OK Womb, Part II

I fell into a pit. With help, I got pulled out. Then, a musical finale.

The first part of this story from 20+ years ago can be found in last Tuesday’s post here. In earlier essays, I mentioned my infertility struggles and how they coincided with late-blooming musical ambitions. Here I’ve detailed some of the most difficult days and moments during those years. IMPORTANT NOTE: The rock-bottom episode here was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, before or since, and even during more pointed tragedies. There is some evidence that the fertility drug I was given can induce psychological extremes and even psychosis. None of my doctors or therapists at the time—all women—seemed to know or mention this.

It had only been a few months since my earliest student jazz piano solos, and I could still count the number of public community college concerts I’d played, but listeners would come up to me afterward, their eyes alight. Even knowledgable people, people who loved jazz or grew up with a jazz-piano-playing parent. Wow, where did you COME from? Did you go to Peabody? Do you have a card, a band of your own? We might want to hire you for our dad’s eightieth birthday. I did not understand this response. I felt awkward, new, and lacking in so many things—finger speed and dexterity, fancy runs and hip chords, muscular attacks, all the features that seemed to constitute excellence in jazz piano. Sometimes I thought people down here in suburban Maryland were focused on me only because I was unusual: an Indian-American woman who looked younger than her years but not quite a kid, with a certain New Yorker-ish/young professional style of dress and carriage, and more often than not, the only female on the bandstand.

One day a 20-year-old drummer I’d been playing with said, Sandy, your solos always tell a story, always start out somewhere and then go somewhere really interesting. It was a sincere and unsolicited opinion and I tried to take it to heart. Maybe this was all it took: an innate sense of melodic structure finding its way out through my still novice fingers.

I did, however, note the irony with a bit of bile. Sure, the blocked novelist can tell great stories with a beginning, middle, and end, as long as no sentences, paragraphs, or chapters are involved.

⏳

I’d never done group therapy before. This would be all women. Baby and bridal showers made me feel freakish, judgmental, and vulnerable. Maybe I was still traumatized from high school girl drama. Patrick and I, who both had close friendships with members of the other sex, had opted not to throw any single-sex parties before our wedding; instead, we met some of our people in lower Manhattan for drinks two evenings before our wedding up in Kingston, New York. I could hang well enough in male-dominated environments, and socially I loved mixed groups. I was one of those women at parties more likely to be found arguing about politics or the economy with the men still sitting at the table rather than back in the kitchen cleaning the dishes with the other women. But I relented to the idea of a female therapy group after enough of my therapist’s maternal haranguing. And I suppose I was curious.

Amanda’s office was already tight for two people and now felt like a clown car filled with middle-aged women. On any given Thursday evening there were five or six of us. We crowded around Amanda in a circle on couches and chairs, our knees just a few feet apart. I was the only nonwhite woman and also, at 34, the youngest. There was a very tall androgynous woman, forty-seven, with a husband so incapable of spontaneous affection that she had to request a hug even if they’d been separated by business travel for weeks or months. There was a smart and funny brunette, also near fifty, with a perfectly wonderful second husband by all accounts, but residual problems with her alcoholic ex and their two grown children. The woman closest to me in age was a smiling beauty with pert, girlish features and long auburn locks, and a closeted gay husband. Others came and went. One woman had been supporting a layabout, unemployed husband for fifteen years, and—from her endless stories about his lack of exercise, poor eating habits, and doomed get-rich-quick schemes—hated him as much as she loved him. But she would not consider leaving him.

Where’s your leverage? I asked her once. If he gets away with everything, why would he change?

I, of course, was not having a problem dangling my misery in front of my husband like a threat. If anything, poor Patrick was catching way too much on a daily basis. Hysterical fits were complicated by occasional moments when I’d take everything back and reaffirm my love for him. His head must have been spinning.

I’m so sorry. Don’t listen to me, honey. That was just the Clomid talking. I think.

He’d give me a tentative hug. I know this baby thing is making us both a little crazy.

