An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  What Oliver can see, he says, is that if one did want a child, there are advantages to doing it alone, without having to commit to another adult, notionally for life, or figure out the relationship stuff first. Having a baby is one thing; determining whether you’re on the same page as your partner about private education or TV during dinner is another order of difficulty entirely. “I can absolutely see the appeal,” he says. “Being on your own streamlines about ninety percent of the decisions.”

  Single men of his age are supposed to feel like this, unsure of “settling down.” Single women are not, and every time we talk about it, the same worry yawns open: that all my rationalizations—that what I’m doing is the smart choice, the responsible choice, the choice that untethers having a child from a relationship not built to support it—are a fig leaf for something less admirable. What if, rather than boldly embracing a new kind of family, what I’m doing is standard-issue, male-type commitment phobia? What if, like my weakness for women in gold Rolexes, I am miscasting as feminist victory what is merely the aping of crass male behavior? You’d think that committing to a baby, the most binding commitment of all, would be enough to assuage this fear, but of course that is not what is meant when people talk about commitment phobia. After the birth of L’s baby, a couple of youngish guys in her office told her she’d inspired them; what a genius move, they said, to carry on being single while having a baby alone, and they sketched out for her, only half-jokingly, a scenario in which they carried on being single heterosexual guys, going out, getting drunk, dating women, having roommates, but doing the family thing, too. “You know someone has to look after the baby, right?” said L.

  I know, of course, that I’m not like those guys. I don’t want to party. I don’t want to date. I don’t even want to go out; I’ve been out. I’m not waiting for something or someone better to come along. Most ludicrously of all, I am not, by some definitions, even single. I call L my “partner,” because what else can I say, but that doesn’t really cover the ground. Six months after the birth of her baby there is love, and closeness, and reciprocity and occasional hatred that can be triggered only by deep romantic involvement, but the need for separation—not just time apart, but profound, structural circuit breaks between us—is real. It is how our personalities work in combination, the distance on which not just our intimacy but our ability to like and not murder each other depends. As the years go by it becomes increasingly apparent that this is not a relationship phase. We have found our level.

  Still, I worry. I hear myself sometimes describing my relationship to others and think I sound like the female half of those heterosexual couples in which the man has persuaded the woman to agree to an open marriage—the tra-la-la, it’s-so-wonderful-to-defy-convention breeziness, when you know deep down it’s a hideous mess. Not belonging to a well-defined category alarms me. I have no words for what I am to L’s baby and I have no idea what she will be to mine and this lack of a language implies something is wrong. And yet whenever I go through these loops, they always end here: with wonder, and amazement, and the most profound gratitude for L’s baby and the possibility of my own. There is doubt and anxiety, but the last word is still love.

  After lunch, Oliver and I walk west toward Gowanus. We talk about staff changes at work, and the ongoing mystery of American health care. We talk about the cost of fertility treatment. When I told L about the bulk package, I half worried she’d give me the speech about everything in life being negotiable and tell me to go back and ask for a discount. In fact, she took one look at the brochure and said she thought the pricing structure was ludicrous and very obviously a scam. (I have no such worries with Oliver, who is even more English than I am and, to avoid confrontation, prefers to conduct his negotiations in writing, over many months, with someone from customer complaints.)

  After bickering for a few moments about who walked the farthest to lunch, we part on the corner of Wyckoff and Bond. “Ah, Brockesy,” he says, giving me a hug, “it’s been a long, bad-tempered marriage,” and although his tone is ironic, the truth of it is that my relationship with L is enabled—subsidized, even—by the nature of my other relationships. Close friendships are supposed to be a crutch of youth, a stopgap until one’s other half comes along, but that has not been my experience and it is Oliver, just as much as L, to whom I look to explain my life back to me, just as it’s Merope I call to reassure me of the things I already know. “Good one,” she says, on the phone from London, when I tell her I am moving on with the baby thing. “Do it, do it, do it.”

