Why I'm Like This (12 page)

I had a choice. I could take a Trial of Fertility Drugs or I could have the Laser Laparoscopy and Hysteroscopy. The latter were surgical procedures to find and repair endometriosis and/or, if possible, address any blockage not revealed by the dread Hysterogram. I had neither the symptoms nor a history of endometriosis, so my doctor recom
mended the drugs. I panicked. Even the lowest dose of Clomid, my doctor's drug of choice, carried a 6 to 8 percent chance of twins. What a fertility drug does if you are not ovulating is to make you ovulate. If you are already ovulating, and I was, it induces the release of an extra egg or two, thereby upping the chances for fertilization. Yikes. Still, praying to the Forces of Good, or whatever, for one baby but not for two definitely did not seem right. I agreed to take the drugs.

I was freaked out by the Clomid. It made me feel very on edge and I was already on edge. I was on the edge of the edge. I spoke in terse, one-or two-word sentences. My head ached. Keep your eyes on the prize, I told myself. Or prizes.

Four eggs came down the chute. One was definitely mature, one might mature in time for ovulation, and two were teeny-weeny specks, useless, wasted things. That's the way with the drugs. To help the front runners I was given a shot of HCG, or Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, in the ass. HCG, a naturally produced hormone, triggers ovulation within a certain window of time, so everyone, the eggs, the sperm, and I, can all get to the theater for curtain, so to speak. We also did two IUIs about twenty-four hours apart; David came home at lunch and we looked at a copy of
Jugs
together. Afterward, I started again with the progesterone suppositories.

Nada.

When my period finished I took another round of Clomid,
this time with no misgivings. Bring on the babies. The more, the merrier. It had been a year since we started trying to conceive. That probably doesn't seem like long to some people, but since I have a self-destructive habit of calculating my life in dog years, it was an eternity to me. We had all but worked our way through the doctor's little pamphlet. He didn't even list In Vitro Fertilization as an option because everyone knows it's the last one. The last-ditch effort. I did not want to end up there, at the end of the line, with nothing else to try. At the same time, the doctor had yet to prove that conception was impossible using plain old sex. David and I could still keep trying after all the extraordinary measures had been exhausted. We would be like the inhabitants of
Gilligan's Island.
We would stand on the beach and shout at ships on the horizon until Kingdom Come or we were canceled.

Our doctor was a very fine doctor. We'd heard stories of couples he had helped who had been told by other infertility specialists to adopt. Perhaps he was like the doctor in Orange County who was caught impregnating his patients with his own super sperm. I tried not to care. The man was reasonable looking, and certainly he was very smart. He was a doctor. The only thing I didn't like about him was that he talked too much. He chatted through every procedure, including the inseminations, most likely with the intention of keeping me relaxed. It had the opposite effect. He and his nurse would quiz me about current Broadway shows while he doused my uterus with David's sperm. I don't like it when
David says anything other than “Oh, Cindy”; why would I want to talk theater? But I couldn't find a graceful way to ask them to respect the sanctity of the moment. It seemed ungrateful. So I brought in my Walkman. I put my headphones on and closed my eyes and I guess they got the message because all I could hear was the Boss.

I went into myself, into my body,
Fantastic Voyage
–like. I swam north with the sperm, single-minded. We were heading upstream to spawn. The doctor had actually praised this particular batch, so we were pretty pumped. We would save the species from extinction or die trying. We courted the hell out of those eggs. We took them out to dinner and held hands with them under the table. We walked twenty-five blocks in the snow and talked as if we'd known each other forever. We bought them flowers at the all-night deli and then slow-danced to “Jungleland.” We ate Häagen-Dazs from the carton watching Dana Andrews obsess over Gene Tierney in
Laura
on the Late Late Show.

Then we made our move.

