Growing up, I always assumed I would have children one day, because that was how life worked: school, college, work, husband, kids. I started off right on track: school, check; college, nailed it; work, this is my sweet spot; husband, hold please? As I’ve discussed, Steve and I found each other a little bit later than biology prefers, reproductively speaking, so once we were married, no time to waste. We all live in the world. We all know the storyline. Husband, kids, now and only now do you have a family.
(Now your life means something.)
“Here’s your fertility at age 19, when your body really wants you to get pregnant,” the fertility doctor said, making a nice mark at the top of the page. We had met approximately seventy-five seconds ago; I was still putting my purse on the chair beside me. Then, with a dramatic swooping motion, she skidded the pencil to the bottom of the page. “And here you are now, at 40.”
I mean….science? She didn’t have numbers or anything, just a pencil and a flair for the dramatic, but that swoop was pretty convincing. I left her office feeling as torn as the paper she ripped out of her notebook for me to show my husband.
Testing later showed a more specific reason that we hadn’t been successful after two years; fibroids were blocking my fallopian tubes, creating a dead end street for any sperm who were trying to hit up my fading eggs. I found a new doctor who did not send me into deep depression on our first consult; he operated, and cheerfully informed me that I would be knocked up any minute now.
Reader: I was not. After six months, even with a clear highway, no cars were reaching their destination. We moved onto IUI, which was extra complicated when your fertility doctor and your husband don’t live in the same state. One day, Steve and I drove in two separate cars halfway to Atlanta, stopped in a gas station, details redacted, and I drove the rest of the way to the doctor’s appointment with…well, hm, you know where you might put a coffee cup to keep it warm while you drive, if you don’t mind living on the edge? Like that.
That didn’t work either, so we moved to IVF. I gave myself shots, carried around a freezer with syringes and medicine. Once I went into a port-a-potty at the starting line of an adventure triathlon, to give myself an injection. It was one of those moments when you feel very weird, thinking I bet no one else is doing this right now. (But I’m older now and I realize: quite possibly, someone else was. Life is so much more complicated than we ever think it is.)
With IVF, says this creative writing major, you put a sperm and an egg together, and then you come back the next day and see if they decided to hook up. Success, then, means the doctor leaves the office with two cells in a petri dish, and the next morning, turn the light on, and there’s four cells. Four cells meant success, but in our case, our little embryo had five.
Five cells! He was already an overachiever, but still: make my family complete? Give my life meaning? That’s quite a lot to ask of five cells. I hoped he was up to it. I hoped I was.
On the day of implantation, I had to drink a gallon of water, to create enough contrast so that the doctor could see precisely where to put him. Then I had to drink another half gallon because there was still too much space in there. (Me: is this because my uterus is so fat?!)
If there is anything less romantic than being in a hospital gown in a procedure room, halfway upside down for fifteen minutes, waiting for your future child to take root, by yourself because your husband works in another state, I don’t know what it is.
Oh, wait, yes I do. What’s less sexy is when you then speed across town to the acupuncturist, because that’s supposed to increase the odds of success. And the acupuncturist rushes you onto the table to stick you with tons of needles, so you’re lying there in your underwear with a sheet over you and forty pins poking out all over, like pine trees on a beach, and she leaves the room saying “now wait thirty minutes,” but you realize five minutes in you REALLY HAVE TO PEE, because you just drank six quarts of water because of your fat uterus, and you hold it as long as you can, the future of your child is at stake, but it is just not possible, your bladder is going to burst, and there’s no way to call for help, you’re just lying on an exam table in an empty room with needles all over you, so you wrap the sheet around you, and you scuttle out into the hallway, mostly naked, trying to act casual, dropping needles everywhere, and with every little pinprick that falls on the carpet that you try not to step on with your bare feet, you think there goes my chances of getting pregnant, all because I can’t hold it in, what kind of mother would I be anyway, and you pick up the needles on your way back into the procedure room, because you want to be a good citizen, and you lie down on the table, and when the acupuncturist returns there you are, holding most of her needles in your hand, just a few leftovers tilting from your body at random angles like trees left standing after a hurricane, and all you can say is, “I had to pee,” well, that is possibly less sexy.
