The Longest Date: Life as a Wife (13 page)

Maybe I’m clearing space, not just for a baby, but for our relationship. I think we need some TLC.

So, here I am, broken and dented, and I wish to sign up for another year, if you’ll have me.

Love, your wife

L
et me just say (before anyone else does) that I know I am fortunate to have
any
partner, let alone a partner like Ian, in this baby quest. I have female friends who have gone through it alone, and I am in awe of their strength and resiliency.

But trying to produce a person with another person has its challenges. Not all couples survive. Every step and misstep along the way, you have to hope you’re still on the same page.

Ian and I somehow remained on the same page until Year Five, and then things got so bad, he needed his own page.

Literally.

He decided to write about what we’d been through trying to have a baby.

I encouraged this at first, because I find journaling to be therapeutic and clarifying (even though I hate the word “journaling”—I don’t know why it’s not just called “writing”), but Ian’s journaling seemed to be bringing him stress rather than comfort. For months he would mutter that he had to finish his “essay,” which, I kept reminding him, did not need to be finished, did not need to be an essay; it was just for him.

But at some point, it wasn’t just for him. It was for all men who had experienced similar losses, and when Ian finally shared it with me, I saw why he had needed to write it, and why he needed to finish it, and why men (and women) needed to read it.

So here it is—Ian’s page—because this baby odyssey is our story, not mine. And because he was able to be more honest than I was about what we lost along the way.

A Father’s Story: The Baby We Didn’t Have

BY IAN WALLACH

It started perfectly. A rocking romance, magical wedding, decadent honeymoon, came home pregnant. My wife stomps out of the bathroom, half smiling, half accusatory, holding a plastic stick with a plus sign and yelling, “Ian, you got me pregnant!” Thirteen weeks later, we see the color flee from the face of our OB/GYN, and he tells us that this being was not meant to be.

“Specialist” was a title with which we would become too familiar. Specialist number one told us that we needed a D&C (dilation and curettage—in this case, a fancy term for ending a pregnancy). Over the next few years, more specialists explained more acronyms, like IUI (intrauterine insemination) and IVF (in vitro fertilization). We tried to understand the science behind each procedure, made ourselves believe we did, and gave each one a shot. Money rolled out while bad news washed in. And then several specialists (and one acupuncturist) suggested we try donor eggs.

A donor gave us eleven eggs and two chances. One procedure required many injections and five eggs but brought only frustration and sadness. After the second attempt, which used the remaining six eggs, we waited for the phone call. I promised I would take it, because my wife had answered all the others. It came late, which we decided wasn’t good. But then something so unexpected happened: we did not get bad news.

Suddenly we were able to spend days, and then weeks, sharing a secret that seemed to cure an invisible injury. Weeks became months. We saw a moving head on a monitor. Later, tiny hands. We heard racing heartbeats (that I’d record on my iPhone). Three months in, we braced for the same fear-inducing test—the “nuchal fold,” or neck measurement, scan—that had led to heartbreak once before. Somehow, still, there was no bad news.

A doctor—a specialist, even—said words like “healthy” and “female.” On the short drive home, we quickly agreed on a name. We began designing the baby’s room and thinking how our lives would change. We sent a global e-mail with the subject line “Congratulations to Us.” I wrote, “Yesterday we passed the three-month-now-it’s-okay-to-speak-about-it deadline, so we can announce that we are expecting a healthy baby girl to arrive in early January.”

Two weeks later my wife woke me to say she was nervous and felt cramps. An ultrasound confirmed all was fine (and another, three days later, did as well). But three days after that, there was a lot of blood and a trip to the ER. Once again we were told that all was fine, shown images of the baby moving, and sent home.

My wife’s cramps worsened. The doctor on call suggested Tylenol. When the pain sharpened, the doctor asked me to locate an open pharmacy to get Vicodin. My wife went to the bathroom, came back to bed, returned to the bathroom, and screamed. I knew.

I told her not to look down. (She had.) Still connected to her, facing west and not moving, was the physical embodiment of what we had only ever seen on-screen. Autopilot clicked on. I looked for a container, knowing I had to save everything. A colored pint glass was by the sink, and I washed it out. My wife moved to the rim of the bathtub. I collected what had fallen and ran to call 911.

