My Last Words: A Bedtime Story

The pictures from our younger days are always so embarrassing

Dear Young Photos,

This might be my final post. Any moment now, according to a certain portion of the Christian community, Judgment Day will be upon us. Had I realized that The End of Times was fast approaching I might not have been so cavalier about my decision to conceive and raise a child. I am so so sorry. In my defense, part of the reason your mother and I were caught unawares is really part and parcel with the eponymous judgment we're possibly about to receive.

See, humans have spent a lot of time and energy trying to understand life. Questions like how did we get here? and what does it mean? have proved particularly vexing. Despite great strides in science to identify ideas like evolution, Big Bangs, and natural selection, our research falls far short of providing a real nice meaty answer. As far as we can tell: before there was nothing, and now there is everything.

So where did everything come from?

In short, a lot of people think it came from God.

The idea of God is complex and has undergone many changes over the years, but the basic idea is always there—God is an invisible and all-powerful boss and you really need to follow His (and in some cases Her, and in some cases Their) rules because, despite being able to build planets and oceans, He/She/They cannot control what we think, and this just irks them to no end.

God's rules are also somewhat in flux depending on who you ask, and this is a real hot-button issue throughout history. Countries invade each other, slaughtering their people, more or less because they disagree about who God is. It happens over and over. The thing is, in all that time no one has ever really turned up any evidence to sway the public once and for all. It's an argument with no end in sight.

Why, you may ask, does God not just appear and set the record straight? Would we not welcome his omniscience into our lives, especially since Oprah is about to go off the air? You would not be the first to wish for this. It would certainly settle a lot of bets.

In God's absence, humans continue to hope and have faith that He/She/They is/are out there, and they organize groups that get together and go over the details of what they think God wants from us. They call them religions.

It's a nice idea really, to look back and discuss ideas, to lay out guidelines for proper interpersonal conduct, to form the foundations of a like-minded community. What I personally do not like is the rigidity of most religions (see above mention of slaughter). Even though there are many religions, often with many overlapping concepts, each religion claims to have the straight poop on God. There is often a subtext of I-am-right-and-you-are-wrong between the groups. But, since no one really knows anything, I find their insistence intolerable and silly. Mostly I avoid the topic and mind my own business.

Oh, but my young child, I can't be let off the hook so simply. The religious groups saw me coming. Built right into their beliefs (in many cases revealed from a source close to God) is the caveat that you kind of have to believe, or at least you are strongly advised to do so. If you do not, it is not taken as an act of free will to bravely question authority. You are not seen as "philosophical" by most. No, there are words for people like me--heretic, infidel, poor lost sheep. And it's not enough to pity or accuse me of wrongdoing. My beliefs cannot be chalked up as confusion or a simple mistake. According to believers, to not believe, Young Photos, is pretty much the worst thing you can ever do. It means if and when Judgment Day arrives we will be in big big trouble.
...

In this country the majority of us are known as Christians. Christians vary in their beliefs, but they all concur that God is a masculine spirit, that he created the Universe in one week, and he lives in a kingdom in the sky called Heaven which is just a really great place. And of course there was the time he caused a virgin to give birth to his son. This man, God's son, is called Jesus Christ.

Jesus, as historical figures go, is fairly important. He is so important that just by being born he caused the western world to reset their calendars to differentiate the dull and terrible time before he was born from the wonderful and enlightened time since his birth. He is so wonderful that his birthday is in many ways an even better holiday than your own. For one thing, some of the most beautiful music ever written was in observance of his birthday. I cannot say the same thing for the off-key mewling that will occur just before you blow out your candles.

It is this Jesus fellow that is the real key to modern Christianity. Before he arrived, God was pretty hands on; he was smiting folks and telling people to murder their first-borns and flooding the planet because he didn't like the direction it was heading. If you read the Old Testament, God is actually pretty terrifying, so it could have been doubly bad when he decided suddenly to have children.

