Around the New Year, back in New York, I was having a wicked case of PMS that I just couldn’t shake. The P of premenstrual kept on and on, with the M not happening. Then it occurred to me: I’m going through menopause. My mother had early menopause at age forty-one, so once I hit forty, I was always aware that it could be coming at any time. I looked up menopause on the Internet, curious whether raging PMS was a symptom. I called my friend Megan, one of my childhood friends from home. I have a group of friends I’ve known since I was a kid, and we all form a circle of amateur therapists, there at the ready for any problem that may arise. “How do I know if I’m going through menopause?” Ugh. I was feeling down. I knew it was a big change for anyone, but when you don’t have kids, it seems especially depressing and final.
“What are your symptoms?” she asked me, and I told her about the wicked PMS.
“Well, you could be pregnant.”
“That’s not possible.”
First of all, there was the aforementioned early menopause in my genetic code. Also, there was the simple fact of my age. As any lady knows, you are constantly bombarded by the media and medical establishment with how difficult it can be to conceive after forty. At forty-three, two months shy of forty-four, forget it. It was impossible. I would need medical intervention to get pregnant at my age, and even then it’d probably take a miracle.
I went to class at the gym and started musing, What if I were pregnant? Was there any way? Maybe I should just get a test to rule it out—a mere formality. I went to the drugstore after my class. The lady checking me out picked up the pregnancy test and said, “Shee-it. These scare me. I don’t even want to look at that!”
“I don’t think there’s anything to worry about,” I said, over-sharing with my local cashier.
I went home and immediately peed on the stick. I’d never done this before, never even had a scare. I wasn’t even the least bit nervous about the outcome. Three minutes later, I went back to check the results. With no ceremony, no heart racing, no sloooow lifting of the stick to grandly eye the results, I picked up the stick, ready to check this off my list as a possibility. Two lines, OK, that must mean “not pregnant.” I looked at the guide. Two lines … pregna—… WHAT? And then, my heart did start racing. I began to pace around the apartment and speak aloud to myself, “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!”
I frantically called Megan back. No answer. Nooo! I called another friend from the Lexington gang. “Debbie!” I say as if I’m being murdered.
“What? What is it?”
“No, it’s nothing bad.” Mid-hyperventilation. “I’m pregnant!”
If you looked at my Internet history that day, it would read: “menopause,” “menopause symptoms,” “signs of menopause,” and then “effects of alcohol consumption in early pregnancy.”
There were two lines on the stick. In the first hours and even the first week, I was just numb. I was incredulous. I didn’t have my wits about me to feel anything. After all the time I’d spent worrying about not having kids, now I felt the sly ol’ Universe had just pulled the ultimate fast one on me. Or that somewhere up there, God was chuckling. Not the Judeo-Christian God but some impish god from Greek mythology, rubbing his hands together mischievously. I could not comprehend the news because I had already written my own story—my negative story, mind you—and typeset it in permanent ink. After telling a few other Lexington friends—all of whom were joyous and laughing and happy for me—I now had to tell John. We had known each other for six months at this point, but we had probably spent a total of one month actually in each other’s presence. I had to tell John that he might be a father and that there was a possibility that, in some fashion, we would be tied together for life.
I called him up and tried sounding nonchalant.
“Hey! Where are you?”
“I’m driving home from work,” he said.
“OK!” said the chipmunk who had taken control of my voice. “Just call me when you get home!”
I wanted him to be sitting down when I gave him the news, and in a stationary location, not behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. He called me back when he arrived home.
“What’s up?”
“Um…” I started to feel like I was going to hyperventilate again. “I don’t know, um, how to say this, but, uh, I was late, uh, with my period, and I just took a test and it said I was pregnant.”
