I have been invited to host a panel on How to Live Child-free Without Regrets at the upcoming Fertility Planit 2014 in Los Angeles (Happily sharing the stage with my good buddy Lisa Manterfield and, the soon to meet, Lynn Newman).
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It is Monday evening and I am on a non-stop flight from Chicago to Los Angeles. I have just spent a long lovely weekend in Chicago. It is the first time I have been to Chicago in years. I could, I suppose, turn this blog post into a travelogue about my time in Chicago and tell you about what a lovely birthday I had and what lovely and generous friends I have—however that is not what this blog post is about. This blog post is about something else, something I am still in the midst of processing—something that I will discover as I write.
When I first planned the trip to visit friends for my birthday weekend I knew that there was something personally meaningful in it for me( even though that wasn’t the main reason I was going), as it would be the first time Keith would be in Chicago together. If you are new to my blog let me catch you up, many years ago( six-years, I think) I left Chicago and in doing so I left behind my dream of being a parent and the dream I had of raising a kiddo there. It was not easy to leave( understatement). I loved Lake Bluff. I wanted to spend the rest of my life there. Only it didn’t work out that way. Having a kid didn’t work out. My marriage didn’t work out either. I was, as you can imagine, not so happy that I didn’t get what I wanted most. Rather, I had a three-year hissy fit about it.
However, the last three years I have been completely hissy fit free. I am happy that it all worked out the way it did. I am extremely happy with my life and I have even come to love living in Los Angeles( proof that miracles do happen).So, even as I planned the trip and delighted with anticipation at seeing my friends in Lake Forest, I was, I think, hoping that going with him back to my old home would show me that I was completely immune to the pain of the past….and mostly it did.
As Keith had not seen my life in Lake Bluff I gave him the tour: this is where I lived; this is where I fell on ice; this is where I ate tomato soup; this is where I substitute taught; this is the lake. It’s not a tour many would endure but he loves me and knows I needed him to see the life that I’d had. During the tour I found that I felt surprisingly little. I think the best way to describe how I felt when I saw the set I had once imagined would house my happily-ever-after was nothing. We drove by the place where a picture of me had been taken when we moved away, a place that I had stood and sobbed, and seeing that site now I felt nothing. And as beautiful as Lake Forest and Lake Bluff are, and they are, they no longer looked like enchanted mythical lands that I had been forced out of. Rather, I could see the beauty without the longing. Somehow my healing, and the joy of my new life, I could see Forest and Bluff for what they are and not as an Eden I had been cruelly ejected from. It was, I can tell you, nice.
My dear friends ,who we were staying with, have two of the most beautiful, adorable, sweet, and kind children that you are likely to meet. Being with these girls was more enjoyable than our trip to the Art Institute or a dinner out in the city. And what was also lovely, lovelier than I can say, is that I could enjoy these beautiful and wonderful girls without feeling sad or envious or anything except delight and relish. I felt nothing but lucky for having these beautiful girls in my life, blessed to have wonderful friends, and spoiled to have the life that I do. This, my friends, is what healing looks like.
When I was packing to leave to come home today I was overtaken by tears. Keith saw my sadness and asked me a number of questions all with the intention of trying to make it better. When I said no to all his inquiries he finally said, “Do you want to live here?” “No”, I answered, “that’s not it. Of course I don’t want to live here, I love our home, our life, my practice. No, I don’t want the snow and the ice and the cold. I don’t want to live in a long ago Eden. I don’t want to live in this place that is meant for families.” I didn’t know what it was that I was crying about but I knew that living there wasn’t it. These tears weren’t about wanting something, of that I was sure. No, this wasn’t what this was about. Rather, this was me crying for a past me, and for all the pain I endured … and the reality that this life that I had so long dreamed of would never-ever-ever be mine, and, yes, even though I am happy about that( SUPER happy with what is) there remains a sadness for what was never to be.
