Then I read that, back in 1953, the country basically screeched to a halt to watch the birth of Little Ricky on I Love Lucy. A record 71.7 percent of all television-owning households tuned in, partly because the subject was still new for television, but also because the characters Lucy and Ricky were played by Lucy and Desi, who in real life were married and the parents of Desi Jr. Media coverage of the event was so massive it overshadowed the inauguration of President Eisenhower the next morning.
Cut to Demi Moore pregnant and nude on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, then to the cable sensation The Secret Life of the American Teenager. I guess the secret is: We even love pregnant teens! And that means you, too, Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin.
With the proliferation of media outlets (People magazine even has a Celebrity Baby Blog; read it to learn why pregnant Nancy O’Dell craves baked beans), we can fill the need we’ve always had to see the adorable little faces that result from celebrity DNA, or to observe someone known for her svelte body, like Heidi Klum or Kelly Ripa, enlarge. Entertainment news is now a nonstop “Bump Watch.”
As a culture, we have a voyeuristic fascination with famous mothers, but we’re simply gaga for multiples. More babies equals more babymania.
How much did we want to see the Jolie-Pitt twins, Vivienne and Knox? People magazine reportedly paid a record $14 million for the first photos.
Watched TLC lately?
I remember when it used to be all home decorating shows (back when I was scratching for my seat on The View, I used to host TLC’s While You Were Out). Now it’s mostly shows about babies and families with many, many babies, including the Duggars, who have nineteen kids with “J” names, including Jedidiah and Jinger.
Don’t worry about the crazy monikers. They won’t get bullied in the schoolyard because (1) Jesus loves them and (2) They are homeschooled.
Why this obsession of ours? Aside from the miracle of childbirth being inherently interesting (a living, breathing entity squirms right out of a human vagina—it never gets old!), and the thrill of seeing some tiny starlet get fat and then thin again (how Jessica Alba or Gisele Bündchen or any other celebrity lost their baby weight sells magazines every time), and the soothing sense that even our most kick-ass power women (Madonna, Katie Couric, Christina Aguilera, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton) had a baby yen, there is also just this: Moms are so ... maternal.
Welcome to facile conjecture-ville, I hope you’ll have a pleasant stay.
Mothers know things. They have superhuman strength. They are selfless, protective, gentle and sacrificing. Not my mother exactly—who should have named my brother and me Burden and Buzz Kill for how much she dug being a single parent—but in general, who wouldn’t want to be imbued with these qualities in the eyes of the public?
Did I want to be the girl with one dead ficus and two perhaps overly adored cats? Did I want to be the woman who forgets birthdays, remembers petty grudges and drives around in an unwashed car littered with empty water bottles and crumpled scripts for jobs she didn’t get?
Or could I use not only a whole new fan base, but also a wealth of new topics to mine for material?
Hell, yes.
So, I certainly didn’t have a baby to help my career. But it shouldn’t hurt.
one
When It Comes to Conception, Porn Is Good and The Secret Is Bad
I can’t let you in ’cause you’re old as fuck. For this club, you know, not for the earth.
DOORMAN, KNOCKED UP
So, I’m thirty-eight. I’m arguably “old as fuck,” and my husband and I decide it’s time to pull the goalie. In the same second we decide to have a baby (after much debate, the nature of which I’ll get to later), I also quietly resign myself to being infertile. I am not only “AMA” (Advanced Maternal Age; saw it written on my medical chart once and felt like Grandma Moses) but I’ve also had an STD, thanks to the stand-up comedian I dated for a year when I first moved to Los Angeles.
Yes, I am going to talk about the clap. Because listen, I don’t want you to panic if you’ve had an STD or two and have seen the other side of thirty-five. Having kids later in life is the new thing, so don’t sweat it.
