Baby Steps (14 page)

I openly mourned my broken body. I was still angry, almost like a child having a temper tantrum.
Of course this would happen to me. I didn't get the fairy-tale family. I didn't get the fairy-tale childhood. I wasn't experiencing a fairy-tale career. I'm not going to get the fairy-tale wedding, and I'm certainly not going to get the fairy-tale motherhood story, either. Of course not. My body doesn't even work. And now I'm going to have to go through this huge thing, and my career will probably be over, but I have no choice because this is my last chance to be a mother.

I was really going to have to commit to Ron, too. I'd accepted his proposal, but having a child together would really seal the deal in a whole new way. Was I ready? It didn't seem like my chances at succeeding at either love or conception were very high at this point.

Who would have ever predicted that this would happen to me? I was healthy, I exercised, I wasn't overweight. Why would I have medical problems? Didn't I do everything right! Did I do something to cause this? Was it my fault? Was I just a victim of fate? A nasty trick? The girl who wasn't allowed to achieve her dreams? Was I not worthy of love? Was I not worthy of a family? Frankly, it sucked. Forget postpartum depression, this was prepartum depression. I admit it was a little bit of a pity party.

One of the people I talked to about all of this was my acting coach, Ivana Chubbuck, because I really was worried about what a pregnancy would do to my career.

“I have to do IVF,” I told her. “And I have to do it now. What do you think? I'm in the prime of my career.”

“Oh, who cares,” she said. “I know people think that they have to be working machines in their twenties and thirties, but this is going to make you a better actress. Your heart will grow ten sizes, like the Grinch,” she said.

“You think I'm like the Grinch?” I said. She just smiled. “So I should do it? I should get pregnant?”

“This is going to be great for your career,” she said. “Because it's great for your life. You're really going to learn how to love, and that's going to make all the difference in your acting. You'll see.”

This gave me courage. Maybe I could stop worrying about being professionally successful awhile. I had been certain that if I stepped out of the spotlight for a year, that would be the end of my career. Everyone would forget all about Serena Southerlyn. But maybe this was a good thing. I wasn't getting the jobs I wanted anyway, so maybe it was time to step back. When I returned, it would be as Elisabeth Röhm, not Serena Southerlyn. The new and improved Elisabeth Röhm. With the open heart. And a baby.

Finally, I realized that all I could really do was let go of the wheel a little bit and put the situation in God's hands. I obviously had less control over my future than I thought. This was disorder at its finest, and although it was extremely difficult for me to understand the “lesson” I knew my mother would want me to find in all of this, I was figuring out how to forgive God for an imperfect life, and how to forgive myself for being so angry about it. For being broken. For being human.

I got closure during those weeks. I decided to trust myself and trust my choices. I became very clear that this was the right decision: in vitro fertilization. Dr. Sahakian had said we didn't have much time, so I wasn't going to waste any more of it. Because I had to become a mother. For love. For my mother. For Ron. For my career. For myself. My life depended on it! I had to make this work! I was even willing to make new mistakes! I was willing to do anything and everything. I was finally willing to admit I needed help.

I would give myself every chance possible. I would do it
now.
And then I went to war. I assembled my emotional armor. The wedding could wait. The acting jobs could wait.
This
was our new agenda. I barely thought about whether I was ready to have a baby or not anymore. If this was the situation, then I was going to attack it. I would fight hard. I would triumph.

But first, I wanted to try one more thing.

“Let's go to Palm Springs,” I said to Ron. It was one of our favorite places to go together, full of romantic memories. “Let's just have sex constantly for a week. Like rabbits. Let's give it one more chance, and if that doesn't work, then we'll get a second opinion.”

Ron thought this sounded like a fine idea, so we went to Palm Springs and we holed up in our favorite spot and we made love as much as we possibly could, until we were exhausted, until we could barely walk. We were so filled with hope during that week that it infused our time together with emotion and love. We were starry-eyed again. All the stresses and pressures of this new unwelcome news about my fertility dropped away and we were like teenagers who couldn't get enough of each other. We kissed, we groped, we lounged in bed naked and ordered room service. After we came home, we did a pregnancy test.

It was negative.

Dr. Sahakian's office was in Westwood, which was a much more humble location than Rodeo Drive. The office was plain and comfortable, but the thing I loved the most was the floor-to-ceiling gallery of families Dr. Sahakian had helped create—not celebrities, but scores of normal, regular, happy-looking people with babies and children, infertile couples who had successfully conceived after treatment. I stared at that wall as I waited in the unassuming waiting room. That wall gave me hope.

