by Tracy Slater
The clinic sold meditation CDs, had their own acupuncture center, and even offered a marine-themed “relaxation room” with large recliners facing a wall-length screen showing calming underwater scenes. Toru and I never went into it, but we liked to peer inside and laugh over the spelling on the door—a Japanese rendering of “reraxation roomu”—and compete over who could come up with the most inappropriate screening for their atmosphere of forced tranquility. Toru suggested Seed of Chucky, I the anti-dolphin-hunting film The Cove, and then we’d cackle about hacking into their AV system while we waited to see doctors who would suck in their breath and clutch my charts, muttering, “So, kana? Do shimashyo?” “So, then, what is there to do now?”
Many women came into the clinic without their husbands but with their mothers, which struck me as odd until I got used to seeing these unlikely pairs. One day, I saw a woman in stilettos, skintight jeans, and a white T-shirt with a black Playboy bunny across the back. I couldn’t tell whether I admired her or thought she was barking up the wrong tree. A little of both, I finally decided.
One of the clinic’s most popular offerings was their Monday morning “fertility stretch” session, which Okomoto-sensei led himself. On Monday afternoons, a group of women would gather in the café after class, wearing loose yoga wear. They’d push long tables together, pull out their bento box lunches, and eat their onigiri rice balls, gossiping and comparing protocols, I imagined, for hours. I’d sit near them, tapping away at my keyboard on one freelance assignment or another, and wonder about them. I knew that far fewer than half of Japanese women worked after marriage, even if they didn’t have kids, but I was still struck by the idea of spending a whole day at an IVF clinic when you weren’t waiting for an appointment. Then I realized I was a lot like them. This is basically what we did with our lives: sit at the clinic, hope for two blue lines on a pregnancy test. They just did it communally, with rice balls.
One afternoon, I went to pick up my medicine in preparation for my treatment cycle. At the clinic’s pharmacy window, a woman in a white-and-blue uniform handed me a pink envelope. In cursive English letters across the top, it said SMILE, THINK POSITIVE, LET YOURSELF RELAX, AND READY FOR CONCEPTION.
• • •
BY THE MIDDLE of that spring, six months after we’d started at the new clinic, Toru’s company had decided against moving us to San Diego. In the meantime, I’d managed to grow one egg that the doctors removed, fertilized, and froze. I’d produced no more with all the tests, preparatory cycles, and stimulation shots than an average woman would have on her own in one month, and I would turn forty-four in less than half a year.
Just before the clinic could transfer my lone embryo, I woke one morning with burning in my stomach. When the hot spells kept coming for a week, Toru booked me an appointment with a GI specialist. “Ulcers, two!” reported the doctor, after instructing the nurse to bring in Gaijin-san, or Mrs. Foreigner, for an endoscopy. He stuck a camera up my nose and down my throat, Toru stroking my head while I choked and tried not to vomit, tears leaking down my cheeks as the doctor explained eagerly to Toru and the nurse how my “narrow foreign nose” made shoving in the camera even harder. When he found two blisters side-by-side in my stomach, he announced in English, “Kissing ulcers!” seeming happy at the term. Then he scraped the lining of my gut, and a week later, he diagnosed a bacterial infection causing susceptibility to GI sores. The cure: two months of antibiotics and other medications, contraindicated for pregnancy or, by extension, an embryo transfer. Another long delay.
“I worry you,” Toru said again, shaking his head. The bacteria had left me vulnerable to ulcers, but he feared the stress of infertility treatment had also contributed.
I cried over yet another stalled step, each day ticking closer to my forty-fifth birthday and our cutoff date to stop trying for a baby. Then I called the airlines and booked a quick trip home. I hadn’t been back to the U.S. in more than a year. In Boston, I still felt numb and lost, but I drank wine and ate steak and French fries despite my ulcers, and I saw my closest friends.
When I flew back to Japan a few weeks later, I had a fresh plan in my clutches. I knew I couldn’t control the outcome of these years of treatments, but at least I could prevent myself from looking back at forty-five and regretting I hadn’t tried everything to conceive, every single month.
