by Sara Connell
I ran into the bedroom, trying to keep enough of it in my hands to show Bill. Dripping water onto the carpet, I extended my palm. “Do you see this! Look!”
Another thought came, so I went to the folder we’d kept of the twins’ ultrasound photos and doctors’ notes. A paper from our first appointment with Dr. Baker confirmed it: January 14 was the twins’ original due date.
I told Dr. Baker about the incident at my follow-up appointment the next week, fascinated to hear what she would make of the amazing mind-body connection.
“There are so many things we cannot medically explain,” she said, and changed the subject.
Her examination confirmed that my uterus had healed completely and we were clear to begin IVF again in the spring. “Just one embryo at a time though, Sara,” she said. Bill and I had come to the same conclusion, based on our own research. I’d also discovered that the term “incompetent cervix” did not apply in the case of multiples.
“So, it was more of an incompetent diagnosis,” I joked when I told Eleanor what I’d discovered.
“It’s a punishing name,” she said. “I support you in relinquishing it.”
The team at RMI welcomed us like family when we went for our next appointment.
“We want this for you now more than ever!” Tracey said, engulfing me in a hug. Dr. Colaum mapped out a new plan based on transferring one embryo. She added baby aspirin to offset the chance of blood clots (which can cause miscarriage) and Viagra to plump the uterine lining.
“Women can take Viagra?” I asked, feeling afraid of what effects the infamous medication might have on my body.
“You’ll be fine,” Dr. Colaum said. “You’ll insert three to four suppositories a day to increase the likelihood of implantation. If we’re going one embryo at a time, we’re going to use every possible resource.”
I warmed under Dr. Colaum’s enthusiasm. My body felt receptive and strong. This time, when UPS delivered the medications from Braun, I ran to the truck to sign and carried the box inside myself.
The day of our pregnancy test, Tracey said she would call us by 3:00 PM. I waited next to my phone like a loaded spring.
“I’m so sorry, Sara,” she said when she called. “You’re not pregnant this time.”
“It’s okay,” I said, feeling a need to reassure her.
We took the requisite two months off between cycles and did our next cycle in June.
The day of the pregnancy test, Rachel called. Bill had worked from home that afternoon, and we both felt hopeful.
The phone rang at 2:00 PM. When I saw the RMI number come up on my phone, I didn’t have a positive feeling.
“It doesn’t look good, Sar,” Rachel said. “Your HCG level is a three.”
Bill and I spent the weekend trying to talk ourselves through the disappointment.
“I understand statistically it’s a 33 percent chance. But I still think we will be pregnant every time,” he said.
Statistics meant little to my emotions. After a negative pregnancy test, fears swarmed like locusts. What if we never get pregnant again? What if something else is wrong with my body? The “no” ripped the scab off the wound, exposing grief that was still close to the surface. It erupted like a rash.
“I saw a woman slap her child in the checkout line, and I actually thought about taking her baby,” Bill said when he returned from the grocery store one evening. “I stood there thinking, You don’t deserve children. If you don’t treat that baby with love, I’ll take it.”
I brought my hands to his forehead and rubbed his temples.
“I’m losing it,” he said, leaning back into me.
A week later, we continued to feel low.
We were open to the idea of adoption and had discussed the option many times. But once we’d confirmed we had all the necessary parts to have children ourselves—good eggs and sperm, a healthy uterus—we felt called to continue, at least for now. On Tuesday after I got my period, we called Dr. Colaum’s and signed on for an August cycle.
At midnight on Friday, August 8, our house phone rang. We didn’t answer, assuming it was a wrong number. A few seconds later, Bill’s cell phone lit up next to the bed. Dread spread across my stomach like a brushfire. The landline rang again. Bill roused himself, his hair tousled and his face creased with sleep. Don’t make assumptions, I said to myself, trying to give whatever was on the line the benefit of the doubt.
“My mother’s dead,” Bill said, after a pained few seconds. His mouth had gone dry, and the saliva on his lips turned the skin white. He ran to the guest bathroom and threw up. He’d told his stepfather we’d leave for Omaha in the morning. I stood next to the bed, stunned and cold. Bill walked back and forth to the sink in our bathroom, drinking glass after glass of water. His skin began to look blue, and I wrapped the duvet around his body. For the next few hours, I held him in the bed, stroking his head until he fell into a fitful and exhausted sleep.
My mother drove through the night from Virginia to Nebraska to attend the memorial.
“I know you have so many people to attend to,” she said, surveying the crowd from the back of the chapel. “I’m just here to honor Nancy, to support Bill.”
“It is beyond beyond that you came,” Bill told her when he spotted her in the doorway.
“I’m here for you,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
She stayed in town, nearby with my grandmother, as we helped sort through Nancy’s things. When she stopped by the house before she drove back to Virginia, Bill asked if, moving forward, he could call her Mom.
At the end of the month, a tornado came through Chicago, throwing out power lines and flooding the basements on our street. A month later, a pipe broke in my office and sent two feet of water spraying through the walls, requiring that the entire floor and moldings be pulled out and redone.
