The Longest Date: Life as a Wife (9 page)

T
was the day after Christmas, and I was reading
Newsweek
’s cover story on diet and fertility when I stood up, ripped the roof off a gingerbread house, and ate it, like Godzilla.

This was not something the cover story recommended, by the way. It was, however, a reaction to something the cover story recommended—namely, that you shouldn’t eat a lot of red meat if you were trying to get pregnant.

I was, as it happened, trying to get pregnant. I’d been trying for the past two and a half years. I also had a steak on the grill, a petite filet that was going to be my lunch before I decided to have the gingerbread house instead.

“Trying” is a good word for this process. At first, “trying” just meant sex without birth control, but when you marry at forty, “trying” quickly becomes more trying, and eventually Ian and I had enlisted the requisite army of experts, most of whom insurance didn’t cover—but of course, you can’t put a price on a baby.

You can put a price, though, on
not
having a baby. By now that was running us close to $45,000 in credit card debt.

So by the time I was reading that
Newsweek
article, I’d done it all . . . drugs, shots, suppositories, IUI, IVF, that test with the blue dye, acupuncture, stinky teas, human growth hormone injections. . . . Once, while we were driving to see a doctor in Beverly Hills, Ian asked what kind of doctor he was, and I said, “I don’t know, but someone said to see him, so we’re seeing him!” It was that doctor, incidentally, who told me to visualize my husband’s face on a cartoon sperm with arms welcoming my egg to him. We decided the guy was a quack, so I saw him only two times a week for about four months.

The thing is, when you’re racing your biological clock, people can tell you pretty much anything and you’ll do it. At that point I was still worrying that I needed to track down some saint named Amachi so I could bring her red bananas. Recently a friend had said something about inversions—standing on your head. He hadn’t been sure if you were supposed to do it before sex, during, or just in general, but the method had worked for two women he knew, so I figured I had to start standing on my head, too. I’d probably visualize Ian’s face on a cartoon sperm while I was at it, not because I was on board with that. It was just a hard image to shake.

I did have limits, though. Several friends had highly recommended a fertility doctor in the Valley, but I would go to China for a baby before I’d go to the Valley.

We had become accustomed to paying people to tell us we weren’t pregnant, so it was almost revolutionary that, for the holidays that year, we made the decision to return to the old-fashioned method of not getting pregnant on our own.

We went to Jackson Hole, and we didn’t even take ovulation sticks, which might not seem crazy to you people, but when you’re in the middle of this madness, not knowing when you’re ovulating is like not knowing where your cell phone is.

And that was the idea. We wanted to lose ourselves for a while. We wanted to just have sex. Every day, you know, just in case, but even so, it was fun again, and that’s how everyone had been saying that it finally worked for them, or for somebody they knew, or for somebody somebody they knew knew.

And in the weeks after that trip, I felt good. Well,
bad
good. I mean, my breasts were tender, I felt a little nauseous, I was dead tired . . . I had all the bad good signs of pregnancy, which I recognized, because I’d been pregnant before.

We actually got pregnant on our honeymoon, and for a moment we were some of the people I now call “those people” (people who got pregnant right away, maybe even accidentally, which now seems as likely to me as accidentally becoming invisible), but back then I didn’t know any better, so we were “those people” until three months later, when we found out the baby’s head was too large, and there was fluid where there shouldn’t have been, and it had a malformed heart, and the baby would not make it to term.

The doctor said we should seriously consider termination unless we were deeply religious. That news was hard to take, but even harder because I felt guilty. The truth is, at that time, I didn’t want to be pregnant.

We’d just gotten married. I still wasn’t sure it was going to last. I also thought a few months as a couple would be nice, since it had taken us forty years to find each other.

But Ian was eager to start a family, so the morning after he proposed we were walking on the beach, and I threw my birth control pills into the ocean in a dramatic display of love and good faith, and it made him so happy that I had to resist the urge to run screaming into the surf to retrieve them.

I had always wanted to have a baby . . . in five years. I’d been saying I wanted to have a baby in five years for about the past twenty. I just had never felt ready.