I went straight to the clinic in Osaka. “I want to try naturally this month, even though I’ll still be on antibiotics for another few weeks,” I told the doctor, a woman this time, Noguchi-sensei. She was younger and less authoritative than Okomoto-sensei, but she also spoke a little English. “I want to have ultrasounds to see if an egg is growing,” I explained. She nodded slowly, her straight black chin-length hair shaking in time with her head, then pointed to the room next door, where I got into one of those mechanized chairs—blue, this time—and prepared to be hoisted, splayed, and wanded.
A week or so later, Noguchi-sensei gave me a shot to try to force my body to release an egg. Then I waited at the long white reception counter to pay. The clinic was busy that afternoon, a line of patients building up behind me as I rubbed my stomach where the nurse had injected me with hormones. When I got to the front, the receptionist pulled out my treatment sheet. She tried to explain a handwritten line Noguchi-sensei had added. “Huh?” I kept saying. “Mo-ikkai onegaishimasu?” “Once more, please?” The receptionist’s face began to redden, the crowd behind me shifting restlessly as she continued to repeat whatever she was attempting to communicate, finally blurting out something that sounded like “Timingu! Timingu!” I had no idea what she meant. Finally, I offered the one line in Japanese that I knew perfectly by now: “Shujin wa Nihonjin. Ato, shujin wa watashi ni oshiemasu!” “My husband is Japanese. Later, he’ll explain to me!”
The receptionist nodded, looking like I’d just handed her a jug of water at the far end of a sweat lodge. Then she ran my credit card, handed me the sheet, and hastily bowed me farewell.
That night, I showed the paper to Toru, who laughed. “What?” I asked. “What does it say?”
“It says tonight we should have fuck!”
I realized what the receptionist had been trying to say: “Timing,” for “timed intercourse.” On the sheet Noguchi-sensei had worded it more medically, of course, than Toru. But I imagined that, with the long line of patients behind me at the desk and the receptionist’s increasingly panicked attempts to explain, the effect at the clinic that afternoon had been barely more discreet than my husband’s.
A few days after I finally finished my last antibiotic, two weeks since seeing Dr. Noguchi, I woke around five a.m., my abdomen heavy. I went to the bathroom to check for blood. Then I went to the closet where I kept my tampons, razors, cosmetics, and pills, rifling through the contents piled in plastic boxes.
Five minutes later, I flew into the bedroom, an early pregnancy test in my hand. It was positive.
• • •
TORU MADE a clinic appointment for me that same day. Neither Okomoto-sensei nor Noguchi-sensei was available, but there was one more doctor who could manage some English, another woman. Yamamoto-sensei was older than Noguchi-sensei and had a more forthright manner. She ordered me a blood test “to make sure pregnancy is . . . real,” she said haltingly.
I spent the next hour and a half in the café, unable to concentrate on anything, trying not to dwell on the doctor’s use of the term “real.” Women filtered in and out, the glass doors opening and closing, little trays of tea or coffee in their hands, but it all felt underwater to me. Nothing penetrated the cottony feeling in my mouth and the thrumming inside my chest.
When Yamamoto-sensei called me back into her office, she tucked a cowlick of hair behind her ear and smiled, pushing some test results toward me. She told me I was due March ninth, almost four months after my forty-fourth birthday.
My head continued to feel underwater for the next few days. I had no ambivalence about
being pregnant now, only a happy kind of shock. Toru walked around with a quiet smile on his face, but still, he told me, “We should stay cool.” That weekend, we wandered around Umeda’s enormous underground in the center of the city, moving slowly through the anonymous crowd, as if speed might somehow dislodge the tiny cells growing in my abdomen. I felt a spike of awe-tinged joy, thinking, It’s the three of us here, walking around together.
I had a day or two of slight nausea, when the smells at my morning café made me clutch a handkerchief to my face. But then the feeling started to wane. I went home and took another pregnancy test, my heart pounding so hard in my ears I could feel it thump while I tried not to stare at the stick until three minutes had passed. When I looked, I still saw two blue lines. But was one even fainter than it had been before? I couldn’t tell.