  * * *

  • • •

  DR. B’S CLINIC is on the Upper West Side, but not the posh part. (Tenth Avenue, a mile from the park, and way up in the nineties.) There is no water feature in the waiting room or soothing Muzak to move a person to rage. Instead, the TV is tuned to Matt Lauer and his chums, and when the Today show ends, the receptionist flips to TMZ. It is a month before Christmas and I am ready to commit. I am ready to commit to a fertility doctor.

  A word of advice for those shopping in this area in New York; as with high-end gyms in the city, every fertility clinic you encounter, I have discovered, puts out word on the street that “Madonna used it.” Poor woman; adoption agencies probably make the same claim. But whereas I can see Madge hanging out at the Equinox gym on Sixty-seventh Street, I have a tough time putting her in this particular waiting room, with its ten-year-old sofas and faded prints of popular artworks on the walls. The clinic is liberal with the insurance it takes, so the waiting room isn’t populated with fortysomething suits but with a mixture of ages and races, dressed up and dressed down, so that to my eyes it looks as near to a normal NHS clinic as you are likely to find in Manhattan. Dr. B, a large, bluff man in middle age, fetches me from reception and we walk to his office. No big eyes, no soft voice, merely an adjustment of his tie as he takes a seat behind the desk. “Now,” he says. “What can I do for you?”

  I explain my situation, rather awkwardly, I suppose, because he says, “OK, so what are you doing for . . .”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to need . . .”

  “What?”

  He gives me a helpless look. “You know you need sperm, right?”

  I burst out laughing. “Yes, I know. I’m choosing a donor.”

  There will, he explains, be some exploratory tests and then, all going well, we will try a cycle of IUI with no drugs. He says this with a shrug, as if to say maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t, then pulls out a chart from his desk drawer, correlating historical birth rates with the age of the mother. There is a big spike at the end, accounting for modern women having babies later and later and which, he says, “evolution hasn’t caught up with yet.” He smiles broadly. “But let’s see what we can do!”

  For the next ten minutes, we chat about other things: my job, the state of the world, our tastes in TV, books and movies. The conversation flows naturally, but it also feels like a discreet but formal phase of the interview designed to ensure that I find him simpatico. And I do. I like him, right up to the point when he learns I work for the Guardian and gets very animated about Julian Assange.

  Something has happened to the Guardian since I moved to New York. When I arrived, it was an office of four people in a building in Midtown, with a communal bathroom down the hall and a children’s talent agency next door, so that every morning the elevator was full of Baby Junes doing high kicks. No one would return my calls, and if they did, by some miracle, they would invariably start the conversation with “Is that the Manchester Guardian?”

  “It was called that fifty years ago, now it’s just the Guardian.”

  After a long pause: “I’m sorry, I don’t deal with foreign press.”

  All that changed after WikiLeaks. Now it’s a loft in SoHo, one hundred people strong, and New York is crawling with former colleagues from London. There are so many of them in my neighborhood, a section of the deli on the corner
has been opened up to British confectionary (Curly Wurlys, Aeros, a few dusty Lion bars). Oliver and I grumble about this—what was the point of moving when the entire office moved with us?—but it is of course deeply gratifying and I take as much passive credit for WikiLeaks and, later, Edward Snowden as I can, although I had as much to do with them as Cindy Adams did with Watergate.

  Dr. B gives a short, rousing speech in praise of Julian Assange, whom he depicts as a folk hero ill served by the media generally and my newspaper in particular.

  “He’s kind of a weirdo,” I say.

  “Of course he is! No one else would take on interests that powerful.” Then he itemizes all the things big government isn’t telling us.

  “I can’t tell if you’re on the right or the left.”

  Dr. B looks indignant. “Neither. I don’t believe in those categories.”

  “Oh, god, you’re not a Libertarian, are you?”