Before the physical part of this equation, let’s get into the mental part. If you have a horrible attitude, and have made the presumption, like I did, that conception is never going to happen for you, please don’t be conned into thinking your crappy attitude about fertility can ruin your chances of conceiving. That seems to be the conventional wisdom tumbling out of the mouths of crypto-spiritual clowns. They try to shame you into thinking your thoughts either make you sick or heal you. In a way, it would be nice if it were that simple, but my uterus has proven that theory wrong. Way wrong.
All I did—and I did it like it was a full-time job—was worry and obsess about being infertile.
Thankfully, the uterus is impervious to “bad vibes” and the universe had bigger fish to fry than punishing me for being such a bummer with my parade of negative thoughts. The Secret isn’t total bullshit, but in my experience, it’s close.
Allow me a brief detour into both my twenties and my scarred fallopian tubes.
You first have to understand that I second-guess everything, including writing about second-guessing everything right now.
Most times I hang up the phone, I generally regret at least one thing I’ve said or neglected to say. When I worked in morning radio, I would spend the entire twenty-minute drive home from the studio each afternoon mulling over something idiotic I had said, like I was jamming a dull scissor into the same spot on my forearm repeatedly. After three years doing the news and being Adam Carolla’s sidekick on the FM dial, this little ritual down Wilshire Boulevard improved exactly none, and even now when I record a podcast, or appear as a guest on Dr. Phil or some other show, I find at least one moment to kick myself in the ass about. I tell you this just so you understand how deeply I question myself, how quick I am to blame myself, and how unlikely I am to let myself off the hook for even a mild or nonexistent transgression. I spend way too much of my life lightly basting in a marinade of shame.
All that being said, I refuse to be ashamed of catching chlamydia.
That’s why I’m writing about it, because a bug doesn’t have a personality, nor does it differentiate between nice girls and skanks. Lots of us have caught them, and it certainly doesn’t mean we’re dirty. There was nothing especially whorish about me; in fact, the stand-up who gave me the “lie down” was maybe my sixth sexual partner, all of whom were long-term boyfriends. It would make me feel all mysterious about things if I could spin a dark yarn detailing drunken nights with strangers, but despite the fact that my mom was a Frye boot- wearing, free love-celebrating, Joy of Sex-reading, laissez-faire kind of parent, I have always been kind of old-fashioned about sex. I refuse to feel like a slut even though I had the VD so bad I ended up at the free clinic in Hollywood, which is generally a sign that you are failing at life.
Even if I’d caught chlamydia from the pizza delivery guy, however, that still would not make me a bad person, and while it might rightly make you question my judgment, it seems critical to note just how common STDs are. With an estimated four million new cases of chlamydia alone occurring each year in the United States, there have to be lots of women of childbearing age who have jacked up tubes or worse. Not everyone is going to be completely forthcoming about why they have trouble getting pregnant, so you may not hear much about the clap and fertility, but I’m starting to think lots of us are in the same boat: the SS VD.
So, here’s my story. I had never even had a yeast infection when I started having some discharge and burning in the girl parts when I was twenty-seven.
I was living down the street from a cemetery in a $385-a-month studio apartment in a building that was basically the Village of the Damned; when people asked where I lived I would either tell them travel east on Beverly until you get scared, then go about three more miles, or I would simply tell them to look
for the corner of Purse Snatch and Car Jack.
My neighbors were a glamorous bunch of bon vivants. There was the Asian transsexual prostitute turning tricks in her studio next door to mine. There was the pudgy, middle-age dude who showed me copious poems about his cat, Shadow, his “only reason for living,” and who regularly received Meals on Wheels. There was the baggy pants dude trying to be a choreographer who would play the same eight bars of “Unbreak My Heart” over and over until I wanted to Break His Face. There was the building manager, a guy on disability for chronic fatigue syndrome (Jesus, that man was tired), and there was the elderly man down the hall who rarely left his apartment but blasted every Dodger game from an old transistor radio. So this was life in the fast lane. That is, if your destination was the heart of freaking darkness.
