By seventh grade, I could buy my own clothes because I had my own money thanks to babysitting, because at the time, eleven or twelve was a perfectly reasonable age to watch other people’s children for money.*2 This meant I had enough money to go to the juniors department at Filene’s in the Chestnut Hill Mall in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, aka the fancy mall that had a Laura Ashley store and a Houlihan’s, and buy, for sixty dollars, a pair of tight, acid-washed Guess jeans with the triangle Guess logo on one of the back pockets. This seemed like the most money that anyone had ever paid for a pair of jeans, and I counted out the cash slowly and proudly and wore those jeans with my Nike Airs and my teased bangs until, all of a sudden, it was the nineties and “tight” and “acid-washed” and “teased bangs” and “pegging your jeans” were no longer part of the teenage fashion lexicon. Instead it was all about going to the Urban Outfitters on Newbury Street or Harvard Square and wearing flannels and Doc Martens and vintage overalls and “streetwear” brands like Stüssy and Fresh Jive. Probably because I lived in Massachusetts, I’d had an intermediate stop in preppy land—J.Crew rollneck sweaters, moccasins from L.L.Bean, a CB jacket with ski lift tags hanging on the zipper all winter, you get the idea, it was all sort of tragic—in between the phases of looking like I’d walked off the set of a John Hughes movie and onto the set of a Nirvana music video.
Being a teenager sometimes feels like you’re the costume designer for the movie of your own life (but of course, actual movies like Clueless and Kids, which both came out the summer after I graduated from high school, were hugely influential too). Every time I decided to start dressing a different way, it required an almost entirely new wardrobe, although there was occasionally some overlap: For example, I’d procured a few flannels when I was in my preppy phase, which transitioned seamlessly into grunge.
But one of my biggest fashion influences during that time was my friend Beth, whom I’d met the summer after my senior year of high school when we both worked at a restaurant on Newbury Street in Boston. Beth was a year older than me, a photographer and film student at NYU, and she was cool. She was living for the summer in an apartment in Cambridge with her older brother—again, cool, seeing as I was stuck at home—and as soon as we got off work, we’d traipse down Newbury Street, sitting on the floor of Tower Records and reading magazines for hours, sipping coffee at Espresso Royale, trying on clothes and shoes at Allston Beat. She wore drain chains for necklaces and babydoll tees and baggy pants, but also slips as dresses and turquoise nail polish. One night, I met her at her brother’s apartment, and we went out in Harvard Square. I had carefully considered my outfit for our excursion, which deliberately channeled Garbage front woman Shirley Manson, if she had shopped in the bargain bin at Urban Outfitters: a zebra-print velour miniskirt, a short-sleeve black polyester collared shirt that looked vintage but wasn’t, fishnets, black John Fluevog boots, and a red patent-leather spiked bracelet.
It was a Look. Of course, “looks” are different when you’re eighteen and using them as armor, to try on an identity you’re not quite ready for. But now I was forty, and I was, once again, tentatively dipping a toe into a new identity, except this time it was wearing a sensible low-heel shoe with a nice wide toe box. I had naïvely thought that, as I aged, I’d be able to continue operating in the same way that I had been since I was a teenager: There constantly would be a plethora of trends and looks for me to choose from, and all I had to do was select one.
And while on the one hand I resented the idea that I should “dress my age,” I also really just wanted to…dress my age. I didn’t want to wear anything tight or see-through or too short; I wanted to feel comfortable, but not like I had totally abandoned all pretense of caring about how I looked, because I do care about how I look and I don’t want to pretend that I don’t. But all around me, all I saw were clothes that I couldn’t imagine putting on my body.
“Is this where I admit that I now understand the appeal of a store like Chico’s?” I asked Kate. “Like, all I want to do is dress like a funky art teacher. I never wanted to look like this before.”
“Yes. I get it. I now understand the appeal of purely comfortable clothes,” she said.
“What is happening to us?” I said, laughing. “I guess I just never thought this would happen to me.”
