The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost

by Robin Rinaldi

  One night I lit a log in the fireplace, Scott slipped a DVD into the player, and we settled onto the couch with our cat, Cleo. A picture-perfect calico, Cleo had been with us since she was only days old. We’d found her and her littermates orphaned on the side of the road near the software company back in Sacramento and fed her through an eyedropper for many weeks. Now she was fourteen.

  The film was Munich. Its opening scene showed a close-up of a husband hungrily fucking his wife from behind. A clear, assured voice in my head pronounced: That’s what I want. The statement was so simple, yet somehow revelatory. Then the camera pulled back to expose the wife’s huge pregnant belly, and in that moment the unrequited yearning in my gut knotted itself into a kernel of pure will.

  * * *

  At my annual exam, I asked my doctor to include an FSH count in my blood work. “FSH” stood for follicle-stimulating hormone, a basic measure of fertility; the lower the number, the easier it was to get pregnant. Mine was low for a forty-two-year-old, as low as many women would test in their early thirties. “And you’ve got a lot of estrogen left,” she said, “which means you’d be able to carry to term. Still, it’s pretty much now or never.”

  That sent me in search of a new therapist. Delphyne had a PhD in feminist spirituality and a long mane of thick auburn hair. She wore dark eyeliner and maroon lipstick. She adorned her fingers in gold and jade, and her flowing skirts breached the top of lace-up boots. I suspected many tattoos beneath her clothing.

  Week after week, I sat in Delphyne’s office looking up at a painting of the Hawaiian fire goddess, Pele, which hung above her door. According to legend, Pele had spewed lava from beneath the sea to form the island of Hawaii and made her home in the caldera of its most active volcano, Kilauea. She was creator and destroyer, a source of both love and violence. The goddess’s black hair flowed outward into liquid flames and her orange eyes bored into me, asking where I was going to draw the line. I wanted a baby, yes, but how badly? What was I willing to do for it?

  It turned out that Chris, my so-called gay husband, also wanted a child. Knowing my predicament, he offered to artificially inseminate me and share custody. In theory, the deal looked perfect. Chris was a published author, financially secure, and his family supported the idea. I could be a half-time mother, Scott a half-time stepdad. Scott and I would still have lots of energy for hobbies and travel. When I broached the subject, Scott actually said he’d consider it because he didn’t want to stop me from experiencing motherhood.

  When Delphyne had me sit quietly and envision this scenario, however, it made my heart sink. I couldn’t fathom how Scott would consent to let another man inseminate me before he’d do it himself. Grateful as I was to Chris, the baby itself wasn’t the goal. It was the process I wanted, and I wanted it with Scott. Was that asking too much? How difficult could it be to convince my own husband to impregnate me? Left and right, teenagers and lesbians alike were bulging in the belly.

  While I knew a baby couldn’t save a bad marriage, I felt sure it could bolster mine from perfectly decent into something to which I could devote myself. We’d surmounted so much: a long illness in my thirties, our substantial commitment fears, two cross-country moves, and the usual slew of family crises. True, we didn’t have wall-banging sex, but when I polled my married friends, I realized how exceptional was the fact that after sixteen years we still had regular sex once or twice a week—sex that lasted forty-five minutes and often ended in joyful tears.

  In private, my friends and family occasionally labeled Scott selfish for not wanting children and, by default, my maternal longing unselfish. I didn’t buy it. Every woman I knew who’d gotten pregnant had done it one of two ways: by accident or out of an urgent drive to become a mother. I had no illusions about motherhood being easy. But it came with deep emotional and societal rewards, and I saw no one consciously pursuing it without those rewards in mind.

  Delphyne exuded dark wisdom. After many weeks spent lobbing seemingly unrelated questions my way—questions about my female friendships in particular, which buzzed about my addled mind like annoying insects—she took another tack. She handed me a tall green candle in a glass jar. She had poured it herself and decorated the jar with an image of Demeter, the Greek goddess of motherhood. Her arms spread wide, the goddess wore a long golden dress and a crown of wheat stalks.

