When to stop trying

Detours on the road to parenthood

“You can tell this isn’t a place where you get good news.”

My husband and I were sitting in a waiting room on the 6th floor of a medical office in Downtown Brooklyn. Well, he was sitting. I was lying across one of the two sofas in the room, eyes closed, breathing deeply, trying to get my blood pressure down from its elevated level so the nursing staff would let me leave.

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

I propped myself up on my elbows and looked around the sterile waiting room. We were the only patients left in the office. It was 3 PM — we’d both taken the day off from work so that we could come to this appointment together. I’d gone to acupuncture that morning, and my practitioner had offered me a packet of herbs to support ovulation. I had planned for us to walk down to my favorite fish market in Cobble Hill afterwards to buy a beautiful side of salmon for dinner. When we arrived, I in no way thought that we’d be leaving that office with anything but hopeful news.

“At my OBGYN’s office, there are baby announcement cards lining the hallway to the waiting room,” I said to Ben, moving my body back into a horizontal position. “There are no baby pictures here.”

A month earlier, I’d walked past that wall of birth announcements, wrapped myself in a thin medical robe, and told my doctor that my last few cycles had been irregular. A blood test later showed elevated levels of a certain hormone that might point to diminished egg count. My doctor explained via email that the results didn’t make sense, given my age, and sent along a referral list of reproductive endocrinologists. I read her note at work, told my team I had to head home early, and burst into tears on the sidewalk.

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I haven’t always been sure that I want to be a mother. I’ve grappled with it, both privately and in this newsletter, weighing the overwhelming love with the overwhelming responsibility. Just today, when logging into the dashboard of this Substack that I’ve let grow dormant over the past few months, I stumbled upon a draft that I was apparently working on before the new year. “I was not born to be a mother” read the subject line. I took a deep breath and deleted it.

There were many reasons for my apathy — the state of the world, unease about the future, anxiety over all of the typical things. Some days I feared I wouldn’t be good at it, worried that I was too selfish, too focused on my career, too afraid to give up Sunday mornings sleeping in and re-watching The Sopranos. “How could I be a mother?” I’d sometimes ask my own. “I still call you every single time I have a problem.”

The true center of the fear, however, was that motherhood would be a kind of prison. I’d imagine myself fundamentally changed, resentful of my new life, saddled with an expensive purchase I was unable to return. I have spent countless hours trying to parse the why behind this, digging at the root of my anxiety, understanding the gender roles I’d internalized. My therapist reminded me to look at Ben, my adoring husband, my equal partner in life. The man for whom I toiled so long to find. How I often come home from a long day at work to the lingering smell of cleaning products and dinner already in progress, neither the result of my nagging. How much he loves kids, and the excitement he feels about the minutia of parenthood: school pickups, trips to museums, bedtime stories. “You chose this man for a reason,” she’d tell me. “You will never be alone in this.” And yet, the fear persisted.

Now, of course, I wish I could take it all back. I have spent a not-insignificant amount of time wondering if the questioning in my mind may have infected my body in some kind of metaphysical way. What is the opposite of a prayer? A curse? I can almost see it — a black, gooey mass traveling from my brain, down my spine, through my heart, and over my belly, finally settling somewhere in my pelvis. A black hole manifest.

And then comes the anger. I’m angry that it took me so long to find the man I could imagine children with, only for us to hit this roadblock once the time came. That I may never be able to see Ben carry our child on his shoulders, or teach them how to doodle on a paper tablecloth while we wait for our appetizers, or watch The Muppets with them on a Sunday morning. That we may never be able to look down at a sleeping bundle and think look at what we made together.

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In the six weeks between that initial blood test and our first appointment with our RE, I watched my emotions swing from one extreme to another. I was bolstered by our circle, filled with voices who assured me things would likely turn out fine. A close family friend and former fertility clinic nurse encouraged us not to spiral until I saw my specialist. Three people in my life announced their pregnancies to me, and I congratulated them with genuine happiness, but then had to excuse myself to breathe through the creeping panic I felt in my chest. I started acupuncture. I started meditating in the morning. I started journaling before bed.

