What Was Mine (2 page)

Dealing with infertility means you're always poised at a fork in the road, staring down two paths: life with a baby or life without. Warren was already setting off on the life without, accommodating himself to childlessness, acquiring fantasies that having babies precluded: exotic vacations, vintage convertibles—but these things stirred no desire in me.

I was reminded countless times in the course of each day of my inability to accomplish what came easily to others. Things I'd barely noticed before now seemed fraught with accusation. Childproof caps. Family-size cereal. Car windows boasting
Baby on Board!

Some mornings before work, I'd stare out our front window, a bay window which I'd come to think of as pregnant, and see people in suits walking children to bus stops, children they ignored or tugged at impatiently. One mother dragged her toddler on a leash, jerking him from objects that caught his attention. So many people had children they didn't deserve. Every day in the papers, newborns turned up in garbage dumps or parents left babies to care for themselves. One father grew so impatient getting his kids ready for school, he took a gun out of his sock drawer and shot them.

As years went by and our childlessness continued, I tortured myself with how many images the word “barren” could conjure: a dried-up field burned brown by the sun. A frozen tundra. A dust bowl or desert where nothing can grow.

A friend at the office suggested visualization, to which she attributed her house in Southampton.
Picture it
, she said,
and it will come true
. Why not? I thought. I had nothing to lose. I outfitted the spare bedroom with a crib, pine rocker, a cheerful border of ducks on the wall. I'd sit in the rocker and close my eyes, imagining a small weight in my arms, rocking back and forth, back and forth, as if I could rock myself to where I wanted to go.

When Warren left me, I was thirty-five, the age grandmothers died in the Middle Ages.

T
rying to get Lucy pregnant was fun at first, but soon the sex was like a part-time job. There were certain days, even hours we had to clock in. If one of us had to stay late at the office, we had to borrow an apartment. There wasn't even the pretense of romance about it. It got so that even when we were in the middle of things, Lucy had her eye on the clock, worrying we wouldn't make deadline. “Hurry up,” she said once, which had the opposite effect than the one she'd intended.

Once we got started at the clinic, I had to do my part in a room marked
Collections
, a closet, really. I tried to relax in a fake leather recliner with a paper pad spread over the seat, watching TV, whichever porn video I'd picked out of the box, trying to ignore sounds of other guys waiting their turns outside the door. Needless to say, I preferred giving at home, but we lived in New Jersey. The clinic was in midtown Manhattan. Which meant that, to get to the lab in time—sperm is only viable for about an hour—I had to drive like mad, hoping there was no tunnel traffic, with a baggie taped to my abs, under a down vest to keep it at body temperature. This was before they figured out how to freeze it.

The worst thing was having to give her injections. There was a reason I went into business instead of to med school. I'd hated needles since I was a kid. I'll never forget the first time I had to give her a shot. She was kneeling on the bed, waiting, her trusting butt in my
face. I was holding the syringe, when I turned and saw our shadows huge on the wall. I looked like a monster about to knife her. I hurried to do what I had to do with the needle before she looked up and saw that monster, too.

At a certain point, I realized a baby wasn't going to happen for us. But I couldn't get Lucy to see it. And nobody but me was willing to put an end to the quest. Everyone else had a vested interest in keeping our hopes up. The leader of our counseling group at the clinic worked for the makers of Pergonal, one of the biggest infertility drugs at the time. The drugs made her look pregnant. Her breasts got engorged. She put on an extra ten pounds, not her fault, and began to waddle because the drugs hyperstimulated her uterus, making walking painful for her. Walking! Forget sex. We'd stopped having it if it wasn't on schedule.

I tried to reason with Lucy: We shouldn't go on. We should resign ourselves to the fact we weren't having a baby. She was enough for me. It made me sad I wasn't enough for her.

I didn't realize how crazy the baby thing was making her until one night, I came home from a business trip and saw she'd turned the guest room into a nursery. Completely outfitted: crib, rocker, even a border of ducks on the wall. When I saw those ducks—in permanent paper, not tester strips you can peel—it was like a cold hand slapping my face, waking me up, making me see how far out of control things had gotten.

