One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir Read online

  To three great eggs

  Contents

  What Took Me So Long (The Condensed Version)

  Step Two

  I Can, He Can, We Will

  As You Wish, Jellyfish

  The Best Laid Plans

  A Bad Chapter

  If at First Second Third Fourth Fifth Sixth You Don’t Succeed

  Instant Convert

  A Little Bit Pregnant

  In A Parallel Universe

  Tour de Fetus

  It’s A Boy!

  M’eternity

  The Home Stretch

  A Room with a View

  Postpartum Impressions

  What Took Me So Long

  (The Condensed Version)

  It’s probably not healthy wanting desperately to be something you’re not, especially if it’s extinct, but there were plenty of times right up through 2003 when I wished I was a Southern gastric brooding frog. No gastric brooding frog husband to find. No career to worry my shiny frog head. Life could be as simple as swallowing a batch of fertilized eggs and burping up some babies.

  For the first twenty-three years of my life, I was sure I’d have babies, at least two. Then it took me fifteen years to decide to go ahead and have just one.

  My mother got married and had her first baby in her early twenties. In the decades that followed, the average age of first-time mothers steadily rose; one third of first-time moms are now over the age of thirty. The number of single mothers and the number of women who opted not to have children also rose.

  Having options is liberating, except for the parts of you that are tied up in making (and remaking) the decision.

  When I was thirty-eight, I finally gave up on finding true love. I had everything else I needed—the career, the home, the friends, the family, and the gumption—to go ahead and have a baby on my own.

  In the end, I made my Baby Decision in a half minute on a clear cold February night in 2001 as I stood at the edge of my driveway watching my EX-partner pull out: beagle, belongings, and all.

  My old gynecologist had left private practice to spend more time with her kids. I took a referral for a new ob-gyn out of the “Baby” folder I kept in the front of my filing cabinet and dialed the number.

  “What is this in regard to?”

  What this is in regard to would be what this is regarding which is, “Single parent pregnancy?”

  “We don’t do that here.” She gave me the phone number for an IVF clinic and hung up.

  IVF clinic?

  in vi • tro fer • til • i • za • tion (IVF) noun: A procedure in which eggs (ova) from a woman’s ovary are removed. They are fertilized with sperm in a laboratory dish, and then the fertilized egg (embryo) is returned to the woman’s uterus.

  I got another referral and I was connected to a nurse named Mary regarding my interest in “alternative insemination.”

  First question: my birth date. “That makes you . . . ”

  “Thirty-eight?”

  “Thirty-eight?” she paused. “We’ll have to see whether it’s even possible.” Mary’s tone did not ring with possibility. “You’ve been getting regular periods? You’ll need to do Day 3 labs, Day 12 follicle studies. And the father will have to be completely tested; he is a potential liability for us. His sperm needs to be washed and frozen. This is all very expensive and your insurance won’t pay; well, we do have one patient, but—you’ll have to check.”

  “I thought the sperm works better if it’s fresh.”

  “It does. Now, you’re also going to need a dye test to make sure your tubes are clear. There’s a lot to do, and like I said, it all adds up. Of course we’ll try to keep the costs down; maybe if your day twelves are okay we can skip the day fourteens. Did you want to make an appointment for a consult?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “And you said you were thirty-eight, right?”

  “That’s right.” Not forty-eight, seventy-eight, or 138. Just plain thirty-eight.

  Mary, I’m a dreamer, not a smoker.

  “She can see you on March 29th.”

  And I want you to know, I’m not one of those OMG-I-forgot-to-have-a-baby thirty-eights. It’s just that life does not always go as planned.

  Let’s start with how I had been planning on having a career in international relations, then spring of my senior year, weeks away from earning degrees in International Relations and Economics, I discovered my favorite class at Brown.

  Jane will be quite an old maid soon . . . she is almost three and twenty! Lord, how ashamed I should be of not being married before three and twenty!

  JANE AUSTEN

  Pride and Prejudice

  I ended up living with my parents for a few months after the bike trip, and then I moved up to Boston, where I had a very short career as a copywriter.

  Then I left advertising to start a greeting card company. That partnership went bad inside of six months. I mention it, Mary, because I think it is the only other big life decision I’d ever made. I had to come up with a lot of money to buy the business, or else walk away.

  Actually, it wasn’t the only other big life decision, but the third one didn’t feel like a decision. It felt like falling in love. That winter I was living at home, I had my first romantic relationship with a woman—Amy, the leader of the cross-country bike ride. She was the other reason I moved to Boston. To put 250 miles between us, so I could make up my mind whether I wanted to be with a man or with Amy.

  I dated a half dozen very nice men in Boston, but I was in love with Amy.

  Wait, Mary, before you put me in a box—

  say Amy was Andy, or Arnie,

  Arthur,

  Adam

  —a lot of my story could pass for infertile-straight.

