by Faith Salie
When he wasn’t working, and I wasn’t traveling for work or under anesthesia having my eggs harvested, John and I were constantly together. After only three dates, his dogs had allowed me my own side of the bed. So I knew I’d really miss him when, three months into our courtship, I went to Belize to do a story. And he told me that he’d miss me “terribly.” When I returned, he said, he might be able to accompany me to my goddaughter’s baptism at a renegade Catholic church, upstate in Rochester.
I went to the jungle for five days. Our little camp offered tons of papaya and scorpions but no cell signal or Wi-Fi. When the producer and I emerged from the heart of media darkness on our way to the airport in Belize City, I eagerly checked my phone to read John’s text messages and listen to his voice mails. There weren’t any. I was sad and surprised. Once I landed in New York, I could no longer take the silence. I relented and texted him, only to receive a sweet but vague response, welcoming me back and telling me he’d been spending some stressful time with his sister, who happens to be mentally handicapped. He texted me he couldn’t make the baptism. I decided it was because he was dealing with family stuff and not because he was anti-Papist (this church had been excommunicated, anyway) or racist (my goddaughter is black).
I kept assuming I’d hear from him over that weekend, and I didn’t. It was so unlike him that I was way more puzzled than hurt. I soldiered on, pleasantly distracted by the niceties of Spiritus Christi Church, where the priest is a woman, they never refer to God as “He,” and they serve gluten-free Body of Christ. I celebrated Tallulah Gail and her daddies, David and his husband, Mark. I smiled when everyone asked how my new boyfriend was. When I got back to Manhattan, I waited to hear from John about seeing each other…and I didn’t.
So I called Susan.
She reminded me that this was completely anomalous behavior on his part, and therefore not likely a sign that he stopped caring about me due to five days in Central America and one wafer of wheat-free Jesus. I knew she was right. And I knew I had to get answers about what was going on because—here’s the amazing part—I wanted to make sure he was okay rather than primarily focus on my own disappointment.
So I told John I wanted to come over and talk to him the next day, which was a Monday. He said he was taking the day off from work, and we agreed to meet at his apartment. Now this seemed serious. Was his Talk going to be disturbingly different from my Talk?
On Monday morning, I decided to tell him I loved him. Just like that. I was sick of waiting. I loved him, I wanted him to know it, and I just plain missed him. I decided not to tell Susan I’d decided to tell John I loved him. I wanted to own the declaration completely, and I felt I’d diminish it by attending practice with my coach. Plus, I knew she’d be wildly proud of me when I sprang the news on her after the fact.
It was an un-angsty decision that made me feel strong and relieved and not sick with dread that he wouldn’t say it back. With John, I didn’t need to hurl a love boomerang. I was prepared to throw a one-way love Nerf dart right at his face. Before I cast myself as the Katniss of love, all dauntless and selfless, I should also say that John made me feel safe. Deep in my gut, I felt that he loved me. I thought I would probably hear him say it back…and if he didn’t say the words, I would still feel his love and wouldn’t withdraw mine.
It was a rainy, late-September afternoon. I put on some tight jeans, a striped sweater, and my Frye motorcycle boots that made me look like a fierce lesbian but always hurt when I wore them. I got to his apartment just as the dog walker was leaving with John’s two dogs. Good—I could do without crotch sniffing and didn’t want this conversation to be tête-à-tête-aux-furry têtes.
John looked weary. He gave me a long, tight hug. We sat on his sofa and didn’t immediately have sex. I told him I was surprised I hadn’t heard from him, and he apologized, launching into a list of pressures he’d been feeling from all sides, particularly regarding the needs of his sister and mother. He did not list me as one of those pressures. In fact, he told me he didn’t want to drag me into his troubles. That was my cue.