My response to his perpetual forgiveness and patience was divided. I loved him for it; it annoyed the hell out of me. If he’d been an utter asshole or responded defensively, it would give me a great excuse to fly the coop. I’d come to group therapy all fired up to rail against him, against our marriage, against every decision I’d made in the past few years. It was as if I needed to test out the worst possible thoughts, whether or not I fully believed them. The women must have felt a certain maternal protectiveness and could not offer the unquestioning support I sought. I yearned for nodding, smiling Yes Women. 

I’d say, I don’t think I want to be a mother, ever.

They’d say, Why not? You’d have a gorgeous baby! We’ll all help you take care of it! Then they’d start cooing as if an actual baby had suddenly appeared in the room.

Amanda would go into full-blown hippie mode. I think maybe you are not willing this baby down from the universe. I just think you and Patrick need to open up a really good bottle of red wine, relax, and enjoy each other’s bodies.

I’d start to weep. Was my barren womb simply caused by a lack of will? Were my doubts preventing me from getting pregnant?

I’d refocus on my non-baby ambitions. Patrick’s holding me back. He doesn’t support my dreams. I feel like he’s trying to cut me down to size.

They’d say, It sounds like you are the only one holding yourself back.

I’d say, My parents sucked at being parents.

They’d say, You won’t be anything like them.

It felt as if I could not get a single fucking person to just listen.

Unless I was writing a newspaper column or playing the piano.

⏳

Sometimes I worried I had pulled a bait-and-switch. Patrick had expected a full and equal modern partner: someone who pulled her share of the household weight. A yuppie wife, sort of. A journalist who writes fiction on the side. Not that I had to make equivalent money, just that I’d be reasonably responsible for paying bills and saving for retirement.

I had been secretly harboring my own different vision. It wasn’t quite a reversal of the age-old pattern in which a talented male creator finds a woman who’ll do everything for him, earn the money, cook the food, and raise the children. I just wanted a reasonable trade-off. Pat would support us financially while I took care of babies; then, once the kids were in school, I’d get to be the kind of artist I was meant to be—writer or musician or both—regardless of immediate compensation. Not because I intended to fail financially. Only because it might take me a while to achieve the big, self-sustaining prizes, a couple of well-published books, a couple of well-regarded CDs, and a capacity to gig and tour and make some money doing so….

Was this not a fair arrangement? Would this not enable both of us to get what we wanted in life? I was playing around in several local big bands as well as a smaller student combo at Howard Community College. I was regularly meeting married-with-kids male musicians who might have to teach or code software to supplement their incomes but were devoted to music first and foremost, and often the primary daily caretaker of their children.

In the Dundalk Community College band run by local legend Ashton Fletcher, I was a curiosity for a few minutes, and then mercifully taken for granted once they heard me play well. At some point, Ashton learned from someone else in the band that I was also a singer. I acted demure about it, but I was thrilled. Would I want to sing and play a number for our upcoming concert—the Peggy Lee classic “Fever”? Well, yes! I’d established my street cred as an instrumentalist; I could vocalize without being relegated to the lowly category of chick singer.

On the appointed day and time, eighteen musicians and their instruments were crammed in a semi-circle on a balcony overlooking the student lounge. I was in the back with a digital keyboard. I was excited to sing “Fever" and record it on my mini-cassette device. We played through the set, my number came up, and I sang it. It was my kind of song, wasn’t it? Low and sultry. I felt I was harking back to my CABARET-star high school days, except now, instead of being out in front in a skimpy outfit, I was a member of the band, protected by the piano, sheltered from the overt sexuality of the song. I let my eyelids droop and concentrated on the sound I was sending through the microphone. Afterward, the crowd clapped enthusiastically and a few of my bandmates turned to smile. 

I brought the recording home for Patrick to prove that I wasn’t crazy, that my dreams were valid. If the song turned out well, I could use it as a demo to get a restaurant gig that actually paid. It’s not like he hadn’t heard me sing before, but for some reason, I imagined this song would be a revelation. We sat at the kitchen table together, drinking beers. I rewound the mini-cassette for a few seconds, trying to guess where “Fever” started. But as I pressed play in a few locations, I noticed truly horrible sounds coming out, wobbly and harsh, the trumpets squealing unpleasantly, the bass boomy, and the whole band sounding far more out-of-tune than I remembered.