But ready or not, we conceived on our wedding night, and on day seven of our honeymoon I felt nauseous and, thinking I had a stomach bug, I stayed in our room.

We were in South Africa on a safari, and they had warned us to keep the sliding doors to our bungalow locked because of the monkeys, but we hadn’t seen any monkeys, and anyhow, I thought they meant we needed to keep the doors locked when we were out.

I was curled up in bed when all of a sudden I heard the door open, and I called out, thinking it was Ian. Then I heard a
thump thump thump thump
 . . . and I knew something wasn’t right, so I got up and looked into the living room, and there were
seven
monkeys throwing food around, and they froze as if I had just walked in on a teenager’s party.

One was on a table by a big bowl of fruit, and it just stared at me, holding an apple, midbite. And the funny thing, looking back, was that this had been precisely my fear: this is what I thought it would be like to have children. This is why I never felt ready.

Cut to the day of the termination. We were already distraught, and then on the way to the appointment, we got pulled over by the police because Ian didn’t see a woman walk into the crosswalk. I did see the woman, but she was on the other side of the street, plus I was trying not to say anything as Ian had taken to charging me five dollars every time I told him how to drive, but the policeman pulled us over and asked, “Are you trying to kill someone?!”

And I was thinking
Yes, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do, and if you would let us go, we could get on with it.

I remember that, the rest of the way to the clinic, I was pissed at Ian for not having seen the woman, and he was pissed at the policeman for being such a dick, and the truth was, we were both just pissed at the universe for giving us this gift that we had to return.

But now, thanks to Jackson Hole, we were getting a second chance. And this time, when I took the pregnancy test, I was praying for a positive result rather than dreading it. But, of course, it was negative.

That was in the morning, and then a few hours later I was reading
Newsweek
and the next thing I knew, I was eating a gingerbread house.

The gingerbread itself was pretty hard. I think it had been made in Korea and not meant for eating, although that was never explicitly stated, just as it’s not explicitly stated that you shouldn’t eat candles. Some things you’re just supposed to know. It came from a kit, one of six kits my friend had purchased for her annual gingerbread-house decorating party, so I had decorated alongside five women who were all mothers, some several times over, one with her newborn son in tow, and I knew it wasn’t a competition, but my gingerbread house was the best.

Sure, these ladies had kids, but
I
had the Sistine Chapel of gingerbread houses. And I was proud of it, as sad as that might be. So just factor that in when you’re imagining me eating it, like Godzilla. It was like eating my young, since, as we’ve established, there were no actual young.

I had decorated the roof with white icing, little sour balls, red Twizzlers, and green gumdrops, none of which tasted very good. What I really wanted was the door, which was made of Hershey’s Special Dark chocolate.

Maybe you’re wondering why I didn’t just pull the door off. Well, I tried that, but the icing for these things is like glue, and the door was stuck to the front of the house, and the whole house was stuck to a foil-covered piece of cardboard, so you had to eat the roof before you could eat the door.

Well, you didn’t have to eat the roof. You could, I suppose, just rip it off. But I was upset for all the reasons I’ve mentioned, and red meat was the final straw.

See, not only did I have a steak on the grill, I’d had a steak on the grill almost every day for the past year. Diet, for me, had been the most rewarding and punishing part of this baby quest. I’d gone from my highest weight ever to my lowest, because I didn’t want to go from my highest to an even higher weight during pregnancy; that would mean spending the rest of my life in caftans. Given how many fears I had about what becoming a parent would do to my career and life (monkeys in the room!), I wanted to at least limit what it could do to my wardrobe. Plus it was supposed to be healthier to get pregnant at a healthier weight.

So I went on a supervised diet with someone we will just call Dr. Skinny. His office was powder blue with white molding, so that the whole thing looked like a Wedgwood plate. He was tall and thin (only 6 percent body fat! he would tell you), and he wore bad blue suits (from K-Mart! he would tell you) and I suspect he wore a toupee, but I was never able to confirm this, even though he confirmed your need to lose weight by pinching your sides with his fingers, so I should have just reached out and grabbed his hair one day in retaliation.

