Baby Steps (3 page)

“I'm getting married,” I said, too quickly, as if that was an answer to his question. I was thinking of the babies, and of course marriage was the first step, wasn't it? Ron had proposed, and I had said yes. I'd said yes to others before, and I'd never gone through with it, but with Ron, it felt different. We'd talked about it a lot. We had a similar moral compass and similar goals. He wanted a family someday, and so did I. We were on the same page, so this was what I was supposed to do, or so I assumed.

“Wow, that's great!” He beamed, and I could tell his happiness for me was genuine, coming from one of those rare, legitimately blissful married people.

“Because I'm ready for a family,” I rushed to explain, almost as if I wanted to prove that this, rather than true love, was my reason for getting married. At the back of my mind, I wondered why I would want to prove such a thing. Why was I making excuses? Why did I feel the need to justify anything?

I rushed on: “I've always wanted to be a mother. I had a pretty fucked-up childhood and I've so looked forward to getting it right. So . . . marriage.” I stifled the urge to make it a question.

“Ah, me too, yes, me too,” he said, but I could hear the hesitation in his voice. Had I overshared?

“Do you guys have kids?” I asked.

“Well, we tried,” he said with a sigh. “But no. We kind of missed the boat on that one.”

I stopped walking. “I'm so sorry.” I didn't know what to say. His answer took me by surprise. He seemed like a man who would have children, even grandchildren. My mind shot back to the day in Vietnam when we'd visited the clinic, and what Patty had said about the way she had become a parent—by making her work with orphans a central part of her life. Is this what Jack was doing, too?

He'd just shared something intimate, and conscious of this, and of my role as that stranger he would never see again, the one to whom he could express the deep things in his heart, I began walking again, not looking at him, nodding. Giving him space to continue.

“We got married later,” he explained. “By the time we started trying, it was a little
too
late.” He seemed to shrug it off, but I could hear the tone in his voice, like an echo from a hole where something should be that never will be.

“I'm really looking forward to going to the orphanage tomorrow,” I said. “Did you guys ever try to adopt?”

“Yep. Afraid we failed that test, too. But we're happy and fine without children. It wasn't meant to be for us.”

I wondered how someone could say that. It was an alien concept to me. Happy and fine without children? And yet, here I was at almost thirty-four, having barely given it a thought. I hadn't exactly organized my life around a long-range parenting plan. I began to feel anxious, like maybe I'd made a mistake. Had I wasted the last decade working and finding myself? What if—and this seemed like a long shot, because I didn't consider myself “old” by any stretch—what if I had missed the boat like Jack had?

“That's why I'm forging ahead,” I explained, with new resolve. “It's time to get married. I've waited long enough. I don't want to miss the opportunity. I'm ready to get settled down.”

“Love and family are two different subjects, of course. You should really love him. You should want to be with him, regardless of
whether children are in the cards. Otherwise, it's not right. Family's not enough of a reason to get married. You're going about things backwards.”

I didn't look at him. We walked past a table piled with fruit and a stall waving with bolts of silk. I loved Ron. He loved me. But the words echoed in my mind:
Love and family are two different subjects, of course.

“Having a baby won't fix anything,” he said. “It's easy to get obsessed with the idea of a baby. All you see is baby, baby, baby. Believe me, I know.” He paused. “But trust me. Wait until you're a hundred percent ready.”

“But you waited, and . . .” I paused. I didn't want to be hurtful, but his advice seemed to contradict what he'd gone through. I decided to focus on me. “I'm ready now! I'm ready to love a child!” I could hear the emotion, the desperation in my voice. The need. The
want.

“That's been pretty apparent here on this trip.” He smiled. I smiled, too, remembering the feel of those tiny babies in my arms. “We can all see that you want to be a mother.”

They could see that? It felt new to me—ancient, and yet, new. I'd always wanted to be a mother, theoretically, but this trip and all those children had galvanized my maternal feelings. They felt more real than they ever had before.

“I could have ended up with any of a dozen different guys, but I wasn't ready. It's all about timing, right? I'm ready now. I'm ready for the whole marriage thing.” I could hear the lack of conviction in my voice, but I refused to give in to that doubt. I was thinking about all the times I'd run away from relationships. But Jack had convinced me I might be running out of time. I felt even more urgency than before.

Then he told me something I'll never forget, something that changed my life.