Lucy and I stayed technically married for a year after that, but we'd already separated, at least in my mind. By then, she wanted only one thing from me and I couldn't give it to her. I met Sasha at work. She was a new hire and I fell for her the first time I saw her in the elevator. I'm not proud of that. But we've been married now for twenty-one years. I have to say it was a relief to be with someone with whom I didn't share a giant problem. We had two kids right away. I put that pressure on. She's ten years younger than Lucy, but
one thing I learned going to all those fertility classes—putting off kids, for women, is like Russian roulette. The older the eggs, the higher the chances of problems.

Lucy and I didn't keep up, but I ran into her at our twenty-fifth college reunion. It was good to see her again. She had her daughter with her. Cute kid, doing cartwheels on the quad. Lucy said she was adopted. That was over ten years ago. We didn't keep in touch.

A
fter Warren left, I toyed with the notion of sperm donors and even called for the literature. But my sister put me off the idea. Cheryl's a nurse. She said my baby could have hundreds of siblings. I imagined the sperm donor as a Pied Piper, followed by midgets who looked just like himself. I didn't want to do that to a child. In my experience, one sibling is plenty.

I looked into adoption, but this was the late 1980s. The irony was, now that I'd separated from my spouse who didn't want to adopt, I couldn't adopt because I was single. I couldn't get approval, unless I went to China, but I'd read up on Chinese adoptions—their process took years. My best bet was to do a private adoption. Private adoptions were beginning to be popular, mostly in the Midwest. I got an art director at work to help me place an ad in the
Kansas City Star.
I liked the idea of a baby from Kansas. I began to dream of a house twirling in air, bringing a baby to me.

Loving Professional Seeks to Mother Your Baby
. But none of the girls wanted to consider a single mom, which is what they themselves would have been. “They all want a home like in the sitcom
Family Ties
,” said a lawyer I called. “I'm sorry,” he added, but I didn't feel apology from him, only haste in dismissing me. I called numbers in ads placed by girls themselves, seeking homes for their babies. It traumatized me, how roundly I failed auditions again and
again. I wouldn't get anywhere telling the truth, I realized. I decided to fake a spouse and ran another ad:
Loving Couple Wants to Give Your Baby a Beautiful Home.
I got calls this time, but soon discovered that the process of adoption involved too much paperwork, too many inspections to pull off this kind of deception.

Did I want to foster an older child? If so, I could probably bring one home right away, someone told me. Part of me wished I was bighearted enough to take in an older child who needed mothering. But I wasn't that generous. I wanted a baby. My heart was set on having a baby, not a child too old to be beautiful in the way that all babies are beautiful. I wished it were otherwise.

It seemed everyone I knew was having babies. I attended shower after shower for coworkers and friends, even hosted one myself, for the art director who'd helped me place the ads in Kansas. I went all out—it was a big deal to ask people to schlepp out to New Jersey and I wanted to make the commute worth their while. Instead of napkins by the plates, I folded cloth diapers. I filled party bags for each of the guests, with jars of gourmet pickles. I spent a shocking amount on cheese to go with the theme: Tetilla, a Spanish cheese in the shape of a breast. During Baby Bingo, one of the guests en route to the bathroom mistakenly opened the door to the nursery and soon the entire party was gathered at its threshold, faces agog, silent, and I saw myself as they did: a woman stocking up for a baby I'd never have. For the first time, I realized, as they did, as Warren had tried to convince me—I wasn't ever going to have a baby. I just wasn't.

Once the party was over, and I walked the celebrant to her car carrying shopping bags full of loot and the hat made of the ribbons in which they'd been wrapped, I spent the rest of the weekend in bed, mourning the baby I'd lost, the marriage I'd forsaken in futile pursuit of parenthood. The baby I might have had (I'd felt it was a boy) would be fourteen years old then and I imagined, with tenderness, the crack in his voice, new hair on his smooth face. He'd be
four years older than Cheryl's Jake and I imagined them together, Jake looking up to his older cousin, the same way Cheryl used to look up to me. Now it was like Cheryl thought I didn't know anything anymore. Once she had babies, it was like she stopped being sisters with me, and became sisters with our mother instead. At family gatherings, they talked in corners, exchanging stories, secret language, as if they were members of a club that I couldn't get into.