John’s initial response was skepticism at the idea that a home pregnancy test was completely reliable information. He told me to try the test again, which I’d have to do the next morning. I said, “It’s just peeing on a stick. I think it’s going to come out the same. I think this is real,” but I agreed to try again. Coincidentally, I already had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for two days hence, so until we got the official word, John still believed in the idea of a false positive. He was in as much numbness and shock as I was. We weren’t used to discussing serious topics—this was all Fun! Light! Merriment! I did the second test: positive. When I went to the doctor the next day, it was confirmed. In a month, I would be forty-four years old, and I was pregnant.
This Little Piggy
We had had a warning that this would happen. We had just forgotten about it. Right away when I met John for the first time on his New York trip, within only two days of knowing each other, we realized that we were seeing pigs everywhere, so much so that we both commented on it. Here is a small sampling: As I mentioned, John brought bacon lip balm to the dinner the night he met me out with my friends. When he came to my apartment, the movie The Amityville Horror was on TV, and I said, “Oh! This is the one with Jodie the pig.” (Jodie was the scary six-foot pig that looked in the family’s windows.) Later, John called my feet hamhocks. I’m not proud of that. After we went out to dinner with my friends on the second night, we had gone to the bar Bourgeois Pig. And across the street from Shoolbred’s, the bar where we met, there is a huge pig painted on the apartment building where his niece was living with her boyfriend. There was the Pork Off in San Fran on July Fourth weekend, with the porku poems. And when John came back to visit a month later, we were standing on the train platform, and a guy came up to me and said, “I worked on The Martha Stewart Show when you were a guest and you made a ham with her.” John and I turned to each other and exclaimed, “What is with these pigs?” There’s a text service called KGB to which you can text any question and they will write you back with an answer. So we were on the train and John texted, “What is the symbolism of a pig?” He received an answer back in a few moments. “Oh my God,” he said, chuckling.
“What does it say?”
He held up his phone for me to see. I looked at the word on the screen: Fertility.
At the time, I was almost embarrassed. I let it go right by because I was thinking, “I just started dating this guy. I’m forty-three. I don’t think we have to worry about that.” It wasn’t the kind of thing you want to stress to someone you’ve just started seeing. What was I going to say? “Well, we don’t have to worry about that. Hahaha! I’m TOO OLD!”
So a mere six months later, when I discovered I was pregnant, I thought, “The PIGS! The pigs predicted it! I didn’t listen to the pigs!”
Serious with a Capital S
Before this bombshell, John and I had never had to discuss anything Serious with a capital S before. The biggest decisions we were making as any sort of couple were what vacation to go on or what wine to order. I think we were both now mildly terrified. To me, I had a miracle on my hands and yet, it was scaring the hell out of me. I knew in my heart I would go forward with having the baby. Even though I had thought I would never have a baby alone, I felt like I’d won some odd lottery and I was going to go with what the Fates/She-Wolf Goddess/Hawaiian Volcano gods or the Universe had determined for me. I didn’t know what John would do. He said all the right things. “We’re in this together, we’ll get through this.” We hadn’t even seen each other in person yet. Some nights on the phone, I would get so scared I would cry. He would calm
me down. Other nights, he would be the one freaking out and I would be the soother. I told him I was going forward with the birth and that he could be as involved or uninvolved as he wanted to be.
We finally saw each other in person about two weeks after I learned of the pregnancy, because we already had plans to meet up at the Sundance Film Festival with a group of my friends. The situation could not have been less ideal. We were crammed into a condo with twelve other people with no privacy and no quiet. One night, I broke down in our room because I was so terrified, scared of whether I could be a mom, of how much work it would be, of what a life change it would be, of losing my freedom. What if I didn’t bond with the baby? I hadn’t been around many babies at all. What if the child had special needs and I was by myself? What if I had postpartum depression? All of these things were swirling in my head and overwhelming me. The next morning, getting into the shower, I had my only bout of morning sickness. I didn’t throw up; I just felt faint and had to lie down on the bathroom floor. I never had another incident of morning sickness. I took it as a sign that the baby was telling me he or she wouldn’t be any trouble. I chose to see it as a message, a message that I needed to hear: “It’s OK, Mom. We’ll make this work.”