As I sit in the dark of the plane typing these words, I feel my eyes burn a little and I feel some residual ennui even as I happily anticipate going home( Pasadena, that is). Simultaneously, I feel something kind of like closure…only it isn’t exactly that( I make this disclaimer as I need to leave the circle open to the possibility of me spiraling around through this once again, if even if at a different level and entering from a different place). Yes, of course I will go back to Forest and Bluff again, but never again will it be the place that it was for me. Never. It has fundamentally changed. Now when I go there I will go there to visit my friends, to play Mermaids with the girls and to see them graduate from middle school or for my friend’s birthday party, or maybe even for a conference….but I won’t ever go home again. It is now NOT what I want. It is now what I wanted, it has moved into past tense and the lovely thing about that is that it allows for a future in which I can go back…only not back home.
“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake, back home to aestheticism, to one’s youthful idea of ‘the artist’ and the all-sufficiency of ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘love,’ back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time–back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”
― Thomas Wolfe
Okay, kids, this one is personal. Yeah, I know…they are all personal. But this one is REALLY personal and I sort of can’t believe that I am writing this and I am not sure exactly why I am sharing this with you now— other than I am sure that I am not the only person that this has happened to. I am about to admit something very personal and something that I might not tell you if we were sitting across from each other. But the truth is that infertility ruined sex for me, and I am sure that I am not the only person that this happened to.
Pavlov, and the other Behaviorists, believe that a behavior will get stronger or weaker depending on what type of consequences follow it. When doing x can lead to y and you can’t make y happen it is likely that you no longer want to do x. If you keep up the x and eat yams, and go to acupuncturists, and change your Feng-shui and you still don’t get y then you might extinguish your desire for x altogether.
All of the trying-to-conceive made it impossible for me to have sex and not think of potential pregnancy. In the early days of trying to conceive the sex was all about being on a mission which made sex more monotonous than the missionary position. The sex was no longer about sex or making love or anything other than “trying to conceive”, which made it more of a means to an end than an end in and of itself. “I’m ovulating” became the stand in for seduction. Lingerie abandoned, as there were no studies that showed garter belts had any impact on conception rates. Ovulation monitors were the closest we came to any kind of sex toy. Positions were chosen not for their potential to please, but rather because they had a higher potential to impregnate. Post-coitus was no longer about cuddling, but rather it became a high-anxiety time in which I timed how long to keep my legs up in the air in order to up our odds of implantation.
The more we tried to conceive and failed to do so, the more I started to dread sex. There was just too much emotional weight to *sex*, there had been all those times we tried and didn’t conceive and “doing it” started to feel like a hurtful reminder of all the other times we tried and failed. It was impossible for me to have sex and not think immediately after, “I could be pregnant”—-even when the doctors told me that there was absolutely no way we could conceive naturally. I was never thinking about sex during sex—but I was thinking. I was thinking about the quality of the sperm and imagining if I really was ovulating and maybe that the ovulation thermometer had been wrong . I thought if maybe I visualized my egg accepting the sperm that we might improve our chances at conceiving. Instead of enjoying myself I thought about all the pumpkin seeds he had eaten and how maybe they had impacted his sperm production. The more I thought the less I was there and the less I was there the less I wanted to be there.
Once I got to the point of KNOWING that there was absolutely no way we could conceive, my ex-husband didn’t know it. He was immune to the hard-science and hard-truths we were told by our doctors. He, you see, had moved on to hope and faith. He took to praying after sex. No, he wasn’t praying out loud or even telling me that he was, I could just see it. When I would catch him I would call him on it, “It’s not going to happen and no prayers are going to make a difference.” “You never know,” he’d argue. However, I did know. I knew I wasn’t going to get pregnant and yet if we had had sex prior to the time my period was due I would join my ex-husband in this folie à deux . And then when I didn’t get pregnant I would grieve. I asked my ex-husband to stop hoping (which I know isn’t really fair, and yet he couldn’t help himself from the hope). But to see him hope after sex was extremely hard for me. And that made me even less interested in having sex than I already was.
