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.