by Faith Salie
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So as not to be a slacker, put another round of IVF on the calendar for the week after your honeymoon. Get preliminary blood work done two weeks before your wedding. While at the CBS offices, working on one of your stories for Sunday Morning, return a call from nurse about your blood test. Be shocked when she tells you you are pregnant, naturally. So shocked that you step out of the building, onto West Fifty-Seventh Street, where you explain to her that she is mistaken. She explains that you are mistaken, and you are indeed pregnant. Call your fiancé and announce the good news/bad news in one breath, as taxis rush by and the revolving door spins behind you: “Okay are you ready for this I’m pregnant but let’s not make it a big deal because it’s not going to last.”
Do a little math and accept the fact that you got pregnant with the aid of the Eternal City and not science on a last-minute wedding planning trip on September eleventh. Gloat that the terrorists didn’t win. Nevertheless, assume that you will have a miscarriage during your wedding weekend or honeymoon, which is highly annoying. Have this pessimism more gently confirmed by your fertility doctor, who gives you about a 20 percent chance of this pregnancy lasting. But just in case this thing is going to happen, stop starving yourself. Put down the Sprite Zero and back away. Eat mostly hard-boiled eggs until you leave for Rome.
Tell very few people you are pregnant. When you feel intense pain a few nights before your wedding, wait for the blood to come. Observe, with surprise, that it never does. Discover it makes your wedding more intimate and romantic that you and your new husband are creating a new life together in more ways than one.
The day before you get married, take a nap with your man. While you lie there, talk to the life inside you, if, in fact there’s still life inside you. Thank it for being there, for however long it’s with you. Then drink a touch of Prosecco and Frascati and dance gymnastically like a dirty whore with your gay brother at your wedding reception. Feel like what is meant to be will be, and this day is for celebration, and this teensy soul is celebrating with you.
On your honeymoon, notice that you feel really sick while walking to see David—the statue, not your brother, whom you did not invite on your honeymoon. Sit down on a bench on the streets of Florence. Realize, with insane gratitude, (a) this is what pregnancy nausea feels like! and (b) I need a nap!! Attend vespers all over Florence and Venice to light candles for your baby. Dare to hope.
Two days after returning from your honeymoon, go to the doctor with your husband. Witness a heartbeat on the ultrasound. Watch tears roll down his face while you smile so hard your cheeks hurt. Text your family and your friends April and Joanne: “Heartbeat!!!” In celebration, hold hands and walk to a café where you split a smoked salmon on pumpernickel sandwich because you know about the no sushi but you don’t know yet about the no smoked salmon.
Have a complicated pregnancy of Advanced Maternal Age. Take good care of yourself, because this little guy needs you to.
Become a mother at forty-one.
Celebrate your first real Mother’s Day on national television. Perform a CBS commentary about being a new mother in [gulp] middle age. Talk about how you have some gray in your roots, but your baby doesn’t care because he can’t see the top of your head, and how you probably need glasses at your age, but you keep your son close so you don’t have to squint to see him. Try not to cry as you deliver these words. Cry a little when you receive beautiful, grateful responses from viewers. Smile a little at the man who comments that it’s selfish to have kids at your age. And the other guy who blames feminism.
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Tick tock: when your son is four months old, see your fertility doctor about getting pregnant again. Time to get your money’s worth from those frozen eggs. Make a plan for starting meds and shots, pump breast milk for your son right up until you have to go on hormones to try to be Best Mother Ever. When your seven-month-old son awakens ridiculously early in the mornings, go running with him in jog stroller so your husband can sleep. Return at 8 a.m. on the dot with cranky baby to have well-rested husband inject your upper ass quadrants with progesterone. Apply lavender-scented, microwavable teddy bear to your butt ASAP. Shove into running pants and walk around with hot bear butt while you chase the baby.
Pee on sticks at 3 a.m. because you can’t wait for blood test. Tell your platonic soul mate, Joanne, you are pregnant before anyone else. Prepare for your husband to take the news in stride. “Why not?” he says again. Don’t bother to explain that “Why not?” could be that you’ve lost one and a half pregnancies, and you’re almost forty-two, and the odds of IVF working are less than 30 percent. Try to invest in his sanguinity. Mind-body connection blah blah blah.