  “Take this home and light it,” Delphyne told me. “Let it burn until the flame dies. Maybe it will bring you clarity.”

  I did as instructed, placing the candle on my nightstand, letting it burn through the day and night. By the time the flame went out, my period was several days late.

  * * *

  Scott always left for work by 6:30, so I was alone in the house. The December dawn filtered in through the light well window in the bathroom. I sat on the toilet, my bare legs trembling. Next to me on the sink lay my cell phone and a digital pregnancy test. I uncapped the test and peed onto it—one, two, three, four, five seconds—then shook it off, laid it carefully back down, pulled up my pajamas, and waited. The last time I was pregnant, when I was nineteen, I’d driven from Planned Parenthood in Scranton straight to my mother’s house for dinner, containing my tears. On the porch, as I was leaving, I turned to her and said, “I have to talk to you.” The fall dusk hung crisp around us. My youngest brothers had just run back inside, yelling and wrestling. My fourteen-year-old brother was at football practice. My dad was out gambling, drinking, or fucking. That was good. Relief permeated the house in his absence.

  She looked at me squarely. “You’re pregnant.”

  I gave a little gasp. “How did you know?”

  “You’re not keeping it. Make the arrangements, and I’ll take you.”

  She didn’t have to tell me that. I’d already made up my mind. Two weeks later she drove me to New York and held me while I cried in the recovery room, groggy and doubled over with cramps. I remember walking up to the clinic, my mother behind me, and stopping at the entrance. I stared at the glass door as if it were made of bolted steel, thinking I can’t do this. I remember the counselor in pink scrubs who sat with me in the low-lit surgery waiting room, saying, “You’re going to sleep like a baby tonight, you just wait.” I remember, right before going under, the doctor’s hand inside me and his voice announcing, “Seven weeks,” as if from the next room. I knew only two things: that I was not strong enough to carry a child and then give it away, and that I would rather die than trap myself in my hometown with a baby and no college degree. The kindly counselor turned out to be right. On the way home we stopped at my favorite restaurant, where my mother ordered me a steak, and afterward I slept for twelve hours. We told everyone we’d gone to Atlantic City for the day, to gamble.

  As I sat on the toilet waiting, I still harbored potent fears of motherhood—surrendering control of my body, giving up all my mental space and sense of self, and, worst of all, the possibility of suffocating so much under a child’s constant needs that I hurt or abandoned her. Now, though, I was equally afraid of not being pregnant—of the existential default in which I skirted life’s surface, locked mentally into a thousand possibilities while never committing to any, experiencing the world through a jumble of restless potential.

  The test beeped. I picked it up and there in tiny sans serif font it said: “Pregnant.” With a capital “P.”

  My fingers shook as I dialed my best friend, Susan, in Los Angeles.

  “Am I waking you?” I asked.

  “No, I’m just getting Amelia ready for school. Did you do it?”

  “Yes. It’s positive.”

  “Oh my god. Wow. How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, but even as I spoke, I looked up in the bathroom mirror and saw a smile. And then words came. “Oh my god, Susan, I won. I can’t believe it. I won.”

  I wasn’t sure what I meant. What, exactly, did I win? The power struggle with Scott? The last and greatest trophy of modern womanhood: college degree, enviable job, handsome husband, beauti
ful house, and now, just in the nick of time, baby? Or something much deeper than any of that, namely the battle of hope—maybe I could create a happy family, a happy life—over memory?

  “All right, take a breath,” Susan said. “Call your doctor right now and tell her you want a blood test to confirm it.”

  Susan knew the drill. When she was forty, with no boyfriend in sight, she went to a sperm bank and chose Number 58499, a grad student who was studying music and willing to meet the baby when she turned eighteen. Since then, Susan had dedicated her waking life to being a single, working mother. The woman who once jetted off to Belize and Venezuela now spent every free moment cooking, cleaning, chauffeuring, and bathing, all while nursing what seemed like a never-ending string of viruses Amelia brought home from preschool. I never worried about Susan, though, because I remembered one afternoon when she’d just come from an insemination and had to lie with her legs up for several hours. We were on the phone, and, trying to be helpful, I said something like, “No matter what happens, it’ll be okay.”