B
y Monday morning, I was myself again—or rather, I acted like myself: made myself get out of bed, take a shower, put on a smart outfit, take the commuter bus to the city, and throw myself into my work. Soon I was the go-to copywriter for fast turnaround: brochures, print ads, TV spots. I practically grabbed pink pages off the top of the pile of job requisites, whereas before, like most creatives, I'd hidden when traffic people came around trying to get me to accept assignments. No job was too much for me to take on. To meet deadlines, I'd sometimes stay overnight at the office, tap, tap, tapping at my Kaypro computer. I came to be one of the copywriters in highest demand, one of the first to be called upon when the agency pitched accounts. I redirected my fervor for a baby into a passion for work, creating campaigns for clients who were like babies themselves in their constant demands, their inability to separate their own needs from that of the person gratifying them.

And that is how I took my first trip to IKEA. The store in Elizabeth had just opened, it was only the second IKEA store in this country.

An account man drove us out to do research—driving is never left to creatives. The parking lot was crowded, though it was midweek and I recall thinking how well the new campaign must be working. Yet, the brand manager was already seeking to replace it. He'd invited the agency I worked for to pitch the account.

It was only May, but we were having a heat wave. We had to walk a long way from the car, in hot sun. The heels of my shoes kept sticking to the tar of the parking lot and I stopped a few times to extricate them. When a wall of glass doors opened up to admit us, a wave of happiness washed over me, which at first I attributed to air-conditioning.

A woman in a red apron greeted us cheerfully, handing us bright yellow bags for our shopping convenience. The yellow bags were enormous, the size of trash bags—but they weren't big enough to hold furniture. I was confused. Wasn't IKEA a furniture store?
Furnish Your Life
was the tag line. Yes, there was furniture—lots of it—but there were little things to buy, too: candles, bottle openers, fridge magnets, measuring cups, clocks, all designed in practical but unexpected ways which made ordinary household items seem exotic. I followed the group into a forest of floor lamps, but soon wandered away, drawn by the room displays. I was mesmerized by dioramas of family life. A white canvas sectional around a giant TV screen showed the commercial the brand manager hated. Blond dining rooms, dark book-lined studies, eat-in kitchens with groceries on the counter—all appeared to be lived in by happy people who had just stepped away. I meandered through room after room of intentional disarray gleaming with possibility. A childlike optimism invaded me. This seemed a place where nothing bad could happen.

I spent the next few weeks holed up in my office with my art director, working to come up with campaign ideas that would make others fall in love with the place, as I had. Our presentation got a standing ovation, but we didn't get the account, after all. The agency of record retained it. But I found myself going back to the store. Not just once, but again and again. I went there on summer Fridays as others went to the beach. Sometimes I'd pack a sandwich from home and eat it on a wooden bench by the entry, observing the comings and goings of people who would enter empty-handed but leave with
so much that red-aproned helpers had to assist them out of the store. Or, I'd stand by the Ball Room and watch children playing sound-lessly behind glass. The Ball Room was like a giant aquarium: instead of water, a sea of brightly colored foam balls in which kids were jumping, diving, mutely laughing in the swell. Basically, it was a babysitting service, a clever marketing move, as it freed parents to concentrate on filling their carts.

Sometimes I'd go to the café, where menu items were Swedish, and linger over meatballs and lingonberry juice, transfixed by the motions of mothers around me, admiring their skill at keeping both trays and babies aloft. They moved in pairs, combining broods of small children, seating them at tables laden with food, fencing them in with large shiny carts overflowing with the fixtures of family life. I imagined their good fortune wafting to me, borne in the mingle of scents from their trays. I pictured myself in their midst, dandling a baby on my knee as I joined in their discussions, weighing in on the advantages of wood cribs versus metal, classical versus pop songs for musical mobiles, at what age to take a binky away.