Feel really sick. Love it. Embrace it. When you actually vomit—the only time you’ve ever thrown up while pregnant—in front of your concerned baby boy, celebrate. Do math: vomiting + heart beating on multiple ultrasounds = baby! Secretly hope it’s a girl. Go away from your son for four days to host a TV show and be a panelist on Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me. Dare to confide in copanelist and great guy Bobcat Goldthwait you are pregnant after you two reminisce about being on the same ’90s sitcom that also starred a stuffed bunny named Mr. Floppy. Justify being away from an eight-month-old baby for almost a week by telling yourself you’re spending time with your other child. Lie in bed at the Hyatt and put your hand on your belly and thank the new baby.
On an offensively frigid day in March, see no heartbeat on the ultrasound. You can’t see the monitor, but you can see your OB looking at the monitor. Know something is very, very wrong when she narrows her eyes and tries not to frown. Squeeze your husband’s hand but not as tightly as you squeeze your eyes shut. Silent tears escape anyway and roll down your cheeks. When your husband wants to connect with you and hold you, all you can do is contract into stasis, much like your baby who has recently died. Try not to wonder when—at what moment—its heart stopped beating. Try not to think of it just floating inside you, lifeless.
Stay silent when your doctor sends you to the hospital to have the miscarriage confirmed on a larger screen by a more powerful instrument. Remind yourself, as you walk through the burn unit, there are worse things than a miscarriage.
When your husband leans in to cry together face-to-face as you lie on the gurney, push him away so you can see the screen. Explain, “I have to see. I have to see the baby.” You need to witness the heart not beating. You owe that to this child—to look. It’s an open casket and your way of saying good-bye.
Resolve not to be so judgmental about pro-lifers, except for the ones who blow up doctors.
Stop crying when your husband needs to cry, and put your arms around him. Take turns. Take a cab home.
As soon as you walk in the apartment, find your little guy. He is wearing his PJs with the monkey on the butt. Sing to him and put him in his crib. Notice that you cannot cry when you are holding your healthy baby and watching him fall asleep by propping his monkey butt in the air. Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful. You have more than some people ever have.
Drink the half glass of Priorat your husband gives you and informs you is a fine glass of wine. Take a hot bath, sniffle. Put away the pregnancy books by your bed and take out Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. But before you climb into bed, do something that you haven’t done in a long, long time: tiptoe into your son’s dark room and lay your hand on his chest.
You need to feel his heart beat.
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After your D&C (this one in the hospital with anesthesia), bleed for weeks and weeks. Stay sad for a long time. Learn that your uterus is made of Velcro and has clung to what is medically termed “POC,” or “products of conception.” Upon learning this, forgive yourself for being so sad, because now you understand that your body was cleaving to this lost baby, so it makes sense your heart was, too. Have another surgery to yank the POC off your Velcruterus.
When you learn that there was no chromosomal reason for the miscarriage, and that the pro-choice fetus/pro-life bab
y was a boy, irrationally blame yourself. Feel certain that this little XY spirit knew you wanted a girl and so departed. Feel awful. Ask your fertility doctor what you can do to prepare for next time—you have nine eggs left. There must be something you can do, to do this better. She tells you to use these weeks to heal and enjoy your family before you will, once again, be beholden to timed injections, blood tests, and a hot teddy bear in your pants.
You have not been able to travel for a long time because of the fertility treatments, so tag along on your husband’s business trip to Paris. Encourage your son to smear fancy Opéra cake all over his face on his first birthday. Light candles at Notre Dame. Go to Rome and rub St. Peter’s foot at the Vatican for good hormone levels.
