The problem with progesterone shots—besides being completely impossible to do yourself—is that they mimic the early symptoms of pregnancy. So my breasts were tender; I felt tired and moody. In the new Matt and Doree’s Eggcellent Adventure Facebook group, people warned me not to “symptom spot”—that is, not to assume that any twinge of symptoms I felt definitely meant that I was pregnant. But it was hard not to, even though I knew it could just be the progesterone talking.
On day ten, when I went into the clinic to get the blood test that would tell me if I was pregnant, I felt cautiously optimistic. I hadn’t taken a home pregnancy test, because I was worried that whatever the result was would make me anxious.
“Good luck,” the phlebotomist said as my blood dripped into the test tube.*
My nurse, Lila, called while I was having lunch with my friend Alie. I went outside to take the call. “I’m so sorry, Doree,” she said when I answered the phone. Lila was a beautiful Iranian woman who had a stapler in the shape of a black stiletto high heel shoe on her desk. “You can stop all your medications now.” She told me that my HCG level was zero, meaning the embryo had completely failed to implant at all.
There wasn’t going to be a Regina or Gloria or Alice or Estelle or Annette. When I got home from lunch, I tore up the picture of the embryo and threw it in the trash.
* * *
—
A COUPLE OF MONTHS later, I was back at the clinic, and my doctor had an ultrasound wand inserted into my vagina as I lay back on an exam table. Matt sat in the corner, eyes on the monitor that would show the contents of my ovaries. We were hoping to do another egg retrieval right away.
“Hmm,” my doctor said. “You only have a couple of follicles on the left, and one on the right. I don’t think we should do a retrieval this cycle.” Ideally, at my age, I would have had five to ten on each side.
“What?” I said. “Does this mean I’m just…done? Like this is the number of follicles I can now expect?”
“No,” he said. “It can vary from month to month. Are you under a lot of stress?”
I couldn’t help myself—I laughed. “I mean, of course I am, this whole situation is very stressful!”
“Well, you should try to be less stressed,” the doctor said.
“Like…how? Should I do acupuncture?”
He shrugged. “I mean, you could.” He seemed uncomfortable. “All right, well…” he said, and left the exam room.
That night, I told Matt I wanted to switch doctors. “I told you when we met him that he was a robot!” Matt said.
“Okay,” I said, “you were right. Happy?” Matt loved to remind me when he had been right about something, and most of the time, I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to be comforted and told everything would be okay—not a smug “I told you so.”
But despite the stress I was under, I knew I was one of the lucky ones, because even if we couldn’t really afford to be doing all these rounds of IVF, we had a lot of credit cards and I was getting very good at the zero percent balance transfer game, and there are many, many people who can’t afford fertility treatments, period. That said, I was kind of kicking the can down the road in terms of paying off the cards. We had just finished paying off our wedding when we started infertility treatments. It seemed impossible that we would ever be out of debt or that we would ever be able to own a house. I checked Zillow obsessively just to “get a sense of the market,” and the sense of the market I was getting was that anything that would have remotely been within our financial reach in Los Angeles was quickly snapped up, and prices were increasing at an alarming rate.
Also, Matt and I didn’t see eye to eye on buying a house. “Why would we tie up cash and take on even more debt that we wouldn’t pay off for thirty years?” he asked. “And if we own a house, we’d be responsible for everything that went wrong. It would be expensive. And there’s no guarantee that we’d make back the money we put into it.”
I tried to explain the concept of “building equity” and it was like I was speaking a different language. He listened skeptically, then said, “ ‘Building equity’ is just not something that’s important to me. I like to have liquidity.” He said he couldn’t see himself as a person who would spend the amount of money that you needed to spend to get a house in Los Angeles.
“We could have liquidity, and a safety net, and build equity,” I said. “I mean, not right now, because we’re tens of thousands of dollars in debt, but one day.”
“Sure,” he said, in a tone that said he was pretty confident it was never going to happen.
“It’s not just about the money, though,” I said. “It’s about making a home and having a place that’s ours. A place for our family. Putting down roots.” My dad may have traveled a lot, but we lived in the same house from the time I was in kindergarten, and I liked that feeling of being home. It was familiar and comforting. I wanted to have that again.
But I didn’t have to add that our family might always only consist of the two of us.
Skip Notes
* Another unexpected and unwelcome result of doing infertility treatments: Someone is constantly taking your blood. When you’re getting monitored in the days leading up to your egg retrieval, you have to go into the clinic multiple times, and each time they take at least two vials of blood. Which wouldn’t be such a big deal if I wasn’t what the phlebotomists rather grimly call a “hard stick,” meaning that my veins are tiny, deep, and difficult to find. They “roll,” which is not a good thing. It usually took two to three tries for the phlebotomist to access them, and so by the end of a retrieval cycle, my arms were so bruised it looked like I’d been beaten up. Finally, I learned to ask for the one guy who could always get my vein on the first try. If you’re like me and you have shitty veins, FIND THE GOOD PHLEBOTOMIST.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In the midst of the various rounds of fertility treatments, I had started going to a barre class on Sunday mornings. Barre is a workout that’s heavily marketed to women that involves doing lots of planks, very small movements of various muscles with one- to three-pound weights or a rubber ball, and an extended segment of class at the ballet barre, where you do a lot of leg exercises that may lead you to wonder whether barre class should be permitted under the Geneva Convention. The classes promise a variety of questionable benefits, mostly involving making your ass higher and tighter. Short of butt implants,* there is pretty much no way that my ass is ever going to be described as anything besides “just this side of flat,” and that’s being generous.