“I want to be a part of your life.” I surprised myself by immediately tearing up. “Because…I love you, John. That means that I love all of you—the easy stuff and the hard stuff. And I want you to share these things with me, and I want to help you or comfort you or just be with you. This is your life, and I want to be in it, and I want you to be in mine.” Tears were rolling now—miraculously not so many that I lost my mascara if I kept my chin at just the right angle. (If you watch any Real Housewives reunions, you have the visual for this skill.) It felt nothing but right to tell him this and watch my words land in his big, beleaguered brown eyes.
Pause. A very bearable pause.
“I love you, too.”
I inched closer to him on his sofa to hold his hand. It was quiet and rainy. It wasn’t a huge dramatic or passionate moment. What it was was true, mutual, effortless, safe—all hallmarks of our relationship then and now. Okay, maybe our marriage is occasionally effortful, like when we get into it because I don’t understand why John has to sneeze so loudly that I’m sure he’ll wake our children and he says he can’t help it and I say what would you do if you were hiding from a murderer and you had to sneeze, you would obviously stifle it, so would you please pretend there is a psychopathic killer in the house next time. Or I ask him if he will feed a child lunch and he says sure and five minutes later he is still looking at pipes on eBay and I decide that our different notions of time are keeping me from being able to Lean the fuck In so I harrumph that fine, I’ll do it myself—these episodes don’t always go well. Oh and also? He interrupts me all the time because he says he just wants to get to the bottom line. But mostly, like the moment we said “I love you” to each other, our relationship is gentle.
That moment was all you could ask for.
But I’m not you, so I couldn’t resist pushing it. I managed to wait a little while before I had to ask him, “So, um…were you thinking you loved me? I mean, would you have said it if I didn’t say it first?”
He didn’t even roll his eyes. He told me he’d been thinking he loved me for a while but that words didn’t matter so much to him. That other people had told him they loved him but had hurt him. That he thought the way he acted toward me made it clear that he loved me. A whole bunch of evolved answers that led me into his arms.
When the dog walker and his wards came back to find us wiping away tears, all three of them looked very confused.
I went home that evening and yanked off my too-tight boots and never wore them again. I didn’t need to appear fierce or be in pain in this relationship. I stood in my socks in the kitchen and ate the final truffle. Much like the words I love you, it melted in my mouth.
* * *
* n.b. A year after this response, this Amy got a divorce. Even though she ended up deservedly happy, it makes me a little sad she offered such unadulterated love to that burly good ol’ boy.
The day after my first date with the man who would become my second husband, I received a text from him.
Where are you right now?
I really liked this man. I thought he could handle the truth. I furtively clicked on my BlackBerry, which I held under the table in a conference room, “NYU Fertility Center at orientation for freezing eggs.” Because there is no emoji for cryopreservation.
He wrote back, :-O
Which I took to mean, “O! you are sexily proactive!”
And so it began.
Here is a helpful guide for anyone who would also like to embark on such a tubular adventure….
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Decide to freeze your eggs upon suggestion of your fertility doctor. Revel in the fact that, contrary to what you’d assumed and even told Nate Berkus when you were a “practice guest” on a rehearsal for his talk show and asked him to coparent with you, you are not too ancient to do this!
Announce to everyone that you will be freezing your eggs, including the producer of an HLN pilot and
your producers at Sunday Morning. Now both CNN and CBS cameras are lined up to film your egg retrieval. Prepare also to make gonzo, personal video diary of the freezing process.
Don’t flinch when you go in for your “teach” with a nurse who shows you how to shoot yourself up in the stomach multiple times a day. Walk on air when the nurse tells you that you need a thinner needle because your abs are in good shape. Astonish yourself by actually being able to plunge a needle into your own body and decide you missed your calling as a doctor or a drug addict. Nod when nurse warns you not to exercise while hyperstimulating your ovaries, because high-impact activities could cause “ovarian torsion,” which is a med-speak for “twisty tying your tubes.” But tell yourself that’s crazy and continue to do the elliptical and careful core work throughout this process. After all, you have camera crews following you.
Commit to a mind-body connection. Decide that you will create eighteen eggs to freeze. Eighteen because that’s a lot but not too greedy, and, let’s be real: reproductively, you’re fairly geriatric. When you walk across Central Park every other early morning to your fertility doctor, focus on how you are investing in your future and not on all the younger women passing you with jog strollers.
