by Emilie Pine
The article appears in the ‘Health & Living’ supplement, an association that we all get a good laugh out of. He makes the newspaper’s front page banner, not quite ‘my battle with drink’ but not far off it. I am unsure how I feel about this. For years I have been impatient with the euphemisms for alcoholism, such as my father has ‘a great fondness for a drink’ or that he’s ‘the life and soul of the party’. Finally, here it is, a clear declaration on the front page – ‘I am an alcoholic’ – and I am proud of him for it and, yes, admiring of the guts it took to write. I buy multiple copies without quite knowing what I will do with them.
But I am also angry. I am angry that the piece does not try to face the damage done to us all as individuals and as a family. I am angry that he can’t see that alcohol was not his friend but his enemy. And I am angry that he chooses to focus in the article on his post-liver-failure diet restriction – no salt – which means that he can’t eat out in restaurants anymore. Big deal. I am angry just generally, even at the line where he calls me and my sister ‘walking saints’. It is too easy to say, another bullshit euphemism. Enough. I decide I need to write my own narrative.
When I was a child and Dad was beginning to struggle with the depression that has characterised his adult life, he made me promise that, when I grew up, I would not become a writer. I solemnly said the words. But inwardly I knew that I would do the opposite. Because what my dad really taught me, despite himself perhaps, is that writing is a way of making sense of the world, a way of processing – of possessing – thought and emotion, a way of making something worthwhile out of pain. And so, inevitably, as I sat beside him in those hospital rooms in Greece, I wondered how I would describe the room, and the man in the bed, as if it, and he, were a scene. I wondered how to tell the story of blood, of nurses and gloves, of doctors and waiting. I wondered who was the protagonist, him or me. And I wondered how I would, if I could, use these notes as a way of understanding the larger story of me and my dad.
Things are better now. I no longer monitor Dad in the way that I did. I no longer even go to his hospital appointments, trusting him to talk to the doctors and manage his medication and take responsibility for his own health. I roll my eyes when he fails to take proper care of himself, when he wears light canvas shoes in the pouring rain, when he loses his bus pass, when he insists that roasted peanuts, and dried soup mixes, and even bacon do not contravene his no-salt diet. I roll my eyes, but I stand back. His principled stubbornness is not only unassailable, it is what guarantees his vow to never drink again. And it is more than that too. I stand back because I know that he does not need to ask my permission, he does not want my opinion, he does not belong to me. As I try not only to read him, as I have always done, but now also to write him, I see beyond my judgement of his alcoholism. I see that he is happy. One of his close friends tells me that they laugh together again, which hasn’t been possible for a long time. If drink was a means for Dad to numb the pressures that can make life feel monstrous, then it was also numbing the qualities that make life joyful. Things are better now.
I finally finish this essay. I phone Dad to tell him that I have written about my memories of his health crisis. He makes a non-committal sound, then asks me to email the piece to him. After I press ‘send’, I sit at my desk in a fretful silence, worrying that he will be upset by what I have written. I worry that he will criticise it. I worry that he will dispute its truths. Most of all I worry that by writing it, by sending it, by hoping to publish it, I will break the fragile calm that we have built between us, in the years since he stopped drinking.
Twenty minutes later, I have my answer. He has written two short lines: ‘It is beautiful. And brave.’ As I parse his response, I realise that here is a moment when my father has surprised me. I thought we had lost the capacity for surprise. But we are not lost, not just yet. Our relationship may be an unyielding kind of story, a chain of unalterable moments, from arguments in bars to vigils at hospital bedsides. But it is also, just as powerfully, an ever-changing conversation between two people, father and daughter, a conversation that we are both grateful is not over. These days, sometimes he’ll call and I am busy and he is self-involved and I snap and he snaps back and I hang up. I text him that I will phone later but, often, I forget my promise. Sometimes he’ll call and he’ll tell me his news, some village gossip that I can barely follow but I listen anyway, and when I yawn he laughs and I laugh too. Sometimes he’ll call and I don’t feel like talking. Sometimes he’ll call and it is just so good to hear his voice.
And every time he calls, my heart races. My heart will always race.
FROM THE BABY YEARS
I PEE ON STICKS and into sample cups. I pee on my own hand when the stream won’t obey. I open my legs wide for sex, for the doctor’s speculum. I hold my arm out for needles and blood pressure monitors and sometimes to grasp onto my partner as he sits next to me. I am fearful and hopeful and shameful. I worry that I am empty, or that I am full of the wrong things. I worry that I am disappearing, eroding, failing. I do not know what to do with all these feelings. I only want to be a mother. Why is that so easy for some people and so hard for others? Why is it so hard for me?
The question was always difficult. Do I want kids? I agonised for years. I tried to stage it as a debate, with pros and cons. I weighed freedom against love, selfishness against selflessness, presence against legacy. In my twenties and early thirties, I watched as my friends answered the question with a ‘yes’ and became parents. I saw the shock on their faces, the tiredness in their eyes, the extraordinary range of emotions provoked by the new person they had made. And I saw the love.