Nonetheless, the IVF worked. Like those few trembling needles surviving the journey into the bathroom and back, the sole viable embryo they had planted took root.
A few hours after we got engaged, Steve and I were driving through a section of the Black Hills called the Needles (needles again!), where the road winds through huge towers of rock, tall as skyscrapers. Steve pulled our car over, so we could admire the rocks, I was flush with joy of this whole new world opening up in front of me, and I had a sudden crystal vision. I saw a little blonde boy, racing away from us, shouting, and climbing up onto the rock. I saw him and I said to myself, that’s the son we are going to have one day.
When I got pregnant, there he is. There’s Fiver.
I was at a new doctor not so long ago, and the nurse was taking my health history. “How many pregnancies have you had?” she asked me.
“One,” I said.
Fiver grew happily for a while, then he stuttered, then he lost his heartbeat, then it came back, then we lost it again.
(Once you have kids your life will have meaning.)
“And how old is your child?” she asked.
We had an ultrasound, it was in my desk drawer for ages, and it has his name on it, a blue Sharpie, Steve’s handwriting.
Fiver.
“I miscarried,” I told her.
Also, in my head: Eleven.
The River That Runs Dry
After we lost Fiver, we tried IVF twice more, but it didn’t work at all. Our road kept getting narrower and narrower, and I was feeling more and more trapped.
I said to Steve, “If we don’t have kids, how will we be happy?”
He looked at me with genuine confusion, the sort of baffled natural optimism that I am always so grateful for. “We’re happy right now,” he said. “Why would we stop?”
It felt like every day I was listening to someone else’s birth story, and it felt like they all said the same thing, a chorus playing in my head over and over, I never even knew what love was, until I saw my baby.
I stood in a close friend’s office one day, one foot in the hallway, and I told her what I feared the most.
(What if I never even know what love is?)
“Robyn,” she said, firmly, a woman who like me spent years fighting the reproductive current, who now held a child in her arms, who knew my story from the inside out. “It doesn’t matter if you have a child. You know what love is.”
One day my cheerful doctor told me, halfway through a fourth IVF cycle, that we really should shut it down. Despite all the drugs we were pumping in, nothing was working. I called Mom crying from an Ingles parking lot, and she said, “I will buy you eggs for Christmas!”
I think it’s a natural human inclination. Keep the story going, no matter what. Did you fail at this, and this, and this? Then try that, or that, or that. Every time a well meaning friend said “Why don’t you just adopt?” I wanted to either laugh or cry. Did you fail at this soul draining process, involving your flawed biology? Take on that soul draining process, to see if your administrative flair can compensate! It felt like asking someone who just flunked out of medical school to try a law degree.
The fact was, somewhere inside me, I felt like we were done. Steve was seven years older than me; for the past several years everything we did had been about chasing this dream of a baby.
But if I didn’t think we should keep going, I also didn’t think I could give up. This was my core dilemma. Unlike Steve, who was “happy now,” I felt like I couldn’t be permitted to be happy, not as someone who gave up before I was through.
How could I go through life, knowing I did not try adoption, did not purchase eggs; that at this moment in time, I said, we’re done. How could I go on, as someone who had walked away from the one thing that gives life purpose and meaning?
Surely, the person who stopped the story before the happy ending didn’t deserve to get one.
The First Deep Story I Ever Changed
We all live with stories that are deep within us, below logic, below rational thought.
If you want your life to be complete, you must have children. You must have a child to know what love is. If you are a good person, a worthy person, you will not stop trying. Without children, you will forever be less than whole.
It is so hard to change a deep story, because most of the time, we don’t even know they are a story. We think they are the truth. It’s like the story of the two fish swimming and they don’t know what water is.
How can you change a story, when you don’t even know it’s a story?
Well. Here’s the pivot. Here’s the moment of grace. I even remember the very very ordinary moment it happened to me.