I told the dispatcher that my wife had miscarried. He asked me to describe what happened and told me that she would probably be going into shock and I needed to cover her with blankets. I didn’t want to go where I couldn’t see her, and the blankets were more than thirty feet away, down the hall. I was stuck. The dispatcher told me to give the phone to my wife and go get the blankets. When I returned, she was crying less. The pain, which she hadn’t known was labor, was subsiding.

In under five minutes the doorbell rang, and I ran downstairs. Four paramedics rushed in, asking questions that somehow I was able to answer: “Where’s your wife?” “Where is the fetus?” “Is it intact?” “How far along?” One of them scooped up our panicked dog and plopped her in another bathroom. These kind, brilliant men then flirted with my wife while simultaneously telling her that she was going into shock (explaining her jitterbug legs). They placed her on a chair and carried her down three flights of stairs. Leave it to my wife—at this moment—to joke about, and apologize for, her weight. Her beautiful, stunning, sexy, pregnancy weight.

Fire trucks and ambulances do little for discretion. The whole neighborhood was outside and knew what had happened. I reached the doctor on call and asked which hospital to go to. She seemed surprised and asked, “You called the paramedics?” I remember thinking, but not saying,
Yes, considering that my bloody wife is convulsing and our child’s in a pint glass
. The kind man in the ambulance told us we were right to call for help, that 911 is there for situations that people can’t handle on their own.

Our regular, more empathetic doctor drove from her home to meet us at the hospital and perform the surgery. Another D&C, necessary to make sure that what we knew was gone was completely so. Two hours later, my wife and I took a cab home.

In the morning, I retrieved the two-week-old celebratory e-mail, cut and pasted the names of the recipients, and informed everyone that the pregnancy had ended and we needed some private time. And then we witnessed different forms of the art of consolation.

The first wave was simply brilliant. Friends tiptoed up to our door, set down plates of macaroni and cheese, lasagna, sandwiches, or fruit, rang the bell—and left. How did I not know of this amazing practice? It was exactly what we needed: a combination of nourishment, respect, privacy, and love (unfortunately, a mere month later, we’d realize we had gained a combined weight of almost forty pounds).

The second wave was floral—very traditional. My wife loved that our house looked and smelled beautiful, but I thought it looked and smelled like a funeral home. I will never forget one arrangement, from a dear friend. The florist had the inspired idea of putting it in a “treasure chest.” I was a bit taken aback when I opened my door to see a delivery man holding a dark wood box, fourteen by eight inches, with a rounded top flipped open to display orchids and lilies.
Really?
I wondered.
A baby casket
? I thought I was being paranoid. But out of caution, I hid it in the kitchen, barely visible behind other arrangements. My wife walked downstairs, passed the kitchen, and stopped suddenly to ask, “Is that a baby casket?” For the first time in ten days, we laughed.

The third wave of consolation came from friends who wanted to touch base, see if we needed anything. These offers were well intentioned and tiring. They required a response when neither of us had much strength. But sometimes we’d read a message, something like: “We don’t know what to say. We love you. We’re here.” And that was perfect.

We eventually started to respond to e-mails and calls and venture outside where we encountered the fourth wave, the most infuriating. It was the unsolicited mention of “God’s plan.” I don’t know if this evoked rage or was the random place where my rage happened to fall, but when I’d hear someone say, “God’s plan,” I would immediately think,
Asshole
.

My wife wasn’t bothered by it. She’d explain that the concept of God’s plan—or its less Catholic/Christian version, “Everything happens for a reason”—brings people comfort, which is what they are trying to provide. To me, it suggests there’s an explanation for your pain but you don’t get to know it. It’s brutal. A person can get headaches and lose sleep trying to remember the actor whose voice is in an animated movie or the name of the woman who slept with Gary Hart (don’t Google; it’s Donna Rice). So imagine the suffering affixed to the unanswered question of “Why did this happen?”

On my worst days, I would remind myself that in the grander scheme, I was quite lucky. I had a beautiful wife, a lovely home, a good job, a great dog, and solid friends. I also had the freedom to take a two-month leave from the office, and though I knew this was a tremendous luxury, it was also necessary. A psychiatrist had written the accurate yet unsettling words that, in her opinion, I was “not prepared to return to work and won’t be for some time.”