John and I retreated to a hotel for a night, away from the crowd, and that’s where John had his freak-out. He was in a complete panic about the situation. John is a bit of a lone wolf. He doesn’t travel in a pack of friends like I do. Would he be able to have a connection with a child? He didn’t say this, but I was wondering if that was on his mind. We dubbed the night of John’s freak-out the Skullcrack, because he was in such a wild panic. He and I were realizing how little we really knew each other. He lived on the other side of the country. That night, I had to talk him down off the ledge, as he had done for me the night before. This was like a romantic comedy, except we were failing to see any comedy in it.
After Sundance, we went on to San Francisco, where I was participating in Sketchfest. We had more heavy times in a hotel room there. In an effort to get my mind off things and provide an escape from the serious conversations, John surprised me with tickets to a dog show that was taking place in a big arena in San Francisco. When I asked what made him get tickets to a dog show, he said, “Well, I know dogs make you happy.” How sweet, right? Little did we know the dog show we were going to weren’t no Westminster. I think it was some sort of preliminary round to get to the big time. We walked in and found it was held in this superdepressing arena that had rooms but looked like a warehouse. Unkempt people who looked as if they’d been living “off the grid” sat in canvas folding chairs surrounded by dog paraphernalia. Bumper stickers and old signs hung everywhere saying I HEART MY WESTIE or CAUTION—WIGGLEBUTT ZONE! and MY NEWFIE IS SMARTER THAN OUR PRESIDENT! Larger breeds like mastiffs and Saint Bernards were splayed out on the floor, eyes rolling up as if to say, “Get me the hell out of this stank hole.” A poodle with its fur in several hair ties and topknots walked endlessly in a circle, obviously insane. We got out of there after about an hour. The energy in the low-rent dog show was even heavier than the energy of a semi-couple discussing an unexpected pregnancy.
We didn’t even know what “we” were. We didn’t know before this surprise and we hadn’t been too concerned about it and we sure didn’t know now. We both went back to our separate coasts, uncertain about what our future held. But I did know that if all went well medically, I was having a baby in September, eight months away, with or without John. I might be a single mom. This was truly bizarre—I was a good girl from the suburbs!
Speaking of which, I decided to tell my parents earlier than the three-month window some people wait for to make sure the baby’s OK. I figured I could use the extra support under my unexpected circumstances. There were no grandchildren in our family. My parents weren’t the type to say, “Sooo, when are we going to have a grandchild?” and put all that pressure on me, I think because they knew that if I could have been married with kids, I would have pulled it off by now.
I felt bad over the years that my parents weren’t going to be grandparents, mainly because I thought they would be really good at it and that it would bring them a lot of joy. Now, I was about to give them some of the best news of their lives. At least, that’s what I thought.
I went home for the weekend with the express purpose of telling them the news in person. I even brought the first ultrasound photo of a tiny little tadpole to show them as well. I was nervous all weekend long. Finally, on Sunday morning, I approached them in the living room. “I have some crazy news to tell you,” I said. “Um, it’s not bad or anything.”
In spite of my warning that it wasn’t bad, they both got serious looks on their faces.
“Um … I’m pregnant.”
I thought I was going to be met with a rousing cry of jubilation and excitement. Sure, they hadn’t met John, but they were going to be grandparents! Who cares the circumstances? Grandparents! By any means necessary!
Instead, their faces were a collage of “Bleep blop blorp—Does not compute! Does not compute!” And what was that look on my dad’s face? It resembled the same grimly set jaw I had seen when I was a teenager and I accidentally hit his Toyota Corolla in the driveway with the other family car. He had the gravity of a doctor, which he is, and I think he mentioned the risks involved with having a baby after forty. What if the baby wasn’t healthy? And even if the baby was healthy, they seemed to be thinking, Can our Rachel handle this on her own? My mom said something like, “Are you sure about this? I mean, this isn’t like the dog that you can hand back over!”
