Given Up for You Page 7

  “I think you will,” she said.

  I didn’t ask Chris if she also wanted to be pregnant and to give birth. I knew she didn’t. I had asked her once, many years ago, but even then the question was only a formality. If you had asked me on that first night I met her if she wanted to be pregnant, I would have told you no, absolutely not. There was something entirely contained about Chris’s body. There was no space in her for another beating heart. And I am sure that her desire for containment, which the animal in me saw as compatible with my desire to grow another human in my body, was one of the reasons I was drawn to her, and one of the reasons she was drawn to me. We are taught the ancient complexities of mating, that men and women’s bodies are designed to sense a virile mate, a hospitable womb. What we are not taught, but what I believe to be true, is that even two women can sense the possibility of a harmonious match.

  Sisters Inc. was a feminist organization whose roots and mission were essentially political: empowerment through mentorship and the arts. The executive director was a young lesbian named Kelly who had recently emigrated from Brooklyn. Kelly was a women’s historian and archivist. Her partner, Gaby, a botanist, was also a Sisters Inc. mentor. On their fridge there was a magnet that said Cats Not Kids, which was clearly a relic from their past, as when I met them Gaby was six months pregnant with their first child.

  Kelly was the first lesbian I had ever known who was like me, who cared about eyebrow waxing and cookware, who read Ann Patchett novels and shelter magazines. Her hair always looked fantastic, her makeup perfect. Her laugh was contagious; her high-heel collection was epic. She had gorgeous dresses and lovely dishes and threw the best parties. Her politics were radical and fervent and a little intimidating. She was startlingly confident. I knew from the first time we met I wanted to be her friend.

  Gaby and Kelly’s baby, a boy due in late spring, was conceived with sperm from a friend of theirs. A known donor. He would be their baby’s father, they told us, although not in the way you are thinking. They were making a new kind of family, they told Chris and me one evening when we had them over for dinner to ask them all our baby-making questions. A new family without models, without set roles. “I mean, if you looked at us, you wouldn’t expect me to be the bio mom,” Gaby said. And it was true: I would have assumed Kelly would, like me, want to carry their child. But Kelly was repulsed by even the idea of pregnancy, while Gaby had always believed she would have a child, despite her butchness.

  We asked them about their donor, and they told us their sweet conception story, and that a known donor was essential to them, that their beliefs about the meaning of family and a child’s sense of identity demanded total transparency and connection.

  Chris and I didn’t really say much in response, and I changed the topic of conversation to baby names. Later, after they had left, Chris asked me, cautiously, what I thought about using a known donor. I told her I would be okay with it if we knew the right person, but I couldn’t imagine who that person might be. She said she couldn’t do it. “He could change his mind at any time during the pregnancy,” she said.

  “Well, we’d get him to sign something.”

  “But he could get out of anything he signed. He could change his mind anytime, and he can’t legally renounce rights until after birth.”

  Neither one of us had any idea who this “he” was, but still we kept on. “Well, we wouldn’t do it with someone we didn’t trust entirely,” I said.

  “I don’t trust anyone entirely,” Chris said.

  I laughed, but I knew she wasn’t kidding. As a lawyer and the daughter of a cop, Chris didn’t really believe in the innate goodness of humanity.

  “So if we use an anonymous donor, have you thought of what sort of characteristics would matter to you?” I asked.

  “I want someone who looks like me,” she said. “I mean, not exactly like me, but the same general ethnicity, Lithuanian, Swedish.”

  “I’m not sure we’ll be able to find that particular combination.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You mean not Asian.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Oh no,” I said, although it was hard not to sense the racist overtones of our conversation. “You want someone who looks like you,” I said. “So do I.”

  I also wanted to choose an identity-release donor, a donor who was willing to be contacted by our children when they were eighteen. Chris wasn’t so sure. “Really?” she asked.

  “It’s a door,” I said, trying to sound equanimous, “and we have to give it to our kids, even if they never open it. They have to know it’s there.”

