Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Infertility makes us snide and courageous and sad.
May 29, 2001 | I'm lucky my house is so quiet. At least, that's what an old college friend, whose 4-year-old is testing upper octaves in the background, is telling me over the phone.
"I envy you," she says.
Envy? I have no idea how to respond, and the quiet in my house grows louder as she waits for me to say something. Anything. The pause is intentionally pregnant. I know she's waiting to hear the latest about my and my husband's tussle with infertility. But I somehow can't commit facts to words, again, as if speaking them will turn childlessness from a vague biological malfunction to a living emptiness. I do not want to conjure up unnamed ghosts.
I know she simply envies my empty airspace. I know that what she's hearing on my end of the line isn't quiet at all, but a reminiscence of her pre-parenting life. That time we were all young and lit by moonlight.
Instead of saying any of that, I change the subject, ask her about the new boat. It beats delivering the same tired response to the same covert question. My husband and I have been speaking the two words for years now: "We're trying." Each time I say this, the weight of colossal failure -- among life's biggest, the inability to self-perpetuate -- descends, a lactating Athena-size shroud of incompetence. My eggs do not play well with others. My husband's sperm is unfocused, not working up to its potential.
We are failed breeders, and having committed neither to accepting childlessness nor to enduring scary science feats or contemplating final-step adoption, we walk a no-mama's land. A no-papa's land. "My seed found no purchase," my husband says of our little savanna.
We still have a few years left in which to let low-tech fertility methods work. I take my temperature and eat zinc; he wears boxers and avoids bananas, per doctor's orders. But I foresee the years leading to a showdown with science as a surreal limbo, waiting to learn what the future holds and trying desperately not to care. We shrug, like Doris Day: "Que Sera Sera." What the hell. Doesn't matter anyway.
We play let's pretend. We tell each other we'd make surly parents anyway, now that we've had 10 self-centered years together without having to relearn our numbers or synchronize our driving for soccer pickups. In fact, we've had so many years of living without tykes that we'd probably compete with them, bickering over whether to watch Bravo or Nickelodeon. I would hide the remote and taunt their undeveloped reasoning faculties. We'd urge them to emulate their peers on "South Park."
They would be on their own. They'd learn to play with matches. Sleep in a pile under the stairs because we'd forget to give them a bedroom. Sell pencils for lunch money. We would beget "Lord of the Flies" children, savage hoodlums starved for love, direction and daily grooming.
This is what we tell ourselves. My husband, meanwhile, serves our 14-year-old cat, the household princess, her water in a wine goblet and tells me "she likes it better that way." At a restaurant, he wraps his arm around our 5-year-old nephew's shoulder and reads him everything on the menu. I hear them whispering to each other. "Are you sure?" my husband asks. Luke nods his head excitedly. "OK then." When the waitress arrives, the two of them look up toward her. My husband orders: "He'll have a thousand pancakes."
"Will that be all?"
"No. He'll also have an ocean of syrup."
I push away from the table quietly, praying no one sees as I head to a bathroom stall. Maternal urges have no manners. They wake up and howl at whim. They need to be carried out of the restaurant to avoid a public scene, soothed in the privacy of restroom cubicles.
What a beautiful, beautiful father. It hurts to see this. To think of the quiet in our home that could be filled with the sound of a spatula making a child a thousand pancakes.
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