I had been amazingly naive, of course. With even a slight bit of actual recording knowledge, I could have anticipated the distorted ugliness I’d get out of this little lo-fi contraption. I finally found my song. As my voice came in, I wanted to run away screaming. It was awful. Not low and sultry, but growly, harsh, and consistently flat. At the same time, I could hear myself telegraphing the message that I thought I was hot shit. The terrible racket I was making was not transformed by my misapplied confidence.   

I had sometimes secretly mocked amateur singers who behaved like divas as charismatic as Barbra Streisand but sounded like Alvin of Alvin and the Chipmunks. Good lord…was I just another one of these delusional creatures?

I looked over at my husband, whose neutral face could be so disconcerting. Patrick was not about to lie to flatter me. I loved him for his lack of bullshit, even though at times it killed me. At times I just wanted him to blow sunshine up my ass. 

Well, I guess that won’t really work for a demo, I said, preempting him—although it was clear he was not planning to say a word. He shrugged, then got up to wash his beer bottle in the sink before tossing it in the recycling bin.

⏳

A friend who was once a professional Shakespearean actor and a thoroughly urban person (NY, LA) had transformed into a suburban housewife and churchgoer. She now lived out in Baltimore County in an old fieldstone farmhouse with her musician-turned-stockbroker husband and elementary-school-age daughter. The one-child life had fit her well when she was still performing, but she’d decided to have another baby.

In late April I went to the shower. I was the only one of her former city friends among a dozen pleasant, smiling white women from her neighborhood and church. I showed up wearing my beat-up old black leather coat, looking like a freak among all the pastel corduroys and Fair Isles sweaters. Beth was at the center of her party, hugely pregnant and exuding joy. 

A few weeks earlier, I’d gone through another brief time of thinking I might be pregnant, and a strange calm had washed over me then. I can do this, I thought. Fate had decreed it; no point rebelling against it now. 

It turned out to be another false alarm. 

Now I stood among these happy moms. I smiled, laughed, and ate cake, ever the good fake, the freelance journalist who could make small talk with absolutely anybody. Inside I could hear myself screaming. I don’t want this. I don’t want this. 

Everybody had been telling me that parenthood was going to transform me, make me a better person, less self-absorbed, calmer, and happier. Why should I believe them? It certainly hadn’t worked wonders for my own immature, self-absorbed parents, passive-aggressive father and aggressive-aggressive mother. 

S: I’m afraid I’m going to drown, that I’ll love my children but still be deeply unhappy.

The Universe: [silent]

S: If Patrick keeps making these unreasonable demands—follow a more lucrative career path but don’t work nights and ruin our relationship, pursue music but don’t aim too high, etc etc—I will leave him no matter how much I love him.

The Universe: [silent]

S: My greatest fear is that I never learned how to love unconditionally. I have trouble even understanding what that phrase means or believing such a thing exists.

The Universe: [silent]

⏳

It was the era of parents everywhere suddenly bragging about their children on bumper stickers. One day that summer as I was driving around greater suburban Baltimore, I saw an unusual example that made me laugh so hard, I almost ran myself off the side of the road.

YOUR KID’S AN HONOR STUDENT BUT YOU’RE A MORON.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

⏳

Women not listening to me had become a recurring motif. I told my OB/GYN about my continuing motherhood doubts and my notion to become a professional musician instead. Dr. Baylor looked as if she were listening and even asked a few pointed questions about what instrument and kind of music I played. Then suddenly she glanced again at my chart, noting my age, and cheerily said We have really got to GET YOU PREGNANT!

She scheduled me for a hysterosalpingogram, a procedure to shoot a radioactive dye into my uterine cavity and fallopian tubes before taking an X-ray to see if I had blockages. It was horrifically painful. I’d suffered some severe dysmenorrhea on occasion; this was five times as bad. Standing over me, watching me squirm, Dr. Baylor actually winced and apologized for the torture. Test results came back: nothing to see here, folks. Everything working just fine.