The doctor was right. My thoughts weren’t clear. I had three fender benders in a week. I wasn’t sleeping well. I was having memories (that, I expected). And visions (not expected). Too many times I recalled the images and textures I saw and felt that night in the bathroom. A few times I dreamed I was rocking a newborn baby swaddled in a red blanket—just that image. Once I woke in the night and walked around the house. I stopped climbing the stairs back to my bedroom to sit and, for about two minutes, speak to a two-year-old girl with black bangs. I was cognizant enough to know she wasn’t a ghost or anything supernatural but rather my mind’s way of burning off steam. I told her I was so sorry that I couldn’t protect her. She said that she forgave me, and I went back to bed.

Another night, hours after taking a sleeping pill, I woke to use the bathroom, only to walk quickly into a wall and fall backward. On more than one occasion I slept for seventeen hours straight. The doctor said that was normal.

My wife and I tried to make love, but, in her words, it was the “scene of the crime.”

A shrink suggested I ask a friend to drag me out of the house on a regular basis. We surfed the chilling waters of Zuma or Venice and I’d talk incessantly (to him, the seals, anything that seemed to listen) about how much it hurt. I was a broken record. Yet he continued to regularly invite me out. Compassion breeds an amazing amount of tolerance.

My brother flew across the country for a night. I felt several seconds behind in every conversation. I went downstairs pretending to get a bottle of wine but was really trying to collect myself, and my brother found me there. I apologized for being slow, and then began to cry. Hard. Uncontrollably. My baby brother held me up, supporting me completely, squeezing me as hard as he could, telling me it was okay. He meant the crying.

A month after the loss, I remembered each hushed backstory or confession of every male I knew who had experienced something similar, and I called them. A colleague whose wife had delivered a stillborn child offered to hang out and have a drink. A friend admitted that he felt embarrassed telling a female coworker that he didn’t want to attend a baby shower. Another, who lost his son in the thirty-fifth week, told me that they’d changed apartments to escape the baby’s room they had created. He said he took no time off from work—not a single day—yet still didn’t understand why he’d misplace things or get lost in midsentence. After a pause, he asked me to keep a secret and said they were pregnant again but too frightened to tell anyone.

My wife and I started taking some short trips, little adventures to get our lives back in motion. A short time later, her period arrived. It was as if her body was saying, “Hey, let’s move on.”

And we are. It’s been almost ten months. Time helped. We are working. We’ve lost the weight and are making love.

In a parallel universe, I’m changing diapers and craving sleep, but in this one, the adoption process is under way, so somewhere there is, or is about to be, a child who will find his or her way to us, and we will all catch and protect each other. In due time, I’ll rock back and forth, holding a swaddled child. In a whirlwind of joy, embarrassment, and hypocrisy, I may even shamelessly think that everything happens for a reason.

F
or me, as soon as we started the adoption process, it felt as if a weight had been lifted. Yes, there was a short period (Year Five) when I had had a nervous breakdown, but aside from that, I took comfort in the fact that it was no longer my job to produce the baby.

I felt like that woman in the television ad from the ’70s who wore a cocktail dress and held a glass of champagne and announced, “I’m cleaning my bathroom bowl!”

I’d be at work, or in a spin class, or at a party drinking alcohol and eating sushi, and I’d think:
I’m having a baby
.

It seemed just as revolutionary as a time-release toilet-bowl cleanser that someone, somewhere, at that very moment, might be carrying—or conceiving—our baby.

I gleefully threw out my pregnancy tests and the syringes we’d collected that made our closet look as if we were running a needle exchange. My period would come and go without fanfare or tears. We could have sex any time of the month, and I didn’t have to prop up my pelvis on a pillow for fifteen minutes afterward. I could actually forget about trying to get pregnant, until someone would say, “That’s when you get pregnant, when you stop trying!”

There is nothing worse than being told that the one thing you haven’t tried is
not trying
. We did get pregnant once not trying, on our honeymoon, and it was all downhill from there. Soon we realized we needed assistance to have a baby: drugs, science, maybe someone else’s eggs, maybe someone else’s uterus . . . finally it became clear that what we needed was someone else’s baby.

And here’s the great thing about adoption: there
are
babies. There are babies in need of homes, and homes in need of babies. It all makes perfect, wonderful sense, and yet friends and family and even strangers feel compelled to tell you about all of the people they know who got pregnant as soon as they started to pursue adoption. “That’s what always happens,” they say, smiling and nodding encouragingly.