Anyway. My presence at this particular class had been inconsistent. It had been hard to become a regular while doing IVF treatments, because the treatments have the unique ability to fuck up your life in unpredictable and highly annoying ways. IVF is your shitty ex who never wanted to make plans more than half an hour in advance, and when you’ve finally moved on, sends a “u up?” text and next thing you know you’re at their apartment making out on the couch. They both wreak havoc with your emotions, make it impossible to plan, and drag you back into their orbit against your will.
I had stopped going to barre in the weeks before my second egg retrieval, because the hormones that I had to take to stimulate egg production also made my ovaries huge and tender, so I couldn’t work out after day five or so of doing the meds, or else I ran the risk of my ovaries contorting or bursting. I had been warned that this would be the case going in, and because I was prepared, I was mostly fine. Whenever I know what’s coming, I’m able to wrap my head around it, but living in any kind of uncertainty is hell. I’d like to pretend that I’m one of those people who can just roll with it, but when the plan changes halfway through, I get agitated in a way that makes me feel like a child whose mom promised them ice cream but then the ice cream shop is closed, and they have to get candy instead, and the candy is fine but the kid is like, Mom, why did you promise me ice cream
when I can’t even get ice cream, and now I want ice cream even more. Like I know I’m wrong, but the world seems wrong, too.
In a way, it brought back uncomfortable reminders of online dating, when I struggled so much to be the “easygoing” and “flexible” woman that I thought guys wanted, or as way too many online dating profiles put it, “I want a girl who’s just as comfortable going out in heels as they are staying in and wearing sweatpants.” We’re told we need to simultaneously be quote-unquote high maintenance, with everything that goes along with that characterization, and also “chill,” “down for whatever.”
No wonder I struggled with this for so long—the person society told me I should be wasn’t truly the person I was, and pretending to be that person gets exhausting. I was never actually cool with it when someone canceled plans at the last minute, or a guy didn’t text back. It really fucking bothered me! But I spent a lot of time just acting like it didn’t, because that was how I thought people wanted me to be.
And being “chill” about infertility just…doesn’t work. Postretrieval, I had really been looking forward to getting back to my workout routine, and specifically, to my Sunday morning barre class. But infertility threw another wrench in my plans: It turns out that you can’t work out until you get your first period postretrieval, which totaled around three to four weeks of not being able to work out, and as someone who wasn’t in perfect shape but used exercise to help support her mental health—this was a problem. I couldn’t even do a gentle yoga class, because you’re always just one seated spinal twist from ovarian contortion.
Finally, the Sunday after I had gotten my period, I was cleared to go back, and I was psyched. What I had put out of my mind was that so many of the other women (it was always women) in the class were in extremely good shape. At this particular class, I immediately noticed an extremely thin and muscular woman with a long, thick blond braid down her back and a crop top that showed off her six-pack. She stood at the front of the room scowling in the mirror, and when the class started, I saw that she was using extra weights for all the exercises. Deep breaths, I thought. In Los Angeles, there are many, many people whose actual job it is to be attractive. And just when you think you’ve conquered any lingering insecurities about your body, someone comes along who’s like, Bwa ha ha, you can pretend all you want that this shit doesn’t matter but GUESS WHAT, IT DOES, and I am going to make you feel bad about yourself!
The woman in barre class not only made me feel bad about myself, but she also looked angry and mean, like she had moved to L.A. thinking she was going to be the next Jennifer Lawrence but hadn’t landed any roles more interesting than “white party girl #2” on her friend’s web series. That’s another thing about L.A. Someone can be the prettiest girl in their high school class, or the star of all the musicals, or maybe even be in a local car dealership commercial, and then they come here and they realize that sure, they’re still pretty and talented, but it’s not enough, and then they end up in a barre class looking like they want to kill someone.
In that sense, there’s freedom in being “average” looking—I never had any illusions that I would need to rely on my looks for anything. But we’re all just at the mercy of the patriarchy, right? When I say that I’m completely average looking, by what metric am I even judging that? A metric that, for millennia, has been determined by men, internalized by women, and spat back out in the form of color-blocked leggings and matching sports bras.
I kept an eye on her the whole class. She attacked the exercises with grim determination, using the heaviest weights in the class and squatting lower than anyone else. I was, quite honestly, in awe. I lingered for a moment in front of the mirror after class ended as she carefully gathered her things, and I was suddenly overcome with the urge to cry, right there in barre class. We’d been doing fertility treatments for a year, with nothing to show for it but a ton of debt and a frozen embryo that might or might not turn into a baby. Friends, many of whom were younger than me, were having their second or even third children, or had kids who were in grade school or beyond. They were selling their first homes and buying bigger houses in nicer neighborhoods. And there I was, in barre class, obsessing over a woman with a perfect body and wondering what the hell I was doing with my life.