A couple months later, start all over again. Feel proud of the one egg you choose to put in, because NYU Fertility Center has given it an “A.” Wish you could do extra credit to make it an “A+.” Save the photo of the day five blastocyst, which looks a bit like a moon crater or a pizza or a condom but may turn out to look like you. Put your son in the baby carrier and walk with him to Blessed Sacrament every morning, where you lean over and allow him to grab unlit candles. Pay for candles so you don’t go to hell. Light them. When you kneel down to pray to Mary, because she’s a woman and probably gets it even if she definitely did not do fertility treatments, feel with satisfaction that this is a really good glutes, hams, and quads work out, since you are carrying twenty pounds of viable child. Smile back at the homeless woman wearing a turban who’s always sitting or snoozing in the back pew. And when your Jewish husband occasionally joins you in these prayers, thank G-d that you married him, because you remember how, on your first honeymoon, your Episcopalian wasband refused to visit famous French cathedrals, disgusted as he was by the history of the Catholic Church.
Promise yourself you will not take a pregnancy test too early. Ignore your promise immediately and tinkle as quietly as possible on a stick at blur-thirty in the morning. Feel your heart swell as two lines emerge. Refrain from waggling the pee stick in front of your sleeping husband’s face and screaming joyously, “WHY NOT?!!” Pee on more sticks for days, because the lines keep getting darker and more beautiful. Save the sticks in the cabinet by your nail polish like a fertility hoarder.
Promise God that you would love a little brother for your son. Name him Rufus to prove you’re serious. “Rufus,” which is Latin for “red,” because you hope he will have fake red hair like you.
Tell no one about this pregnancy except Joanne and John. Even put water in your Sprite Zero bottles to drink during the Sirius radio show you host so that your cohost has no clue, because you once told her that if you ever stopped drinking diet soda, she’d know you’re pregnant.
When you’re ten weeks pregnant, and you discover you’re having a girl, try hard to believe it. Try not to mind that the first person you tell is the nanny you will later fire for stealing from you, because she’s right there when you hang up the phone. Go to Rome for your anniversary, and when you are walking through Piazza della Minerva, remember that this is the first place you ever stayed with your now-husband, at the Grand Hotel de la Minerve. Recall strolling by the square’s Bernini elephant statue with your mother almost twenty years before. Walk with your son and husband into Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the basilica with the cobalt blue ceiling painted with stars, and light candles once more for your son’s sister. Decide you will name her Minerva. Note that you light a ton of candles. Hope the proceeds are not going toward the care and feeding of old pedophiles.
Think it’s a good idea to give birth this time without any drugs, so you can see what your body can do. At forty-two weeks, receive a saffron bath as your water breaks. Experience the walloping physical agony to which you psychotically committed. Drip amniotic fluid on Carlos the doorman’s shoes as you shuffle into a taxi. Promise taxi driver you will not give birth in his vehicle. Vomit in the lobby of Labor & Delivery as you moan, “GOD HELP ME.” When you tell them you have to push, and they tell you to wait, listen to your body and push. When they whisk your daughter away as she leaves you and enters the world, covered in meconium, feel like your heart is across the room wailing to be returned to your body.
A few months later, return to Blessed Sacrament to light a candle (of course) on what would be your mother’s seventieth birthday. Cherish the fact that your prayers are now “Thank you” rather than “Please.” Wonder why God has given you so much. Thank your children for choosing you. Thank the babies who were yours for weeks for paving the way for the babies who are now yours for life. Also observe that this kneeling involves only thirteen pounds of new baby, so genuflect a few extra times to target postpartum glutes. Notice the turbaned homeless woman. Smile. Wonder if she realizes that you’re the same lady who prayed and prayed for the little girl in the pink floral sun hat whom you’re now carrying in front of your heart.
When your joke sucks, there’s no difference between performing in front of fifteen thousand people or five hundred people. The silence produced by a large crowd not laughing sounds exactly the same as that of a more intimate audience. I discovered this not too long ago during a Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! taping in Chicago’s Millennium Park, in front of a sea of the show’s fans.
