Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  I was joking, because I felt I needed to joke. But I believed what I said, that a baby would bring about a new chapter for me and Aaron. I was twenty-seven. He was thirty-four. We had been together for ten years. He had wanted to be a dad since I met him. Getting pregnant would ignite in him, I was certain, the spontaneous desire to (1) see a shrink, (2) quit smoking, and (3) get a job. I would will the life I wanted with my womb.

  * * *

  I went about trying to get pregnant with the determination, organization, and superstition that my father had put into trying to win the Florida lottery. When I was growing up, he kept a binder full of all of his pink scantron-bubble sheets, a record of all the winning numbers, line graphs charting frequency, form, design: an attempt to de-randomize the random. My father’s daughter, I owned graph paper, clipboards, fine colored pencils, with which I charted my cycle month by month. I took my temperature every morning. I learned the rather humiliating list of abbreviations in the fertility chat rooms. I bought the giant and famous book Taking Charge of Your Fertility. I bought a little ovulation predictor kit with a tiny microscope that lived in a velvet sack in our bathroom drawer; it required spitting on test strips and watching the pattern of my saliva, noticing the way it ferned or didn’t fern. I couldn’t see anything in those strips, but it gave me a strange rush of power and wonder, that my body, without my knowing, was producing signs and symbols of its mysterious utility.

  There are people who struggle with fertility for years, whose stories include drugs and donors and IVF and loss. I heard those stories in my chat room. Compared to those, my story was small.

  But it was still painful. A few months into the process, I started having terrible cramps. Periods unlike I’d ever had before. And sex started to hurt. When you’re trying to get pregnant and sex hurts, and then you get your period and not only are you not pregnant, but you feel like your whole body will shatter, it sucks.

  I went to the doctor. A young internist who I later learned was pregnant with twins. This detail would sting: that she had interfered with my having a baby, and she was having two. I explained my symptoms. I’d done some Googling. “Could it be endometriosis?” I asked. I was embarrassed to ask it, as though my illness might inconvenience her.

  She gave me a paternal smile. “What does it feel like?”

  I didn’t know to say, “It feels like uterine tissue is growing outside of my uterus.” I said, “It feels like really bad gas.”

  “Then it’s probably gas,” she said.

  I cried a lot those months, in pain and in frustration, in shame over my false hopes, in my wildly misinterpreted symptoms, a phantom boob pain, an abdominal twinge. I cried on the phone to my mother as I dusted the dressers. “It’s the only thing I’ve never been able to control!” My house was very clean in those months. I got my period, I lay in agony on the couch, and then when it was over I got up and cleaned and cleaned.

  My mother understood. She hadn’t been able to get pregnant for a long time, either. I had known in my bones that I might have inherited my mother’s diminished fertility. Maybe that was why I’d thrown myself so scientifically into trying to conceive. There was little my mother could do to comfort me, though, and little Aaron could do.

  Of course, he did his part, happily. When my temperature rose, he did his part two, three, four times a day. Afterward, he helped me slip a pillow under my hips. He shared my excitement, and my disappointment. But the project was my own, and it was not a romantic one. The charts, the books, the test kits were my own. I retreated into my chat rooms, spent hours there speaking a language of mourning and hope Aaron could not decode. Praying for a positive LH for you and your DH!

  Perhaps, it is easy to say now, if I had put a little more effort into our marriage as it was, I might not have needed to force a fantasy upon it, might not have needed to narrow our odds to one solution. Things will be better when we have a baby. We might have tried talking about what was really on our minds, the resentment and fear and isolation that had crept into our house like mold. We might have tried some therapy.

  Aaron himself had agreed to see a psychiatrist. There was that. He knew he was depressed. He was ready to try a new medication, to get some help. I called the same doctor Callie had recommended when I was looking for a therapist and this time we were referred to a Dr. North. I dropped Aaron off for that first appointment at a second-story office in a brick building above a music venue downtown, and I picked him up. “He’s a good guy,” he determined. Older fellow, gray in his wavy hair, experienced, mellow, respected in the community. Dr. North prescribed him Lexapro. In time, Aaron came to trust him enough to tell him about his father’s abuse. He was the first mental health professional he’d ever confided in.

