Why I'm Like This

by Cynthia Kaplan

  There’s a point when you are starting to think about having children that you begin to notice other people’s. And you say to each other, I want one of those. And you get excited. And then, oddly, the longer you try the more children you notice. In fact, everyone on the street is pushing a stroller and the ratio of pregnant women to non-pregnant women in your neighborhood is at least three to one. Everyone has a baby but you. Everyone can have a baby but you. All the other things your life is about aren’t what it is about anymore. They all go away. What were all the things I used to do? I was in a lot of plays. I was in some independent movies, but then, everyone in the world has been in some independent movies. I still hadn’t gotten on Law & Order. I wrote some stuff. A script, some essays, and some stories that I performed around. I went places with my husband. We went to movies and met up with friends and played tennis and went on ski vacations together. He’s a terrific guy, of course, but he’s no baby.

  Everyone says that the best way to get pregnant is just to get on with your life and not worry about it, and that’s what I tried to do. On the outside. But on the inside I did nothing and went nowhere. On the inside I was sick at the thought that I might not be able to have a child. I finally had a husband and security and work that I cared about, all the things I’d always considered the prerequisites of motherhood. And I was less woondangled and hublittered than I’d ever been. It never occurred to me in a million years that anything I was doing in my life was about becoming a mother but in retrospect, all roads led here. They would, I presumed, lead away again at some point. Or who knows, maybe not. But I kept coming back to the idea of Luck. I just wasn’t lucky. Other people were lucky. Why were other people lucky? And to me, being unlucky wasn’t just a manifestation of unseen forces in the universe; it was a personal flaw. Luck was something I somehow failed to have. Which by definition is contradictory, but it’s so like me to seek blame and yet refuse it at the same time.

  Every month I would take a blood test ten days after my presumed ovulation. A blood test could determine pregnancy several days earlier and with greater accuracy than a urine test, and the doctor wanted as much time as possible to prevent an early miscarriage. So one morning each month I would give blood at a lab on Eighty-sixth and Park and then the doctor’s assistant would call in the afternoon with the results. In order to prevent any miscommunication, her greeting was this: “Hi, it’s Suzanne, I’m sorry, sweetheart.” That was it. Every month. And then, after a few bloody, disconsolate days, she’d call with the next month’s instructions and we’d start again.

  I had a choice. I could take a Trial of Fertility Drugs or I could have the Laser Laparoscopy and Hysteroscopy. The latter were surgical procedures to find and repair endometriosis and/or, if possible, address any blockage not revealed by the dread Hysterogram. I had neither the symptoms nor a history of endometriosis, so my doctor recommended the drugs. I panicked. Even the lowest dose of Clomid, my doctor’s drug of choice, carried a 6 to 8 percent chance of twins. What a fertility drug does if you are not ovulating is to make you ovulate. If you are already ovulating, and I was, it induces the release of an extra egg or two, thereby upping the chances for fertilization. Yikes. Still, praying to the Forces of Good, or whatever, for one baby but not for two definitely did not seem right. I agreed to take the drugs.

  I was freaked out by the Clomid. It made me feel very on edge and I was already on edge. I was on the edge of the edge. I spoke in terse, one-or two-word sentences. My head ached. Keep your eyes on the prize, I told myself. Or prizes.

  Four eggs came down the chute. One was definitely mature, one might mature in time for ovulation, and two were teeny-weeny specks, useless, wasted things. That’s the way with the drugs. To help the front runners I was given a shot of HCG, or Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, in the ass. HCG, a naturally produced hormone, triggers ovulation within a certain window of time, so everyone, the eggs, the sperm, and I, can all get to the theater for curtain, so to speak. We also did two IUIs about twenty-four hours apart; David came home at lunch and we looked at a copy of Jugs together. Afterward, I started again with the progesterone suppositories.

  Nada.