  Later Chris would thank me for my insistence on that point, but in truth she was the one who deserved thanks. My claim on our theoretical children was much stronger than hers then, and it was easier for me to suggest that such a thing might be necessary. She was the vulnerable one, and she agreed anyway.

  Chris didn’t want to sort through donor profiles with me, so I told her I would do the early research and show her the top picks, as though I were her donor-selection intern. This was in the early days of the internet, and we still had dial-up; I still had to plug my laptop into the beeping modem and listen to the shrill call of one machine to another before I could go to the sperm bank’s website and see what new donors might be waiting for me there.

  Chris also wasn’t interested in interviewing doctors or midwives, or even in reading Rachel Pepper’s Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians. “Can you just summarize?” she asked me when I gave her the book.

  I looked at her. “Can you please just read it?”

  And so she did; she read it cover to cover one Saturday afternoon. “Interesting,” she said. “Seems pretty straightforward.”

  I asked her if she had read the section about the challenges of insemination, including the short life span of thawed sperm and the possibility of expensive fertility treatment. “You’re not even thirty yet,” Chris said. “She’s not talking about you.” And while I needed Chris’s confidence and her healthy perspective, part of me wanted her to share in my obsession—the part of me that mistook obsession for interest, for engagement. But the baby was an abstraction to Chris, and she approached the process of getting one as something that seemed possible, and logical. The data showed that it had worked for many people; why wouldn’t it work for us?

  So I obsessed without her, and I turned the baby into a to-do list. There were many decisions to make: Did we want “washed” sperm that could be directly inserted into my uterus by a doctor or midwife, or sperm that was hearty enough to swim through my cervix so we could do the inseminations ourselves? (Definitely not. We could barely load the dishwasher together.) Did we want to use Gaby and Kelly’s lesbian obstetrician or the midwifery practice I had been hearing about, the one that made insemination house calls? Every day I made more phone calls and downloaded new donor profiles. I began to chart my cycle. I liked the forward motion of my to-do list, and for a little while I was content to busy myself with these tasks, but before long there were glitches, small complications in my well-ordered system. A donor we loved was suddenly no longer available; my limited graduate student insurance didn’t cover the house-call midwives, and Chris’s insurance, which did cover the midwives, was not available to domestic partners. I waited and waited to ovulate and impatiently stood by while day 14, day 15, day 16 passed without so much as a twinge in my side.

  In early spring I made an appointment with Gaby’s obstetrician. Dr. Marshall was tall and blonde, boyish in a New England prep school way. At that first consultation she told me she herself could not imagine wanting to be pregnant. This strikes me now as an odd and inappropriate disclosure, but at the time it barely registered. I was just glad she enjoyed the professional challenge of getting other lesbians pregnant, which she did with an impressive success rate. We chatted for a little while, and then she asked me about my cycle. Was it regular? I showed her a small chart I had been keeping, whose template I had photocopied fr
om the back of Taking Charge of Your Fertility. The paper was soft from being folded so many times, and nearly every box was filled with letters and abbreviations written in different shades of ink. I had taken note of basal body temperature, changes in cervical mucus, bloating, breast tenderness, cycle length. Dr. Marshall looked at the chart in disbelief. “You didn’t need to do this,” she said. She was trying—with limited success—to keep from laughing. “I think you need to get a hobby,” she said.

  Why didn’t I—after that humiliating and cruel remark—just thank Dr. Marshall for her time and leave? Because I needed her. Gaby and Kelly said she was the best, and I had read too many stories of incompetent doctors, doctors who didn’t understand how insemination with thawed sperm really worked or who refused to do weekend and evening inseminations. So I stayed. My staying was the seed of both my resignation and my grief, although it would be the grief that bloomed faster, sunk deeper roots. It would be the grief that I would continue to mistake as well-justified and understandable worry, as necessary vigilance, when really what I felt was a terrible sadness that despite what I still believed I was entitled to, I would not, could not, conceive a baby in my bed with the person I loved.