  What else they talked about inside that building I didn’t know. What was Aaron’s story about those months? Was he sad that we weren’t getting pregnant, or was he just sad that we’d become a fertility factory?

  We flew to Mexico, swam in cenotes, zip-lined through the rain forest. Aaron threw up on the ferry to Cozumel, and then on the ferry back. We sunbathed and drank and bought weed on the street, and I thought Jesus, can’t he go one week without weed, thought Maybe we’re not getting pregnant because he smokes too much weed, then Maybe he has the right idea, and for the first time in a long time I smoked some with him, out on our hotel balcony. Relax, I thought. I tried. We tried.

  * * *

  I had read all of Taking Charge of Your Fertility, but when we returned from Mexico, I read it again. This time, I stopped at the description of endometriosis. Pain during menstruation, pain during sex, back pain, excessive bleeding, infertility. Now, that last symptom leapt off the page. It had been eight months.

  This time I went to an ob-gyn. “I think I have endometriosis,” I told her. She told me, “I think you do, too.”

  The word rang a bell for my mother. Endometriosis, I told her, ran in families. Maybe, back in the early seventies, the doctor had just said “blocked tubes,” not explaining what those tubes were blocked with. “Who knows,” said my mother, “if I passed it down to you?”

  My mother came for the laparoscopic surgery. She and Aaron were there when they put me under, and they were there when I woke up. How sweet their friendship was. I imagine that they got a snack in the hospital cafeteria while they waited, smoked a cigarette or three.

  In the course of the surgery, endometrial tissue was in fact discovered in my fallopian tubes and removed. It made sense. A decade of hormones from birth control pills had suppressed the disease, and then, set loose, it had roared back. A flare.

  * * *

  You kept trying. Your body, a machine put back together, wept a rusty blood. You might have let go of the charts and graphs, now that you knew what the problem had been, but still you minded the calendar. When your husband made a plan to go to Florida, you made sure he went in between cycles.

  Why did he go, and why didn’t you go with him? Now you can’t remember why. His father was gone, but he was still going to Florida, to retrieve things from his father’s storage units to sell, to have hurricane shutters installed at his father’s condo, to see friends. You weren’t teaching that summer. You might have gone along. You might have done a lot of different things. Maybe staying at his father’s place didn’t sound like a vacation. Maybe trying to get pregnant had exhausted you both, and you needed some time apart.

  Tell it fast, like ripping off a Band-Aid. Your husband was gone nearly a month. You were sad, desperate even, lonely, confused, your hormones made you a person you didn’t recognize. These are all the reasons why, when you attend a two-day conference at work, a department assessment of academic writing—is there anything less sexy?—your attention is captured by the guy sitting across from you. A colleague—how that word will be corrupted for the rest of your marriage—you’d never met before. He complimented your shoes. He drank tea from a mason jar, had another full of homemade trail mix. At the end of the second day, a beer with other colleagues. Y
ou had so much in common! You were both writers! And teachers! He laughed at your jokes! He asked about your novel! Six years you’d been writing this book, asking your husband to read it, leaving the half-finished manuscript on the coffee table, like you used to leave the Help Wanted ads, a passive-aggressive stack of demands: Read me. And here was this guy you’d known for two days, asking to read your book. He paid attention to you in a way you did not know you needed.

  Look, it didn’t take a lot. You were not a girl to whom many guys paid attention. In the seventh grade, sitting in the courtyard before homeroom, the jockiest jock in school had laughed at your boyfriend in front of you. This is her? he asked, and laughed. You and your boyfriend sat in a quiet puddle of shame, and the next day you broke up with him in a note, even though he was a nice guy, because who wants to be someone’s laughable girlfriend?

