The Longest Date: Life as a Wife Page 9

  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 mo
lding, 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.

  But that was the point: You don’t know. You don’t know what dream you’ll be willing to abandon and what dream you’ll be willing to adopt. You only know that once you have your baby, the movie will be rewritten so that is the only possible ending, the only baby for you, but for now, you’re just slogging your way through the second act.

  Which you have to do, I guess. As in any worthwhile endeavor, you have to go through the hard, unsavory part before you get to the good stuff. You have to eat the roof before you can eat the door.

  The Great Escape

  Why do men get man caves, but women don’t get dame dens? Are men really so oppressed in the company of women that they need somewhere to hibernate?

  “Yes,” said Ian. And he proceeded to design what he now fondly calls the Escape Pod.

  At first I was annoyed by the name. What exactly was he escaping from? He smiled at me as if the answer was too obvious to say aloud. (Me. He was escaping from me.)

  Rubber-stamping the Escape Pod was (a) probably part of the reason Ian wanted an Escape Pod in the first place, because why did everything in our marriage require my rubber stamp? and (b) my final attempt to cure Ian of his other mode of escape: pot.

  I should clarify that Ian has a prescription for pot, which makes it legal in California, and he got his prescription from an OB/GYN, which should be an indication of what a racket this whole business has become. I think she prescribed it for insomnia. How staying up all night watching action movies and eating barbecued ribs is a cure for insomnia, I’m not sure, but maybe I’ll understand more when we get the results of his pap smear.

  Ian and I don’t fight often, but when we do, it’s almost always about his right to party. I have nothing against pot or pot smokers per se, but even other pot smokers will tell you that when Ian smokes pot, he doesn’t become more fun. He becomes inanimate.

  I once thought that maybe the problem wasn’t the pot but the element of surprise. I never knew exactly whom I was coming home to: Ian or this other guy, his catatonic cousin. So, ever the creative problem solver, I suggested Friday High Day. That way Ian could partake once a week, and I could plan ahead to see friends, thereby avoiding his annoying cousin altogether.

  Despite the catchy name, Friday High Day did not catch on. Ian felt one designated day a week was too limiting, and I thought it wasn’t limiting enough. The way I figured it, if we were married seven years, I would have spent one entire year with Ian’s catatonic cousin, who, by the way, I never would have married. I probably wouldn’t even have become friends with him. He’s lousy company.

  I finally asked Ian if he could refrain from smoking pot just while we were trying IVF. I made this request after my first night of progesterone injections. I had already been nervous about the needle Ian was holding, which seemed much longer than necessary, when I noticed him staring a little too intently at the liquid in the syringe.

  “Are you high?” I asked, incredulously. He said he had forgotten that we were starting the shots that night (the shot that he was supposed to stick into my upper buttock in a smooth, dartlike moti
on), and he might have had a few bites of ice cream.

  Pot ice cream. With his prescription from the OB/GYN, Ian could go to the Farmacy (yes, spelled like “farm”) and get pot in various forms (pot butter, a lollipot, buzznana bread), because apparently good old-fashioned marijuana was no longer good enough. It was just old-fashioned. Pot was much stronger now, and came in various colors and blooms, like fancy teas, and it could be vaporized, used as a cooking aid, or made into a sundae.

  I gave myself the shot that night, which was no small feat, and the next morning I tried to appeal to Ian on a scientific level. “There is evidence showing that pot affects sperm count, or sperm motility, which could be why we’re having problems conceiving,” I said. What I did not say was that if Ian was any indication, his stoned sperm were not likely to get off the couch, let alone make a baby.

  On our next visit to the fertility clinic, an apparently unconvinced Ian asked our doctor if smoking pot once in a while might indeed be affecting his sperm count. And the doctor said no.

  This was a male doctor.

  I’m not saying that his gender had anything to do with the veracity of his answer, but it might have had something to do with the fact that he seemed amused rather than offended by Ian’s “I told you so” jig that followed.

  The doctor explained that their process involved spinning down the good (sober) sperm, and apparently there were enough of those guys that Ian’s occasional habit would not hinder our ability to have a baby.

  I was starting to hate doctors. And husbands.

  Why wasn’t it enough that I would have liked my husband to stop, that it would have meant something to me if he gave up pot, because I had given up alcohol, red meat, sugar, sushi, soft cheese, skinny jeans, my fear of injections, and three years of my life trying to have this baby? Why couldn’t he give up marijuana?!

  He didn’t understand why I cared so much. I tried to explain again that he wasn’t really present when he was high.