“Well, I'm gonna put it to you quite simply, Lis. Go home and freeze your eggs.”

“What?” I stopped again. Freeze my eggs? I'd never even heard of such a thing. Eggs? It sounded so unromantic and clinical and also bizarre. I guess I knew women have ovaries and all of that, but I'd never really thought about human babies coming from eggs. I imagined sitting on a nest of eggs, like some giant duck or chicken. It made me laugh.

“I thought babies came from storks,” I said.

“I'm serious,” he said. “Freeze your eggs. Then you'll have the time to figure out if the relationship is the right one for you. You'll have time on your side, and you won't feel rushed to make a decision either way. Because you're right—the time is now and timing is everything. You aren't getting any younger. It won't be long before it's too late.”

“Too late?” I blushed. As an actress, I'm conditioned not to talk about my age. We're supposed to remain ageless. “No, I'm still young,” I protested. “I don't want to freeze my eggs. Why would I do that? That sounds so . . . I want to do it the old-fashioned way.” I felt a little dizzy suddenly, in the warm spring air.

“You're thirty-four tomorrow, Lis. You're running out of time. I waited to marry the love of my life, but she was thirty-seven, and our time was out. I wish someone had told her what I'm telling you now. I'm doing you a favor. Get control of your destiny.”

“But . . .”

“The clock is ticking, but not for you to make a decision about whom to love. Don't marry someone because you want to have a kid, Lis. Don't do a thing like that.”

He was quiet after that, as if he knew he'd said enough. I let the words echo in my head. I didn't say anything, either. I was stunned at the idea of freezing my eggs. It seemed so utterly unromantic, and
I'm nothing if not unrealistically, pathetically romantic. And I found it very hard to believe that I might already be on the steady downward side of fertility. Could it be?

But I knew Jack was wise on two counts: he knew what real love was, and he knew the heartbreak of infertility. Maybe I should consider his advice. I thought about all those young girls with their babies in Vietnam. I was at least a decade older than most of them.

He was definitely right about one thing, I realized. I was putting too much pressure on the question,
who?
Who would be good enough to be the father of my children? Unfortunately, when you come from a broken home and spend a lot of time thinking about the art of parenting and all the mistakes
you won't make,
you put a lot of pressure on your potential parenting partners. It's almost possible to forget questions like,
Who will love me the most? Who will love me best? Who will stay with me forever?

I'd spent my young adult life analyzing and overanalyzing what makes someone a good parent. Childhood had complicated my thinking about love. The question should have been,
Do I love this person, baby or no baby?
The question should have been,
Do I love Ron?
There was no other question.

And yet, what about that baby? The one I didn't yet have? The one I knew was waiting for me somewhere in the future? What about that? As Jack and I made our way back to our hotel, I felt like I was seeing the world through a completely different lens. Freeze my eggs? Love someone in spite of baby plans? Too late? It all swirled around in my mind and I hardly knew what to do with it all. And then my birthday was over, and I flew back home to California, and to Ron, and everything changed.

Meeting Jack and having that conversation in Cambodia was a wake-up call I desperately needed. It turned my whole way of thinking upside down. I thought I had infinite time, and I was wrong. I
thought I could have it all, and I still believe women
can
have it all, but that “all” might not be exactly what we thought it was, and it might take some strategic planning because we do
not
have infinite time. I used to believe that it was easy and natural to have a baby in your late thirties and forties. I'd heard the stories we all hear, about women having babies well past their twenties, so I thought I could do it, too. I didn't realize that my time was running out.

Although I didn't give birth there, in a sense, Cambodia is my daughter's birthplace. It certainly was the place of my rebirth. When I got back home, I wrapped my arms around Ron and told him everything.

“I need to go to the fertility doctor,” I whispered in his ear. “Everything is probably fine . . . but I need to find out how much time I have. You don't have to go with me.”

“I want to go with you,” he said. “I'm going with you.”

And so our journey began.

Life began with waking up and
loving my mother's face.

—George Eliot

 

F
ertility may be on a lot of people's minds the first time they have
sex, thanks to those didactic “teen pregnancy” videos they show in junior high sex ed class, but it wasn't on mine. I was more focused on the embarrassment—the mortification, even. Because I hadn't really wanted to do it.

I was fourteen years old, and I hadn't wanted to have sex. Neither had the boy I'd reluctantly allowed to deflower me. But there it was.