Once again I went for my blood test. And once again I spent the afternoon in stone cold dread of the inevitable phone call from Suzanne. Things had gotten to the point where I could not imagine any answer other than no. I'd stopped envisioning my body as being capable of anything at all, much less conception. Nothing ever happens the way you think it will. When David proposed to me, I had to ask him to repeat himself because I hadn't been listening. I had been
thinking about my grandmother, Lil, who had just died, and my father, who had just had a heart attack. The whole thing, the romantic restaurant, the roses, the funny, crappy fourteen-dollar ring from Weber's Closeout, all smooshed by in a blur. Most people I know are capable of giving highly detailed, minute-by-minute accounts of the defining moments of their lives, and I'm always like, “What did you say?” That is how I felt about trying to become pregnant. Like the moment of truth had somehow come and gone without my quite knowing what had happened. It was supposed to be so easy. Like on TV. “Remember when we made SusieJustinBrittanyMax?” “He touched my deepest fla fla.” “I don't know how but I just knew.” I'd laid there with a pillow under my butt and my legs in the air and I knew nothing. I'd taken my temperature and put my fingers inside myself to gauge the quality of my vaginal mucus (stretchy like egg whites = fertile; tacky like old jam = infertile). I'd performed countless at-home ovulation tests and I'd gulped Robitussin, because I'd heard of women getting pregnant during bouts of cold and flu and that they credited the mucus-thinning agent in cough medicine. I'd gone to the best doctor I could find and done everything he told me to do. I'd wished on eyelashes, on chicken bones, on candles, on stars. And still, I knew nothing. And I'd come to the conclusion that those home pregnancy kits were a joke, a marketing scheme. They would never turn the other color or show two lines or three dots or a smiley face.

So I waited and finally Suzanne called. She started talking about how I'd brought my Walkman in and something else, but I didn't hear her because I was listening for the word “Sorry.”

“Well, it must have been the Walkman,” she said.

Where was “Sorry”? Come on. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

“What?” I said.

“It must have been the Walkman.”

“What?”

“It must have done the trick because you're pregnant.”

I just kept saying, “What, what? What did you say?” like I always do. And she repeated the whole thing again and I cried loudly and said, “Oh, my God,” thirty times.

“Call your husband,” she said.

I did. I called David and cried, “We did it!” That was the best I could do. I knew I was supposed to show up at his office with a bottle of champagne or FedEx him knit booties or casually refer to him as Daddy-o over a candlelit dinner. But I had no self-control. I was utterly incredulous, as if a dinner plate had spoken to me in French.

Dumb luck. That's all it was. Or, who knows, Grace. Divine leniency. This morning when my son saw me his face did this: Is that you? It
is
! It
is
you! Oh hooray! Hooray! HOORAY! And now, here we are riding up and down the elevator in Bloomingdale's looking for pink shoes.

I
MAGINE
, if you will, that it is late at night, maybe you've just come home from some jolly event, some dinner dance or cocktail party, and you're feeling happy and relaxed. You're getting ready for bed, grateful to be taking off your bra, when you hear a slight rustling behind you, so slight you might have made a mistake. Maybe it was just the wind in the curtains.

If you had curtains.

Suddenly, as if unleashed from a cage, It spirals frantically towards you. You scream, “Oh, God,” and run from the room, hoping against hope It does not follow you. Your husband springs into action. He knows what to do; he has been
through this before. He must go into the bedroom, shut the door, and kill the moth.

This is why I will be a bad mother. I am pathologically afraid of moths. I can't stand their insane flapping, their arbitrary, freaked-out flight patterns. Their fuzzy, dingy bodies and papery wings disgust me. They are like wads of used tissue on acid. How they get into our apartment on the thirty-third floor is a mystery that haunts me. But they do. And sometimes they prove so elusive that I will walk and sleep in terror for days after their initial sightings, further tortured by the knowledge that one day, maybe years from now, I will find them petrified on surfaces upon which, given their utter incapacity for self-control, landing would seem inconceivable. Book bindings, the edges of drawers, the sides of poster frames. In the folds of shower curtains, on the cuffs of sweaters. I will jump at their dead selves, still horrified by their powdery, innocuous existences, and I will wait for David to arrive home and remove them.

I should admit that I have other mostly morbid, unfounded fears, like of avalanches and Legionnaire's disease, as well as perfectly normal fears that are remarkable only in that I dwell upon them for inordinate amounts of time and with unhealthy zeal until they have stopped being normal and become morbid and unfounded. I have tried to trace the history of my dread, starting with fear of adults and culminating with fear of being shot in the head by a sniper. In between, I have documented fear of being knocked over
at recess by a big girl named Heather, fear of getting into a fatal argument over the TV remote, fear of Drano.