I’d stopped taking the antianxiety medication in preparation for IVF and had begun having nightmares again. I would get out of bed multiple times a night to check that the front door was locked, that the floors were still dry, that the burners on the stove had not switched themselves on and started a gas fire. Bill said he felt cursed.
Sometimes, though, after my nightly rounds, I would sit in the solarium alcove and talk to the twins in their blue metal urns. Kaitlin had sent me an article about a sect of Judaism that believes the babies who “do not stay” become intercessors and guides for the children who are to come. I found the same lore in Mexican traditions describing how “the babies that pass through” are given a place of reverence in the family.
We’d installed a water feature next to the twins’ urns, and the constant gurgle was soothing. I looked out through the sliding glass doors up at the moon, a slash of light in a cloudless night. The Great Mother was there somewhere, I thought—existing, at least, as part of the collective consciousness, as Jung would say. I ran my fingers over the Y-branch that we’d found on the car after the twins’ cremation. The sight of that branch and the way it had come to us motivated me to continue.
Our fourth round of IVF started under a new moon, which was said to be auspicious for new projects. I’d stopped trying to feel for an intuitive knowing about the outcome of the cycle, surrendering myself to the idea that I was not in control. All I could do was take the medication and bring my body to the procedure.
Dr. Colaum transferred one blast. I watched the screen as the blast shot into my womb. My eyes had become more practiced over the past three cycles. This time, I saw the embryo land, a white meteor falling from space.
“It doesn’t get any better than that,” Dr. Colaum said with a confident smile.
Nine days later, Tracey and Rachel called together. “You’re pregnant, Sara! Your HCG levels look good.”
We called all the grandparents in a round; they rejoiced and expressed having felt parched for good news. My mother and I signed up for BabyCenter again. I did my best to join the excitement, but felt wary and afraid. I told myself I was having a new experience, that I
could trust this baby to grow. The bubble of impenetrability was gone, though, and I clenched with every twinge in my abdomen, squeezed my eyes shut each time I went to the bathroom, terrified to see blood. I worried that the stress and anxiety I was feeling would hurt the baby; pregnancy books and the Internet stressed the importance of being relaxed and joyful in order to have a successful pregnancy.
Kaitlin reminded me what her doctor had told her when she became pregnant after having three miscarriages: “Women have babies in the middle of war-torn countries; women have babies from rape. I’m not saying stress is wonderful or that it wouldn’t be good to relax, but you are not going to kill your baby from being anxious. Anyone who says so is misguided.” Kaitlin was eleven weeks pregnant again. Six months later, her son, Eli, was born a healthy eight pounds, three ounces, at forty-one weeks.
On a Wednesday night six weeks into the pregnancy, I started to bleed. It was nine thirty. Bill was at the sink in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. I stood over the toilet; the halogen lights in our bathroom glowed happily, the white spa towels were stacked high, the rows of my essential oils stood straight. No sign that anything was amiss.
“I’m bleeding!” I called to Bill.
“No,” Bill said, opening the door that separated the toilet from the greater bathroom. He looked at the toilet paper in my hand, thick drops of red and brown blood. “No. It’s just spotting. All the websites say you can spot. Remember your friend who had almost a full period and her baby was fine?”
“I think it’s too much blood for spotting,” I said.
“It’s not,” Bill said, the way a child might when not getting the toy he wanted.
I placed a thick pad in a clean pair of underwear and shoved the stained pair into a plastic bag.
“I guess we can wait a little while to call,” I said. Dr. Colaum’s staff had left hours ago. The RMI literature said to call the emergency number only if I was bleeding through a pad an hour. I kept a watch on the bleeding.
I walked in circles around the bathroom. Maybe it was just spotting. Maybe the pregnancy would continue. The cramps intensified, and I felt the warmth of more blood. I could not imagine that this was good. My forehead felt prickly and hot.
“I don’t feel good,” I said to Bill.
His eyes were glassy and he looked crazed. “Don’t you say it,” he hissed, his words menacing and sharp. “We are not having . . . ” He refused to say the word. His voice was raised and hot with anger. “My mother wouldn’t let this happen.”
Grief enfolded Bill like a cape. I wasn’t sure he could even see me anymore.
I felt like I was cracking, like a stone statue turning into dust. Bill turned away from me, jumped in bed, and pulled the covers over his face. I felt fully abandoned. I slept, or rather lay awake, in the hallway between our bedroom and the bathroom, arms and legs curled into a circle, the way our Labrador slept when he was sick.
Dr. Colaum performed an ultrasound the next morning. Bill had apologized on the drive to Evanston and now seemed himself, his face poised like that of an army general about to hear news of a battle. I felt empty and bereft.
“It doesn’t look good,” Dr. Colaum said. The blood had washed the embryo and growing placenta away like rain. “I’m guessing it was something with the embryo,” she said. “Sometimes it’s as if nature knows there’s a problem; the embryos self-select out.”