But Jesus turned out to be a pretty cool guy. He preached nonviolence and love and acceptance; he healed the sick and fed the hungry and he even brought a dead person back to life before we knew about CPR. But his real coup de grace is that he let a bunch of Romans nail him to a large wooden pole, an act of selflessness of which we are still feeling the effects.

These effects concern the fate of our souls. The soul is a tricky concept but it is similar to the mind in some ways, the main difference being that it goes on thinking and feeling and stuff after you're dead--an important difference because your mind may only be around for 100 years at most, but your soul goes on forever. Christians believe when you die, if you are Christian, your soul ascends to Heaven where it remains alongside God in eternal ecstasy, while your body is stored in the ground until it is exhumed to make space for condos.

Christians also believe that if you aren't Christian, you cannot get in to Heaven. And let me be clear, there is no wiggle room on this. It's like Costco: you're either a member, or you have to go somewhere else. They don't give you a pass for being a super nice guy and always doing the right thing. You have to believe. Even if you're a fairly good person that was not raised as a Christian, or you're a well-read intellectual sort that asks a lot of questions about literacy and translation, or you're weirded out by the amount of wars and persecutions and molestations that have occurred under the flag of Christianity and can't at this late stage possibly see how it can be real, well, off you go.

And that's really it. It's beautiful in its simplicity (if a bit churlish. After all, why does God—a man that created the Universe—and his relatives need our acceptance so desperately?).

The real bummer is your soul still has to go somewhere. So, instead of going to Heaven, if you're a nonbeliever your soul will go to Hell, which is a place of permanent suffering and torture, again, like Costco.

For obvious reasons, I'm glossing over a lot of things, but the point is that, up until today, we humans have always been able to live out our lives, so to speak. We would have the entirety of our lives to sort of weigh our options and decide whether or not to repent and accept Christ, an act that is effectively stamping our ticket to Heaven or Hell.

What is different about today is that today is (possibly) the cutoff line. A group of Christians believe that Judgment Day has arrived. They believe this because of a prophecy in the Old Testament that says the world shall end several thousand years after The Great Flood, and according to one man's math that day is today. (Of course, he also thought the world was going to end in 1994, but hey, we all make mistakes.)

It is thought that, on Judgment Day, Christ himself will return to Earth to summon the souls of the believers to Heaven, an act known as The Rapture, and imagined by me to resemble the tractor beam that sucks humans into flying saucers. After The Rapture, the rest of the people of Earth (including all the plants, animals, and stuff the believers used to own) will remain here to perish and just make a royal mess of things.

According to an article in the New York Times, "Nonbelievers will endure five months of plagues, quakes, famine, and general torment before the planet's total destruction in October." (Honestly though, minus the Christians, you might just as easily be describing pre-Rapture Earth).
...

As a nonbeliever, it was pretty surprising to find a story about the end of the world on the front page of the paper, especially since I only read elite liberal media.

But what should I think? How am I supposed to know? Is it best to just throw a hail mary to Jesus in the event that The Rapture is real? And, if so, wouldn't he see through it as a feint to save my soul's neck? In other words, isn't it already too late?

At this point, two things can happen. First, the world really could end and I'll be super pissed that I spent my last hours wiping geriatric asses for $9.50 an hour. Second, the world will keep right on chugging, some of the believers will die of embarrassment, and a certain REM song will have enjoyed its best week of airplay in quite some time. (Sing it with me now: Leo-nard-Bern-stein!)

Honestly, I don't think the world is about to end, so I'm not all that concerned. Then again, I do believe the world will end at some point, so maybe today really is the day. All I can do is wait and watch my Facebook feed for updates like Erin has suddenly developed leprosy.

One reason (but certainly not the only reason) I'm not worried is because we've lived through Doomsday prophecies before. On the eve of the new millennium we thought that a massive computer crash was destined to bring about total financial/societal collapse. (This event was known as Y2K, and it amounted to little more than a programming glitch on the scale of a digital clock at Daylight Savings Time. The world didn't even come close to ending, despite the fact that I'd just been dumped by my girlfriend of two years for no discernible reason and really, in a way, wished it would have). These portentious predictions are happening all the time. In fact, if this Doomsday doesn't take there's another one scheduled next year!