  I asked Dr. Marshall the rest of my questions and thanked her for her time and told her I would be in touch when we were ready to begin inseminations. When Chris called to ask how the consult had gone, I said, “Oh, it was good. I liked her. You will too.”

  A few days after my visit to Dr. Marshall, my neighbor Emily called me and asked me to come over; she had some news. She was pregnant. They weren’t exactly trying, but they were thrilled. She was tired, and the world smelled terrible, and she couldn’t get enough cookies. “Cookies and naps!” Emily said cheerfully. “That’s my new life.”

  How exciting! I said. How amazing that you weren’t even trying! How amazing. I stayed long enough not to seem rude, and then I walked across the street as quickly as I could, trying my best not to cry before I got to my front door. It was not envy I felt so much as embarrassment, and shame. I thought of my chart. I took it out of my purse and unfolded it. My face burned at the sight of all those letters, all those tiny parentheticals, the occasional smiley face. You need to get a hobby. I tore up the chart into tiny pieces and threw them in the kitchen garbage. I went upstairs to our bedroom and threw away my basal body thermometer. Then I went downstairs to start dinner and tried not to look out the window at the lights in Emily’s kitchen, and the lights in the room down the hall, which, she had told me, would be the baby’s.

  9

  Trust

  After a few months of negative pregnancy tests I began to lose my mind. A friend of my mother’s sent me a smooth, black river stone painted with the word “trust.” In the accompanying note she told me that the rock would get darker and more beautiful as the oils from my fingers smoothed its surface. I kept the rock by my bedside table and every morning I held it, took a few semideep breaths, and pretended to meditate on its message. Then I jumped out of bed and ran to the bathroom, where I peed on a thin plastic strip, inserted it into my battery-operated ovulation monitor, and breathed shallow breaths while I waited for the day’s reading.

  The machine needed a few minutes to read the tea leaves of my urine, minutes during which I stood with my back to its blinking face. I looked out the window at the narrow river across the street, and beyond it to the town’s one-room library, whose etched cornerstones reminded me that Wise Men Put Up Knowledge. Over the months I used that monitor I must have spent hours at that window waiting for the monitor to beep, fantasizing about the day when would I walk next to the river with my baby, then bathe her in the claw-foot tub beside me, leaning over its curved ceramic lip to soap her body. When the monitor finally beeped I would grab for it, only to have it tell me in its own indifferent way, not yet. And then, in an instant, the baby would vanish from the tub. On those mornings I longed for the chance to walk out of that bathroom and into an entirely different life. A life in which I slid back into bed with a man to whom I could whisper: Not today, but why don’t we try anyway?

  You need a mantra,” a friend told me when I confided my anxiety. “I use them all the time. Try one like, ‘All will be well, all manner of things will be well.’”

  But all was not well, I wanted to point out to her, and if I didn’t get pregnant soon, all would most certainly not be well. I feared this concept of wellness, as though, baby or not, the universe would continue in its indifferent divinity and I would make my way in it; I would learn hard lessons and be tempered by loss and bloom into full personhood. That all sounded lovely and maybe I would get on board later but right now my stakes were too high.

  Still, a mantra was not a bad idea. “I’ve got a mantra,” I told my mother on the phone when we were talking, as we often were, about my not being pregnant. “Oh good,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Jesus has my baby.”

  My mother burst into laughter.

  “Are you laughing at my mantra?”

  “No, no,” she said, still laughing. “I love it, you know I do.”

  I knew she did. I loved it too, although more than anything I was surprised by it. Jesus was mostly in the shadows of my life then. I hadn’t chosen Hector’s solitary path to God and while I still thought of myself as a faithful person, I had no idea how to act like one. I hadn’t been a Catholic long enough to say I was now lapsed, but I was certainly drifting. Occasionally I went to Mass at St. Mary’s in Northampton, and I found some joy there, at the familiarity of the service and the sanctuary itself: the stained glass windows, the gently curving arm of each pew, Jesus on the cross, the statues of Mary and the saints tucked into alcoves and window wells.

