by Sara Connell
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Epilogue
A Conversation with Grandma and Surrogate Kristine Casey
Reader’s Guide
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Selected Titles from Seal Press
Copyright Page
To my mother, the Great Mother,
and the mother in all of us
Prologue
I couldn’t breathe. I lay in bed in the labor and delivery ward of a Chicago hospital on the South Side of the city, the doctor’s words smashing my heart like a wrecking ball.
“We can’t save them. I’m sorry,” Dr. Eagan, head of Maternal-Fetal Medicine, told us. When the attempt to sew my cervix shut had failed, Dr. Eagen had shouted, “Shit!” and thrown the stars-and-stripes do-rag he’d been wearing in the OR to the floor.
Everything in the room was an assault: the lights too bright and fluorescent, the whirring of the medical equipment too loud, the furniture dated and worn. I turned my head to the wall, unable to bear the stricken faces of my husband, Bill, my obstetrician, my sister, and now my mother, who had jumped on a plane from Washington, D.C., to Chicago that day after receiving a panicked phone call from Bill.
I twisted on the bed, stretching my hands over my protruding belly, trying to hold on to the lives that had been growing inside me for more than five months. Going into the procedure, Dr. Eagan had told us we had only an 8 percent chance of success. But we’d been hopeful. Babies at twenty-four weeks sometimes survived. We were weeks, if not days, from viability. Someone had to be in the 8 percent.
“We’ll take you back to the OR tonight,” my OB said. She looked at the wall behind me as she spoke. “You’ll be out for the duration.”
For five days after the operation, I lay tormented in a hospital room, desperate to find some way for this not to be real. Our burgeoning family (Bill, the twins, and I) had passed all the reassuring milestones: trimester one; genetic screening (all good!); trimester two; the twenty-week ultrasound, where we not only discovered that both babies were boys but saw them with our own eyes—moving and full of life. They did scissor kicks and somersaulted; they had heartbeats, ten fingers, ten toes. At one point, Baby Boy B, as the technician called him, had even sucked his thumb.
The day we left the hospital, a therapist from the perinatal loss department presented us with two death certificates and asked us if we wanted the bodies for a burial. I’d been packing the things Bill had brought me from home: bathrobe, toothbrush, two purple stones from our garden. As the counselor held the papers out to me, I dropped the stones and listened to the knocking sound they made as they hit the linoleum floor and rolled under the metal bed.
“There’s no rush to decide,” the therapist said gently. “We can keep them here for up to a month. It’s probably something you want to decide once you’ve talked it over at home.”
As Bill helped me into the wheelchair I was required to leave the hospital in, I overheard an on-call OB talking to some nurses outside the door of our room. She’d neglected to close the latch, and the door had crept open.
“When they’re ready to go, take them out the back way—in the service elevator. I don’t want them going out through the reception area with all the new moms and babies.”
I slumped into the chair next to the hospital bed, folding the top half of my body over my legs, trying to suck in a breath. I understood the doctor meant well, but I couldn’t help seeing her decree as yet another rejection: We were being taken out the back like the trash, sparing those families who came to the hospital and left with a baby, arms full of balloons and flowers and plush toys, the unsightly image of two devastated parents with shell-shocked eyes and dangling arms empty, like wraiths.
Two months later, I flew from Chicago to my parents’ house in Virginia, where I’d grown up, for the wedding of a family friend. I was tired from the weeks of grieving and yearned for the comfort of the rolling hills and the woods near my family home. As soon as I arrived, I questioned my decision. The wedding was crawling with new babies and children. My stomach was still round from the pregnancy.
The aunt of the bride, who lived out of state, rushed to greet me from across the room.
“I heard you were having twins,” she said, her eyes bright with excitement. “When are you due?”
I struggled to answer. Death seemed an inappropriate thing to mention at a wedding. “Stillborn” was a word that was still unutterable on my tongue.
Late that night, I stood in the hallway of my parents’ house outside the bathroom, sobbing. I’d started brushing my teeth but stopped when I realized I could no longer see. The blood in my head made a whooshing sound, like fast-moving water, in my ears. Spots appeared in front of my eyes, and I wondered if I was going to faint. I dropped the toothbrush into the sink and leaned into the hallway, bracing myself against the wall beams with my arms.
My heart fluttered in the unnatural way it had since I had lost the twins. Sometimes I found it difficult to breathe, and it did not seem unrealistic to me that a person could die from this kind of pain. My raw cries sent my father to the basement, but my mother came to meet me in the hall. There had been a time, even two or three years before, when she would not have come, or when I would not have let her near me. Our reconnection had come as a surprise, with a will of its own, fueled perhaps by the same phenomenon that allows mothers to lift cars to save their infants.
She encircled me in her arms, squeezing my body as if she was trying to suck the pain out of me, as one does for snakebites. I remember vaguely the feel of this embrace, her brown skin, a freckle on the side of her neck, her short hair that had become a bit coarse from coloring. I heaved and wept. When I’d exhausted myself, she held me a foot or so from her and lifted my chin, forcing me to meet her eyes.