I was not alone in this agonising negotiation: my partner, R, felt the same. Together we talked about the possibilities of becoming parents, together we talked, almost nostalgically, about our lives as people who loved quiet, and calm, and the space to read and write. On the page those may seem like little virtues, but that list represented for me, for us, a peaceful, happy, fulfilling life. A child would mean giving all that up for years. Would it be worth it? I was anxious that I would re-enact my parents’ mistakes, anxious for my relationship, anxious that, confronted with a small, crying person whose needs I would have to meet, I would feel it was an impossible task. It felt like a blind choice between what I had and what I might have. It felt like I was risking everything. And I did not know that it would be worth it.
I MEET SOME FRIENDS in a park one Saturday morning and we sit and talk and drink our take-away coffees and watch their children playing on slides and swings and that thing that spins round and round. One of the kids falls off. There is soft bark underfoot and the child is not harmed, but, shaken, she runs over to her mother, buries her head in her lap, looking for a cuddle. And there it is. The love. My stomach churns and I have to stand to disguise my sudden influx of emotions. Releasing her mother, the child sees me standing there, and she takes my hand. She guides me to the swing-set and I lift her up and start to swing her and she laughs and smiles, all shock forgotten. And there it is again, the love. The love undoes me and all my protests about peace and quiet and calm. I want this love.
For a while I keep this epiphany to myself, afraid that it will not be shared by R. When I do tell him that my mind is made up, he is still hesitant, and there are some slow and difficult months during which we talk and don’t talk about this huge thing that I think I want to do and that he thinks he does not want to do. A baby is not something I can make on my own, despite what I’ve heard from friends who secretly stopped taking the pill so they could get ‘accidentally’ pregnant. I cannot imitate their acts of simultaneous faith and betrayal. I want to make a family with this man, the best person I know, the person I love the most. I want to go through this with him, to share the love.
One evening, a moment comes. I arrive home from work. It’s raining and I’m soaked and R meets me at the door, takes my dripping coat, and asks me if I’m alright. I’m miserable, and it’s not because of the rain. I can’
t help myself, I start to cry. ‘I’m just so sad. All the time. I want a baby of my own.’ He is equally upset. He tells me he’ll do anything, anything at all, just to stop me from being this kind of sad. I say again that I want to have a baby. He asks me if I’m sure. I say yes. R isn’t sure, but he’s now unsure enough to allow me to sway him. ‘Okay,’ he says.
THE FIRST TIME we have unprotected sex it is weird. We try to pretend that it is not weird. We get used to it. We both imagine that if we have a lot of sex then pregnancy will follow. But the fun and games of having sex all the time pall a bit as the months go by and I start to wonder why sperm and egg are being so coy at this whole getting together thing.
Then, eight months into trying, as they say, I am late. I only notice this belatedly, while I am in another city at a conference. I check into my hotel and, as I’m unpacking, I curse myself for not remembering to bring tampons. Then I realise that I should have got my period already. Huh. I leave the hotel. Like some sort of secret agent, I walk in the opposite direction to the conference, trying to find a pharmacy where I won’t bump into another delegate. I buy a test and stash it in my bag as I head back towards the venue, sweating slightly. At the opening reception I stand amidst circulating trays of canapés and warm white wine, but all I can think of is how soon I can excuse myself and make for the toilets. I sit in a narrow stall for what feels like an age, and then with trembling hands I unwrap the test. I read the instructions, I pee on the stick and I wait. Women come and go, flushing and washing. I don’t let myself look until the minute hand tells me I’ve waited long enough. It’s faint, but there is a positive line. Holy shit. What have I done? I leave the reception. At the hotel, I do another test, and it’s positive again so, with wildly beating heart, I dial R. While I am freaking out, he sounds calm, if physically far away. He reassures me and as I listen to his voice I start to believe we can do this. Still, I spend a restless night plagued by the fear that I have just lost control over my life.
The next morning I give my paper, and I don’t even bat an eyelid when the PowerPoint doesn’t work, because secretly I’m wondering what the hell I’m even doing here. But when I do a third test – because, well, I’m needy like that – it’s negative. I don’t understand. How can two tests yesterday be positive but one test today be negative? I get on the phone again to relay this new news, and a still-calm boyfriend tells me it’ll be fine either way. I make it through the day and spend another sleepless night at the hotel. The next morning, I invent a kidney infection and abandon the conference to go home.
R goes with me to the late night surgery, and the doctor does a few tests, just to be sure, but they’re all negative and he tells us it was probably a ‘lost pregnancy’. He takes some blood, suggests that I relax, and that the next time will be for real. A bit shell-shocked by the barrage of conflicting information over the past forty-eight hours, we head to a friend’s birthday party, and order tall beers, neither of us sure whether we’re celebrating a reprieve or drowning our sorrows. The next day, post-adrenaline rush, we are both subdued. And we are both disappointed. I realise what I’m feeling is grief. R says he feels the same. We both really want to be parents, and it’s time to stop leaving it to chance.