She sent me off to a fancy infertility clinic where the next doctor was also friendly and sympathetic-seeming. I told this doctor, as well, that I was going through a hellacious emotional roller coaster. I told her I literally did not know from one day to the next which of my thoughts were real. I told her that one day I’d dream of leaving my husband to become some kind of jazz nun and the next I’d dream of walking around my neighborhood with a stroller.

The doctor averted her eyes and said, blandly, Yes, some mood swings are known to be a part of the process.

It was spring 2001. I’d be 36 near the end of the year. I went on auto-pilot, body compliant, mind a blank. I planned to try one round of IUI, intrauterine insemination. I’d already decided this was as far as I could go. I was not willing to take the next step and try IVF; I’d seen too many women acquaintances empty out their life savings and emotionally zombify themselves in that process. Enough of the rollercoaster already.

A few days earlier The Sperminator had dutifully managed his part of the task in a small private booth filled with magazines. Then it was my turn. I had an ultrasound, but the doctor found no developing egg follicles, despite the hormonal injections I’d been taking.

No point, she said, in wasting the sample.

I came home and keened like a rifle-shot dog and banged my fists against the wall. 

⏳

My mother called and left a message. She was arranging some kind of investment trust in case of her death—she talked about her impending demise constantly in those days and would continue to do so for the next several decades. She wanted me to discuss the provisions that would be made for my “children.” Right there I cut the message off. 

I’d been assigned a tiny, three-sentence review for US Weekly on a book of celebrity family photographs. It was to be one of the last book reviews that magazine ever printed, before deciding that nobody gave a crap about books. I opened up HOLLYWOOD MOMS and immediately started crying for the second time that day. I was supposed to interview the actress Téa Leone about her participation in the project but she was difficult to schedule.

As a backup, the book’s publicist put me on the phone with another woman involved in the project, the wife of a major movie producer. We had a nice long chat about fairly intimate emotional matters, which made sense given the subject of the book. I mentioned something about my pregnancy woes and this woman insisted I needed to come out to Los Angeles, where the doctors were nothing short of miracle workers.

A few days later, Téa Leone left a long voicemail saying Hi Sandy and offering several pithy, articulate comments with no invitation to call back. (Patrick was so adorably excited, he wanted us to preserve the message forever and ever.) Later it was Téa, not the producer’s wife, whom the magazine chose to quote. When the piece came out in print, the producer’s wife called, her voice full of disappointment, bewilderment, and accusation. Why had she been cut from the piece? Why hadn’t I quoted her? Did she not say what I’d hoped she would say? Had she offended me in some way? I thought we’d really connected, she said, in a tone just short of whining.

Had this woman not been around the block? Did she not understand that her non-famous self would get bumped for an A-list television actress? I apologized and said it had been my editor’s decision, which was plainly true. I felt torn between pity and revulsion. Hollywood was legendarily a brutal place for insecure and competitive women. I understood this and tried to be empathetic. Still, my stomach lurched to hear how much this small, almost meaningless situation had upset this very rich white person sitting in her Malibu Beach house, just like Barbie.

⏳

I went to Sam’s Bagels on Light Street on a crowded Sunday morning. Behind me in line was a father with his daughter: long, straight, dark-brown hair, olive skin, and big brown eyes, wearing a maroon knit dress and colorful stockings, talking in sweet high tones to her daddy. I looked at her and then had to look away, afraid I’d have a screaming fit there in the bagel shop.

I’d been lying to myself, right? Suppressing my deepest desires in order to stay with this man I loved. In late April Patrick and I attended the Towson University faculty jazz concert. The next morning I told him I was thinking about applying to the jazz/commercial music program in the fall as a so-called “second bachelor’s” candidate. I said I’d be able to take 12 credits and still keep up my freelance writing pace.

He was gobsmacked. Does that mean you’ve been slacking all this time? What about finishing your novel? His face contorted with resentment. Fine, do what you want, go back to school, but when do I finally get what I want in this relationship?