So, why do people so desperately want the world to end? Why are they quitting their jobs and spending their life savings to spread the word? And why do they seem so pleased about it?

I think it's an ego thing; these people believe that they're the chosen ones who will witness the destruction of humanity, that they are the last people to live here, like the Earth couldn't possibly go on without them. They don't consider the gajillions of people before that felt the same way. They don't consider that they're just ordinary and the human race will outlast even the memory of them.

Anyway, I hope they approach life with a bit more humility if it turns out they're wrong. Still, there's an outside chance this is it. I confess that I woke up in the middle of the night and, laying there in the dark, became gripped with the fear that they'd been right and the sun had burned out. I was afraid to look at the clock lest it should confirm a late hour without any light. It would be pretty awful. And what really sucks is that here, at last, is the proof I have been hoping for. Finally Christ gives me something I can hang my hat on. Only, by then I've missed the ferry. I will not be allowed to reap the rewards of my convictions. The Real Christians will be gone already, sent to Heaven to laugh and sing and enjoy the heck out of the afterlife, and I'll be here with everyone else trying not to get killed by roving gangs and hoping I freeze to death.

Long story short, my son, the world you are born into may not be such a great place and I can't help but feel responsible. I wish I had planned ahead more thoroughly and considered whether the planet would still be intact on your due date. I am not clear on the policy for entry to Heaven concerning those born after the apocalypse, but it seems unlikely that you'll have the wherewithal to accept Christ at three months. Maybe they make exceptions for tiny babies, even if your soul's brain is still too undeveloped to be able to remember or appreciate how much fun Heaven is.

Goodnight my child. I'll see you in Hell, if not the morning.

An Attempt to Rectify What Is Thus Far a Glaring Omission from the Supposed Record of My Life and the Events Thereof

Artist's rendering of my first apartment

Two years ago, on April Fools Day, an old friend named Jen decided to play a joke. As her Facebook status she wrote: Jen is pregnant! I admit that I didn't pick up on the joke immediately, and I went on with my day feeling vaguely happy for her while people wrote things like Congrats! or I KNEW it!

Later, back on Facebook, (or more likely still on Facebook), I saw that another more perceptive friend had not been fooled and called her bluff. Jen capitulated and the merriment that accompanies a light-hearted joke was enjoyed by all.

Later still, (and I'm sure by now I had to have logged out of Facebook at least once even though I was back on), I saw that the wave of comments below Jen's post continued to swell. In a space-saving measure, Facebook shows only the two most recent comments beneath a post, and I have noticed more than a few times that subsequent posters will not bother to read through what others are saying on a given topic before they post, leading to duplicate-and-slightly-obvious wisecracks. In this case it meant that Jen's confession had been buried many times over as more and more friends publicly pronounced their well-wishes.

Finally, and with some chagrin, Jen just posted a rebuttal: Jen is NOT pregnant. Jeesh.

Watching it all unravel in somewhat-real time, I found the event to be a humorous lesson in translational ethics, not to mention an authentic example of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. (I doubt that an actual Jen pregnancy is going to be announced on FB due to probable backlash). What I didn't know or even consider at the time is how this harmless prank could actually be very hurtful to some. For one thing, a lot of people, especially older people and kindhearted relatives, don't like to feel they've been manipulated. An outpouring of warmth and flattery towards someone that is fooling you can seem mean, frankly. But the other people I now think of are all the people out there who are trying or have tried to get pregnant and cannot.

Darby started referring to FB as Babybook a while back. As anyone my age can attest, it is now the world's largest repository of baby pictures and birth announcements and status updates of the darnedest things my friends' kids said. We are just at that age when a large majority of our friends are having children. This trend is further skewed by the fact that stay-at-home moms our age are especially prolific users of the book of faces.