  Amy and I moved in together. We found the perfect place: a carriage house with a garage (for all the greeting cards), a basement office with separate entry, and a second bedroom that could double as Amy’s office or a nursery.

  Fast-forward to age thirty. I had everything in place—the relationship, the career, the house. Then I went and fell in love with a funny folksinger who was also all but married and didn’t want anything to do with kids.

  Mary, some of your silences strike me as judgmental even though I know you mean to be respectful.

  I dated men, I dated women. I gave up on dating. I decided to have a baby alone, and then the father’s offer fell through.

  At that point, I was thirty-four, the same age as my mother when she had me. People were giving up on my marriage prospects. My friends thought I was too picky and didn’t mind saying so. My handyman said, “Sue, after thirty, you start to get set in your ways. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, it just gets too hard to live with someone else.” I’m hearing him. I’m hearing everybody. And I’m hearing my biological clock ticking. I know I really have to make this decision.

  This is when I met Karen, the ex with the beagle and belongings who just left me. We’re almost at the end here, Mary.

  On our first date, I told Karen I wanted to have kids. She told me she had no interest in being pregnant, but her friends all said she’d make a really good dad. Well, three months later, she flip-flopped—no kids, not hers, not mine, no way, no how—only by then we were in love.

  Here’s the un-universal curveball part: Six months post-Karen’s flip-flop, I had a grand mal seizure and I ended up being diagnosed with a mass on my brain which required brain surgery, and that unexpectedly led to some temporary loss of my abilities to speak, read, or write. I was on antiseizure medication and in speech therapy and had to back-burner my next book project. I remember stammering something to a neuropsychiatrist about being afraid I couldn’t
do it, meaning write the next book, and she said, so casually, “Have a baby? Let’s not rule it out just yet.” “Let’s,” you know, like maybe she and I were going to have the baby, and “yet,” like . . . never mind.

  By the next spring, that was last spring, I was starting to feel more like myself. One afternoon, I went back to my car to feed the meter and I found a rosebud-patterned baby dress laid out on the navy-blue hood. I don’t know if you believe in Signs from the Universe, Mary, but this was my third in three months. The first was a pristine white lace baby’s bonnet sitting on a post at the head of a trail I hiked during mud season. And the second: a baby bib tied to the tree at the end of my driveway. Anyway, I put the baby decision back on the table. I went to a seminar on artificial insemination.

  I bought a basal body thermometer.

  I convinced Karen to go to a support group for couples considering parenting, even though she never really was considering parenting. I was the one; I was supposed to decide so we could both get on with our lives.

  It’s awfully hard to pit an imaginary baby against a real live relationship, Mary. Paralyzing, in fact. But then I had an epiphany.

  Wanting to have a baby had always meant not wanting to be with Karen. But when I separated the baby and Karen, when I made them into two decisions— SNIP! Do you want to be with Karen? Yes! Do you want to have a baby? Yes!

  I could make them.

  Karen mistakenly opened an old e-mail from my friend in Melbourne before I ever got to make use of my epiphany.

  From:

  Steve

  Subject:

  A New Channel

  Date:

  November 17, 2000

  Dear Suzy,

  Thanks for your letter. This is strange-- I’m not used to typing or e-mailing anything to you. I’ll keep this short; my aim is to open up a new channel. So, where to start? Baby, I guess. I can see a whole heap of practical issues, yet I have this innate trust in you. I told my friend Diane it’s kind of a puzzle, not one that provokes anxiety, but one that is a bit exciting. I think you’re telling me you want to be a father, she puts it to me, and I tell her, yes, I think it could be nice.

  Love, Steve XOXO

  Karen concluded I was trying to have a baby behind her back, packed up, and left me the night before last.

  So there it is, Mary. How I got to be thirty-eight and childless.

  This conversation has been so helpful, thank you. I have always wanted to have a baby.

  I’m still a little afraid, but I’m done letting my fears stand in my way. I know what you think, Mary. I really hope it’s not too late. All I can do is try.

  Step Two

  I had the Day 12 follicle test. I went in, slightly nervous, not knowing what to expect—most likely an internal exam, possibly a blood test—and the nurse practitioner (not Mary) examined my head. I passed the test. She showed me the special hairs above my right ear, hairs I’d never noticed before, but once she pointed them out, they were very obvious. Each one had a tiny cup holding a very tiny egg. In my dream, I felt like Horton carrying around these precious eggs.

  The appointment with my new gynecologist was a quickie. In and out in under ten minutes. “Suzanne, when was the last time you were seen?” Last time I was seen . . . “Never mind. When was your last period?” Last period, last period—“I’ll have Ellen schedule your Day 3 labs and HSG.”

  “HSG?”

  “A hysterosalpingogram. A test to make sure your tubes are clear.” Oh, the expensive one Mary had mentioned.

  “How much will that—?”

  “This will all be covered under infertility. Any questions?” Wait, are you saying I’m infertile?! She rose, I rose, we shook hands, and Ellen escorted me to an examining room where, with the aid of a calendar, I was able to reconstruct my last period.