I have a tendency to catastrophize — it’s something I’ve done all my life. Call it a flair for the dramatic, but I am constantly leaping to the worst-case scenario. In the lead up to our appointment, however, I felt an eery sense of calm. I sincerely believed we would have gone through all the trouble only for the doctor to confirm that I was, in fact, catastrophizing. “Why are you here?” I imagined him saying. “Everything is fine — you haven’t been trying for that long. Call me in six months.”

But that isn’t what happened. For once in my life, I wasn’t conjuring disaster out of thin air. Things were truly as bad as they seemed.

After walking us through all of the potential scenarios in our future, our doctor guided Ben and me into a small room where my blood was drawn and my blood pressure measured. (Ridiculously high in reaction, no doubt, to the news we’d just gotten.) Next was an ultrasound, which seemed to confirm the doctor’s initial diagnosis of the next-to-worse-case scenario — premature ovarian insufficiency. The word rang in my head over and over again: insufficient. I started to cry, but then he pointed to the screen. “You’re actually ovulating today,” he said. There, on the diffused black and white screen of my insides, was a tiny gray circle. A single egg produced by one of the handful of follicles my one working ovary had stimulated to maturity that month.

I remember looking at it, that tiny smudge on the screen, and sending all of my thoughts and energy into it. “You can do it,” I remember thinking. “C’mon, baby, you can do it.” I’m not someone who usually believes the disparate pieces of conception are actually children-in-waiting. (If anything, this entire experience has made me more solidly pro-choice.) But sitting in that stark, bright doctor’s office, I saw that little smudge as our future. I squeezed my eyes shut and sent a silent prayer into the universe, an invocation for an outcome I no longer questioned.

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And so we wait — a brutal fate for a type-A woman who has never met a situation she didn’t try to control. We wait for test results, and bleeding, and ultrasound appointments, and openings in my acupuncturist’s schedule. We wait for the news to change.

We get out of bed each morning, despite my desire to sleep for days. I’ve filled my closet with bright, colorful dresses to offset the dark I feel inside. I wear talismans of fertility — a St. Gerard pendant around my neck, a moonstone bracelet around my wrist. Ben and I plan our trips to the shore and Portugal over the summer. I try to decide what to give him for his 40th birthday, since the gift I’d hoped we’d be celebrating may not materialize. We eat dinner together every evening and hold one another close as we cry. I try to let go of the feelings of injustice over our fate and try not to feel robbed of the spontaneity of pregnancy. I search for meaning in the twists and turns of our story.

After we got the news, my mother and I went to see a psychic medium, hoping that any one of my five grandparents on the other side might send a message about our future. Toward the end of our session, she turned to me. “I’m seeing kids,” she said. “I feel like you have one now.” I told her that we didn’t yet, but she insisted that they were just beyond my fingertips. She encouraged me to quiet my mind, to listen to myself, and to imagine myself already as a mother. “This is a good thing for you right now. Your soul is choosing for you to go through this journey so you can learn what it feels like to want something so much,” she said. “That’s what I’m seeing for you. I’m not seeing a no.”

I wonder when I’ll finally be able to grasp the brass ring of karmic understanding. But maybe the point is to stop trying so hard — to interpret, to learn, to earn perfection. I just need to believe that if I let go of the steering wheel and stop questioning, my fate will finally place me where I am meant to be. Maybe I’m up against the final boss of struggle before I finally let go and reach my own personal nirvana.

When I close my eyes, I can picture it. I’m in our beautiful home, with Ben beside me, our curly-haired children squirming in our arms. I look at him, overcome with gratitude for the detours, and say the words I used to fear I’d never say: “Look at what we made together.”

It’s right there, just beyond my fingertips. All I need to do is trust that it will arrive.