My mom, who is the best mom in the world, came at the whole fertility and parenting experience from a different perspective than I did. She got pregnant at the end of her senior year in college, and then she and my dad got married. She was 22, I think, when I was born. My dad was 25. She and my dad used birth control except for two times -- me and my brother.
This experience guided my young adult life. While I may not have cleaned my apartment, written thank you notes or stopped drinking before I had had too much, I ALWAYS used birth control. I did not have anything AGAINST marriage or children. But the conventional thinking when I was a young adult was that you didn't want to have kids in your early 20s, because that was too young. Also, that was before I quit drinking forever, and I knew I had to quit before I could have children.
I did get married in my early 20s to a very nice person who also drank too much, and together we had a dysfunctional relationship which ended after a few years. I like to think we would have been great friends if we hadn't gotten married. He is very happily married now, and they are very clearly soul mates. I can honestly say I am happy for them, and I really do admire them both tremendously.
But that marriage was a little detour from my road to parenthood (although it did start me on the road of sobriety). At 27 or so I found myself starting over again, newly single.
And, to be honest with myself, I am not the most social person. The idea of going to bars (even if I hadn't quit drinking) to meet men, was daunting. And without the help of alcohol, I had become more shy. I ended up dating a number of men that I met on America Online (AOL) back in the early days of that service -- before it had even a half a million members, back when my modem was only 2400 baud, before anyone had heard the term: "World Wide Web."
I dated a chef, a copy editor, a teacher. But there was another person I kept chatting with who I hadn't met because he lived far away. He was in California and I was in Pennsylvania. But we kept chatting online. We eventually progressed to chatting on the phone. Nine months after we typed our first words to each other we met in Reno (he was visiting someone there.) Those were the best three days of my life. After some more visits back and forth, I moved to California.
On the evening before our wedding, the toast that my uncle gave compared this new type of Internet relationship to Jane Austin-esque relationships where the lovers wrote love letters to each other for a long time. Then they met in person to make sure the other one "didn't have two heads." If the love was still there after that, they got married.
Such a relationship lets you talk and talk and talk before you ever get physical. You know each other as friends before you are lovers.
I think this was very much the case for us. We celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary on June 1 this year, and we have never been happier together. We have said to each other as recently as earlier this month that our relationship has just gotten better and better.
Not that there haven't been bumps along the way. So many deaths in the family and among friends, and then the infertility.
So by the time we got married I was 31 or 32. We wanted to enjoy life together for a few years without thinking about kids. But after a few years, David still wasn't ready and I HATE pushing people to do things they are not ready to do. And he'd gone through the death of his dad and was still traumatized by it. But by the time I was 36 I was starting to push him. We started trying in the spring of 2001, but then a few months later I got laid off from work. I made most of the money, and he didn't want to try again until I got another job. Of course, a terrible recession ensued. I did freelance work, but it was not enough to provide the kind of stability that made him comfortable. Finally I landed a job in spring of 2002 and we started trying to conceive in earnest.
You'd think it would be fun, but timed intercourse is not. It's loaded with pressure and it's not about love or affection anymore.
Anyway, a year later we started visiting the doctors, and the story picks up from there at the first entry of this blog.
OUR perspective on fertility and children, not surprisingly, is different from my mom's or other people who have had unplanned pregnancies.
Ann Lamott comes to mind. I love her writing and her Operating Instructions book -- a diary of her son's first year of life. But my take on fertility and parenting is closer to Wendy Wasserstein in the final two essays in her book Shiksa Goddess (or How I Spent my Forties) Essays.
The second to the last essay of this book talks about her sister's fight with breast cancer and her eventual death. At the same time Wendy, at 40 or so years old, is looking at her fertility options. At the end of the essay a doctor she'd seen before, someone from St. Barnabus Hospital where they pioneered PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis) comes to her and says to her, I think we have something that could help you.)
And the final essay of the book is about the premature birth of her baby, Lucy, before she'd even told anyone that she was pregnant.
(Tragically, Wendy Wasserstein died of lymphoma earlier this year.)
I read both Ann Lamott's and Wendy Wasserstein's accounts of becoming parents at around the same time. They are both tremendously moving.
When I had that conversation with my colleague recently about the quad babies, I was coming at it from an entirely different perspective than she was. And caught up in the emotion of my own struggle with infertility and my losses it was hard for me to understand her perspective. (For her, and for most people, such a story only evoked feelings of joy. She has never been in the world of infertility or multiple pregnancies.)
And like she did not understand that, I will never know what it is like to have an unplanned pregnancy, as my mom did or Ann Lamott did. I cannot imagine the turmoil that can cause in a person's life, and how they make the choices presented to them -- continuing with the pregnancy and keeping the baby, ending the pregnancy, or continuing the pregnancy and giving the baby up for adoption. That is another world to me. But I know it must be hell.
With that in mind, I feel like I need to give the well-meaning fertile a little more slack. They don't mean to be hurtful. Often they are trying to help. It's just hard to see that through tears of grief. Maybe the first step is just taking a deep breath when something like this happens.
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