It never bothered me I guess. It's not like what I post on FB is any more important or any less self-absorbed. There are those who use it purely as a promotional tool. There are those who actually socialize. There are news junkies and short-form poets and irritating humanitarians. There are smart alecks and cheerleaders and braggarts and self-surveillors (whose phones tell you when they are at Church's Chicken or "ran 2.4 miles and felt good"). In other words, none of it is terribly important, so to criticize new parents for overestimating the level of concern the world has for their children would be cynical AND naive.

Then I read a very sad article a while back about infertile couples and the painful experience of watching everyone but them be able to have children. According to these folks, and for the reasons just stated, Facebook in particular was becoming impossible to bear. No one went so far as to condemn the overzealous new parents. But they found it harder and harder to feel genuine happiness for their friends. Many just stopped logging in because it was a constant reminder of this really difficult thing they were going through. And maybe that sounds selfish, or petty, but I can sympathize.

In 2008, shortly before I realized I’d had enough working in “The Arts” and decided to go back to school, my wife and I decided we were ready to start trying. We were already in our 30s, we were just starting to climb out of a deep debt, and if you’d asked us I think we would have said we were scared and not really ready to be parents. However, we also agreed that we might never feel quote-unquote ready—I don’t know about you, but the massive responsibility that I believe goes into parenting is enough to buckle the knees, especially to a self-centered artist-type who likes to spend uninterrupted periods of time alone listening to the same three Destroyer records—so we’d better get going while we were still young enough to be able. And so, with the vague conviction that we would someday want children we ceased all contraceptive measures.

As you can perhaps tell from the discrepancy between the date of this writing and the date in the previous paragraph, all did not go as planned. Getting pregnant proved to be much more difficult than we were made to believe as horny but somewhat impressionable teenagers. What started out as an exciting new phase in our relationship soon became fraught. With the arrival of each new cycle our fears that something was wrong were harder to keep hidden. It is probably not surprising that Darby took our inabilities harder, felt the failures more acutely and personally. After all, it was her body that seemed to be the problem, or at least it was the barometer of our level of pregnance. To her credit, she did not lose hope. She began to do research. She decided to take command of the situation by attempting to be more methodical.

Based on her research we started to use math. We measured temperatures and calculated luteal phases. We scheduled our 'tries' and did our best to take all the fun out of sex. We eliminated certain things, like caffeine, from our diets because… actually, I don’t really want to get into the scientific and pseudoscientific stuff here. Though having intercourse is fairly straightforward, suffice it to say if you are attempting to get pregnant and you don’t get pregnant like right away, it is assumed by everyone that you’re doing something wrong and therefore not only need but also want a lot of advice. People, whether you’re friends with them or not, and whether you asked for their opinion or not, will unload all sorts of pointers concerning you, your body, and all the poisons you’re naively putting in said body and how you’re never going to get pregnant that way. I suppose it would have been funny if it weren’t so tense and depressing and rife with migraine headaches from caffeine withdrawal.

About this time I started recording the thoughts/feelings/actions my wife and I thought/felt/attempted in our quest to conceive. The writings are a mixture of journal entries to provide chronology and posterity, with longer sections in which I discuss our personal histories, philosophies concerning childrearing, and what, if anything, not having children means from an existential perspective.

My plan, or at least my concept, at this time was to write a book. (I just referred to it as The Project.) I worked steadily and faithfully, covering what became a protracted process. Much of the time the words came easily for me, and as a breathtakingly slow and unproductive writer I was grateful at least for this. And certainly the writing process was a therapeutic means for me to deal with what grew into a very sad period in my marriage. Whatever happened, I kept imagining that at the end of it I would have our story to share. I pictured myself giving it to Darby—who respects my privacy as a writer and therefore knew nothing of The Project—after its completion. As our situation grew direr and our hope supplies ran low, I think I believed The Project would help prove my love to Darby. I thought it would be a way to preserve a feeling of togetherness during a tough time.

And of course I just couldn’t write about anything else most of the time. As someone who typically looks no further than his own field of vision for subjects, a large and painful and life-altering event is hard to ignore.