The clinic put me on so much medication to prevent another miscarriage and protect my ulcerated stomach that we told Otosan I was pregnant again, though naturally, not with our frozen embryo, Toru explaining while I laid out my series of pills one night after dinner. Otosan smiled wide, his eyes bright, but then he turned pensive and asked Toru a question in Japanese.
“What did he say?” I wanted to know.
Toru shook his head at me, and I knew once again his father had annoyed him. Otosan was never judgmental about our doing IVF, but he didn’t really get what it was all about. Toru rolled his eyes like he did when his father couldn’t figure out how to turn on the computer, then said, “He wants to know, which baby do we want? The one in your stomach now or the one in freezer?”
The next morning, my nausea still seemed on the wane. I was scheduled to go in for another blood test in a few days, but I texted Toru at work. “I think I should go back to the clinic now, as soon as possible,” I told him when he called back. “I took another test this morning, and I really think the line looks fainter. It’s still there. But faint.”
I saw Yamamoto-sensei again, and she sent me back for a second blood test. I spent another hour or so in the café trying not to cry, flipping listlessly through a Japanese magazine from the waiting room, seeing nothing. When Yamamoto-sensei called me back into her office, she had another sheet of test results in front of her. She pushed them toward me again, but she didn’t meet my eye.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Tracy,” she said, “but your baby is not growing up.”
I tried to keep my voice as steady as possible, swallowing hard and glancing around the stark walls before I worked up the nerve to look near her face. In the end, I only managed a shaky question about what to do after the inevitable miscarriage. “I mean, I know we still have the frozen embryo,” I croaked out. “But if that . . . if that one doesn’t work either, can we try naturally again?”
Yamamoto-sensei tucked her black hair behind her ear again, then looked straight at me. “It’s a miracle you even got pregnant naturally at all,” she said, her English sounding perfect just this once.
Six weeks later, after I’d miscarried, I had my last embryo transfer. It failed, too.
• • •
“FOR GOD’S SAKE, you’re not going to get pregnant, Tracy.” My mother—never one to mince words—tried to level with me a few months later over Skype. She worried we were wasting precious time. Toru and I had stopped the IVF treatments, but I insisted we still try every month with ultrasounds and hormone support from the clinic, plus new twice-a-day injections of a blood thinner for a “clotting disorder” the clinic had diagnosed, which they claimed could cause early-state miscarriage. My stomach bloomed with red and purple welts from all the shots, but I was undeterred.
“Why don’t you just adopt?” my mother demanded. My eldest sister said she cried for me, she was so sad that I wouldn’t have a child with Toru, but she also couldn’t understand why we didn’t “just adopt.” “I mean,” she said, “if you’re still not willing to do egg donation.” Both she and my mother pointed out that with adoption, too, we needed to hurry, since many agencies had age cutoffs.
Then my mother took to telling me about her friends whose daughters had used surrogates. “I can’t even produce a normal egg, Mom,” I said in frustration. “How is hiring a surrogate going to help?” To Toru, I complained ungenerously that, as usual, my mother thought hiring someone would solve the problem. “As if she doesn’t even realize how expensive having a surrogate would be in the first place!” I said, my eyes fixing him with annoyance meant for her.
“Poor Charlotte,” Toru said, as he usually did when I complained about my mother. Then, “Poor my love.”
I worried about Toru holding in his own sadness and frustration, but when I tried to talk to him about it, he insisted he was “okay.” “Sometimes, a little sad,” he admitted, when I pushed, telling him how I’d read that men often think they need to stay strong for their female partners during infertility treatments. “It’s not fair for you to have to always be the strong one,” I said.