  At St. Mary’s I often found a sweet spot of refuge from the noisy world, although there was always an accompanying agitation. There was always the pang of what I had not done, an accounting of the ways I had grown my life according to my own will, and not waited patiently to discern God’s. God had become a sort of long-distance benefactor, a patron whom I had disappointed and whose letters, out of shame, I did not open, not realizing that the disappointment was my own. And Jesus, well, he was like a dear friend set out on a long journey, so that weeks sometimes went by without my thinking of him, although when I did it was with genuine fondness, and with longing.

  But when I had closed my eyes and coached myself to think of a mantra, I immediately saw Jesus, saw my baby’s head against that worn flannel shirt. And I heard him too, heard him laugh at the thought of what I had asked him to do, but still opening his arms to do it.

  On that one blessed day each month when my ovulation predictor deigned to illuminate its blinking, purple egg, I called Dr. Marshall’s office and told the receptionist to put me on the morning schedule, crossing my fingers in hope that Dr. Marshall herself would be out of the office. As it turned out, I far preferred her colleague, Dr. Bryant, a shy but charming Irishman and father of five children. After the first few inseminations, Chris and I had gone straight home to have sex. But soon enough I admitted to myself that I didn’t want to have sex after having a speculum in my vagina, and, sometimes, an extraordinarily painful clamp around the lip of my cervix. So we started going to movies, and eventually we just went back to work. And while Chris did not complain about lack of concentration on those workdays, after an insemination I walked through campus cautious and altered, then stood in front of my class and lectured about Emily Dickinson’s use of the em dash, thinking only of the two possible outcomes of my morning: a miracle, or nothing at all.

  During what fertility experts refer to as the TWW (the two-week wait between insemination and a discernable pregnancy), my body became like the plot of the Sierra Nevada forest I spent a high school summer surveying, cataloging every plant, catching every flying squirrel, holding their squirming bodies in a thick leather glove and tagging their small ears so that later I could break apart owl scat and find those tags. Only when it came to my body, I could see less; what bloomed or withere
d, divided or didn’t, did so in the darkness of a space I couldn’t see during a moment I could not be certain of. I could only measure small tremors and tracks, subtle swells of mood and skin. I couldn’t be sure of anything other than the blood of failure, and even that came so quietly that the first moment of every sighting took me by surprise.

  I told Chris about my mantra. “Does it help?” she asked.

  I wanted to snap at her, say that nothing really helped, and nothing ever would, except a baby. But I knew she was tired of my pessimism, tired of my vigilance. I worried she could sense how often I wished for the chance to shed my skin, to enter another life.

  “It does help,” I said. “Sometimes.”

  “You know,” she said. “I do wish I could get you pregnant.”

  I touched her face. “Oh, I know you do,” I said. I wanted so much for her to not feel responsible, to not feel inadequate, despite the fact that lately I couldn’t help myself from seeing her that way.

  Chris and I didn’t talk about my mantra again, although my mother, as is her way and the way of all my family, kept the humor of it alive. “Good thing Jesus has the baby,” my mother said as we carried boxes into my sister’s new apartment on a warm afternoon in May. “Because I couldn’t do this lifting without you.”

  By midsummer I had become increasingly bothered by the peeling lead paint on the windowsills and sashes of our two-hundred-year-old house. “I think I’ll ask the owner about the lead paint,” I said to Chris one day. “I’ll tell her we’re trying to have a baby, and we need her to fix it.”

  “You mean have the house abated?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll ask her to paint over the windows.”

  “I’m not a real estate lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that’s illegal, once it’s been determined that there’s lead.”

  “Well, we can’t have a baby in a house with lead paint.”

  “I know,” Chris said, calmly. “All I’m saying is that I don’t know if she’s going to fix it.”