Then, one day, I was in a shop near my house and I spotted a sleeveless, oversized, black linen jumpsuit. I tried it on. It was looser than almost anything else I owned, but instead of feeling like a blob, I felt airy and free. It exposed my upper arms, which I had historically kept covered because…why? I suddenly wasn’t sure. I thought about how all my body insecurities—my “flabby” upper arms, my “paunchy” stomach, my “too thin” legs, my “too thick” waist, my “flat” butt, my “big” boobs—had dictated what I wore and, perhaps more significantly, what I didn’t wear. It seemed exhausting, this automatic fixation on “flattering” clothes and covering parts of my body up that didn’t need to be.
I bought it. It became my nonwork go-to, the item of clothing I wore most often. It felt both slightly childish and, somehow, with its lovely drape, sophisticated. I felt more like myself than I had in ages.
Skip Notes
*1 Fast-forward almost forty years, and I’ve almost broken my ankle approximately one million times in my years wearing clogs. I don’t want to say Mom is always right, but she was right about clogs and ankles. That has not stopped me from buying many pairs, however. You can’t stop me now, Mom!!!!
*2 Of course, this now seems insane. These days, if people saw or heard about an eleven-year-old babysitting, the police would probably arrest the parents who hired the babysitter and the babysitter’s parents. But in seventh grade, I had a regular job watching two brothers a couple of days a week after school, where I mostly spent the afternoons playing Tetris on their home computer after heating up some SpaghettiOs for the boys. More shockingly, I also had a regular gig with a three-month-old whose parents finally stopped calling me once she started crawling and somehow broke the glass door of their stereo cabinet, at which point they probably realized that there had rarely been a better example of getting what you pay for than paying an eleven-year-old six dollars an hour to watch an actual infant.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The seasons of infertility are marked by whatever appointments and procedures and results you’ve gotten. There’s the Spring of Initial Optimism and Polyp Removal, the Summer of Disappointing Retrieval Results, the Fall of the Failed Embryo Transfer. I was hopeful that the summer of 2017 would be the Summer When Things Finally Started to Go Right.
I had a new doctor, Kelly Baek, and I immediately felt more comfortable with her. She was obsessed with getting results for her patients, but she also was straightforward. When we first met with her, she told me she was concerned about the first embryo transfer, the one that had failed. “Your HCG was zero,” she said, referring to the hormone that’s present when you’re pregnant, “which means that the embryo didn’t implant at all.” She said she wanted to do an endometrial function test, which would determine if the embryo had been transferred at the optimal time for my uterus, and she would also check my uterus for any abnormalities. To do the test, I would have to take all the meds that I would typically take for a transfer cycle, but they’d just do a biopsy instead of a transfer at the end of it.
I grumbled about it on our way home. “It’s just another dumb roadblock,” I said to Matt. “They’re not going to find anything, and in the meantime, we’re set back another month or two from doing a transfer.” A month here, a month there—it didn’t seem like much, but before I knew it, another year had gone by.
* * *
—
A FEW WEEKS LATER, I was in a tiny exam room at my fertility clinic getting a microscopic camera inserted into my vagina. It hurt. I lay back on the exam table as the doctor—not Dr. Baek, who had injured her knee and couldn’t physicall
y do the exam I needed—cracked jokes and told me about growing up in Brooklyn and being a fan of the Mets. “See that? Now we’re getting to your uterus—” He stopped talking and immediately the joviality was replaced by a grave look. “Get Dr. Baek,” he said to the nurse in the room. “Immediately.”
“Um…is everything okay?” Even as I asked, I knew it wasn’t, but the way the mood in the room had changed so quickly was jarring and I hadn’t quite caught up.
He shook his head. “No. It’s not,” he said as Dr. Baek came hobbling into the room. The other doctor pointed to the image of my uterus on the screen. “See that?” he said to her. She nodded grimly and put her hand on my arm. “You have a uterine septum,” he said. “When you were born, the two sides of your uterus never fused, and so an embryo can’t get the blood supply that it needs when it’s transferred. That’s why your transfer didn’t work.”