“Well, that’s not going to happen to
me
,” I would say with finality, but the conversation invariably continued: “That’s what my sister-in-law’s friend thought, and then she got pregnant with twins!”

I’m telling you, these people are relentless.

Here’s one reason why I knew that that was not going to happen to me: I just referenced a commercial from the ’70s. And you can’t find that commercial on YouTube. I have a
memory
of it. (That’s what people had before YouTube.) And the fact that I remember life before YouTube is another indication that I won’t get pregnant just because I’m not thinking about it.

And now, thanks to these yea-sayers, I
was
thinking about it, so I definitely wouldn’t be getting pregnant. And I didn’t want to get pregnant. I wanted to adopt! That’s how this conversation started!

That’s the other annoying part of the urban myth: that once you try to adopt, you will get pregnant. It implies that by adopting, you are settling.

Maybe at one time Ian and I thought it was important that a baby be biologically ours, but once we started looking critically at egg donors and birth parents, it became abundantly clear that we would have rejected ourselves. We would have taken one look at our age, weight, alcohol and drug consumption, family relationship, and health histories and agreed that these were not the kind of people we’d choose to create our baby.

So no, we were not secretly hoping to get pregnant. We’d let go of that hope, and now we had a new hope. Or a new plan, which is better than a hope. Fuck hope.

Hope was the most complicated relationship I had had during this baby quest. I had tried for so long during the IVF process to hang on to hope, to harness the power of positive thinking. Then I began to wonder if hope had been making the disappointments feel too acute. So I tried lowering my expectations, being less hopeful. And when that didn’t work (it even felt like the reason things weren’t working) I let go of hope altogether (see Year Five), and as it turns out, hope is like oxygen. You need it to stay alive.

But hope has nothing to do with whether or not you are able to birth a child.

I have two female friends who demonstrated this (so it must be true). They were both trying to get pregnant when I was trying, going through the same IVF hell. One remained optimistic throughout, the other pessimistic. They both felt equally heartbroken when things went wrong, and equally lucky when things finally went right. So together, we decided hope has no role in the miracle of childbirth.

In fact, a “miracle” might be exactly what it is, and despite all of the scientific and biological breakthroughs in fertility, we’re not in control of miracles. I don’t know who is (because the Octomom confused the issue for me), but I know I’m not.

The Octomom will forever be tied to our baby quest in my mind because she was making news when we were unable to make babies. She gave me a whole new appreciation for the movie
Raising Arizona
, which I loved already, but I could now see how a couple without a child might get annoyed (to the point of criminal activity) with someone who seems to have children to spare. I am not sure what upset me more: the fact that the Octomom had fourteen kids, the fact that she began to do porn to support them, or the fact that, after birthing fourteen children, she still had a body for porn.

Despite the seemingly unfair nature of nature, Ian and I were excited about our decision to adopt, and eager to focus on the business at hand, which
was
like a business, because apparently we had to market ourselves as parents.

Even though there are babies in need of homes and homes in need of babies, it felt as if we were the sellers and the birth mothers were the buyers, as evidenced by the fact that we needed several homemade Books of Us with photos and handwritten captions explaining how lovely and child-friendly we were, a stash of “thank you for possibly giving us your baby” notes, a lengthy home study that involved four visits from a social worker, the addresses of everywhere we’d ever lived, Red Cross certification, baby proofing, and fingerprinting.

I think the most humiliating part of the process was when I went to a liquor store that offered fingerprinting services, and the middle-aged Asian man inking my thumb asked if I was ready to be a parent. “It’s a big job,” he said.

Really? Did I need his approval, too? The guy at the liquor store?

There were so many gatekeepers on our adoption journey—social workers, lawyers, and now this guy? And then, of course, there were the birth mothers.

Our lawyer would call with basic information about prospective candidates (“She lives in Texas, she’s due in two months, the birth father and sex of the baby are unknown”), and then I would drop whatever I was doing and call right away. It was like calling a radio station for concert tickets—usually the line was busy—which is why you have to call right away, especially in Los Angeles, because the gays are very on top of this stuff.