If you’re not a fan of the show, you should be, for reasons having nothing to do with me. Like most panelists, I appear on it about once a month. But the program has almost five million weekly listeners, and it’s been on air—and now podcasting—for almost twenty years, so it’s doing something very right. Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! (or WWDTM, as we acronym-hungry NPR types write) is a quiz show in which a regular rotating cast of comedians and writers makes jokes about the week’s news. It tapes on Thursdays in front of a studio audience and then gets edited and aired over the weekend. Its host is Peter Sagal, a public radio rock star who makes sardonic sexy, and his sidekick/scorekeeper was, for sixteen years, the iconic Carl Kasell, the most avuncular gentleman in radio. Now Peter’s joined by self-proclaimed “legendary anchorman” Bill Kurtis, a playful éminence grise with a voice groovy enough to make Ron Burgundy drop an egg.
The public radio tribe is a fairly small clan of resiliently nerdy folks. Even after my own show was canceled, I remained family. I asked my agent to reach out to WWDTM, and the producers took a chance on me. They invited me to be on a show, and I figured if I didn’t screw up, I might get asked back. So this would be an audition, really, that millions of people would get to hear. I felt like I was from New Jersey and being invited to jam with The Boss. I wanted to crush it.
A couple of days before I flew to my first taping in Chicago, Peter called to give me some tips. I tried, as I walked through Central Park with the phone to my ear, to get used to hearing the voice that had become so familiar through my radio, talking to me, just me, so warmly. Peter said he knew I might feel nervous (yes) but not to be (ha) and then offered two main pieces of advice. He suggested I say whatever jokes popped into my head before figuring out whether they’re funny. “Half the stuff gets edited anyway, for time,” he said. “We’ll protect you from sounding like an idiot.” He continued, “And if something calls to mind a personal story—it doesn’t have to be funny, just true—give it a shot. You never know where things may lead.”
Peter’s advice indeed proved helpful. At my debut, beloved panelist Mo Rocca, who happens to be a college friend, put me at ease as soon as the catchy WWDTM theme song started. Sitting in front of our mics at the panelist table, he started swaying his shoulders to the music. Then he began shimmying like he meant it, and I could not help but choose to join him. We looked like a pair of Muppets. That was my first taste of how much more fun this radio show was in person. I did fine that first time, won a few laughs, got asked back. And asked back again. It took me a couple of years, though, to stop worrying about whether I was offering enough funny to become a regular.
I also had to embrace the fact that being part of the show means getting laughs that most people will never hear. We re
cord for close to two hours, but the final version that airs is less than an hour; stuff gets cut. This happened with that Millennium Park show, after a caller named Connie informed us she was an OB-GYN. She was playing “Bluff the Listener.” Bluff the Listener asks the contestant to hear three ridiculous stories based on a common topic, one of which is actually true. The producers e-mail us the night before and assign one of us to write up the real story and the other two panelists to concoct fake ones. (I type mine on the plane to Chicago so I can refine it all day; Mo, in contrast, often scratches out something priceless—perhaps even with an obscure early ’80s TV reference, like Gavin MacCleod—in the green room just before we take the stage.) During this particular show, with Dr. Connie, I had the real story, and she didn’t choose it, which would have won me a point in the game. Instead, she dithered between the other fake stories written by my two male colleagues, so I rebuked her. “Connie,” I said, “you should stick with vaginas.” For better or for worse, it was my biggest laugh of the night, which you missed if you listened to that show. They edited it out. I guess because it’s public radio, not pubic radio.
For a while, I tried to figure out my role on the show. I don’t bring the bold comedy chops of panelists Paula Poundstone and Alonzo Bodden, who tour the country doing stand-up. I don’t have the inspired irascibility of veterans like Charlie Pierce and Roy Blount Jr. I find a comfort zone being a bit of the wonky one, not a know-it-all—because I don’t know it all, at all—but the one who’s done enough research to add a bit of trivia to the news stories. Also, I’m usually the only woman onstage when I do a show,* and I’ve discovered that being transparent about my unique perspective often pays off. I’ve learned to trust myself to be more funny than clever. An audience can usually sniff out prefab jokes, and if they can’t, my fellow comedians nail me on it: “You’ve been sitting on that one, haven’t you, Faith?” Jokes are not made to sit on. Neither are these lessons I’ve learned over my years on the show.