“You will know joy again,” she said.
I cried harder. I shook my head no.
“Yes,” she said, almost laughing at my obstinacy, the way one might to coax a toddler out of a tantrum. Instead of offending, her lightness wedged an opening between me and the hurt.
“There is going to be joy at the other end of this pain,” she said again.
I looked into her face through the gleam of tears and still couldn’t imagine it. But I stopped crying and began wiping my eyes with the edge of my nightgown. My mother pulled me to her chest again. This time our embrace was quiet. The house was still. Through the cotton of her T-shirt, I could feel the thumping of her heart. Against my chest, it sounded like hope.
Chapter 1
By the time I arrived for my appointment with Dr. Bizan, a doctor of osteopathy (DO) OBGYN I’d found in Chicago, I hadn’t had a period in almost three years. I had just turned thirty, and even though Bill and I had not officially begun trying to have children yet, the fact that we might already have fertility issues weighed heavily on my mind.
When I signed in, the receptionist informed me that the doctor was running two hours behind schedule. Two hours. I took a seat in the waiting room and tried to calm my nerves. It seemed an inordinately long time to wait. I was already anxious.
Bill and I had just celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary. Six years older than I was, he said he felt forty stalking him. Even if Details and GQ didn’t write about it, men felt the pressure of the biological clock, too, he said. “I don’t want to be sixty when our child graduates from high school.”
I
was trained in holistic medicine and for two years had pursued a natural approach to resuming my cycle. But when I still didn’t have a period, Bill became alarmed and, after twenty-four months of acupuncture and herbs and tinctures and teas, it was my turn to try something different. My hope was to find a Western doctor who was at least open to a complementary approach.
Dr. Bizan’s office had an air of neglect—a somewhat disconcerting contrast with the luxurious and polished offices of Chicago’s other highly ranked OBs I had visited or would visit over the next six years. Looking around at the disarray of Dr. Bizan’s entryway—the fingerprint-covered glass, floorboards from the 1930s that were crumbling in places and had never been restored—I wondered if she had the expertise of a top-level doctor. But while Dr. Bizan’s lack of punctuality and office aesthetics did not inspire my confidence, what I really wanted in a doctor now was someone with expertise in fertility and menstruation, an open mind, and some compassion, qualities that had been lacking in the plush, clockworklike offices of the last OB I’d visited. I’d left that appointment with Dr. Angelli in tears, after she’d chastised the alternative approach I was taking with my menstrual health, and hadn’t been back to a Western MD since.
I sat in a grungy waiting room, cluttered with stacks of pharmaceutical ads and tattered magazines that looked as if they’d been dropped in water and possibly even chewed on by children who’d grown bored with the colored blocks and wooden toys that were strewn around the room.
The air was stuffy. A harried-looking woman with a protruding belly tried to interest her older child in a stack of blocks. I sat beside a younger African American woman whose belly was too large to be contained, even by her army green maternity top. A stretch of her caramel skin gaped between her shirt and pants as she fanned herself with a magazine. I’d taken a seat in the least stained chair I could find and pretended to look at an old Cosmo. I hadn’t realized how much I wanted Dr. Bizan to be on time. I thumbed through the magazine, looking for a distraction. New sex moves, how to dress sexily, sex secrets of married couples—the usual Cosmo fare. I replaced the magazine on the table. Ten minutes in the waiting room would have given me time to think. One hundred and twenty minutes gave me time to obsess.
I had not had a regular menstrual period since I’d stopped taking birth control pills three years before. I’d learned that the technical name for the condition, lack or absence of a period, was amenorrhea. So I knew the when and the what, but not the cause.
My friend Caroline, who had referred me to Dr. Bizan, had told me that she was an open-minded and excellent OB. Dr. Bizan had delivered all three of Caroline’s children, supported her in natural childbirth, referred her to a doula-midwife practice, and recommended that she do prenatal yoga. I saw nothing of the holistic influence in the waiting room, though. From the brand-name wooden magazine rack to the plastic clipboards advertising the latest hormone-replacement drugs, the office seemed to be sponsored by Pfizer and Eli Lilly.
I worried that she would try to dissuade me, the way Dr. Angelli had, from taking a holistic approach to menstruation. My sister, a Western-trained MD, explained that because holistic principles weren’t taught in medical school, doctors could not endorse them and often explained them away as “placebo” or some kind of primitive medicine, akin to rubbing two sticks together when right here at the flip of a switch there was fire.
I continued flipping the pages of the magazine, attempting to read but failing. I was still angry at myself for having gone on the Pill so unconsciously in college. At the time, I’d suffered from intense menstrual cramps and one of the student health center doctors had told me that the Pill would regulate my cycle and alleviate the cramps. “Plus, it’s great birth control,” she’d said. Going on the Pill seemed like a rite of passage for a college-age woman. It seemed like the responsible thing to do. Now, I wasn’t sure.