Anyway, as you can imagine, I was uninsured, which is how I ended up getting my privates checked out by a staunch nurse with a tight blond braid at a Planned Parenthood nearby, meaning in the ghetto. She said I seemed fine, and by that, I think, she meant white; she sent me home with some yeast infection medication. Before leaving the clinic, I used the bathroom. When I went to wash my hands, I noticed the soap dispenser was empty and I remember thinking, “No soap? Doesn’t soap prevent the spread of disease, and isn’t that what this place is all about?”
Several visits and Pap smears later, I learned I had chlamydia, which a guy can carry and be totally asymptomatic, so I could hardly blame the comedian, although I might have felt better about the whole thing if he hadn’t “all of a sudden” remembered a cocktail waitress in Charlotte who mentioned something about having something, which didn’t seem relevant to mention until, um, it was.
Lots of bad medical care later, I finally went to a real doctor, who told me I had pelvic inflammatory disease from trying and failing to treat the bug with various gnarly antibiotics from the clinic.
There was such a sense of euphoria when I was being treated by an actual doctor, with a white coat and everything, that I almost didn’t want to ask if there would be long-term effects, but I did and he told me my tubes might be scarred and I could have trouble having kids later. He said he didn’t think so, and I asked how we would know for sure. “If you try to have kids and it doesn’t work,” he answered.
That was over ten years ago, but it haunts me as we commence baby making.
I take my friend, a mother of two-year-old fertility treatment twins, out for margaritas, and grill her about the entire process, taking down the name and phone number of her fertility specialist. The forty-seven-year-old redhead from Pilates who finally conceived after five attempts at in vitro fertilization, I corner her to get every detail, marveling at her determination (not to mention bankroll). When I run into a pregnant neighbor at the Coffee Bean, I trap her in a fatal talk hold while I soak up tales of daily hormone shots, Clomid cycles, acupuncture, cryopreservation of embryos and intrauterine insemination. I see her eyeing the door as her latte goes cold, but I can’t let her loose.
I’m on a need-to-know basis with every woman who has ever had trouble getting pregnant. Furthermore, the girls who just flat out procreated with no trouble? I need to know their stories, too. Mainly so I can resent them. Mentally, I am socking away money for assisted reproductive technologies. I will need them all, I am certain.
Within just a few days off the pill, I am consumed with infertility and certain that because of my age and my dubious STD history it’s going to be a long, barren haul that may never ever actually yield a baby. Infertility is everywhere I look until I am convinced that no one gets pregnant just like that, and that one-night-stand pregnancies must be an urban legend or the province of teenagers with more youthful vaginas. I walk by the newsstand, and it seems like every actress I see is either having multiples from fertility treatments or hiring a surrogate. When I think of my reproductive system, I literally picture one lonely egg, as if human eggs look like chicken eggs, covered in cobwebs and dust like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. While I’m probably supposed to be making vision boards filled with giggling babies and gloriously pregnant bellies, I’m mainly picturing that egg, decayed, rotting and old as fuck.
I start peeing on those ovulation kit sticks and trying to squeeze through the so-called fertility window. When I calculate that a day is the optimum day, based on half-assed knowledge cobbled together from searching the Internet and reading parts of books and unscientifically polling various women, I pressure my husband into having some very un-fun, desperate, high-strung sex the second he gets home. Afterward, I sit in bed facing the headboard with my legs elevated against the wall for twenty minutes. Someone told me this helps the swimmers succeed in getting to their destination, which may be true, but it makes you feel like a character Meg Ryan would play, bursting with such extreme quirkiness and adorable self-doubt that she’s like a knife in your brain. Every morning before work, before rushing out at the ass crack of dawn to prep the morning news, I pee on a stick to find out my ovulation status. It’s the least romantic, most confusing, clinical, pressure-filled month ever. I detest those sticks, the legs against the wall, the lame, forced sex.
When I get my period that first month, I am crushed. I feel about as womanly as Steve McQueen listening to a Rush song while playing Call of Duty, which is to say I feel like a total dude.