If we had stayed together I feel sure it would have taken a lot of work and therapy to separate sex from the hope of having a baby. We weren’t even close to differentiating that when we broke up. And, please, hear me, I am not at all blaming him or the infertility or how the infertility f#$@!d up or our sex-life for our breakup–that’s not why we aren’t together. But I do think it has a lot to do with why we weren’t “doing-it” and “doing-it”, I think, and studies show, is important in the success and well-being of an intimate relationship.
For the past year-and-a-half I have been in a new relationship and thankfully, in this new relationship, there was no history of trying to conceive and I had really and truly given up on having a baby( okay, there have been micro-seconds of insanity—but happily they have all passed pretty quickly) and so…uh, yeah, this is where it gets embarrassing and hard to write about…so, sex is no longer about trying-to-conceive and I am extremely happy about that. Now when I have sex( and yes, I am having it) I am thinking about the sex and not about conceiving. For me, sex is no longer about babies and hence my sex-life is no longer f@#$%ed up. And, as long as I am being so extremely personal with you, I will admit something that will likely not surprise you at all, sex is better when you are not thinking about something else. X for x and not x for y is better x—at least in my opinion.
This post is not intended just to be a place for me to gloat about having the incredible fortune to see Morrissey perform live in L.A. on Friday night, or to tell you how unbelievably AWESOME it was to sit just eight-rows away from him and to be able to see his eyes when he sang, “Everyday is like Sunday.” Nor is it even about how Morrissey is more like a beloved friend to me than a performer and how it feels a little odd to see so many people who also consider him the personal soundtrack of their life. And I wouldn’t even dare to try and explain to you my love for him or what he has meant to me since I first heard the Smith’s when I was 15—-it is just too big and, dare I say, transcendent to try and explain. Even after going to the concert with me, I don’t think Keith still fully understands my relationship with Morrissey. He knows that I love him. He knows that I swoon when I hear him and yet he is, I think, a bit baffled by the fact that I have no interest in meeting him ( I just couldn’t bear it if Morrissey the person did anything to ruin Morrissey the myth) and I am certainly not sexually attracted to him( not that he isn’t lovely—it’s just that my love for him is more pure and spiritual than that).
Yes, he sang many of my favorite songs. And I felt overwhelmed, as I do every time I see him, by hearing in person the songs that are the soundtrack to my life. However ,it was this song that made me think of so many things and really experience just how far I have come. And this is what this post is REALLY ABOUT:
In 2008, three days before I saw Morrissey perform in Chicago I had undergone an embryo transplant and when I heard this song I sang along as if it was a prayer. I thought maybe that hearing this song sung by Morrissey and singing along with him, that maybe…just maybe. Only it didn’t–our shared prayer didn’t give me what I wanted.
Ever since then that song has been associated with my infertility. However, on Friday night when Morrissey sang this song I didn’t feel sad. Yes, I felt some sadness about the past,and about not getting what I wanted. But I also felt an incredible relief that I wasn’t praying with Morrissey to get what I wanted. What I felt instead was a clarity that there was nothing that I wanted now. As soon as I realized that, then the tears came. You see, it is a lovely thing to want for nothing. Thank you, Morrissey, for helping me to see that “I haven’t had a dream in a long time”… and that is a very good thing.
Last week I got a comment on a post of mine that was about moving on and letting go of the hope of having genetic offspring. This was a post in which I was talking about how I was managing to move from grief into acceptance and, ultimately, into a happy ending. The comment that was left for me was by a well-meaning man, a man who clearly had the best of intentions. This man wants me to be happy and to have the child I had so long wanted. This man’s well meaning suggestion was that I “just adopt”.