  In the end, it didn’t make a drop of difference; I needed to call on the first day of my next period and then come in for a blood test two days later. Meantime, Ellen advised me to purchase an ovulation predictor kit (OPK) and use it, following the directions on the box. I planned to save my $16 until I had my Day 3 lab results.

  I called my friend Lorene with a progress report. In the weeks since I’d been single, she and I had settled into a pattern of daily breakfast calls and weekly dinners. This was a midmorning update. “Well, I wasn’t going to say this while you were with Karen,” she said. “But having a baby was the best thing I ever did.”

  Lorene and her twenty-one-year-old son, David, lived in the house where she had grown up (and her mother before her) in Hudson, the next town over.

  “I’ll come to the birth. Babysit. Do daycare. You can drop him off; you can give me Mister, too!”

  She already took care of Mister, my flat-coat retriever, when I went away. “I’m serious. I love babies. He’s all yours when he’s thirteen . . . ”

  The whole time, I had been thinking I was going to have this baby alone. Plenty of people had offered to help, but they were well-meaning, overly busy people who weren’t their own bosses, and they didn’t live three miles away.

  “So when are you going to tell Steve? Is that next?” Lorene asked.

  “You mean ask Steve.” I’d met Steve and Gary twelve years earlier, back when Amy and I were vacationing in Skyros, Greece. The four of us got along so well we’d joked about partnering up, marrying (this was way before same-sex marriage was legal), and having babies together. Steve and I were writers and we’d kept in touch. He’d renewed the baby offer several times; however, he could always renege, now that it was real. “I’m going to ask Bruce first.”

  Bruce is my best friend. We’d been spending Saturdays together for more than ten years by that time. He would make a great father, but he wasn’t ready back then. Asking was a foregone rejection.

  When our Saturday rolled around, we met at Café Algiers in Harvard Square. The tables were tight . . .

  . . . so tight I couldn’t bring myself to ask him the question.

  We were in my car, more than halfway home, and I was desperately seeking a segue. Bruce was describing a friend of his: “He always asks, ‘Why would you want to spend time with me?’ The question makes me feel completely cornered.”

  “Uh, speaking of questions that make you feel cornered, would you be the father of my baby? I mean, I’m set to go ahead with Steve—it’s just that when Steve and I made the plan, you were twenty-two and we were just becoming friends. I know if you were going to do this, I’d wonder, ‘Why didn’t he ask me, or at least have a conversation?’ So that’s what this is, the conversation.” Or monologue. It was starting to rain. I went on, “I really don’t want the question to torment you. I know you’ll be in the baby’s life either way.” The wipers smeared the windshield. “I—well, you would’ve said yes by now,” I stopped.

  “It’s the timing. I feel like I haven’t had enough experiences or relationships.”

  I let him finish. I didn’t say, “I know,” or, “It’s not the end of experiences.”

  “If there was anyone I wanted to do this with, it would be you. Even this afternoon, while we were sitting there, I was wondering if I could ever have this kind of love with a partner. There have been these times when, I swear, I wish I could just ask you to marry me, that it could be that uncomplicated, that there wouldn’t be these missing pieces . . . ”

  We happened to be passing by the turnoff to Bruce’s parents’ road. I put my blinker on. “Let’s go tell your parents we’re getting married and we’re going to have a baby!”

  He flipped it off, laughing.

  “Can I just say one thing about the timing?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s taken me years to recognize there isn’t going to be a perfect time—a time when everything’s lined up, pointing in the direction of a baby. And a lot of time can go by while you’re waiting. It’s kind of like peak foliage . . . and now I’ve got to worry about my biological clock.”

  “That’s why I don’t want to say no without taking some time to
think about it.”

  He took until the next Saturday, and then he said no, just as I expected, but it was still hard to hear. “I wish I could say yes,” he said, and I hugged him. I hadn’t been ready at thirty-two either.

  That night, I e-mailed Steve. I waited fifteen minutes for an instant reply, then shut my computer off and went downstairs. An hour later, I went back up and turned it on again, just to check.

  From:

  Steve

  Subject:

  Ring ring

  Date:

  April 26, 2001

  If you think you can do it, I think we can work out the logistics.

  Call me Thursday or Friday!

  Sunday morning, I woke up and called Lorene while I was still in bed. She was happy for me, but she wasn’t available to celebrate. She was getting ready to go away for three weeks.

  I am going to be a single mother.

  If I’m lucky.

  I Can, He Can, We Will

  The receptionist at the sperm bank was initially sympathetic, generically speaking, on a par with pet-cremation or funeral-home personnel. But once she got the picture—there was no terminal illness involved, Steve had not been called up to war, and, in fact, we weren’t even married—she went cold. “We have criteria for ‘selected donors.’ They must be between the ages of eighteen and thirty-eight.”