“Oh,” I said. My head was spinning. “How did this happen?”
“We don’t know,” Dr. Baek said. “It’s something you were born with. Only three percent of women have them. The good news is, it’s easily fixed with surgery.” I would need to have a surgical hysteroscopy to repair my septum and fix my uterus. Then I would have to wait another couple of months before we could do a transfer, to let my uterus heal.
I walked to the car, slightly dazed. It was a lot to process at once. Three percent! Why couldn’t I be on the winning side of 3 percent, like one of the tiny percentage of women who gets pregnant without IVF after being told they need to do IVF? That embryo never had a chance, I thought bitterly. If only they had done this before they transferred it, they would have known about it, and maybe it would’ve worked. I didn’t want to think too much about it.
More jarring was the realization that in fact, there had been something wrong with me this whole time.
* * *
—
NOW THAT WE were doing the podcast, and I was public about doing IVF treatments, everyone wanted to talk to me about infertility. I usually didn’t mind, but sometimes I did.
At work one day, one of my colleagues cornered me. “My wife’s cousin had been trying for years,” he said. “And then, right when they were about to do IVF—like, their appointment was the next day—they found out she was pregnant. How crazy is that?”
“So crazy!” I said, even though what I really wanted to say was, Please leave, this story is only going to upset me and it’s even more upsetting that you somehow think you are doing me a favor by telling it to me.
“I know, I couldn’t believe it!” he said. His face was eager, as though waiting for my acknowledgment that his story would be the one that would make me realize that this, too, could happen to me, if I just, I don’t know, heard enough stories about miracle babies?
By that point, I had heard all the stories. And they always started the same way, with a well-meaning person who, upon hearing that I was doing IVF, simultaneously expressed sympathy but also brightened a bit. They had something they couldn’t wait to share, something that would definitely make me feel better about the hellish road I was on.
It would turn out that their friend’s roommate’s cousin’s sister-in-law—or, wait, was it the best friend of someone they went to college with? Or maybe it was their partner’s co-worker’s ex-wife. Yes. That’s who it was, definitely! Anyway, this person, whoever she was, had been doing IVF for years and, whaddya know, spontaneously got pregnant with a “miracle” baby, just when they had given up hope and stopped trying. Or wait. Was it that they were about to do IVF and got pregnant with a miracle baby? No. Sorry. It was when they went to Aruba as a consolation for IVF not working that they got pregnant—because they had stopped trying, of course. And then there was the person who already had two IVF babies and wasn’t on birth control because the doctors had said they had a .00000001 percent chance of getting pregnant on their own, and then it happened, as though the pregnancy goddesses are sick fucks who will only allow pregnancy to occur once you’ve given up or completely stopped trying. (The implication is related to the “advice” given to single people that “once you stop looking, s/he will appear!,” which I personally also think is bullshit because meeting someone, especially over the age of thirty-five, is actually hard work.) These are the same people who earnestly suggest that you try meditation and acupuncture, as though you weren’t already meditating and acupuncturing like it was your job, and as though they—random person who has never themselves undergone infertility treatment—have the solution that you and your doctors have somehow never heard of. “But look, they totally helped my friend’s sister,” this person will say, just as you want to smack them.
In my head, whenever I would hear a story like this, I would make a long fart sound, but in real life, I forced a smile as the person babbled on and on with their cheerful miracle baby story. On the podcast with Matt, I was emphatic in my distaste for these “miracle baby” stories. “Who are these stories helping?” I asked. “They’re not meant to make me feel better. They’re totally self-serving. People just want to feel like they can feel better in the face of something they can’t fix or control.” What these people didn’t know is that anyone going through infertility has long since reconciled themselves with the idea that most of what they’re going through is out of their control. In these moments, all I could think is that the things I would most like to control were the words coming out of this other person’s mouth, and preferably to shove them back in.