Dr. Sahakian himself was over six feet tall and he had a fatherly air about him. He told us he had five children, and he spoke lovingly about his wife, never once mentioning the names of any celebrities. He had a way about him that made me trust everything he said. He was nurturing and calm, and I knew almost immediately that I wanted to put my fertility into his hands. He became hope personified.

“You waited in the waiting room,” he said to me, in his gentle voice.

“Where else would I wait?” I said.

“Most celebrities insist on coming in the back way and taking the service elevator up to a room,” he said. “They don't usually want to be seen. You have that option if you want. I care about your privacy.”

“Wow,” I said.

He smiled and said, “Nobody wants to admit they are infertile. They don't want anyone to know. I guess I'm Hollywood's dirty little secret.” He chuckled.

I hadn't even thought about that. “It's okay. I'm not embarrassed to be here,” I said. I was keeping a stiff upper lip, even though I was trembling on the inside.

He smiled warmly at me. Ron and I decided we really liked him, even when he confirmed that, yes, my FSH levels were unusually high for a woman of my age. FSH, or follicle-stimulating hormone, is
a hormone that goes up as a woman's eggs are getting used up or diminishing in quality. It is one sign that fertility is winding down, and that, yes, I probably would need fertility drugs to conceive. He hit us with the diagnosis: accelerated ovarian aging. I hated the sound of it. But he could help us, he said. I believed him.

My doctor said he'd never seen anyone move so quickly to start the process, but I'd had enough disorder in my life. I was ready for structure again. I'd always wanted law and order, even when I fought it. Even after I left it. It was time to reclaim it. I was tired of being reckless in my restlessness. I was ready to swing back the other way. I had to get back to who I really was and what I believed in, if this was going to work.

The recognition of my infertility changed me. I realized that love was something that I was going to have to work on. I was going to have to earn it, even if it seemed unfair, even if others seemed to get it for free. I would make it work with Ron, and I would make it work with the life I intended to create. Because she
would exist,
my as-yet-unconceived child. She would. She had to. When I realized that this was true, without a doubt, I was ready.

The rest was up to God.

We are at a major epoch in human history,
which is that we don't need sex to recreate the race.
You can have babies without sex.
This is the first time in human history that has been true.

—David Cronenberg

 

G
od answered my prayer for a baby, but the answer was not “Sure!
Here you go, kid!” The answer was “How badly do you want it?”

Our first visit with Dr. Sahakian happened on July 6, 2007. He explained that nobody knows why eggs age prematurely in some women. My eggs, at thirty-four, looked more like the eggs of someone who was forty-four. Just great.

Dr. Sahakian told us all about IVF. He told us the steps, the risks, the success rates. Although his nurturing, gentle way and buttery voice made us both feel folded up into the metaphorical arms of his care, we also realized that we had a long hard road ahead of us.

He explained that about 10 percent or more of couples have infertility problems. According to the World Health Organization, that's about 70 to 80 million people around the world. About half the time, it's a male problem, and about half the time, it's a female problem, so no one gender is to blame. But Dr. Sahakian also had good news: for people under forty years old, IVF has a success rate of about 70 to 80 percent. That's huge. It
usually works.
This gave me hope, but hope notwithstanding, I realized I had no time to lose. I felt like my eggs were literally shriveling up inside me at warp speed, like on a time-lapse camera that shows a flower bud opening, blooming, wilting, dropping its petals, and then withering away to die, all within seconds. I felt an extreme sense of urgency. As he explained the risks of complications related to all stages of the IVF, I barely heard him. I wanted to scream, “Just give me the drugs! Let's get started!”

But it wasn't so simple. A pill wasn't going to make me magically produce a baby. There was a process, and we were about to enter it. As Dr. Sahakian explained how it all worked, I listened intently, trying to pay attention. I felt like a science project, sitting there in his office: a guinea pig. My shoulders were tense, an inch above where they usually
sit. We were embarking on an experiment in modern miracles. I felt like I was being forced to sit in the front row and know all the answers, like there would be a test—and there would be! A pregnancy test!

The next visit was disconcerting. I remember the feeling that the office was rocking back and forth, like it floated on the ocean, like there was no longer such a thing as solid ground, as the layers of information and feelings swept over me in waves—the instructions, the emotions, the medical layer, the spiritual layer, all of it swirling together in a maelstrom. Soon, the doctor began to sound like the teacher on a Charlie Brown cartoon:
mwah mwah-mwah mwah mwah.