  “No, it won’t,” she replied. “If I don’t have a baby, I’m really not all that interested in being on this planet.”

  If Susan’s maternal instinct was a roar, mine was a whisper. It had slowly and quietly fought its way to life against my mother’s warnings like a weed in a sidewalk crack. Subterranean and tenuous, its sole chance of manifestation was the old-fashioned method: in my bed, with my husband, the only human being I’d ever fully trusted.

  And now, beyond all odds, it would get its chance.

  I slipped on a skirt and boots, ran my hand over my abdomen, and headed out to work under a mauve-blue sky. The winter wind braced my cheeks, and a hundred little surges unfurled inside me like tendrils, accompanied by a checklist of anticipation. I would eat well. I would be offered seats on buses. I would join a hallowed sisterhood, one that even my mother had come to honor in time. Scott and I would be guided by primal forces larger than our fears. This baby would change us in the best possible ways: fulfilling my need to be needed, snapping Scott from his philosophical heights down to the mire of fragile flesh. Parenthood would sculpt me into someone less selfish, Scott into someone less cold. We would have something important to do with the next twenty years of our lives, and when we were old, grandchildren would sit at our table.

  I had a feeling it was a girl. I already knew her name. Ruby.

  As I headed underground into the subway, I brimmed with an unfamiliar kind of happiness, a joy that traced its way back through pain and circumstance to the source of things, and that simultaneously cleared a path to the future. A feeling that finally, my life would come to fruition.

  I’ve never had a morning like it, before or since.

  * * *

  I didn’t expect Scott to immediately rejoice, but I also didn’t imagine how stricken he’d be. By the time I got home from work that night, he looked so depressed that all my earlier excitement was sucked from me as if into a vacuum. The only other time I’d seen him so listless was when his dad had been diagnosed with cancer.

  “You know when a flower blooms,” he said, “if you cut the stamen off, the part that holds the sperm, the flower lasts longer. Once the flower reproduces, it dies. I don’t want to die. I want my own life.”

  The strangest thing happened as he spoke. As if I’d taken a psychedelic drug, his features softened and his shoulder-length hair appeared to grow a half inch longer, transforming him, for a brief second, into a woman. I reactively took a step backward.

  “You won’t die,” I countered. “You’ll grow into someone new, someone larger.”

  “I don’t want to grow into someone new.”

  “Why?” I pleaded, beginning to cry. “Why!”

  He took my forearm and led me to the hallway, where hung a framed, enlarged photo he’d taken the year before on a trip to his hometown in Indiana. It showed an abandoned train track receding into the blurred nighttime distance, surrounded on both sides by the bare, wintry branches of overgrown trees. It was lonesome and surreal.

  “Because of that.” He pointed to the photo.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Because of the months he spent drifting after high school, living out of his car in the Indiana woods? Because of some existential ache at his core? Was he finally confiding to me, a full six years into my earnest and tearful questioning, the reason he couldn’t bring himself to have children?

  “What do you mean, Scott?”

  “Just … that,” he said, looking at the photo. This often happened: At the moment of divulgence, we trailed off into a dead end. I waited but he remained silent. I had no idea whether he was hiding something or simply in the dark himself.

  After a full minute I quietly said, “All those months talking to George about this before we got married. Do you remember him saying that if I wanted a child badly enough, you’d get on board?”

  He shook his head. “George was wrong.”

  That’s when I gave up. If it had just been me and Scott, locked motionless in that hallway, I might have kept fighting until menopause, but luckily the deeper reality finally hit me. This wasn’t at all like talking him into cohabitation or marriage, because it wasn’t merely my happiness or his at stake. There was a third person to consider here, a powerless person whom it was my job to protect. I could well be bringing into this world a child unwanted by its father. That might change in the ninth month or the ninth year, but suddenly, the thought of risking it made me sick—perhaps the only shred of selflessness in my desire to be a mother.