I was sitting home alone, torturing myself, you’ve ruined your life forever, you don’t even deserve to be happy, you’re just selfish, what a loser, and I took a breath, and in that breath, a blessing, a gift, just a moment of grace, a quiet quiet quiet thought, a whisper I almost couldn’t hear:
What if that is just a story?
And then
What if there is another one?
Inhale. What if that awful thing you’re telling yourself is just a story?
Exhale. What is there is a better one?
And I thought to myself, like I was pondering an existential rewrite, what if it’s easy to be happy when you get everything you ever wanted? What if it’s easy to be joyful and grateful and cheerful when you have your kids, and your perfect job, and your loving spouse, or whatever else you dreamed of?
Maybe anyone can be happy when all their dreams come true, but maybe the real test of character is can you be happy even when you’re heartbroken?
I thought, maybe you can be someone who is brave and finds meaning and purpose and hope and joy, even when you lose something so important. Maybe that’s a person you want to be. Maybe that’s a life that has meaning.
It really did feel like I let go of something in that moment. Like I had been carrying a weight, and I didn’t realize that I had the opportunity to set it down until I did.
Whatever deep awful thing you believe, about yourself, about the world, about life itself? That horrible truth that haunts you? Consider the possibility.
Maybe this is just a story.
Maybe there’s another one.
The Kingdom of God
Early in our relationship, when I told him that I really wanted a family, Steve said to me that he wasn’t sure about kids, but he really believed in the Kingdom of God. I said, how religious are you, exactly? I thought he wasn’t a pamphlet kind of Christian, but this was alarming.
And he said, no, to him, the Kingdom of God is whatever community you build around you. All the faces at your table. All the love in your life.
It has been more than ten years since I had that breath of grace. And of course, yes, there has still been grief over not having children. There always will be. I will always see Fiver running ahead of me on the rocks, blonde and blue-eyed, and just out of my reach; I wasn’t quite fast enough to catch him.
But I have also learned, this is what life is. Life is not about being happy because you have everything you want. Life is about creating meaning with all that you do have.
I learned that life can be filled with endless adventures, and having a child is one of those wonderful adventures, but it’s not the only one.
Steve and I have worked hard to create a Kingdom of God, now he calls it Realm of God because patriarchy, and we have many children in our lives. We host sleepovers for families with little kids and put up forts in the living room; we rent a lake house for weeks every summer, and have hosted a parade of kids through the years, multiple families with multiple kids who come to Camp Robyn and Steve, and Steve teaches them to kayak, and we latch them behind a pontoon boat and try to rip the steering wheel hard enough to throw them off the inner tube pulling behind. We host Lake Olympics, with events like mid-air soccer-distance-kicking, or competitive yoga lake noodle.
And then the kids and their parents go home, and Steve and I spend the end of the vacation alone in the house, and we sit on the porch and look at the quiet water, and we drink wine, and read our books, and we smile at each other, and we feel grateful for the joy of the past few weeks and the peace of the present moment, and we say to each other, maybe this is just perfect for us. Maybe this is how it was meant to be.
Fiver gave me so many things. He taught me that there is more than one road to a meaningful life. He taught me, just before I lost Mom, that you can carve meaning from the greatest heartbreak. He taught me that the worst things can happen, and you can survive them. He taught me that there is more than one way to find joy and purpose in the world. He changed my story, and my life, forever.
It was quite a lot for five cells to do.
This is one chapter in a year-long saga of love, grief, and the stories we tell to survive it all. To find out how it began, go here. Or subscribe for free to get a new chapter every week.
Such a bitter pill to swallow,but so many truths. Replace “children” with “grandchildren” and the story remains the same. Find the joy given in so many little things and your ability to give and share love becomes exponential. ❤️
Wow, that is so beautiful! I know you hurt so bad over that I remember being with you and my heart breaking for you, but I’m so proud of you for using your sorrow in such a profound way. This was so beautiful. I meant so much to me. Love you, Robyn