And now, of all things, I am a person with a child. The idea of having your own is such an abstraction until the day arrives when you do. And then it is terrifying. An entire new assortment of fears descends upon you and you realize they will never ascend but rather multiply exponentially until you are carted away to the place where crazy people ride giant tri-cycles that your mother has requested
she
be sent to when and if the time comes that you do something so stupid and dangerous that you finally drive her out of her mind for good. Oh, my God, where was I? Oh, yes. In the first weeks of parenthood you are so completely wasted that you just feed the baby and change it and hold it and do all these things almost without thinking about it. And then it dawns on you: It's alive. The poopy thing is alive and it is up to you to make sure it stays that way. Whatever you do, don't drop it on its head. Don't spill hot liquids on it. Don't drink hot liquids. Be careful of its floppy neck. Be careful of its nose and mouth. Keep those airways free. Don't forget that it exists when you go to the bathroom. Don't wake up in the middle of the night and think for a second that it isn't there, next to you, in the bassinet. Unless, of course, you fall asleep together after nursing and it is actually in your bed. Don't roll over on it.

Once upon a time my husband and I called each other from work to rehash the sex we had the night before. Now he calls me or I call him and this is what we say, furtively: “I
have a bad story. I'm just telling you because it is a warning.” Ugh. It is the worst of all possible kinds of gossip; it is the dissemination of the Tragedy. Someone else's tragedy, that is, often someone we don't even know or have met only briefly or is a friend of a friend of a friend.

And then I say to David: “No Fritos until the baby is four, no, five. No nuts and no hot dogs and no doughy bread and no peanut butter and no popcorn and no grapes. And no gum and no small hard candies. No Pez.”

“No roughhousing,” I say, that night, when the baby is in his bed. “You always have to be in control. The baby can get out of control but you can't. No jumping, no flinging, no tossing. Don't trip.”

I wake David at 3:00
A.M
. to say, “He gets his own seat on a plane.”

I call my friend who also has a baby. I tell her our most recent stories and then throw in some more accrued over the months. Stories that I have deposited in my bank of terrible stories, the account to be drawn upon and its filthy currency spent whenever I am feeling nervous or helpless, whenever I need to make a strong point in favor of doing things my way. The careful way. The boy-in-the-bubble way.

Recently, my niece broke her wrist while she was on vacation in France with my brother, his wife, and their other daughter. She fell off a swing. Let me say first that I was not in France. And yet I have replayed the scene, or my render
ing of it, over and over in my imagination. I take nothing in stride. How could it have happened? Wasn't anyone watching? She herself told me about some Charging Wild Boars. What about them?

This is how it goes, late into the night. Clearly, there is an ineluctable crack in my psyche which will eventually require surgery, or drugs, or both.

A couple of years ago, as David and I rambled around our favorite store, a hiking-and-camping-supply store in Vermont, considering camping gear—tents, stoves, water-purification systems—I happened to open a book with a title that was something like
Bear Attacks.
What possessed me to do this is a question I have been asking myself on every hike and campout since. Did I need to read about people having their arms ripped off by ferocious bears? Did I need to read about people whose heads were mauled and torsos chomped and bones stripped bare? Did I need to hear them tell their tales themselves, in first person singular, an indication not only that they lived at all, maimed, scarred, in all their armless glory, but that they were semiconscious during the attack? If David thinks that we will take our baby camping with us next summer, he can do it with his new wife.

Are there really bears out there? Yes. Would David and I take the baby hiking in serious bear country? No, of course not. And isn't a rousing chorus of “I'm 'Enry the Yeighth, I Yam” in a bad cockney accent sufficient to scare the occa
sional bear off? Besides, all bears really want to eat is your Doritos and your toothpaste. So, honestly, is there anything to be afraid of?

Yes. Mountain Men.