  By the time I went to my doctor the next day, half of me was hoping it was all a mistake. She sent me into the restroom with a pee cup and the results mirrored my inner turmoil: negative. “I don’t get it,” I told her. “It wasn’t like I had to interpret a pink line. The test was digital. It said ‘Pregnant.’”

  “You might be pregnant,” she said. “Or it could have been a false positive. Or, you might’ve had what we call a chemical pregnancy, which is really just a very early miscarriage. We need a blood test.” She sent me to a lab downtown, and after drawing my blood they told me it would take five days to get the results.

  I scheduled a couple’s appointment with Delphyne on the fifth day. Scott had joined me for a few sessions in the previous months. My plan was to call the doctor, then walk immediately to Delphyne’s so I didn’t have to be alone with the answer. But I already knew the answer, which the doctor merely confirmed. No pregnancy. Whether I had miscarried or gotten a false positive, I’d never know.

  I walked the four blocks to Delphyne’s and sank into her couch. Scott was already there. I put my right hand on the cushion and he placed his left one over mine, as usual. Pele the fire goddess looked down on us with her murderous eyes.

  “I’m not pregnant after all,” I told them. A column of thick, dry air, ancient and immovable, lodged in my throat. It made breathing an effort.

  I don’t remember the next fifty minutes. All I know is that at one point, Scott said, “I’m going to get a vasectomy. I’ve been wanting Robin to suggest it, and she hasn’t, but I’m going to get one anyway.” I looked up from the spot on the floor where I’d been fixing my gaze and, still holding his hand, said, “I agree. Get a vasectomy. I support you. And I’m going to do whatever I want, and you need to support me. Starting now, we’re in this for our own individual goals, not for anything larger.”

  He stared at me, forlorn. I let the grief suffuse my skin, muscle, all the way to the bone. I let it nail me to the couch without a fight. And yet, deep inside my skull, back where the brain attaches to the spine, something shivered to life. Relief. Freedom. The happy family a long shot I needed no longer concern myself with.

  “All bets are off,” I said, looking back at the floor. And I must have meant it, because seven months later I found myself knocking on Paul’s door.

  7

  The Epiphany

  IT TOOK FORTY-EIGHT HOURS for the reality that I’d cheated to hit me. Scott and I went to N
apa to research a travel story I was writing, and after a day of vineyard-hopping, we checked in to a plush bed-and-breakfast in Yountville. As Scott dozed off, I lay in bed next to him reading a magazine and came across an ad for diamond anniversary rings that showed a couple meeting, marrying, having children and grandchildren. A few pages later I flipped to an ad for a mattress, on which a gorgeous couple sprawled with their three young children. Next up, a profile of Catherine Zeta-Jones, describing her life in Bermuda, how she was “crazy in love” with her husband and how she quizzed him on having kids before agreeing to marry him.

  I closed the magazine and tried to sleep. My limbs buzzed and my head started pounding. I massaged my temples, as if that could stop the gathering onslaught. I knew that women’s magazines were not the place to go looking for truth. But the storm that had been looming since the moment I rang Paul’s doorbell was so inevitable that it took only a few pretty pictures to invite its descent.

  I curled up on my side. The pain knifing my forehead was more than physical. I blamed myself, not just for Paul—for everything. For marrying Scott when I knew he didn’t want kids. For not having slept with more men before I married. For wanting both passionate sex and motherhood while doubting I could handle what either of them would require of me. For masquerading as a carefree little tart with Paul when in reality I was a damaged weakling. No wonder my marriage was floundering. I was pathetic.

  I sat up, switched on the light, and dug through my purse for ibuprofen in vain.

  Scott rolled toward me. “What’s wrong, kitty?”

  “My head’s killing me. I need some medicine.” I missed the days when I could tell him anything. No matter how difficult the confession, we could count on the honesty to add one more layer to our strong foundation. Even if I hadn’t been keeping a deadly secret, that habit had ceased a few years back.