But I remembered how he never liked to talk about his mother after she died, how discussing painful things proved harder for him than staying silent about them, despite all my Western psychoanalytical beliefs in the dangers of repression. I thought about the Japanese tendency to show love and support not through words but with actions that increase interdependence. I adored Toru’s father, but our bond was built on hardly any conversation: I cooked for him and he helped me with my Japanese, teaching me new words and reading directions and filling out forms I couldn’t decipher. Now, with Toru, I tried to make his favorite foods or run a nightly bath for him, or insist he go for a shiatsu massage after every failed fertility step or night where his father was especially unsteady on his feet. Eventually, I found comfort in these simple, practical actions. I knew Toru’s heart hurt for me, and he knew mine hurt for him, and we didn’t have to pretend words would fix anything.
As for my mother and sister’s advice to “just adopt,” I saw on the IVF chat boards and from friends or friends of friends that the adoption process is frequently as heartbreaking, as filled with delays, false starts, and disappointments as medical treatment. Often even more so. Despite their good intentions, when people urged adoption as the obvious Plan B, I felt angry. If they are so proadoption, with their brood of biological offspring, why don’t they go ahead and adopt? I thought crabbily. Moreover, I was suspicious about this Plan B concept. It seemed potentially belittling to both adoptive parents and children. Many parents who adopted, I saw, did so because they longed to adopt, to become family with a life already in existence, not because it was the second-best choice.
Still, I knew people on the IVF forums who were fine giving reproductive technology one or two tries and moving on to adoption. I also knew women who were willing to put their marriages at risk to become parents. They would spend life savings, leave their husbands or partners if they couldn’t agree on options like egg or sperm donation, or adoption.
“A therapist once told me,” a woman wrote on my Over 40 forum, “that if what I wanted most in the world was to be a mother, then I would be one; I would find a way, no matter what.” The writer found deep comfort in this truth, and when I read her post, I admired her, but I knew that wasn’t true for me.
What I wanted most in the world was to be with Toru, and then to have his biological child. Before marriage, before babies meant anything to me besides a frightening threat to one’s freedom, I’d always thought in an abstract way that adoption was one of the loveliest choices a person could make: to decide to become family with another little person. I’d never put much stock in genetics. After all, my sister Lauren had found more comfort and safety with her foster family than she’d ever found with the parents whose DNA she shared. Even when my friend Jenna, who’d adopted her son, told me that the ideal of the adoptive parent “was total bullshit,” that people who adopt do so because they want to, not from some innate altruism, I still secretly harbored admiration for parents who welcomed a lone little one in from the wide open worl
d.
Yet when Toru told me that he wasn’t open to either egg donation or adoption, I felt an unexpected relief. Since adoption in Japan is so rare, I wasn’t surprised by his stance. But after we’d begun the process of trying to have a baby years before, I’d realized that my own growing longing to parent our biological child didn’t necessarily translate into a yearning to be a parent in general. Wanting to have your biological baby isn’t the same as wanting a child in general.
By now, the experience of going through years of treatments had confirmed another surprising truth to me: just because you think you are open to certain possibilities in the abstract—such as adoption—you never know where your true limits lie until you’re faced with actual, lasting choices. Rational or not, I felt safest in my gut with the idea of a baby who was half Toru. I believed it would be harder for me not to bond with, not to love a child whose every cell contained half of him. And if Toru and I couldn’t make a baby together, I’d still rather be together and childless than a mother apart from him.
Sometimes I wondered if that made me less deserving of parenthood, or of mourning its elusiveness. I didn’t know the answer, but I knew the whole issue of my fertility would become obsolete soon, with my forty-fifth birthday looming just past summer. Most major studies don’t even consider women giving birth at forty-five or beyond, when the average chance of someone having a baby with her own eggs drops below one percent. The latest U.S. National Center for Health Statistics report defines women of childbearing age as between fifteen and forty-four. I’d already entered the territory of a statistical nonentity.
• • •
A FEW MONTHS LATER, just days before my forty-fifth birthday, I lay curled in bed past midnight, sobs shaking through me. Toru lay beside me, wiping strands of wet hair from my cheeks. “You know,” he said, locking his steady eyes to my teary ones, “if we can have baby, that would be like miracle. But it will still only be like dessert, because you will always be main course.”