  Excuses. It was flirting. You didn’t act on any feelings. But the feelings—they were there. They had you by the neck. They scared you. You paced the house. You walked the dog. That the beautiful house you built, the marriage you built, might explode: you felt sick to your stomach. You had that Sylvia Plath line in your head, from “Lady Lazarus.” What a trash / To annihilate each decade.

  You called Ursula. “I feel sick to my stomach.”

  “Tell him,” she advised.

  “He’ll die,” I told her. “He’ll want to die.”

  “Maybe he’ll understand. Maybe you can work through it.”

  What did you want to work through? What did you want? You couldn’t tell up from down when he came home. He parked the car, came through the gate, big smile on his face. It had been a long drive, a long time. You met him on the porch, heart beating. How many times had you wanted to have a talk? To say, We are in trouble. To say, We need help. How many times had you backed down?

  “Let’s sit,” you said.

  His face fell.

  You were on the verge of ovulating. He was supposed to be carrying you inside. But on the red porch swing, you told him you’d met someone. You liked him. You didn’t know what it meant. You didn’t know what you wanted.

  His face fell. Then hardened. “You want to be with this guy?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  Part of you knew it already: it wasn’t about the trail mix guy. There were a thousand trail mix guys out there just like him. Who knows if he even wanted you? Before long you wouldn’t feel anything for him but embarrassment. He will be a series of cartoonish details—your husband will ask for all the details, and you’ll give them—that will trigger you both for the rest of your days. It wasn’t about him. It was about the hole he revealed in your marriage, gaping, a silent chasm. It was about the part of you that you’d silenced or stored away, the part that wanted more than the perfect house and the job and the dog and even more than a baby: the part that wanted more. What, exactly? More connection? More common ground? We don’t have anything in common anymore, was how you put it. Cutting out the words for him with children’s safety scissors, not wanting to harm. Did you want him to make his own trail mix? To read your novel? To do something with his talent? To take an interest in his health, in literature, art, the future, life? What you really wanted—was it for him to be, simply, someone, something else?

  No, no. He had simply gone away, and it had taken his going away to understand just how far you were from each other, just how far you’d drifted apart.

  Perhaps a regular kind of marriage, then, a regular kind of problem. But it was not mended in a regular way. You didn’t go to couples counseling. You didn’t start talking about your problems or saying what you wanted. And you didn’t even consider trying to stop getting pregnant. You did what you always did: backtracked, sewed up, soothed. And after many unbearable hours on the porch, as the sky darkened and you’d both talked yourselves dry, you took him into the bedroom and made peace.

  * * *

  There’s this dark, secret stanza in “Everything I Have Is Yours.” It can only be found in the early versions of the song:

  My love is yours alone

  You came and captured

  A heart that was free

  Now there’s nothing I can call my own

  The opposite of everything is nothing. “I Have Nothing.” “Everything I Do, I Do It for You.” Those were the songs of two of your middle school friends and their boyfriends. You always wanted a boyfriend, if only so you could claim a song, too. What could you expect, growing up with these ballads on the radio, but this totality of sacrifice? Your heart didn’t get to be free.

  In the coming days, he began to turn into stone. Stopped talking. Stopped eating.

  “Come back,” you told him. “Let’s work this out. Come back,” you said, “I love you.”

  “We’d be breaking up, wouldn’t we?” he asked. “If we weren’t married.”

  “No,” you told him, “of course not.”

  But you said you didn’t know what you wanted, he said.

  You said, “I was confused.”

  And then, a few days after his return, you went to Vermont. He was supposed to go with you, for a friend’s wedding. But he could not go to Vermont. He could not leave the couch. You were scared to leave him again, scared of what he might do. Scared that he would not be there when you returned. Go, he said. You could have stayed. Would it have been better to stay, to work on your marriage? Or was that the problem, always staying, always taking care of him, when you wanted to go to weddings in Vermont?

  You went. Got in the car and drove north in the rain. You didn’t get far. A half hour out of town, on the wet, dark road—you were talking to Ursula on your cell phone, already crying, it was before hands-free laws!—a deer appeared in your headlights. You turned the wheel, braked, screamed, pinwheeled, fishtailed, how many times, across the opposite lane, across the median, thought you were dead, came to rest against the barricade. Alive. But totaled.