  When my period finished I took another round of Clomid, this time with no misgivings. Bring on the babies. The more, the merrier. It had been a year since we started trying to conceive. That probably doesn’t seem like long to some people, but since I have a self-destructive habit of calculating my life in dog years, it was an eternity to me. We had all but worked our way through the doctor’s little pamphlet. He didn’t even list In Vitro Fertilization as an option because everyone knows it’s the last one. The last-ditch effort. I did not want to end up there, at the end of the line, with nothing else to try. At the same time, the doctor had yet to prove that conception was impossible using plain old sex. David and I could still keep trying after all the extraordinary measures had been exhausted. We would be like the inhabitants of Gilligan’s Island. We would stand on the beach and shout at ships on the horizon until Kingdom Come or we were canceled.

  Our doctor was a very fine doctor. We’d heard stories of couples he had helped who had been told by other infertility specialists to adopt. Perhaps he was like the doctor in Orange County who was caught impregnating his patients with his own super sperm. I tried not to care. The man was reasonable looking, and certainly he was very smart. He was a doctor. The only thing I didn’t like about him was that he talked too much. He chatted through every procedure, including the inseminations, most likely with the intention of keeping me relaxed. It had the opposite effect. He and his nurse would quiz me about current Broadway shows while he doused my uterus with David’s sperm. I don’t like it when David says anything other than “Oh, Cindy”; why would I want to talk theater? But I couldn’t find a graceful way to ask them to respect the sanctity of the moment. It seemed ungrateful. So I brought in my Walkman. I put my headphones on and closed my eyes and I guess they got the message because all I could hear was the Boss.

  I went into myself, into my body, Fantastic Voyage–like. I swam north with the sperm, single-minded. We were heading upstream to spawn. The doctor had actually praised this particular batch, so we were pretty pumped. We would save the species from extinction or die trying. We courted the hell out of those eggs. We took them out to dinner and held hands with them under the table. We walked twenty-five blocks in the snow and talked as if we’d known each other forever. We bought them flowers at the all-night deli and then slow-danced to “Jungleland.” We ate Häagen-Dazs from the carton watching Dana Andrews obsess over Gene Tierney in Laura on the Late Late Show.

  Then we made our move.

  Once again I went for my blood test. And once again I spent the afternoon in stone cold dread of the inevitable phone call from Suzanne. Things had gotten to the point where I could not imagine any answer other than no. I’d stopped envisioning my body as being capable of anything at all, much less conception. Nothing ever happens the way you think it will. When David proposed to me, I had to ask him to repeat himself because I hadn’t been listening. I had been thinking about my grandmother, Lil, who had just died, and my father, who had just had a heart attack. The whole thing, the romantic restaurant, the roses, the funny, crappy fourteen-dollar ring from Weber’s Closeout, all smooshed by in a blur. Most people I know are capable of giving highly detailed, minute-by-minute accounts of the defining moments of their lives, and I’m always like, “What did you say?” That is how I felt about trying to become pregnant. Like the moment of truth had somehow come and gone without my quite knowing what had happened. It was supposed to be so easy. Like on TV. “Remember when we made SusieJustinBrittanyMax?” “He touched my deepest fla fla.” “I don’t know how but I just knew.” I’d laid there with a pillow under my butt and my legs in the air and I knew nothing. I’d taken my temperature and put my fingers inside myself to gauge the quality of my vaginal mucus (stretchy like egg whites = fertile; tacky like old jam = infertile). I’d performed countless at-home ovulation te
sts and I’d gulped Robitussin, because I’d heard of women getting pregnant during bouts of cold and flu and that they credited the mucus-thinning agent in cough medicine. I’d gone to the best doctor I could find and done everything he told me to do. I’d wished on eyelashes, on chicken bones, on candles, on stars. And still, I knew nothing. And I’d come to the conclusion that those home pregnancy kits were a joke, a marketing scheme. They would never turn the other color or show two lines or three dots or a smiley face.

  So I waited and finally Suzanne called. She started talking about how I’d brought my Walkman in and something else, but I didn’t hear her because I was listening for the word “Sorry.”

  “Well, it must have been the Walkman,” she said.

  Where was “Sorry”? Come on. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

  “What?” I said.

  “It must have been the Walkman.”

  “What?”