“Just” is quite a word. “Just” sounds so simple. “Just” tricks you into thinking that the task it is asking of you is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. And I can assure you that my experience with adoption was been anything but ‘just”. And, not that I talk about it much here or anywhere, but I can tell you that my failed attempt at adoption hurt me a million-zillion-trillion times more than any IVF procedure ever endured. It hurt more because there was a baby that existed and that for a period of time that baby was promised to me. When the mother changed her mind and kept her baby I was unhinged. I was the closest to a catatonic depression that I have ever been. I continue to think of that little girl almost daily. I know her name and I know what city she lives in and I know what grade she is in now and all of that knowing makes it harder to let her go. I know that I don’t have it in me to endure that again. I feel sure that another failed adoption would kill me, and I am not being hyperbolic when I say that. One, I believe, has to enter adoption knowing that they might not get the child that was promised to them. One has to enter knowing that and be able to handle that risk. I simply cannot handle that risk, and so that is why I don’t adopt. For me it is just as simple as that.
Lisa Manterfield, the author of I‘m Taking My Eggs and Going Home: How One Woman Dared to Say No to Motherhood, and the blog Life Without Baby, explains her own reasons:
I think I could answer this question calmly and logically if I thought it was asked from a place of genuine curiosity or concern. But it always feels like an accusation, as if a woman who wanted children but didn’t adopt is somehow a lesser human being, or the dreaded word so often associated with childlessness: selfish.
So, instead of educating about the complexities of the adoption process, I usually just offer a neat version of the truth: that would have, if we hadn’t already maxed out our heartbreak cards.
After five years of dealing with infertility, my husband and I did choose adoption over the expensive and evasive fertility treatments that were offered as our next low-odds hope. We quickly learned that the “millions of unwanted children looking for loving homes” is a myth and “just adopting” isn’t a matter of going to Wal-Mart and selecting a baby off the shelves.
At the time, foreign adoption was a quagmire of bureaucracy and corruption. Guatemala was in the midst of a baby-stealing scandal, China has just changed its requirements (making us ineligible), and good friends of ours had finally pulled the plug on six fruitless years of trying to adopt from Russia. Private domestic adoptions can be prohibitively expensive and just as fraught with danger. With the availability of birth control and the lessening stigma of the unwed mother, there simply aren’t enough “unwanted” babies to meet the demands of potential adoptive parents. As such, competition to adopt domestically is so stiff that it can feel more like a game show than an application for parenthood.In the end we opted to pursue adoption through the foster care system. We now understand that this route is a calling, and not just an alternative route to parenthood. The goal of the system is to keep blood relatives together whenever possible, and foster families can have several children temporarily in their care before an adoption becomes possible. We were more than ready to open our hearts to a child (or children) who needed a home, even if that child wasn’t the newborn we’d once dreamed of, but having had our hearts ripped out and stomped on so many times through infertility, we no longer had the emotional stamina to go through losing a child over and over again. Some people may view that as selfish; I prefer to call it self-preservation.So, when someone asks me why I didn’t just adopt, they’d better hope I say, “Because I’d maxed out my heartbreak card,” or be ready for a long education about the realities of adoption.
I believe Pamela has said she views adoption as a “calling” and one that she just didn’t feel personally. Another online friend once put it this way: adoption was something that she tried to get excited about — but couldn’t. Her heart just wasn’t in it. And didn’t she owe it to any child that she adopted to be excited, truly excited, about bringing that child into her life?I don’t think that makes her, or me, a bad person. Better to be honest with yourself about your feelings and limitations and what you personally feel capable of doing.
My husband & I talked about adoption, but I didn’t feel that excitement or enthusiasm that I saw in other couples we knew who were considering adoption. If I felt anything, I think I just felt exhausted. Dealing with stillbirth and years of infertility does that to you. I was in my 40s (he
was too). I’ve often said that, maybe if I’d been 35, I might have felt differently. As it was, I was just tired, and ready to move on with my life. I didn’t look at adoption & see a possible child for us. I just saw more work, more prodding into our personal lives, more money, more complexity,
more waiting, more uncertainty, more potential for more heartbreak. I didn’t want another roller coaster ride. I’d had enough of roller coasters. I wanted off.”