An obvious drawback to the my-own-life-as-fodder approach to writing is that not everything is or can be public information. At her request, I promised Darby I would not post or say anything about our problem. As an extrovert, I would always rather tell everyone. But she felt it would invite yet more intrusion, so I respected her wish.

This made small talk even more difficult for me than it already is. The question What's new? is at once so innocent and so loaded. We all keep certain details to ourselves as polite society dictates, so we don't expect much from this question. Still, really good conversations arise when someone has a real answer to this question. For example:

"Hey, John. Long time no see. What's new?"

"Well, I had to have a semen analysis yesterday." Or maybe: "I had sex three times this morning and then spent the afternoon reading about adopting a Haitian child."

Instead, for what seemed like a long time, I just said, “Not much,” and I would feel the conversation become dull and we’d both start figuring out a way to end it without seeming as though we are trying to do so.

It’s not that I crave pity or empathy. I just prefer honesty. And I think the awkward scenarios that being a person sometimes entails are what create meaningful connections.

  

I don’t mean to whine. Not being able to share very private details about you and your wife’s sex life with friends and friends of friends isn’t exactly oppression, but I felt like I had to pretend that this very consuming thing that we thought about all the time didn’t exist, and it just squeezed out all the energy for anything else for a while, so not being about to tell anyone just made me feel really sad.

I don’t know, maybe there’s no getting around the sad part, and that is just how mine manifested. The point is The Project began to take on a very heightened position for the future. I think it came to represent an endpoint. Being able to show The Project to people would mean that we were no longer going through all the stuff I was writing about. It would mean we were happy again and our ordinary lives had returned to us. It would mean that we were still married and in love and thinking about something other than babies and our inability to have them. If I could finish the book I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. However, as funny and sad and wonderful as I thought The Project was, it soon became clear that it didn’t have an ending.

At first I think I believed the stories of just trying to get pregnant were good enough. But the longer we went without succeeding, the sadder our story got and the less I felt like sharing it. And, as a narrative arc, it had a predictably depressing rhythm. Each new month we would renew our hopes; each new month we would try something else to up our odds; and each new month would end in ever more despair than the previous one had as we edged towards accepting the reality that we just weren't going to be able to conceive.

Certainly this is when I did, thanks in no small part to observations and conversations I had with Darby about infertility, some of my best writing. I even started to accept how this process, and writing about it, could be very positive.

But part of me also couldn't let go. Below is an excerpt from a journal entry that I am particularly fond of for the superstition I seem to believe governs our lives:

Jan. 29, 2010: 

Well, here is a confession of sorts. When I had the idea for this book I made an outline of topics I wanted to cover. I thought about the structure of the book—journal entries vs. introspective writing, etc.—and how it might be arranged. Since it was (still is) an ongoing process the ending was as yet undetermined. But I did consider how the ending would impact the story. Like all stories, wouldn’t the reader want resolution? Taking it one step further, would they not want a happy ending? As I looked over my notes I could not help but think how great it would be if we ended up with a child. I actually started to believe that my writing could somehow positively influence the outcome. It would provide an against-all-odds triumph after a disastrous narrative arc in which relationships are tested, emotions laid bare, and hopes are dashed.

And what if we could never get pregnant? I'm not sure what the ending would have been or when I would have understood it as such. Maybe it would have been a reflection on our journey with pithy resignation to our fates. Maybe it would have been open-ended. Maybe a transitory speech about deciding to adopt.

As it happens, we officially gave up trying last year around May. It had been a long time coming. We had tried and failed, hoped and then cried, once a month for two years, and we were both ready for something new. We'd talked about quitting before, but it proved harder than we thought. For one thing there was still nothing medically wrong with Darby as far as anyone knew. For another, I think you'd hate to look back and think that you didn't try everything you could. Because if you did, give up too soon or easily I mean, you'd regret it forever. But I followed Darby's lead. I agreed to keep trying as long as she still wanted to. Finally, she said she was ready for it to stop.