Smile broadly in the darkened room as your doctor moves a wand around your ovaries and counts and measures your follicles. Thank her when she announces you have “amazing ovaries.” Try to be humble about it (“Oh, these old things?”), but secretly wonder if you are manifesting all this with the mind-body connection you are cultivating. Call your father and brothers to report on your high numbers as you walk back through Central Park toward the non-high-impact exercise you will do at the gym.
See this new man John as much as possible. Wonder if all this chemistry between you is helping your eggs swell. Time your dates around injections. Keep him posted, hoping that this whole process will make you appear as someone who is goal oriented but doesn’t have to get pregnant tomorrow or even the next day, but the day after that would be okay. Leave some cookie dough you’ve made for him in his freezer to distract from the drugs you’ve left in his refrigerator. When he offers to take you to the egg retrieval, kindly decline and say you’re covered, so as to have an air of mystery about you.
Be sure to work out extremely early in the morning before egg harvest so you look thin on camera—in a hospital gown, underneath the sheets—because you are a freak. Put on makeup. Greet CNN and CBS camera crews at entrance to NYU Fertility Center. Go in, go under, come out. Learn that you produced twenty-one eggs, exactly eighteen of which are worthy of being frozen, which is eggsactly the number you wanted.
Your friend Elliot, son of a rabbi, teaches you that, in Judaism, the number eighteen is sacred. It is “chai.” Not the Oprah kind that Starbucks sells, the kind that is pronounced as if you’re trying to expel a hairball.
It means “life.”
High-five yourself on mind-body connection.
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Explain to your boyfriend that there’s just really no way you can get pregnant naturally, you never have; it would be a miracle. Begin using no contraception whatsoever. Do not convene A Talk About Having a Baby Together. Everything’s been pretty effortless so far, and although you and your boyfriend have not technically decided to get married, because you’ve only been dating for four months, implicitly understand that you are each other’s Second Chance, and you’d like to create a family together. Find improbability of conception confirmed about every forty days—dramatically so on romantic trip to Marrakesh where you learn that Muslims aren’t big on tampons, so you just make do with some toilet paper, which they’re not real big on either.
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Eleven months after your first date, when your breasts start feeling like fiery tennis balls, take a pregnancy test for kicks. When you notice that the pregnancy test says “PREGNANT” for the first time in your forty years, say, out loud, “Oh my God.” Go to CVS in your PJs and buy five more, daring them to say the same thing. Call your brother. Tell him the amazing news while he almost crashes his car into a support structure in the State Department parking garage. Wait all day to tell your boyfriend in person. Expecting an overjoyed response, try not to be disappointed when he acts just joyed and smiles serenely and says, “Why not?” Recognize that this man of yours, he has a profound belief in good things happening.
Tell almost everyone, because you want to demonstrate that you do not believe in jinxing. Do the math and realize you were actually pregnant when your boyfriend took you to look at engagement rings on Mother’s Day, historically your least favorite day of the year. Intuit it’s a girl. Name her Sursie, which is a southern word for “surprise gift.”
Google image “empire-waist wedding dresses” for at least forty-five minutes a day.
When you are seven weeks along, watch nothing move on the ultrasound. Try to be stoic. Try not to be the hysterical woman in the fertility office whom you’re sure your doctor has seen a thousand times. Do not sob until you walk out of her office and your boyfriend can hold you on the corner of Madison and Seventy-Seventh. Go to the Mark Hotel across the street where you had your first date and drink some tea, which you can now sweeten with as much Sweet’N Low as you choose. You can even stir some Brie in there if you’d like. Don’t say too much but hold hands a lot. When your boyfriend walks you home through Central Park, call your father. When you hear him cry, your heart breaks all over again.
Host a live comedy show that night, even though all you want to do is to curl up in a fetal position. While you are in the green room, accept an offer from BBC America to fly to London to shoot a pilot with Graham Norton. This does not take away the pain, but note that really sad things and pretty cool things can happen in tandem.