  You called AAA. They towed the car. And, of course, you called him, and of course he came to pick you up.

  Maybe it was a sign. You were so shaken. You could have been dead. In bed, you cried on his shoulder. Come with me, you said, please. So many times, you’d tried to coax him to you.

  The next day, you rented a car and made the drive to Vermont by yourself. At your friend’s wedding, in the misty Green Mountains, you watched the whole beautiful ceremony as if you were made of cardboard. After it, while everyone else filed into the tent, you crouched behind a tree in your coral-colored dress and cried.

  * * *

  At home in Virginia, you returned to find your husband had not resumed eating. He was a husk.

  Was he punishing himself, or you?

  Eat, you told him. Please. You have to eat.

  He had looked up the guy while you were gone. You had told him his name when he asked for it, and then he wanted to see his face. He had seen the guy’s face, the slender cheekbones, and now he would be skin and bones, he would make you want him again. At least that’s the way you saw it. But it wasn’t like that. You told him, He’s no one. You told him, You’re beautiful to me, and meant it.

  He had also gone to see Dr. North, his psychiatrist. It was one of the reasons he’d wanted to stay, to make his appointment. He had bonded with the man, whose wife, it turned out, had cheated on him. Your husband told you this. You pointed out that you had not cheated. You felt a little cheated on yourself, felt the loyalties shifting, the loyal men against the unsatisfied women. You could hear in his voice the new love he had for his fellow man.

  You told him, patiently, I’m sorry.

  You told him, angrily, I didn’t do anything wrong!

  You yelled—you were beginning to yell—For fuck’s sake!

  You didn’t yell, Get over it.

  You remembered a recent visit your parents had made to Charlottesville. All of you sitting outside at a restaurant. For some reason you had mentioned an old boyfriend of Mom’s, a college boyfriend—here she was, a woman in her sixties—and
she kicked you, hard, under the table. Don’t go there. An almost imperceptible nod toward your father.

  You thought, Jesus, did your mother have an affair or something?

  But maybe she hadn’t. Maybe it was enough to say another man’s name. And that was enough to undo him.

  * * *

  I was wrong, of course. When I told my mother that getting pregnant was the one thing I couldn’t control, what I wasn’t saying was that getting pregnant was an attempt to rewrite my story with Aaron, to guide us toward some new and promising future, and that he, more than anything, had always been beyond my control.

  Of course, I wanted a baby, badly. I wanted to be a mother. My mother talked about the dolls I’d had as a child, a new life-like baby I demanded every Christmas. I gave them serious names, like Jonathan and Sebastian. It was a want that preceded any man. But now I wanted a baby with this man, and I couldn’t have one.

  After a year of trying unsuccessfully to conceive, a woman is officially deemed infertile. We didn’t waste any time. We had hoped that the surgery would clear my tubes enough so that I could get pregnant on my own, but four months later, it hadn’t happened. We were still on the clock—the endo could come back at any time. We’d invested so much! Can’t stop now! We went to the fertility clinic. We did some tests. It was recommended that we try intrauterine insemination. We made an appointment. I was prescribed Clomid, to stimulate my hormones before the procedure. I picked up the prescription, ready to start it at my next cycle. I was ready to log it all in my notebook.

  I’d like to think I relaxed a little that month, but I was probably just tired. Distracted, looking the other way, toward the next month, and the next. I wasn’t thinking about the non-medicalized sex I was having with my husband that month. It was still make-up sex, the only kind of communication we seemed capable of, our wordless way of trying to repair the damage. My own body, it was repairing itself, building its own scar tissue. On my belly were the three little scars from the surgery, two under my bikini bottoms, one in my navel. I watched them heal and fade and then all but disappear. I brushed them with my fingers, my secret battle wounds, tiny talismans of hope. And after I got pregnant—to our amazement, on our own, in that thirteenth month—I watched them stretch across my growing belly, bright and proud.