I head for the pharmacy, buying half their stock of ovulation test kits, trying to ignore the annoying picture of a grinning baby on the box, hoping I don’t see anyone I know, and wondering how I became the person who buys these things. As soon as I get home I crack open the packet to start tracking my cycle and to discover my ‘optimum conception days’. I read and re-read the instructions. I can’t believe there are only three high-fertility days per month. Three? I remember back to the panic we were made to feel as thirteen-year-old schoolgirls in the annual compulsory sex education class. We were terrorised with the idea of getting pregnant, made to feel that if a penis waved anywhere near our vaginas we would get knocked up. But now that I want to get pregnant it’s magically revealed to me that the baby-window is fucking tiny.
I start the process of tracking my cycle and I go through all the phases, from eagerness to boredom to resentment. Though I’m monitoring myself, I reject the enforced jollity of online fertility calendars that animate each month with images of cherubic babies and hearts. Likewise, I shudder at the fertility manual’s helpful tips on getting my partner to observe my physical ‘signs’. Get him to tell you when you seem premenstrual. Well, we’re not doing that. And perhaps that’s because I’m a little embarrassed myself by some of the requirements.
I read that my cervical mucus is meant to be like egg-white for optimum sperm motility. Right. Before now, I didn’t even register that I had cervical mucus, but now I’ve got to become a connoisseur of its consistency. I make an omelette just to remind myself what egg-white looks like. And then I move on to probing my own body, inserting a finger, and, following the instructions in the manual, stretching the fluid out, recording my observations. Some days it is thick and white, some days it slithers oleaginously. These are the good days. I write it all into my diary, next to the schedule of classes I’m teaching. Cryptic signs allude to no mucus, too much mucus, perfect mucus. And when it comes to announcing to R that today is the top day for implantation, I find out that what I’ve read is true: waving a recently-peed-on ovulation test stick at a man as an invitation to sex is not, actually, sexy.
The ridiculousness of this behaviour has to be acknowledged; in fact laughing at the absurdity of it all seems like the only sane response. Doing ovulation tests when you’re at work, between teaching classes on European avant-garde theatre, and trying to remember not to pee for four hours so that the reading can be accurate – if you haven’t tried it, let me tell you, it’s both ludicrous and stressful. Unfortunately my default way of dealing with stress (pouring it all out to friends over a glass of wine) isn’t an option at the moment, given that for half of each month I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’m pregnant. And when I mention the unsexy ovulation-stick moment to a friend, one of those friends with three kids who got pregnant ‘without even really trying’, she pats me on the arm, pityingly. I solemnly resolve in that moment never to share bodily fluid stories with my fertile friends. I quickly come to realise that infertility is a particular kind of loneliness.
Though most people don’t know that we’re ‘trying’ (oh, how I begin to hate that word), the friends who do know offer mixed advice, ranging from the best sexual positions for conception, to the problems of a tilted uterus (but how do you know if you have one of those?), to the joke that drunk sex, or – astonishingly – sex while on drugs, will definitely result in pregnancy. I am so paranoid about why I’m not conceiving, and fearful that I’m doing it wrong, that one night I get deliberately drunk before launching myself at R, on the off-chance that they’re right. Another friend shocks me when she blithely says that I should consider adopting a child as she knows several couples who conceived naturally once they ‘got into adoption’. She cannot be serious, I think. I move the conversation to another topic.
In search of more like-minded companionship, I go online. Pregnancy message boards are new to me and I find myself haunting them, yearning to find an answer through my screen. I get to know the acronyms, which are, in their own way, useful, bizarre and a little bit sad. When they don’t want to say ‘sex’, they say BD (baby dance); when they don’t want to say ‘fail’, they say BFN (big fat negative); and when they daren’t say what we’re all really hoping for, they say BFP (big fat positive). I am moved when women post long messages about their infertility, their slowly expiring hopes, and the ways they beat themselves up for failing. I am moved when I read the comments on these posts, in which women cheer each other on, in which women give each other support, in which women point out that none of us is failing.
The months wear on until it’s more than a year since we decided a baby would be a good thing. I’m still not pregnant. My GP tells me to relax, and then to relax some more. She suggests that I try to stop thinking about it, because obvious
ly thinking about it is what’s causing sperm and eggs to disobey the biological imperative. As advice, this seems perilously close to asserting that women’s minds are dangerous to their bodies. I make an appointment with a different GP. But when I ask her what my options are, she says, sadly, that it’s IVF or nothing, and ‘that’s very expensive’. She offers to print off the ‘Getting Pregnant’ help sheet from the NHS website. I tell her, thanks, I’m good for print-outs.
* * *
AND THEN I’M PREGNANT.
On the way back from the doctor’s office (I’m taking no chances this time on home tests), R and I can’t stop grinning. He takes me by the arm and looks me in the eye. I see that he’s both crying and smiling, as he says he has thought about it and he knows what it would mean to me and he wonders if the baby could have my last name. It is a precious, joyful moment. I have long speculated (aloud) why children automatically have their father’s names. R’s suggestion means, to both of us, that we may be changing our lives but we won’t change who we are. The same week as the pregnancy is confirmed we go ‘Sale Agreed’ on a house. A house that’s big enough for a family of three.