Dr. Skinny was basically an obesity doctor, so I was hoping that when I went to the first group meeting he sponsored that he and the group would say, “What are
you
doing here?” but instead, he snapped my “before” picture, and the next thing I knew, I was weighing my food at restaurants and doing lines of Splenda in the bathroom.

The Dr. Skinny diet is called an “eating plan,” but it is really a “not eating plan.” It definitely works, but it’s very strict. You’re not allowed a gingerbread house, that’s for sure. It’s basically protein and vegetables with Wasa crackers thrown in for survival. You get only two meals a day, with only three ounces of protein per meal, so I decided my protein would be filet mignon whenever possible.

My plan was to lose weight until I got pregnant, but since it was taking so long to get pregnant, I ate a lot of red meat, and I lost a lot of weight. Fifty pounds, to be exact.

For the first time ever, I felt like someone who belonged in Los Angeles. I bought a pair of skinny jeans and strutted my significantly smaller stuff down Robertson Boulevard. I felt, in a word, fabulous. So fabulous, in fact, that it took me a while to notice that I wasn’t getting my period. And not for the reason I’d been hoping.

As annoying and depressing as it is to get your period each month when you’re trying to get pregnant, it’s nothing compared to
not
getting your period for five months when you’re trying to get pregnant. So although I loved my skinny jeans, I didn’t love them enough to give up having a baby, and I still don’t think it’s fair that that might be the price I’d have to pay for wearing them. I thought $178 was expensive. It’s like I made a deal with the skinny devil.

I did get my period back, thanks to going off my “not eating plan,” which I approached with the gusto of someone who’s been told to gain weight for a role. And thanks, also, to Dr. Dao, who suggested “electro-acupuncture” to jumpstart my ovaries.

That was another mistake I’d made. I’d left Dr. Dao of “Mao and Dao” at the Tao of Wellness six months earlier. If you’ve ever tried to get pregnant in Los Angeles, someone has probably recommended going to them for acupuncture, and it’s worth it, if only for the friendly desk staff, soothing music, heat lamps, and weekly nap. I loved Dr. Dao, but I saw him only once a month. For the other three visits each month I saw another doctor in the practice, who was very nice, but he didn’t show after my first IVF attempt failed, and he didn’t show again the following week, so not only was I forced to see someone who wasn’t even Asian, I found out the reason my usual doctor hadn’t appeared was that his wife had just had her second baby. Like I said, I know this wasn’t a competition, but I was mildly annoyed that this nice man was sticking needles in me, and in all of these other women, listening patiently to our fertility problems, while at home, his wife was just pushing ’em out.

I’m not saying my decision was rational. I’m not saying it was pretty. But I did leave Dr. Dao for another acupuncturist and immediately regretted it, because she forgot every week why I was there, so I had to explain each time about how I hadn’t had a period for two, then three, then four, then five months, and each time she reacted with horror. “Five months?!” And her receptionist was downright surly.

So I finally returned, contrite, to Dr. Dao, and he agreed we needed to jump-start my ovaries, which, I’m not kidding, involved tiny little spark plugs that were attached to the needles they put in my stomach and caused a
zap zap zap
sensation.

There was a control that changed the speed and intensity of the
zap zap zap
. And usually Dr. Dao would set the dial, but once he left me alone with it and let me control it, and that’s when I wondered if maybe I was in some sort of cruel medical experiment in which they were trying to figure out how far a woman would go to have a baby. Would she stand on her head? Lose fifty pounds? Blow up her ovaries? Keep turning it up until . . .
poof
!

Because really, how much disappointment could one woman take? How many times could you be hopeful when odds were that you were going to get sucker punched by your period or a negative pregnancy test or something else you had never seen coming?

And yet you couldn’t stress about that, because stress was the worst thing for fertility.

I knew, by the way, that once you had a baby, this all got put behind you. I knew the end of this movie. I didn’t know where or when or how to get there. My fertility doctor broached the idea of donor eggs, but I didn’t really like having guests in my house, so in my womb . . . I don’t know.