We met with an adoption agency the next month. It was still very painful and Darby sobbed afterwards, but it felt good to have a new direction for our thoughts to go in. Of course, the adoption process has many of its own pitfalls. As with our failed attempts at getting pregnant, adopting a child turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.

A lot of people like to tell you that the adoption process is a great way to get pregnant. We personally know three couples to whom a surprise conception resulted once the papers were signed—in one case the baby was adopted about a month before the mother turned up pregnant. The popular explanation is that the infertility was merely psychosomatic, that the woman was just too stressed to get pregnant, and that by initiating the adoption process she finally relaxed enough for it to work. (To her credit, Darby would bristle at this theory. "It makes it sound like it's just stereotyping women as over-emotional, like 'Oh, sweetie, it's all in your head.' It's so condescending!")

True or not, because of this belief I became paranoid that Darby or I or both of us were only now considering adoption because we secretly believed it would get us pregnant, kind of a last-ditch mental redirect to achieve fertility. Well, I don't think I was the only one. As we started to tell people we were thinking of adopting the replies were often met with knowing glances and stories of how so and so did the same thing and now they have eighteen children of their own. Honestly, I found the unflagging optimism on our behalf exhausting. Not to mention that it made our decision to adopt seem cheap, like it was public knowledge that we didn't really want to adopt and things might still work out for us.

The other thing about this theory is that it isn't true. Research has shown no significant impact on fertility to prospective adoptive parents. When I asked Darby to explain the perceived, if not actual, prevalence of stories like this she said, "Because it's rare it's more sensational, so it gets repeated. You never hear about the people that don't get struck by lightning." As I thought about this I decided she was right. For the three couples I know that have had this happen there are also three couples I know that have adopted. And there are likely many many more that I just don't know about that didn't want to adopt so it doesn't come up.

We met with the agency. We filled out reams of paperwork. We even told our parents we were going to adopt. For several months we were operating under this impression. Tales of our struggle to conceive were finally surfacing. I got really excited about adopting. Darby mellowed considerably. Life felt fun again.

...

I awoke on my birthday. We were going to go to the Grand Canyon, but it was still very early. Darby was shaking me.

"John."

I'm a pretty heavy sleeper in the mornings.

"John. I'm pregnant."

The words sounded impossible. Please pardon the tired cliché that I thought I was dreaming, but at least in my case I was still in bed and had been, only seconds ago, actually dreaming. But then I remembered, my mind returning, that we had walked to Walgreen's the night before to purchase a pregnancy test. We didn't really, or at least I didn't, think she was pregnant. It was a precaution to the upcoming weekend in which we'd be staying at our friends' cabin with said friends and where we would be consuming copious amount of whiskey and wine and beer. But Darby's period was late. This was nothing new; her period was often erratic. She'd mentioned the tardiness the previous weekend while we were hiking. Five days on, it still hadn't arrived.

Given the fact that we had not been trying, and the fact that we'd been through this before, were old pros at this, I went to bed without another thought. So the words did not elicit much excitement at first. In fact, I didn't know what she was talking about. As my waking life began to solidify around me, the meaning crystallized.

My first thought was about my book. Clearly this was an ending. But I also thought it was too easy, too Hollywood Happy. I thought it would seem schmaltzy. Nothing would be learned (by the reader, or by us). I thought it would be too sad and possibly offensive for all the people that have not been hit by lightning—the very people I felt such a connection with and who I felt I was writing to. By getting pregnant I'd sold out. My book was ruined. And what about the baby we were planning to adopt someday? What would happen to them? In an already overcrowded world full of perfectly good children in need of families, I'd gone and gotten a brand new one like a spoiled yuppie.

The feelings were complex. I was elated, but even just a tiny bit disappointed, as though all the worrying and hoping and writing and brooding and fucking and not masturbating and acupuncture and Clomid and weird sexual positions and pep talks and resentment had all been for nothing. Getting pregnant was actually that easy. It was no story at all. We were going to have a baby, and we hadn't even tried.

I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just smiled sleepily and managed, "Happy birthday."

...

Special thanks to Gail Miller for editing.