  He smiles and raises his eyebrows, which I take to be an invitation not to take him too seriously. “I describe myself as an anarcho-capitalist.”

  We don’t get around to money until the very end of the interview. It is nine hundred dollars per insemination, plus the cost of drugs, blood tests and ultrasounds, and I will pay only for what I need. Without insurance coverage, says Dr. B, it can get expensive very quickly and he will work with me to keep the costs down. Perhaps this is a sales pitch, too, but it works. Instinctively, I trust him.

  Then he says something that shocks me. “Do you believe in god?”

  I am so taken aback I laugh. “No. I mean, no. Not for the purposes of this conversation.”

  “I assumed you wouldn’t.” He looks embarrassed. “But I have to ask, because if you do, there are parts of this process you might find . . . problematic.”

  “Don’t worry. I don’t think you’re assisting me in going to hell.”

  “OK!” He gets up, skirts the desk and, showing me to the door, offers a hand to shake. “Very good, very nice to meet you and I’ll see you next week.”

  The second I get outside, I call Oliver. “Would you let someone who thinks Julian Assange is a hero rummage around in your ovaries?” I ask.

  “Um,” says Oliver. “I mean, the two things aren’t really related, are they?”

  “No. Although there’s a broad question of judgment.”

  “Did you like him apart from that?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure I disliked him for it. If anything, I liked him more for the fact he’s not an establishment drone.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it, then.”

  “I mean, he’s wrong about Assange, but . . .”

  “Yeah. As long as he knows what he’s doing with your . . .”

  “Yeah. Right. OK. Good.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ONE OF THE THINGS you have to get used to when you are a British person embarking on fertility treatment in the United States is the pace of it all. In a small country like Britain, the law of supply and demand is such that there are more women wanting donor sperm than there are donors to give it, so that even in the private clinics there’s often a waiting list. In America, where no one with adequate resources waits for anything, you have a chat with your doctor, schedule a date, call the donor bank, which bikes the sperm round to the clinic, and off you go. You might have spent six months or six years deciding to do this; but you could, potentially, be pregnant within a month of first seeing your doctor.

  I do not anticipate this will happen to me—getting pregnant without a struggle still seems too outlandish, too decisively female, to fit the rest of my life. But the very fact that it might, or that it might be revealed to be conclusively impossible, makes the week before the last diagnostic test feel like the pause at the top of a roller coaster. If I want to avoid the possibility of total destruction, now is the time to get out. As of this moment, I’m a thirty-eight-year-old woman who wants but doesn’t have children, a sad state but that’s life, what can you do, maybe next year. If I let this go further, through diagnostic testing and beyond, I will potentially be a thirty-eight-, thirty-nine-, forty-plus-year-old woman who is trying and failing to have children, which sounds to me like a different order of upset altogether. It’s not just the fear that the treatment might fail. It’s the fear that it might fail over months and years and still end in nothing. It’s the fear that my standard damage limitation response—“maybe I wasn’t that bothered in the first place”—will be impossible to pull off. If Dr. B discovers something catastrophic when he examines my fallopian tubes next week, a whole new schedule of adjustment begins. I will have to grieve for the biological child I can’t have and reconfigure what my next decade might look like. I will have to deal with my animosity toward people with children. There will be the sheer bloody hassle of having to accommodate new facts about myself, at an age when I’m inclined to think I have it somewhat worked out. Ovaries that don’t work shouldn’t impact a woman’s fundamental identity, but I have a feeling they do, so that the choice, at this stage, seems to be between two negative self-images: that of a woman trying and failing to conceive and that of a woman too scared even to try.

  And then there is L. I can’t begin to guess how infertility might affect our relationship. But given my bottomless capacity for resentment, I assume it won’t be for the better. Suddenly, I understand why women my age who want children nonetheless let the years slide by. Better to wake up one day and, without having made an active decision, realize it is over and the option to conceive has expired. In this scenario, it’s not that you “couldn’t have children” but that you “didn’t have children,” a presentation of the facts relieved of its diagnostic burden. The self-help industry assures us it’s always better to try and fail than to not try at all, but in the case of women’s fertility, there is a strong rationale for avoiding “failure” at all costs, given the way in which that failure is perceived.