  “It must have done the trick because you’re pregnant.”

  I just kept saying, “What, what? What did you say?” like I always do. And she repeated the whole thing again and I cried loudly and said, “Oh, my God,” thirty times.

  “Call your husband,” she said.

  I did. I called David and cried, “We did it!” That was the best I could do. I knew I was supposed to show up at his office with a bottle of champagne or FedEx him knit booties or casually refer to him as Daddy-o over a candlelit dinner. But I had no self-control. I was utterly incredulous, as if a dinner plate had spoken to me in French.

  Dumb luck. That’s all it was. Or, who knows, Grace. Divine leniency. This morning when my son saw me his face did this: Is that you? It is! It is you! Oh hooray! Hooray! HOORAY! And now, here we are riding up and down the elevator in Bloomingdale’s looking for pink shoes.

  mountain men

  IMAGINE, if you will, that it is late at night, maybe you’ve just come home from some jolly event, some dinner dance or cocktail party, and you’re feeling happy and relaxed. You’re getting ready for bed, grateful to be taking off your bra, when you hear a slight rustling behind you, so slight you might have made a mistake. Maybe it was just the wind in the curtains.

  If you had curtains.

  Suddenly, as if unleashed from a cage, It spirals frantically towards you. You scream, “Oh, God,” and run from the room, hoping against hope It does not follow you. Your husband springs into action. He knows what to do; he has been through this before. He must go into the bedroom, shut the door, and kill the moth.

  This is why I will be a bad mother. I am pathologically afraid of moths. I can’t stand their insane flapping, their arbitrary, freaked-out flight patterns. Their fuzzy, dingy bodies and papery wings disgust me. They are like wads of used tissue on acid. How they get into our apartment on the thirty-third floor is a mystery that haunts me. But they do. And sometimes they prove so elusive that I will walk and sleep in terror for days after their initial sightings, further tortured by the knowledge that one day, maybe years from now, I will find them petrified on surfaces upon which, given their utter incapacity for self-control, landing would seem inconceivable. Book bindings, the edges of drawers, the sides of poster frames. In the folds of shower curtains, on the cuffs of sweaters. I will jump at their dead selves, still horrified by their powdery, innocuous existences, and I will wait for David to arrive home and remove them.

  I should admit that I have other mostly morbid, unfounded fears, like of avalanches and Legionnaire’s disease, as well as perfectly normal fears that are remarkable only in that I dwell upon them for inordinate amounts of time and with unhealthy zeal until they have stopped being normal and become morbid and unfounded. I have tried to trace the history of my dread, starting with fear of adults and culminating with fear of being shot in the head by a sniper. In between, I have documented fear of being knocked over at recess by a big girl named Heather, fear of getting into a fatal argument over the TV remote, fear of Drano.

  And now, of all things, I am a person with a child. The idea of having your own is such an abstraction until the day arrives when you do. And then it is terrifying. An entire new assortment of fears descends upon you and you realize they will never ascend but rather multiply exponentially until you are carted away to the place where crazy people ride giant tri-cycles that your mother has requested she be sent to when and if the time comes that you do something so stupid and dangerous that you finally drive her out of her mind for good. Oh, my God, where was I? Oh, yes. In the first weeks of parenthood you are so completely wasted that you just feed the baby and change it and hold it and do all these things almost without thinking about it. And then it dawns on you: It’s alive. The poopy thing is alive and it is up to you to make sure it stays that way. Whatever you do, don’t drop it on its head. Don’t spill hot liquids on it. Don’t drink hot liquids. Be careful of its floppy neck. Be careful of its nose and mouth. Keep those airways free. Don’t forget that it exists when you go to the bathroom. Don’t wake up in the middle of the night and think for a second that it isn’t there, next to you, in the bassinet. Unless, of course, you fall asleep together after nursing and it is actually in your bed. Don’t roll over on it.