Skip Notes
* You can tell yourself that you’re just voyeuristically browsing online plastic surgery forums where women show off their new Kardashian-inspired butts only so many times before you start wondering, Wait, do I want a Brazilian butt lift? Is the recovery really that bad? Could I finally wear a pair of jeans without looking like my body was just a pair of legs somehow attached to a torso?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A couple of months before my novel Startup came out in April 2017, I got drinks with my friend Amanda from work. Amanda is ten years younger than me and an incredibly smart reporter. “So,” she said, as we sipped our drinks, “how do you feel about your book coming out?”
“I feel okay,” I said. “I mean, I feel good. I just don’t know what to expect.”
“It will be great,” Amanda said.
“I hope so,” I said. “I just want to be able to call myself a novelist. Does that make sense? Like, when do I get to call myself ‘a novelist’?”
Amanda looked confused. “Um, right now? You are a novelist! You wrote a novel!”
She was right, of course, but it was hard for me to wrap my head around. Even though my book was being published by a major publisher, even though it had already gotten positive early reviews, I still felt like an interloper in the fiction world. Who was I to think that I could just swoop in and write a novel? But no, I had to remind myself, I had worked really hard on the book. And my book was good. I could call myself a novelist.
It struck me that I was still struggling, at nearly forty years old, with the same issues I’d had for so long: Where did I belong in the world, and what contributions was I going to make to it?
When the book was published, I was pleasantly surprised by the good reviews and positive reception that it received. The night of the release, I did a reading and conversation at Housing Works, a bookstore in Manhattan, and the place was packed—standing room only. Some people were sitting on the floor. People I hadn’t seen in years were there. I was emotional—all those people were there for me! Back in L.A., after a reading at Skylight Books, we had a small party at a bar nearby, a kind of combination book party and fortieth birthday celebration. Matt got a cake for me in the shape of my book, and everyone toasted me, and it felt good.
But turning forty was a real maelstrom of mixed emotions. Hanging over everything was the fact that I still wasn’t pregnant. And even though my book launch had been a success, I was still struggling with questions of identity. Not being pregnant made me feel broken, like I sucked at doing this really basic thing that literally billions of people have done for centuries.
And my internal struggles were spilling out into how I presented myself to the world. It turned out I had no idea how to dress myself anymore. For most of my thirties, I’d had a work uniform: floral or patterned silk top, skinny jeans, ankle boots. Sometimes I’d invert it and do patterned pants with a solid color top; there had been some slight variation with button-down plaid shirts and skinny jeans when I was at Rolling Stone because I was, consciously or not, trying to fit in with the guys who worked there. But now, when I put on skinny jeans and a top, it didn’t feel like me anymore. The jeans weren’t especially comfortable, and in the morning I scanned my closet in increasing desperation as I eliminated each shirt, one after the other, from daily contention.
I was also having trouble shopping, which had historically been a pastime that I truly enjoyed, perhaps a little too much. But now, when I went into my old standby stores—shops like Madewell and Topshop and Club Monaco and Zara and H&M—I was having an increasingly hard time finding clothes that appealed to me, and actually fit. My turning fort
y also coincided with the truly unfortunate fashion trend of one-shoulder or shoulder-cutout tops, a look that was very difficult to pull off without a strapless bra, and I’m sorry, but if you’re above a D cup, there is no strapless bra on the planet that will be comfortable for you. (If there is, please send one to me.) I could have worn one of these shirts or dresses with my sensible beige Maidenform racerback bra showing, but that seemed to negate the whole point of these tops in the first place. Not wearing a bra wasn’t an option; it’s a matter of physical comfort. It’s achy to have them just flopping out there in the wind (and don’t even get me started on boob sweat).
I had never been someone who felt like I needed to “dress my age,” and yet now, all of a sudden, I was willing to dress my age but I had no idea what that even looked like. What were forty-year-old women even supposed to look like?
* * *
—
I HAVE, for better and (for my own mental health) for worse, always been someone who cares about how I look, and how other people think I look (see also: Revenge Jacket Doree). And I have also always been a faithful student of the people around me and what they were wearing, like a little proto-Harriet, always watching and absorbing.
When I was four, a girl in my class at daycare had a pair of yellow clogs that I wanted so badly. I begged my mother for them and she (wisely) said no, that I was only four and I would probably break my ankle.*1 So I didn’t get the clogs, but I did get extremely concerned with having cool clothes and shoes. This really picked up speed in third or fourth grade, when I finally persuaded my mom to buy me a Benetton rugby shirt, which seemed to be the absolute pinnacle of cool at the time. Don’t forget, it was the eighties, and some diabolical genius had convinced us all that rugby shirts with huge logos on them looked amazing. “It’s literally just a shirt with a big brand name on it,” my mom said, and I nodded enthusiastically. Wasn’t that the whole point, to show everyone you could be part of the club by wearing a really dumb-looking shirt with a truly massive logo on it?
Thanks for Waiting Page 16