cycle. Pissed that I even had to do it. I got a voicemail a few hours later, congratulating me on the good news.
Um. What??? WHAT?? I mean. What?
I ran to Walgreens to get my own stick to pee on, even though the blood test was way more accurate. I needed to see it with my own eyes. Yep. Pregnant. Holy everything. I was finally going to be a mama.
***
It's April 2014 now and we have ten-month-old twins at home. I wish I could remember what it felt like to find out I actually was pregnant after hoping for so long. The feelings, or the memories, have been washed away. Being a mom is. . .everything I ever heard or read and nothing like I could have imagined. It is ass-kicking. Full. Tiring. So many things that I don't have good words for yet.
Two surprises--one I actually suspected might come to pass and the other that knocked my socks off entirely.
1) I'm still myself. Becoming a mother did not soothe the searcher in me. It's not the answer to whatever the question is that life keeps asking me:
"Who are you and who will you be?"
It's a relief and a drag to find that out.
2) I'm pregnant. With twins. Again. All naturally.
If all goes well we'll welcome fraternal twin daughters this summer, somewhere between twelve and fourteen months after our son and daughter were born. Oof! Ha! What can you even do but. . . no seriously, I don't know what we're going to do other than to go forward with fear and trembling. Awed.
So that's my story, or one of them. A big one. I don't know what I will write about on this blog. I don't know how honest to be or who will even read it. The invitation to connect my story to Momastery was too tempting to resist, even though I don't feel ready.
My messy beautiful?
My body. My confusing, mysterious, strong, scarred, doubted, cursed, believed-in body. My messy beautiful blessed self.
http://momastery.com/carry-on-warrior/
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