I had stayed on the Pill for nine years. When I’d gone off it, three years into my marriage, I had been so optimistic. I’d just assumed my cycle would resume. Bill and I had been living in London, having the expat experience of our lives. It was in England where I’d discovered holistic medicine and had taken every opportunity to study with pioneers in life coaching and the healing arts.
I became certified in reflexology and then as a life coach and counselor. I trained with teachers from Africa and Ireland and visited the research lab and greenhouses where flower essences and essential oils were distilled and transferred to the dark amber bottles we used at the holistic clinic where I went on to work. As manager of the clinic, I had the opportunity to apprentice with herbalists and homeopaths and a fourth-generation teacher of ayurvedic medicine from India.
Growing up in a traditional Western family, I was ignorant of alternative healing. There was no mention of meridians or quantum physics at the dinner table with Uncle Tom, the cardiologist from San Diego; or Aunt Jen and Uncle Alan, who worked in hospital administration in New England. If the subject of alternative medicine had come up among the Midwestern intellectuals on my mother’s side, it would have been seen as a joke, appropriate for a cartoon in The New Yorker. My new field of work seemed uncharted and exotic. At the same time, I felt I’d come home.
For the first two years we lived in London, Bill supported us while I did my postgraduate programs and training. I’d met him at the advertising agency where I worked straight out of college. He remained with the company, and his work with the agency was the source of our move to London. What I first noticed about him was his lean, wiry body and dark eyebrows that gave him the look of a character out of one of the Brontë novels I used to love.
One of our first conversations was on a walk back to the office from a business lunch, during which we discovered we shared a dream to live abroad in England and to have children. The relationship progressed, and within months we put in a request with human resources for a move to the UK, one that was initially greeted with a guffaw.
“We have English-speaking people who can do the work in England,” the company rep said. “The only way you’ll get transferred to London is if something gets majorly screwed up and you’re the only one in the agency who can fix it.”
We didn’t have to wait long. In June 1999, two weeks after Bill asked me to marry him, the account that he had spent the past five years growing in the United States was put on probation in London. He was, according to the executive vice presidents, the person to fix it. And so they moved us to London, into a row house on the River Thames, close enough for Bill to walk to the agency’s office in South Kensington.
We embraced the experience, spending long weekends in Paris and exploring London’s burgeoning culinary scene. I wrote and studied and worked part-time. I joined an artists’ group and started reading my pieces in small circles. I was offered a column in a holistic-health magazine, and Bill and I celebrated with a dinner at Nobu in Mayfair. We savored the freedom, taking care, as people often reminded us, to enjoy this time, unhindered, before we had children and would need to be more responsible.
I made the decision to go off the Pill because of an article I read at the clinic while preparing for a women’s health workshop on hormones. My friend Kaitlin, who was leading the workshop with me, discovered the work of a homeopath named Melissa Assilem, who’d written a treatise about taking a natural approach to women’s health. The article expressed concern about a possible link between women who’d been on the Pill for an extended time and later fertility issues.
“Young women in our culture are now going years, if not decades, without ever having a natural menstrual cycle.”
Even though I understood that the Pill controlled my menstrual cycle in some way, I had never considered exactly how it worked.
“Did you know we’re not even having real periods?” Kaitlin asked after I read the article. “Did you know we haven’t been ovulating?”
I had not known, and we guessed we were not the only women with a deep misunderstanding of what was happening in our bodies.
> “I am going off the Pill starting tonight,” Kaitlin said. I had come to the same decision. I offered to consult my gynecologist to obtain more information and went home to tell Bill I wanted to stop taking the Pill.
It was May and balmy for London. Bill made pizzas and we ate outside in the garden, from which we could make out the outline of colorful houseboats bobbing on the lapping brown water of the Thames. At low tide the river receded to expose rocky sludge and the houseboats sat wedged on the slanting gravel river floor; the air smelled mossy and damp.
“So, we just wouldn’t use any birth control?” he asked. I’d been on the Pill since I’d met him, and we’d never had to explore other methods.
“We can use condoms, or foam, or spermicidal jelly,” I said, giggling as I tried to recall various birth control methods I had learned about in seventh-grade sex ed.
“Actually, I’m fine if we don’t use anything.” He smiled at me and pulled at one of my fingers. “I know we’re planning to wait until we move back to the States, but if we have a baby sooner than planned, it certainly wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
I looked at Bill for a moment, surprised, and then grinned. I imagined strolling through Hyde Park with a baby in a Moby wrap, snuggled to my chest. The image filled me with joy. I reached for Bill’s hand and he squeezed mine firmly.
My gynecologist in London, Dr. Eagen, confirmed the information Kaitlin and I had read in Assilem’s article. Dr. Eagen was Cambridge educated, a tall, reedy woman with formal manners. She was caring, though, and took extra time in consultations. When answering a question, she would place on her nose and then remove a pair of wire-framed glasses to emphasize her points.
“The Pill does suppress ovulation. The period you have is caused by the low dose of hormones in the Pill,” she said, holding her glasses like a pointer in her left hand.