I’m sure she would say she was making a joke out of nervousness, but I think part of her was truly afraid I might show up at their doorstep and hand the baby off to them, Maury Povich—style, saying, “Sorry, guys, but I gots ta party.”
She did get up and hug me, and I think she looked happy. She got a little teary even. About a month later, she would send me a bunch of maternity clothes from T.J. Maxx, confirming their support and also reminding me that having a baby to bargain-shop for might be my mother’s greatest joy. But at the time, though they said they would support me, I left there that day feeling like Juno. A forty-three-year-old Juno.
After I told good friends and the parents I was pregnant, I then entered the phase where I had to tell people I didn’t know as well. This was not quite as fun. People would assume I was trying to get pregnant or they’d ask, “Were you using birth control?” (Yes, they did get that personal.) The answer is, I was not trying to get pregnant and I was using what I thought would be fine for birth control given the onslaught of “It’ll never happen” news that had already taken over my brain. I can tell you this: You know those warnings they give you in junior high school health class about how the withdrawal method is not a reliable method of contraception and can still result in pregnancy? Well, now I know firsthand, they weren’t just whistlin’ Dixie. They meant it!
During what I thought of as my fertile years, I was conscientious, never being careless about birth control whatsoever. But I was pushing forty-four by the time John and I got together. In addition, John’s last relationship had been with a woman my age, so he was already quite versed in the over-forty fertility realities. I have several dear friends of similar age who were married and trying to conceive and were having to rely on medical intervention: Clomid or IVF. And I had been told by my doctor that early menopause is often hereditary and could negatively affect my fertility.
With all of these elements, why would I think I could ever get pregnant, especially with my high school birth control methods thrown in for good measure? Look at it this way: If you were ever advising someone on how to get pregnant, would you ever say, “Wait until you are two months shy of your forty-fourth birthday, don’t pay any attention to your cycle and the forty-eight hours when you could become pregnant, and, shall we say, withdraw before completing the act? Good luck!”?
I was astounded by what happened. It changed my way of thinking, because I had f
ully bought into my own negative future about having a child. No one could have budged me on that. I found the most receptive audience to my story were the single women in their late thirties and early forties, like me, who were used to hearing that motherhood at their age was a difficult if not impossible feat. I was a tiny beacon of hope (or in my case, a bacon of hope) for any one of them who thought they still might want children at some point—one real story to go against the barrage of news reports, magazine articles, advice, and sob stories to the contrary. I knew better than anyone that not everyone is lucky enough to find love during their “safety” years and that not every woman is cut out to say, “Whatever. I’m doing it alone.”
As opposed to the awe I was eliciting from the single ladies, I noticed a vastly different response when I told women my age with kids who’d been married for many years. “Were you using birth control?” When I’d tell them the honest answer, they would laugh at me! They downright scolded me as if I were a teenager! “Rachel! That’s HIGH SCHOOL stuff!” a woman whom I do not know well enough to have been sharing my personal information said to me. To which I could have replied, “Oh yeah?! Well, I wasn’t having sex in high school!” I always got a bit angry when I heard this “duh” reaction, because of course a married woman who had her kids right on schedule has never really taken in and felt the barrage of “YOU BETTER HAVE KIDS BEFORE FORTTYYYYYY OR YOU MAY HAVE FERTILITY ISSUUUUUES!” news stories and magazine articles and general conversations that a single woman who may still want kids hears and pays attention to and has to contend with on a regular basis. Also, I always thought all the warnings they give to teens about not relying on the withdrawal method was just some bullshit you told high school kids who had no control of their bodies. I honestly didn’t think people really got pregnant that way. Yes, I did purport earlier that I was in the “smart” classes.
Girl Walks Into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle Page 13