Mountain Men are men who live in the mountains and occasionally come down and kidnap female hikers. At least this is my understanding of them. They have long, matted beards and wear ancient Wrangler jeans and cheap flannel shirts and furry vests. They look like a countrified ZZ Top. They go too long without the company of womenfolk and litt'luns, which is what makes them so dangerous. Or so I gather.

Sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it? I think so.

My mother, like any really good mother, spent a reasonable portion of her life protecting her children from danger or at least trying to. She made me put one of those orange flags on the back of my bike and yelled at me when she passed in her car after I'd ditched it in the woods. She made me wear wool hats to high school despite the certainty that I would spend an agonized day with static hat head. She made me wear a Medic-Alert bracelet so, God forbid, any paramedic peeling me off the pavement would know I was allergic to penicillin. And her vigilance has not wavered with my adulthood. She still phones with hurricane alerts and migraine medicine updates and her newest clarion call: computer virus warnings. She hates that I take the subway, that I run in the park, that I visit friends in what she would call iffy
neighborhoods. Ironically, I have pretty successfully repressed many of the everyday bugaboos associated with city life. I ride the subway at all hours. I walk dark streets with aplomb. I act unafraid and I pooh-pooh my mother to the point of insult: “Take a cab after midnight, are you mad?” Because what I really fear is the escaped mental patient, the rogue wave, the freak accident (
The chandelier just fell, just like that!
). I am more apt to think someone is following me on a nature trail in Montana than down an alley in Hell's Kitchen.

So is all this her fault? Probably not. In fact, in comparison to me I think she was a little, I don't know, criminally negligent. Even now, her blasé attitude toward Drano irks me. And in some ways she is my exact opposite. Her fears are for the most part founded; I
should
have used the orange flag. Mine, on the other hand, are baseless; they are the spectral imaginings of a lunatic mind.

Maybe this is a thing about control. Maybe I just want to be on my toes, to be prepared for anything. And perhaps if I were to be hypnotized, which I won't be, but if I were, it would come to light that my illogical, some might say, ridiculous fears are actually the conscious manifestations of their more logical but repressed counterparts, i.e. that it is just
easier
to fear a Mountain Man, since I am only at risk from one a few times a year, tops.

 

One morning, there is a penny in the baby's poop. Who put it there? Is it supposed to be a joke? Did the baby somehow
pick up a penny and tuck it into his diaper? He has such a crazy sense of humor. You wouldn't believe the things he laughs at. Anything on my head is an automatic gut-buster, as is the sound I make when I cough. I could be dying of consumption and he would be howling with glee. But, really, what's the story with the poopy penny? I cry several times throughout the day, thinking to the edge of the unthinkable, of how it might have been different. My husband and I retrace our steps. We can't figure out when it could have happened. Which is worse? To know exactly when you weren't watching closely enough or not to know?

I call a couple of friends, friends who have children. They gasp. I say to each of them: “No, you're supposed to say, ‘A penny, why, that's nothing! Why, I once found a matchbox car/tennis ball/commemorative silver dollar! Why, a diaper is nothing more than a salvage yard!'” But everyone is stunned and I am sickened. “When did it happen?” one woman asks. “I don't know,” I say. “Some time over the last couple of days,” I say. “No, no,” she says. “It takes a week or two for coins to work their way out.” “Ah,” I say. “Then it was that awful moment a week and a half ago at our friend's house in Vermont when we thought the baby had maybe picked up a sharp little corner of a tortilla chip. He was crying and coughing so we let him work it out himself—that's what they tell you to do—and then he was okay. It must have
been the penny.” “Yes,” says the woman, a mother, too. “Yes, it must have been.”

I get an e-mail from a friend.
It was a lucky penny,
she writes.

Yes. Oy.

How do I go forward without a lobotomy, you ask. That's the first question. I don't know the answer to that but I'll ask my mother, she might. Next question, and more to the point: How do I raise a child not in
this
world, but in
my
world? There's no way to answer that except to say that it is too late to turn back now that I own a Tiny Love Gymini Deluxe 3-D Activity Gym, an Evenflo Excersaucer Junior, and a Graco Doorway Bumper Jumper. So when we are home alone and the moths are doing their demented dance, I will muster up some courage. I will. Or we'll wait together in the bathroom until help arrives.