In equal part with the sadness I felt, I also felt relief. Relief that the miscarriage had happened this early, that there was no physical trauma. I felt relief that I did not need to spend every minute of every day and night gripped by anxiety and fear. Going into this pregnancy, I’d been so worried about my body and its ability to carry the baby, but now, as I felt the cascades of relief course through me, I wondered for the first time about my mental ability to carry a child in the future.
I doubled up on therapy sessions and EMDR. I met with a woman named Sheila Swenson for hypnosis. I increased my meditation time and upped my yoga practice to two or three times a week. I knew myself to be a courageous and capable person. I was determined to overcome the plaguing terror and doubts I felt about pregnancy.
Bill and I took on more work to generate the money we would need for a next round of IVF. We’d used up the allotted three cycles covered by insurance and would need to pay the entire $20,000 ourselves. “Do you offer frequent-flyer discounts?” I joked to Lisa Rinehart when I saw her at the end of our next consultation. If we paid in cash, RMI would knock 5 percent off the cost.
A friend of Bill’s from college contacted him through email and shared that he and his wife had stopped trying after three cycles. They had decided not to have children. Other people told us stories about couples that stopped trying and then became pregnant. I did not believe we would become pregnant unaided. I was afraid of pregnancy and did not love doing IVF, but I wanted to have children and believed this was our way.
We did our fifth cycle of IVF at the beginning of 2009. For the first time, a small part of me actually hoped that we were not pregnant. As hard as I tried not to, I kept seeing blood, Bill screaming at me while I miscarried. When the pregnancy test was negative, I felt both crushed and relieved.
Bill and I agreed we needed a break. Financially, we would need time to fill up our reserves again. Emotionally, we felt brittle and spent. We decided we would take eight months off from doing any fertility treatments. We would take a vacation. Friends told us about a new place in Mexico that looked nurturing and serene. We would go away, cleanse our palates, reconnect with each other as a couple.
We agreed to check in with each other once a month. In between, we would spend time on our own considering all options, listening for what we felt guided to do: more IVF, surrogacy, adoption. Outside of the check-ins, we would not talk about babies or fertility.
We shared our intentions with our parents. “We’re taking a break,” we said. “We will let you know when we have something to share.”
“This sounds really healthy,” my mother said. “You can take some trips and focus on your coaching practice. Frankly, I could use a life coach. One of these days I am going to come to one of your workshops and see what it is, exactly, that you do.”
Every January, I facilitated a vision workshop in Chicago where participants explored a vision for their year, using coaching exercises and techniques. Unbeknownst to me, my mother called Bill to find out the details and arranged to attend that year’s event. The workshop had grown in number in the four years I’d offered it, and when she arrived there was a line out the door of the venue in Lincoln Park that was sponsoring the event.
I was shocked when I saw her, standing in a new gray peacoat, snowflakes sticking to her eyelashes and the tops of her hair.
“I’m here as a participant,” she said. “I think I need what you’re teaching today.”
I tried not to think about her reaction to the activities of the day. To my knowledge she had never tried life coaching and had always seemed skeptical of counseling and therapy work. Facilitating demanded all of my attention. Nearly eighty people showed up, and I had to adapt some of the exercises to accommodate the large group. I didn’t think about my mother’s reactions again until we’d finished and I’d helped the volunteers restore the room. Then I saw her, standing patiently by the door, as a few last people surrounded me with questions.
She spent the ride back to my house telling me about the small group exercise and how interesting the people in her group were. “We visioned that one of the men’s screenplays won an Oscar,” my mother said. “And that this other guy, Kurt, who does standup, emceed a roast for Bill Gates.”
My mother had also told my sister and brother-in-law about her surprise visit. They were in our kitchen with Bill when we came in from the garage. Bill had spent the afternoon cooking a stew. We entered the house to a crackling fire and rich smells of black pepper and red wine coming from the stove.
“How was it?” Bill asked.
“Fantastic,” my moth
er said. “But Sara is going to have to explain the vision board I made. I don’t understand over half the things on it. Will you come upstairs with me?”
I carried my mother’s suitcase to the guest room and she laid the vision board on the bed. The lower half of the board was full of images of fresh vegetables and healthy food, a bike and active people running. In the top left corner, there was a young woman with a baby.
“That’s you and your baby,” my mother said. My eyes filled. “Is it okay to include visions for other people?”
“No rules,” I said, my throat tight. In one corner was a red magazine page with the words “women after menopause have a choice.” In the center she’d pasted a large baby ostrich with its beak wide open, eyes bulging with joy. “I don’t know what to make of this image,” she said. “I chose it because I want to find or do whatever makes me feel like that ostrich,” she said. She ran her hands lovingly over the glossy photo.
“I really don’t understand the menopause part,” she said. “I think I meant retirement, that people after retirement have a choice. I’ll cover it over when I get home.”
Over hot plates of stew, my mother told Bill and my sister and brother-in-law about the big crowd and the part at the end where they imagined scenarios in which their visions had already happened. “Sara is a great teacher,” she said. “Everyone loved it.”
Over the next few months, my mother called with coaching questions. “What I want is to find my calling,” she said. “I have my vision board up on the wall in my room where I see it every day, but I still don’t have a clue.”