  Once upon a time my husband and I called each other from work to rehash the sex we had the night before. Now he calls me or I call him and this is what we say, furtively: “I have a bad story. I’m just telling you because it is a warning.” Ugh. It is the worst of all possible kinds of gossip; it is the dissemination of the Tragedy. Someone else’s tragedy, that is, often someone we don’t even know or have met only briefly or is a friend of a friend of a friend.

  And then I say to David: “No Fritos until the baby is four, no, five. No nuts and no hot dogs and no doughy bread and no peanut butter and no popcorn and no grapes. And no gum and no small hard candies. No Pez.”

  “No roughhousing,” I say, that night, when the baby is in his bed. “You always have to be in control. The baby can get out of control but you can’t. No jumping, no flinging, no tossing. Don’t trip.”

  I wake David at 3:00 A.M. to say, “He gets his own seat on a plane.”

  I call my friend who also has a baby. I tell her our most recent stories and then throw in some more accrued over the months. Stories that I have deposited in my bank of terrible stories, the account to be drawn upon and its filthy currency spent whenever I am feeling nervous or helpless, whenever I need to make a strong point in favor of doing things my way. The careful way. The boy-in-the-bubble way.

  Recently, my niece broke her wrist while she was on vacation in France with my brother, his wife, and their other daughter. She fell off a swing. Let me say first that I was not in France. And yet I have replayed the scene, or my rendering of it, over and over in my imagination. I take nothing in stride. How could it have happened? Wasn’t anyone watching? She herself told me about some Charging Wild Boars. What about them?

  This is how it goes, late into the night. Clearly, there is an ineluctable crack in my psyche which will eventually require surgery, or drugs, or both.

  A couple of years ago, as David and I rambled around our favorite store, a hiking-and-camping-supply store in Vermont, considering camping gear—tents, stoves, water-purification systems—I happened to open a book with a title that was something like Bear Attacks. What possessed me to do this is a question I have been asking myself on every hike and campout since. Did I need to read about people having their arms ripped off by ferocious bears? Did I need to read about people whose heads were mauled and torsos chomped and bones stripped bare? Did I need to hear them tell their tales themselves, in first person singular, an indication not only that they lived at all, maimed, scarred, in all their armless glory, but that they were semiconscious during the attack? If David thinks that we will take our baby camping with us next summer, he can do it with his new wife.

  Are there really bears out there? Yes. Would David and I take the baby hiking in serious bear country? No, of course not. And isn’t a rousing chorus of “I’m ’Enry the Yeighth, I Yam” in
a bad cockney accent sufficient to scare the occasional bear off? Besides, all bears really want to eat is your Doritos and your toothpaste. So, honestly, is there anything to be afraid of?

  Yes. Mountain Men.

  Mountain Men are men who live in the mountains and occasionally come down and kidnap female hikers. At least this is my understanding of them. They have long, matted beards and wear ancient Wrangler jeans and cheap flannel shirts and furry vests. They look like a countrified ZZ Top. They go too long without the company of womenfolk and litt’luns, which is what makes them so dangerous. Or so I gather.

  Sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it? I think so.

  My mother, like any really good mother, spent a reasonable portion of her life protecting her children from danger or at least trying to. She made me put one of those orange flags on the back of my bike and yelled at me when she passed in her car after I’d ditched it in the woods. She made me wear wool hats to high school despite the certainty that I would spend an agonized day with static hat head. She made me wear a Medic-Alert bracelet so, God forbid, any paramedic peeling me off the pavement would know I was allergic to penicillin. And her vigilance has not wavered with my adulthood. She still phones with hurricane alerts and migraine medicine updates and her newest clarion call: computer virus warnings. She hates that I take the subway, that I run in the park, that I visit friends in what she would call iffy neighborhoods. Ironically, I have pretty successfully repressed many of the everyday bugaboos associated with city life. I ride the subway at all hours. I walk dark streets with aplomb. I act unafraid and I pooh-pooh my mother to the point of insult: “Take a cab after midnight, are you mad?” Because what I really fear is the escaped mental patient, the rogue wave, the freak accident (The chandelier just fell, just like that!). I am more apt to think someone is following me on a nature trail in Montana than down an alley in Hell’s Kitchen.