I started yelling and screaming. At first, I couldn’t speak so I just raged and grunted like a mad woman. But then I looked right at him and said, I am so angry I could actually KILL you right now. The words burst from my mouth. I thought my head would explode. 

He walked out of the kitchen, put his jeans jacket on, walked out the front door. It was the only time ever he’d left for work without kissing me goodbye. I was filled with remorse. I knew I loved him, felt bonded to him. But maybe I had always just been using him. Maybe I’d made some kind of evil bargain with myself: marry this man, give him kids, and he’ll have no choice but to support me as I try to become the artist I’m meant to be. Was that it? Was I just a horrible user, now unwilling to put up my end of the secret bargain?  

In my journal I wrote, By staying with Patrick, have I ensured that I don’t actually make the real commitment to myself to be an artist? That I keep one foot firmly in upper-middle-class land, get to drive a new car and wear nice clothes and buy lots of CDs? 

My mother’s and father’s epithets from twenty years earlier were ringing in my head again. I was a LAZY, SPOILED PASHA. I had WARPED VALUES. I was TOO PUSHY and NO MAN WOULD LOVE ME. I hadn’t gone to medical school and thus I was a NOTHING.

⏳

One night after dinner, I stood crying in the middle of the kitchen floor. I just feel so needy! Is that the only reason I married you? Because I’m pathetic and needy? Patrick was sitting at the kitchen table. For the first time in days, I allowed myself to look right into his eyes. They were wet with tears, too. As if I’d infected him. Do you think you’re the only one who’s needy? His voice caught in his throat. 

It was a shock. So mired was I in my own vulnerability, I had completely ignored his. Worse than that, all this time I had completely misinterpreted his detached, engineer-y way of speaking. I’ve always heard parenting is one of the great joys of marriage. He’d made it sound like a process he wanted to optimize rather than a profound life experience that he desired from his depths. How stupid of me to have mistaken style for substance, how self-centered I was. I went over to hold him and we cried onto each other’s shoulders.

Days came and went. It was like mourning: I’d be fine and functional for stretches, but there was a bleak buzzing in my brain the entire time, and every once in a while I’d break down. I followed my cycle on the calendar. I took those fucking pills and injections when I was supposed to. I practiced so much piano that I raised a blister near my wedding ring.

⏳

I got a surprising, weekday mid-morning phone call from an old friend in a city far away. She sounded upset. She’d read a recent CityPaper column in which I discussed the phenomenon of strong-seeming, feminist women caving to the plans and ambitions of their husbands. It was absolutely a reflection of how I was feeling in my own marriage, yet I’d hidden that fact by writing, instead, about this anonymous friend’s troubles. In my myopic depression, I’d thought that a few changed details would protect her identity. Also, I didn’t quite believe that anybody was actually reading my column. Even though it appeared in a paper with a circulation of 300,000. Even though I often met people who knew my byline. Even though it was on the Internet for all the world to view. 

Sandy. Her voice was somewhere between brusque and baffled. A colleague just called me up and said, ‘I’ve just been reading all about you online.’

A hot wave of shame engulfed me in silence.

I’d actually told her to look up your columns because I thought she’d love the writing, and then she came and told me this.

What could I say?

I’m...oh...shit...I am so, so, so, sorry. I thought I had...masked—

Well, no, you didn’t mask anything. The whole world knows my business now.

My friend was not yelling, which made it worse. If anything, she just sounded confused by my betrayal. I tried to explain the circumstances of the writing, how I had originally intended to use just a few unidentifiable details about her situation as an introduction to segue into the difficult early marriage of Katharine Graham, owner of the Washington Post. Instead, I’d got caught up in my friend’s story and revealed much too much.

This didn’t sound very convincing even to me. She didn’t yell and scream, but it was clear I’d effectively killed the friendship. I hung up with her and wept, pounded my fists on the desk, stood up and put my hands against the wall and banged my head there. Why was I alive? I thought. What good was I? What was the point of my existence?