Matt was horrified that I would be so “rude.” “These people are just trying to help,” he said. “They’re just trying to relate to you.”
“I know,” I said. “And I’m saying that it doesn’t work, and it’s not helpful. I know their intentions are good, but maybe good intentions aren’t good enough, okay? And I’m also allowed to find what they’re saying to be really fucking annoying.”
“Okay,” Matt said. “You are allowed to do that.”
* * *
—
AS SOON AS my body had healed from the septum resectioning, we decided to do another embryo transfer. For the transfer itself, I had to have a full bladder, because Dr. Baek said that a full bladder helped her guide the embryo in (in contrast to my previous doctor, who wanted an empty bladder). A nurse did an ultrasound to check my bladder when I got to the clinic. “Not full enough!” she said cheerfully. “You’ve got to drink more, dear.”
As I lay on the pre-op bed, guzzling water, I tried to stay calm. Another nurse came by and offered me a Valium. “You don’t have to take it, but it might help you relax,” she said. I took it.
Finally, it was time to go into the operating room. Matt sat next to me, holding my hand. I lay back, my feet in stirrups, as we looked up on a screen where an image of the embryo was on display. Dr. Baek confirmed with the embryologist that it was the correct embryo, and then it was loaded into a catheter that she inserted into my vagina, navigating past my cervix, and finally inserting it into my uterus. “That’s it,” she said. “All done.”
In a way, it was anticlimactic, but maybe that was the Valium talking. After the last transfer, with its complete lack of implantation, I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but it was almost impossible not to. Isn’t optimism ultimately part of the human condition? If we didn’t have optimism, why would we have persevered over millennia of hardship, if not for the faith that things would one day get better? My uterus was fixed now, the embryo had been genetically tested. According to my doctor, there was a 70 percent chance that it would work. Those were good odds, but like everything else when it comes to IVF, numbers can sometimes feel meaningless. What was I supposed to do with the knowledge, for example, that only 3 percent of women have a uterine septum? The odds were overwhelmingly against my having one, and yet, I did. So even as I told myself that this time, the odds were in my favor, I was also worried that once again they would not be.
* * *
—
/> THE PREVIOUS SUMMER, right around the time we started IVF, we’d gotten a dog—an eighty-pound goofball rescue pup named Beau who was either one and a half or three years old, depending on who you asked. And soon after we adopted Beau, the lease on my convertible was up, and when we went to the dealership, we had decided to get the largest SUV that Volvo made, because it didn’t seem crazy to think that by the following summer, we’d be driving a dog and a baby around. The massive SUV would be able to carry us all, with room to spare for a stroller, a diaper bag, and whatever other gear tiny humans needed carted around with them.
But the car took up too much space—physically and mentally. When I got behind the wheel, I felt like a suburban mom, except that there was no one in the back seat. As the months went by and I didn’t get pregnant, it became an expensive reminder of the life I thought I’d be living by now, but that remained stubbornly, frustratingly out of reach. Whenever I would have these thoughts, I would remind myself that I was fortunate to be in a position where I could afford a large SUV and where I could afford to be doing IVF, and then I would feel guilty about being upset that the car had become an albatross and that I should, in the immortal words of Rihanna, just shut up and drive.
I googled “can I get someone to take over my car lease.” The short answer: probably. The car was, actually, way too big for me. I not so jokingly called it the boat, but it really felt like I was piloting a blimp through the streets of Los Angeles. If I’d had trouble driving my previous car, I now felt like I had lost all sense of peripheral vision. “You don’t know how big the car is!” Matt would say, the exasperation clear in his voice, as I’d pull into the driveway with yet another scrape or scratch. One day, I obliviously took a piece of the fence on the edge of our driveway with me as I pulled into my parking spot, which I only learned when Matt got home and said, “Did you not notice that you took a piece of the fence with you?”
Thanks for Waiting Page 17