Bringing in Finn (19 page)

Kaitlin reminded me what her doctor had told her when she became pregnant after having three miscarriages: “Women have babies in the middle of war-torn countries; women have babies from rape. I'm not saying stress is wonderful or that it wouldn't be good to relax, but you are not going to kill your baby from being anxious. Anyone who says so is misguided.” Kaitlin was eleven weeks pregnant again. Six months later, her son, Eli, was born a healthy eight pounds, three ounces, at forty-one weeks.

 

On a Wednesday
night six weeks into the pregnancy, I started to bleed. It was nine thirty. Bill was at the sink in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. I stood over the toilet; the halogen lights in our bathroom glowed happily, the white spa towels were stacked high, the rows of my essential oils stood straight. No sign that anything was amiss.

“I'm bleeding!” I called to Bill.

“No,” Bill said, opening the door that separated the toilet from the greater bathroom. He looked at the toilet paper in my hand, thick drops of red and brown blood. “No. It's just spotting. All the websites say you can spot. Remember your friend who had almost a full period and her baby was fine?”

“I think it's too much blood for spotting,” I said.

“It's not,” Bill said, the way a child might when not getting the toy he wanted.

I placed a thick pad in a clean pair of underwear and shoved the stained pair into a plastic bag.

“I guess we can wait a little while to call,” I said. Dr. Colaum's staff had left hours ago. The RMI literature said to call the emergency number only if I was bleeding through a pad an hour. I kept a watch on the bleeding.

I walked in circles around the bathroom. Maybe it was just spotting. Maybe the pregnancy would continue. The cramps intensified, and I felt the warmth of more blood. I could not imagine that this was good. My forehead felt prickly and hot.

“I don't feel good,” I said to Bill.

His eyes were glassy and he looked crazed. “Don't you say it,” he hissed, his words menacing and sharp. “
We are not having . . . ”
He refused to say the word. His voice was raised and hot with anger. “My
mother
wouldn't let this happen.”

Grief enfolded Bill like a cape. I wasn't sure he could even see me anymore.

I felt like I was cracking, like a stone statue turning into dust. Bill turned away from me, jumped in bed, and pulled the covers over his face. I felt fully abandoned. I slept, or rather lay awake, in the hallway between our bedroom and the bathroom, arms and legs curled into a circle, the way our Labrador slept when he was sick.

Dr. Colaum performed an ultrasound the next morning. Bill had apologized on the drive to Evanston and now seemed himself, his face poised like that of an army general about to hear news of a battle. I felt empty and bereft.

“It doesn't look good,” Dr. Colaum said. The blood had washed the embryo and growing placenta away like rain. “I'm guessing it was something with the embryo,” she said. “Sometimes it's as if nature knows there's a problem; the embryos self-select out.”

In equal part with the sadness I felt, I also felt relief. Relief that the miscarriage had happened this early, that there was no physical trauma. I felt relief that I did not need to spend every minute
of every day and night gripped by anxiety and fear. Going into this pregnancy, I'd been so worried about my body and its ability to carry the baby, but now, as I felt the cascades of relief course through me, I wondered for the first time about my mental ability to carry a child in the future.

I doubled up on therapy sessions and EMDR. I met with a woman named Sheila Swenson for hypnosis. I increased my meditation time and upped my yoga practice to two or three times a week. I knew myself to be a courageous and capable person. I was determined to overcome the plaguing terror and doubts I felt about pregnancy.

Bill and I took on more work to generate the money we would need for a next round of IVF. We'd used up the allotted three cycles covered by insurance and would need to pay the entire $20,000 ourselves. “Do you offer frequent-flyer discounts?” I joked to Lisa Rinehart when I saw her at the end of our next consultation. If we paid in cash, RMI would knock 5 percent off the cost.