I did not tell Patrick about what I’d done. I did not tell anyone, actually. I had probably never been more ashamed of myself in my whole life.

One night we watched the movie BILLY ELLIOT on DVD. In it, a young boy from an English coal mining town falls in love with ballet. At first, his tough, hardworking father belittles his son’s effeminate passion. In the end, he comes around to understand how deep his son’s love is for the art, and supports him in his bid to enter the Royal Ballet’s competitive school. It’s a triumphant ending. I looked over to Patrick in despair.

People love their children so much!

I blubbered and tossed my head sideways into Patrick’s lap. He squeezed my shoulder and stroked my hair. I was engulfed by awe and fear.

⏳

At some point that summer I interviewed by phone the ridiculously young novelist Zadie Smith about her smash debut WHITE TEETH. She was already sounding jaded from all the publicity, or maybe that was just a defensive posture. The novel itself was marvelous. It made me seethe with envy and shame. I’d all but abandoned my unfinished draft. Here in my face was this young woman who, while still finishing up college, had written an accomplished, readable, vividly peopled, well-plotted story about many of the same ideas in my failed novel: race, identity, postcolonial history and ethnic diasporas, genetic nature versus nurture and environment.

She had gone and done it, the brat, yet during our interview she kept downplaying her achievement, claiming she’d never put more than 60 percent effort into anything in her life, including this universally hailed, best-selling book. At one point she bemoaned that she wasn’t truly clever like David Foster Wallace or Donald Antrim. I thought Donald Freaking Antrim, Come ON. In the end, I was perfectly solicitous with her and wrote up an appropriately laudatory review/interview for Time Out New York. 

I tried to work, I made calls, I pitched stories, I did interviews, I wrote and wrote. I marked the days on the calendar. Deadlines for the fertility clinic, for my editors, for the next big band or student combo concert. I spent more hours at the piano than at my writing desk. Along with my classical teacher with whom I worked twice monthly on Brahms, Prokofiev, Ginestera, Bach, Scriabin…I now also saw a jazz pianist, Lou Rainone, in the alternate weeks. Radiohead’s OK Computer had retaught me the lesson of close, attentive listening, and now I spent many hours each week doing exactly that: classic bebop, free jazz, third-wave, fusion. I sought out women composers/pianists like Myra Melford and self-accompanying pianist-singer-songwriters like Patricia Barber. I listened to almost everything the concert pianist Martha Argerich had ever recorded.

Pat would come home and ask me how my day went and I’d murmur a guilty Oh fine. 

I wrote short books, entire 80-page manuscripts of historical and biographical subjects for the young adult publishers Chelsea House. Over a few years, I cranked out seven. Work-for-hire projects, no royalties, less than $4000 per job. For each one I did all the research and writing within a five-week period, and kept writing my column and other short things. I was highly functional yet in a complete emotional fog. Doing something, always doing. 

Patrick and I were fighting again but he did not want to split up. I want to stay with you even if we decide not to go through with the baby thing. This was meant to make me feel better but instead emphasized my horribleness as a person. How could I do that to him? No, it would be better to dump him and give him a chance to find a woman with reasonable career aspirations and a genuine hankering for babies. 

I asked a friend, a retired lawyer in his 60s who played jazz guitar, whether he and his wife might have a room I could rent in their house. His thick salt-and-pepper eyebrows popped up and I realized he thought I was making some kind of weird pass. Here I’d figured all along that he understood we were just fellow musicians and platonic friends, nothing more. Stupid me. I felt unaccountably duped and abandoned.

Whatever we need to do to make this work, I’m there, Patrick said. He started coming with me to see Amanda, who seemed instantly charmed by my charming husband. The most critical thing she ever said about him was that men tend to be a bit more conservative than women. I wanted her to tell him off, tell him he was wrong in some way, and let me off the hook for how badly I’d been acting. It was not to be.

How are you feeling, Sandy?

I’m...I’m...I’m just so...LONELY!!

Patrick’s eyes locked onto mine. He looked utterly bewildered.