On your way home from London, begin bleeding in the Virgin Upper Class Lounge. Try to distract yourself by watching Meryl Streep on one side of the lounge and David Hasselhoff on the other. On the flight home, sit one row directly behind a very handsome man and his wife and their nanny and their toddler son and baby daughter. When the man says to you “I’m sorry” about the ruckus his kids make, use everything you have not to tell him that his noisy life is your dream and that you’re going to the bathroom several times an hour because you’ve lost your first baby.
When you return, have a D&C in your fertility doctor’s office without anesthesia, because it appears that the “spontaneous abortion” is almost complete. Still, it hurts like hell, but you are strong; you can do this. Accept the frosted sugar cookie the nurse gives you after the procedure to help your blood sugar. Or to cheer you up. It is a purple-and-yellow flower. Actually eat the entire sugar cookie, which is something you’d never otherwise do.
When you get engaged ten days later in front of the Fountain of Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, appreciate that you have exactly forty-five minutes before your first appointment to look at wedding venues. Yes, you knew you were going to get engaged on this trip, so good thing you’re wearing the floral “engagement dress” you purchased just for this moment! Which, excuse you/me, is in no way presumptuous, since you both decided to go to Rome to choose a place to get married, even though he hadn’t asked you yet. You’re no longer premaritally pregnant, but he’s still going to make an honest woman out of you. You two are old-fashioned like that.
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Decide that a round of IVF is just the thing a bride needs to distract her from planning a foreign wedding in three months as well as finding a new place to live with her fiancé that will accept his two smelly dogs. Listen to fiancé suggest perhaps this is a lot to take on? Assure him it is not, as forward motion is healing, and every month matters to you. You will save frozen eggs for making baby number 2 when you are even older. Impress nurse at your refresher teach with how unsqueamish you are about giving yourself the shots. Fire up mind-body connection. Go through the whole injection process again, but this time with specific sperm in mind. As the process unfurls, try not to blame yourself that your follicles aren’t as prodigal as they
were last time. When your fertility doctor calls an audible and advises punting by turning this into an artificial insemination, say sure. Having intrauterine insemination (IUI) allows you to pretend you are one-half of a celebrity lesbian couple.
Explain to your fiancé how he needs to produce a “sample” that will be brought with swiftness to your doctor’s office. Present yourself as the world’s most perfect partner by offering to help him produce this sample the old-fashioned way rather than having him take things into his own hands. As soon as you, Team IUI, produce sample together, leap off him and nestle cup o’ sperm in your tiny cleavage inside your running bra to keep it at optimal temperature. Give him a kiss and racewalk from Second Avenue across Park Avenue, being careful not to slosh the genetic material. When you bump into an acquaintance en route, feel lucky that you do not literally bump into him and endeavor to be friendly but not engaging enough to allow for deleterious cooling of semen. Do not mention you’re holding a wad between your boobs.
Upon learning that your fiancé’s usable sperm count is solidly in the millions with excellent motility, feel proud that you have chosen such a potent spouse and wonder if your whole mind-body connection thing is infectious. Lie back, relax, and let millions of sperm swim toward five good eggs. Visualize their doing so. Resolve that, with those odds, there’s no way you won’t get pregnant. When the doctor tells you that you can leave, go the extra mile by reclining longer while texting your fiancé the good news about his sperm count. In fact, text your whole family so that your father calls him “33 Mill” for a while, as if his future son-in-law is a rapper.
When at-home pregnancy tests reveal that you are not, in fact, pregnant, try not to take it too hard. When blood tests at the doctor’s say you were pregnant for two seconds, try to put a positive spin on it, as if two seconds is better than no seconds. Do not grieve this “chemical pregnancy” as a second miscarriage, because that seems way too pro-life. Convince yourself that the upside is you can now attempt to get drastically thin for your fast-approaching wedding. Being thinner for your second wedding than your first seems like an admirable goal.