A friend of Bill's from college contacted him through email and shared that he and his wife had stopped trying after three cycles. They had decided not to have children. Other people told us stories about couples that stopped trying and then became pregnant. I did not believe we would become pregnant unaided. I was afraid of pregnancy and did not love doing IVF, but I wanted to have children and believed this was our way.

We did our fifth cycle of IVF at the beginning of 2009. For the first time, a small part of me actually hoped that we were not pregnant. As hard as I tried not to, I kept seeing blood, Bill screaming at me while I miscarried. When the pregnancy test was negative, I felt both crushed and relieved.

Bill and I agreed we needed a break. Financially, we would need time to fill up our reserves again. Emotionally, we felt brittle
and spent. We decided we would take eight months off from doing any fertility treatments. We would take a vacation. Friends told us about a new place in Mexico that looked nurturing and serene. We would go away, cleanse our palates, reconnect with each other as a couple.

We agreed to check in with each other once a month. In between, we would spend time on our own considering all options, listening for what we felt guided to do: more IVF, surrogacy, adoption. Outside of the check-ins, we would not talk about babies or fertility.

We shared our intentions with our parents. “We're taking a break,” we said. “We will let you know when we have something to share.”

“This sounds really healthy,” my mother said. “You can take some trips and focus on your coaching practice. Frankly, I could use a life coach. One of these days I am going to come to one of your workshops and see what it is, exactly, that you do.”

 

Every January, I
facilitated a vision workshop in Chicago where participants explored a vision for their year, using coaching exercises and techniques. Unbeknownst to me, my mother called Bill to find out the details and arranged to attend that year's event. The workshop had grown in number in the four years I'd offered it, and when she arrived there was a line out the door of the venue in Lincoln Park that was sponsoring the event.

I was shocked when I saw her, standing in a new gray peacoat, snowflakes sticking to her eyelashes and the tops of her hair.

“I'm here as a participant,” she said. “I think I need what you're teaching today.”

I tried not to think about her reaction to the activities of the day. To my knowledge she had never tried life coaching and had always seemed skeptical of counseling and therapy work. Facilitating
demanded all of my attention. Nearly eighty people showed up, and I had to adapt some of the exercises to accommodate the large group. I didn't think about my mother's reactions again until we'd finished and I'd helped the volunteers restore the room. Then I saw her, standing patiently by the door, as a few last people surrounded me with questions.

She spent the ride back to my house telling me about the small group exercise and how interesting the people in her group were. “We visioned that one of the men's screenplays won an Oscar,” my mother said. “And that this other guy, Kurt, who does standup, emceed a roast for Bill Gates.”

My mother had also told my sister and brother-in-law about her surprise visit. They were in our kitchen with Bill when we came in from the garage. Bill had spent the afternoon cooking a stew. We entered the house to a crackling fire and rich smells of black pepper and red wine coming from the stove.

“How was it?” Bill asked.

“Fantastic,” my mother said. “But Sara is going to have to explain the vision board I made. I don't understand over half the things on it. Will you come upstairs with me?”

I carried my mother's suitcase to the guest room and she laid the vision board on the bed. The lower half of the board was full of images of fresh vegetables and healthy food, a bike and active people running. In the top left corner, there was a young woman with a baby.

“That's you and your baby,” my mother said. My eyes filled. “Is it okay to include visions for other people?”

“No rules,” I said, my throat tight. In one corner was a red magazine page with the words “women after menopause have a choice.” In the center she'd pasted a large baby ostrich with its beak wide open, eyes bulging with joy. “I don't know what to make of this image,” she said. “I chose it because I want to find or do
whatever makes me feel like that ostrich,” she said. She ran her hands lovingly over the glossy photo.

“I really don't understand the menopause part,” she said. “I think I meant retirement, that people after retirement have a choice. I'll cover it over when I get home.”

Over hot plates of stew, my mother told Bill and my sister and brother-in-law about the big crowd and the part at the end where they imagined scenarios in which their visions had already happened. “Sara is a great teacher,” she said. “Everyone loved it.”