Amanda turned her head sideways, like a cocker spaniel. 

Do you mean a kind of existential loneliness, you think?

I shrugged and continued to weep. I didn’t know what I meant, exactly.

One day at home Patrick said, Thank you for doing this all this time, the fertility treatments. For trying to do something you didn’t want to do. I know you were doing it for me.

I thought I would burst open from love and anguish. 

⏳

I had trouble sleeping. One night I woke up and looked over at Patrick, his back rising and falling slowly. Profound affection surged over me like an electromagnetic pulse, stopping my breath. Our life was my life. How could I even entertain thoughts of leaving him? 

Once, many years earlier, I’d told an on-and-off boyfriend that I never wanted to have children.

But that’s so wrong. You’re exactly the kind of person who should be having children!

He then went on to enumerate the apparent genetic factors that made me an ideal breeder. I flinched. I thought his was a terrible, immoral mindset. Maybe this was a good remnant of my Christian upbringing revealing itself: I hated his implication that smart, good-looking people deserved to have children more than average people. No, absolutely not. It was a form of intellectual eugenics. Just because we were damn lucky didn’t mean we were better.

And yet now in the midst of hormonal-emotional chaos, I could not keep myself from thinking: Every stupid fucking moron on the planet can get pregnant just looking at some dude’s crotch in tight jeans, EXCEPT ME!?!?!?

The fancy fertility clinic referred me to a new therapist who knew about infertility, having struggled with it for ten years herself before adopting her first child and eventually getting pregnant with her second. I drove forty minutes down to Annapolis to see this woman, who promptly told me that all the talk about willing babies down from the universe or drinking wine to relax with my husband was victim-blaming bullshit. You have a medical condition. That’s all it is. Your infertility is not a failure of will or spirit, it’s not a reflection of your ambivalence, and it is not something you did wrong. In my heart, I immediately dropped Amanda cold and transferred all my love to this new counselor.

It should have been a terrific day, except I managed to spoil it that evening. Patrick and I again got into an intense conversation about marital expectations. We’re both making sacrifices for each other, Sandy. For example, I can’t decide to take six months off from work to go bicycle across the country. We can’t afford it.

I was a terrible, terrible person. It was true, I did not make enough money to support our household, I’d been dabbling in various low-paid media and had turned my husband into my involuntary sugar daddy.

Our evening went by in the usual manner but the next morning I felt so dark I could not think straight. I found myself in my desk chair in pajamas, wishing I were dead. I put my head in my hands. My home office was a mess—papers, file folders, and books everywhere around me, on the desk, on the floor, in disorganized piles threatening to slip sideways off the bookshelves. Its chaos was the manifestation of my disordered mental state. I slapped my forehead with my palm, which escalated to beating my temples with my fists as I screamed. Tears poured out of my eyes and nose. I bent over double in my chair. Make it stop, make it stop!

I couldn’t imagine hurting myself seriously, couldn’t make the leap to methods, times, repercussions. It wasn’t that rational. I simply wanted the pain to end, even if that meant my life had to disappear. I just wanted to stop BEING, entirely. 

Patrick?

I wailed into the phone.

Pat…I can’t...I can’t...

What? What is it? Are you okay?

I don’t know...I don’t know...I don’t know.

Should I come home right now?

Yes...I think you’d better...

I hung up the phone and rushed out of my office, down the hall, and into the bedroom. Weeping. The last remaining light inside me got sucked past the event horizon. I was no longer standing at the edge. I had fallen completely in. Could not see or think.

It would have taken Pat at least half an hour to return home. That time is lost forever. What was I doing? Pacing around in circles like a caged, enraged lion? Screaming and yelling? Banging my head against the wall? Balling up on the floor hugging my knees? Probably all of the above, yet I remember nothing.

I only came back to myself the moment Patrick found me, folded up in the middle of our unmade bed as if trying to camouflage myself in the crumpled green sheets. He jumped onto the bed and wrapped his arms around me. Together we rocked back and forth. I heard a keening wail. I wasn’t even sure my mouth was open. The sound was just pouring off me, out of my shoulders and chest and face.