Our lawyer told us some birth mothers prefer a gay male couple, because then they won’t feel replaced as the mother. Still, there are plenty of birth mothers who will accept only a “traditional” (read: heterosexual) home for their baby. That might have been good news if it weren’t offensive. Ian didn’t think we should take a child from a birth mother who had negative feelings about gay couples, but we had to remind ourselves that the baby would be born with no prejudice, and we would try to raise the child to love everyone equally, and, PS, a lot of these birth mothers were antiabortion, something we also had an issue with since we were pro-choice, but their position might be the reason we were getting a child, so we decided to put our politics aside.

Of course, our friends’ and families’ politics seemed to bubble up all around us. People felt very comfortable sharing their thoughts about what ethnicity our baby should be, open adoption versus closed, from the United States or abroad . . . it was like we were buying a car; everybody had an opinion.

And some opinions were persuasive. There had been a terrible earthquake in Haiti—maybe you should adopt from Haiti. There were foster children who had been in the system for years; weren’t they more deserving?

It was hard enough completing our family, and now we had to decide who was most deserving? Maybe
we
were most deserving. We’d waited five fucking years.

Ian and I finally realized/admitted/confessed/apologized that we wanted to adopt domestically so that we could have a newborn. I was waiting for my father’s politically incorrect sigh of relief that we weren’t adopting from Africa as Ian had originally wanted to do, but he surprised me by bringing up an entirely new issue—he wanted us to look into Jewish adoption agencies.

Really?

The religion of our unborn child was something I hadn’t even considered worrying about. I found myself wanting to adopt whatever child would be most upsetting to my father, but again, there is no place for politics, even if they are only family politics, in adoption.

The important thing, I thought, was that Ian and I had finally made a decision that would allow us to move forward. Until we realized it wasn’t our decision. It was the birth mother’s. She had to choose us. Which meant she had to be open to two forty-something Jews with a dog who looked as if he could eat a baby for breakfast.

And that is how I came to be pitching myself to pregnant young women in the Midwest. Our lawyer said that I should make the initial call, because a lot of these women have trust issues with men. Understandable, since it’s a safe bet a man got them into this predicament.

I would have to phone a complete stranger (who was just as nervous about the call as I was) and try to strike up a natural-sounding conversation that would ideally end with me saying, “Can I send you some pictures?” And then I would send one of our handmade scrapbooks and a cover letter and a personalized note in the hopes that she might decide to give us
a child
, and then invariably we would not hear back.

One situation seemed promising. The birth mother was having twins (something Ian and I discussed and actually got enthusiastic about), but it turned out she was going to jail (something we were less enthusiastic about), and then she rejected us.

And we had great letters of recommendation.

That was one of the more gratifying parts of the adoption process. We got to read letters our friends wrote about why we would make great parents. It was nice to be reminded by our true friends why we were doing this. Of course, most people don’t need a letter of recommendation to become parents. The Octomom, for example.

Eventually we talked to a birth mother who was having one child (not two, or eight), and we liked her enough to want to meet her, and miraculously she wanted to meet us, too.

She was seven months pregnant when I first spoke to her. I liked that she seemed not just intelligent, but emotionally intelligent. If we were going to have an open adoption (which we wanted), that seemed important, now and in the future.

When we met her in person in Los Angeles, one month before the baby was due, our nursery was only partially finished.

She confessed later that this worried her. She thought we weren’t ready.

If only she knew how ready we were, but Ian had been nervous about another plan collapsing, leaving us with the reminder of an empty nursery. I, on the other hand, wanted to allow myself a little joy; I wanted to behave like a woman who was expecting a baby, thus the compromise of the half-finished nursery. I remember Tink watching, concerned, as the stuff of my home/office went to storage unit R3176, and the paint went up, and the rug went down, and the crib and changing table arrived.

•   •   •

Then the baby arrived.

We even got to be in the delivery room.

I always envisioned being in the delivery room as the person delivering, but instead I was standing by, like the father at a birth, with the father at the birth, Ian.

And as we held hands, and witnessed the miracle of our baby being born, we fell in love all over again. Not just with the baby—a perfect baby girl—but with each other.

And maybe even with the universe.

I have never felt so grateful, so aware of what a gift I was getting, than when this veritable stranger gave us the gift of a baby.

And when we got home with this long-awaited little one, even Tink fell in love.

So now it’s the four of us against the world.

But Tink still secretly thinks of the baby as a houseguest.