 

Over the next
few months, my mother called with coaching questions. “What I want is to find my calling,” she said. “I have my vision board up on the wall in my room where I see it every day, but I still don't have a clue.”

I recommended some books and asked if she was open to meditation. “It's the only practice I recommend for everyone,” I said. She found a rock in the woods near her house and began meditating on it daily after her morning walk with her friends. “I hope no one sees me,” she said. “They'll think I'm the crazy woman in the woods.”

“Dad meditates,” I said.

“Only in the house,” she answered.

Sometime in April she called me, agitated. “I've got nothing,” she said. “I'm meditating every day. All the coaching books say to think of the time you were happiest in life, the thing that brings you more joy than anything else in the world.” Frustration echoed in her words.

“The only answer I have is being pregnant with you girls. It's the same thing when I meditate. I see images of being pregnant. I'm fifty-nine years old. I've been through menopause. I'm trying to see it symbolically—pregnant with a vision, birthing an idea—but honestly, I don't see it.” She hung up the phone muttering something about looking into microloans for mothers in Africa.

Bill and I did our “check-ins” at the beginning of each month. In May we sat outside under our new green patio umbrella that Bill had found on sale. We'd spent the previous weekend clearing pots for a new crop of tomatoes and packing the herb boxes with fresh, dark soil. The wind that felt omnipresent in Chicago in the winter months was lessening but still cool. I was counting the days until our vacation to Mexico. We were leaving in a week. I moved out from under the umbrella's shade to sit directly in the sun.

Our conversation was the same as it had been in February and March: Bill wanted to do more IVF. I wanted to say “great!” and share his enthusiasm, but more IVF was not the answer that came to me when I sat in my quiet times and took walks in the forest preserves north of the city. Often before starting on a trail, I'd ask for guidance about having a family. I never heard a clear answer, the way I'd heard from the Divine Mother in my bedroom, but I would regularly find a Y-shaped branch, often in the middle of the trail, so obvious it was impossible for me to ignore. I brought these branches home and was starting to form a little forest on the twins' table in the solarium. The branches did not give me a specific answer, but my heart did. The answer that rose up again and again was surrogacy.

“We have good eggs and sperm. They like each other and make great embryos,” I said to Bill. In April I'd attended a meeting of an organization called Resolve that ran support groups for people going through fertility struggles. The group was self-run by members, and I'd been surprised by the accounts of women years further into a journey than we were, people with different challenges than ours: older or defective eggs, partners with low sperm count, deficient embryos. I hadn't realized how much we had going for us.

“We have great biological components,” I said. “The part we need help with is the carrying of the baby.”

“I don't want a stranger carrying our baby,” Bill said. “I want to
share the experience with you. I want to rub the belly and talk to the baby the way we did with the twins. What happened wouldn't have with one baby.”

I didn't know how to explain that I didn't trust the process or the doctors or my body anymore. Dr. Baker imagined I would be put on bed rest for the second and third trimesters. I could be hospitalized for a large majority of the pregnancy. And that was if my cervix stayed closed. I'd looked up success rates for pregnancies with a cerclage again: still 60 to 80 percent.

“Every pregnancy is a risk,” people told me.

But things changed for me when I knew the odds going in. Sixty percent was not high enough for me; neither was eighty.

Bill and I were at an impasse, but we agreed to stick with our agreement. We'd continue considering options and check in again after our vacation in May.

Every day, after my quiet time, I prayed.

“If it is only fear that is keeping me from carrying our baby, please take it,” I said to the Universe, the Great Mother, whomever or whatever might be listening and available for help.
“
Please give me the clarity and courage to do whatever is for me to do.”

 

I thought about
surrogacy during our time in Mexico. Once, a few months after the twins died, a woman from my meditation class had said, “I wish I could carry your baby for you.” She was a beautiful young mother of three children. I daydreamed about calling her up.