What is it? he said. His voice was hushed and trembling. I couldn’t look at his face but I imagined it was signaling pure terror.

I just—I can’t—this is—I can’t do this anymore! It’s killing me!

Shh, shh, it’s okay, it’s okay—

It’s not okay! I’m a failure! At everything! 

It was the strangest sensation. On some level, even through the chaos, I knew it was absurd for me to make such a claim. But it was exactly how I felt: failure, failure, failure. It was not a performance. If anything it was a ripping away of every costume I’d ever worn.

How can you say that? You’re not a failure at all. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. You’re an excellent writer, an excellent musician. You’re a good friend to many people—

At this I wailed. He didn’t know about the dear friend I’d recently betrayed.

I can’t do this anymore! I can’t! I can’t!

Shh, shh, shh, it’s okay, I’m here now.

We talked and cried, talked and cried. 

Time passed. 

He held onto me. We rocked together in the middle of the bed.

I clung to him. I slowly calmed down. Patrick had rushed home to rescue me from me; he had reached out his hand and was pulling me up out of the darkness. Somewhere beneath the fear, grief, and rage, I felt a sense of surrender and exhilaration. 

We have to be happy, he said. But my happiness can’t come at your expense, and your happiness can’t come at mine. If the only way for us to be happy, both of us, is to split up, then that’s what we’ll have to do.

We cried some more. I was silent but nodded my head in agreement. His words were warm. He kept talking.

I hate to even think about it. But we have a long way to go before we come to any decision like that.

I nodded silently. 

It’s probably time for us to give up on this fertility business. It’s just gone on way too long and caused you too much damage.

I silently held onto him, nodding, nodding. Yes. Too long, way way way too long. Three and a half years, to be exact.

The most important thing right now is to get you healthy again.

Yes. Yes. I need to get healthy.

That’s what we have to focus on now.

Yes. I nodded. Yes, yes, my love, my friend, my one true family. Yes.¹

⏳

After an hour, when my eyes were dry and my breathing was back to normal, we both realized we were ravenously hungry. I went to the bathroom to wash my face, straighten my hair, and get dressed. I walked down the stairs in summer-weight jeans and a sleeveless yellow cotton sweater. Patrick smiled gently at me and said, Well, I know you feel crappy, but you look great. I laughed for the first time in days.

We walked hand in hand to SoBo Cafe for a late lunch. 

Later that afternoon, in some act of continued family engagement that now seems misguided, I called each of my parents to tell them what was happening.

My father pretended to listen, then said You should just go ahead and do the IVF, I can help pay for it.

My mother asked if she could pray for me. I let her do it, then regretted it. The big ostentatious voice intoning dear Lord and beseeching this divine entity to watch over me. The performative aspect of it. These things had always bugged me. A moment of mutual silence would have felt more appropriate, perhaps, but I understand that this was her sincere attempt to comfort me. So I accepted it as best as I could.

At SoBo Cafe, the first song Patrick and I heard as we sat down was Kansas’s “Carry On, My Wayward Son,” a hit from our youths that I’d since come to consider cheesy. I sang along quietly, marveling at the fact that I remembered all those ludicrous lyrics.

Wait, why exactly was I belittling them? It was a song, a cohesive story, lyrics and melody and harmony working together, a small thing of beauty, a minor miracle, catchy and memorable. The message was perseverance. The message was live now because soon it will all be over anyway. I thought, I should be less judgmental and more open-minded. After Kansas there came all sorts of other hits from the era of our childhoods. Heart’s “Magic Man.” Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing.” We looked each other in the eye across the table and sang along together to the oldies, smirking a little, and not caring if anyone in the restaurant really wanted our serenade or not. 

~The End~

1. If you’re a new reader and want to know how we resolved the baby issue and where my music ambitions started leading me, you can check out my previous essays Do What You Love, The Mindf*ck Will Follow and Children ruin everything. The spangled web we weave is an Independence Day essay about many things political and personal, and contains more details of our decision to adopt a baby.