  For the rest of the week, I distract myself with business as usual. I meet Oliver for lunch (a Vietnamese sandwich shop in Park Slope, a decisive win on his part). I research a piece about people who die unexpectedly on airplanes, tracking down a Swedish woman who tells me what it was like to sit next to a corpse for nine hours on a full flight from Sweden to Kenya. On the weekend, I go to Costco with L and the baby. As we cruise the overlit aisles, trying samples and reliving our greatest Costco hits—this was where we bought the crab paste that got recalled; here, the site of our most legendary impulse purchase, a machine that vacuum packs meat—I try to imagine another child in the cart, this one with my face on it. Will we look like a family? I wonder. Or like two disparate people and some babies who’ve teamed up to buy bulk?

  I am not supposed to shrink from describing what happens next. I should be proud to reclaim the language of female anatomy. Unfortunately, while it strikes me that “testicle” can raise a titter and “penis” can be kind of fun, and that post–Eve Ensler even “vagina” is less burdensome than it was, once you get into the realm of hard-core female reproductive machinery—FALLOPIAN, OVARY, CERVIX, UTERUS—I find it very hard not to feel that I’m letting the side down. Womb. Glands. Tubes. Eggs. If I could write about my experiences while avoiding these words, I would. In the event, all I can do is apologize to anyone who finds this kind of thing as distasteful as I do and recommend skipping ahead to chapter 8, where there is blood, yes, but also some lovely Vancouver scenery and a walk-on appearance by Al Gore.

  For those still with me: here is Dr. B, at the foot of the gurney, firing a tiny jet from a water cannon around my fallopian tubes while following its progress on the ultrasound. “Look,” he says, pointing at the screen, a black expanse streaked with silver. It looks like a shit version of Space Invaders.

  “Hmmm,” I say, as if we were standing before a painting in a gallery.

  We wait. And wait.

  “I’m not seeing any movement through the fallopian
tubes,” says Dr. B. “Hang on.” He adjusts the tube and points to the screen. “See? This is where the water is going in and . . . nothing is coming out the other end.”

  I frown as if making intelligent sense of this, although the truth is medical details hit my brain like street directions; if I’m lucky, I can grab hold of a single orientating term to feed into the Internet afterward. Otherwise, I go on the mood of the room. This one isn’t good.

  The absorption of bad news can be forestalled by the more pressing task of dealing with the feelings of the person who’s giving it. For about twenty seconds after we got my mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis, she and I looked at the mustachioed oncologist and thought, my god, this poor man is in agony. One imagines that a death sentence will unleash violent emotions, or perhaps paralysis. What one doesn’t anticipate is the embarrassment. As Dr. B stares at the screen, I feel the weight of his discomfort more keenly than the findings.

  “No,” he says eventually, looking a little cross. “Nothing’s coming through the other end. OK, we have a problem.” I get dressed and, after a short wait, adjourn to his office, where he prints out a screenshot of my fallopian tubes and places it on the desk between us. It looks like grainy satellite imagery of enemy ground the U.S. Air Force is preparing to bomb.

  “OK, there are some options,” says Dr. B. The hydrosonogram is not a foolproof procedure and sometimes produces false negatives. Maybe nothing is wrong and we should start the treatment regardless. On the other hand, he says, maybe the test is right and I have blocked fallopian tubes, in which case there’s no way I’ll get pregnant without intervention—at the very least, an operation called a hysteroscopy, in which a tiny endoscopic camera will be threaded into my uterus, so the doctor can identify the problem and potentially fix it. It could be fibroids, it could be nothing, it could be something. My call. I am, after all, the paying customer.