And that’s when people start to quietly suggest that I am causing my own fears to come true. I should shut up about infertility and stop being so sure I won’t get pregnant, because my mind is doing some voodoo on my body. This is all my brain’s fault.
Thus I came into contact with The Secret, the self-help documentary that posits the “Law of Attraction,” the idea that your thoughts and feelings attract events. Ostensibly, this principle is both hopeful and elegant; Oprah did two episodes on it, and I like to live according to her teachings. However, let’s just say you can’t master your negative thoughts. Well, too bad, because you are doing some major “manifesting” of all the disastrous bullshit that crosses your mind, or so says The Secret and all of the New Age-y schools of thought that run parallel.
One friend actually printed out a hundred quotes from The Secret for me, and I folded it and tucked it into my handbag, thinking, it can’t hurt. Unless, of course, I’m found dead and I can’t pretend from Beyond that I was toting that thing around with a sense of irony.
“Whatever is going on in your mind is what you are attracting,” read the handout. “You become and attract what you think,” it further taunted me. “People think about what they don’t want and attract more of the same.” And if I wasn’t already filled with New Age guilt, another quote warned me, “Those who speak most of illness have illness” and “You attract your dominant thoughts.”
Armed with this knowledge, I still could not stop the infertile thoughts, the ongoing calculations of how many in vitro fertilizations I could afford if I sold my condo, the image of that yellowing egg fixed in my head, burned there like an image paused too long on an early plasma TV screen. “Choose your thoughts carefully,” admonished the dog-eared page of quotes. Like I can choose my own thoughts. I have about as much luck with this as I have with betting on horse races or corralling killer bees.
If my thoughts could have made me infertile, believe me, they would have.
After the first month of unpleasant sex and legs on the wall, I sit next to a woman at a wedding who is both a cardiologist and a new mom. She tells me, “Throw away the sticks. The sticks stress women out and cause performance problems with men. The sticks don’t work. Your fertility window is three days long. Just have lots of sex, so you don’t miss it. Just have Lots. Of. Sex.”
Because I need structure, I ask her how much is lots, and she says every other day, to allow the Mister’s sperm count to recover (I’ve since read this is a myth, and that every day is better, but whatever). This sounds like a plan. And while this petite woman in a fringe shawl daintily nibbling on a dinner salad isn’t my doctor, she is a doctor, and that’s good enough for me.
> Even for newlyweds like us, having sex every other day, without fail, can be kind of a chore. No matter how in love you are, carefully plotted procreation flies in the face of hot sexual abandon.
That’s why I always recommend porn to anyone who is trying to get pregnant.
Not only will X-rated movies increase your husband’s enthusiasm for the conception process, it may also increase his fertility. In my duties as a “news” reporter, I once did a story about an evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia who found that looking at pornographic images of men and women together can increase the quantity and quality of a man’s sperm. According to this study, watching another male having at it with a female creates a perceived “competition,” thus inspiring faster, more motile swimmers. Yes, this is the kind of hard news I brought to the FM dial.
I was the Woodward and Bernstein of jizz.
It comes to me, having never actually watched porn, that I should spearhead a “let’s watch porn” campaign with my husband. I had interviewed lots of porn stars while doing morning radio with Carolla, and I always thought they were sweet girls—super molested and broken, but sweet. The porn stars and their agent-boyfriends were always handing out free product, which I dutifully took home because I can’t turn down free stuff, even Sinner Takes All.
Just about every man likes porn, and if you think yours doesn’t, you are probably wrong. I once read an article in Cosmopolitan magazine suggesting there are four things that are true of every male: He wants to earn more than you do, he wants more oral sex, he would rather hang out with you than his buddies, and he consumes porn, whether you know it or not. Yeah, I just quoted a Cosmo story, which neutralizes the Great Expectations reference I dropped earlier, but I must say I have found those four things to be universal when it comes to guys.
Exploiting My Baby Page 2