Once

American Thanksgiving

On the drive across town on Thanksgiving Day, the streets of Washington,DC, where I live, were near empty. Some people would say the city was dead. But it wasn’t dead. Not alive either. A pendulum pulling down, silent, ready to be set going again, everything in suspension. So. Still.

But amidst this half-emptied city, there was activity. Visitors rolled suitcases down the sidewalks to get to their hotels or friends’ or families’ houses; dogs begged at the doors of their houses and got taken out, tongues wagging in thankfulness, into the small urban parks here and met other dogs. Owners exchanged pleasantries and wished each other happy holiday, gone strangers again only in the parting.

Then there were the few shops, businesses doing business. Pink neon “Open” signs. Wide glass windows lit up from within that seemed like a flashlights amidst buildings gone dark in their closure.

And all those workers. Just in my short trek, I saw policemen, gas station attendants, taxi drivers, security guards, doormen, and bus drivers on duty. I passed by hotels and the hospital filled with people working their way through this holiday--tallied up the registration clerks and the cleaners and the doctors and nurses and orderlies alike. If it was a holiday for any of them, it was a delayed one, set out of joint by employment and its obligations.

Several years ago I visited a local Pentecostal church as part of research for a story. During the prayer and thankfulness section of the service, a teenager thanked God for answering his prayer after so many months and finally giving him Sundays off, so that he could come and worship. It doesn’t matter what you yourself believe about religion to come to understand the weight of a boy’s belief that it will take divine intervention to allow him to have a say in his own work schedule. I thought about him just as he described himself--down on his knees time and again, praying hard. I thought about the part of the story he didn’t tell as much. All those weeks the schedule went up with a thumbtack on the corkboard, a white sheet marked up with a chart of the days and hours and his name, penned in, again on Sunday. All those times the answer came back to him: No.

Most people working the holiday in this city didn’t choose to do so. They’re the newest or youngest or most elderly or lowest ranking--whatever it was that allotted them the least choice in the lottery of working days. Whatever bad luck had become ordinary life.  

A friend from Canada takes pains, when she discusses this holiday, to announce it as American Thanksgiving. She explained to me that Canada celebrates its own holiday on the second Monday of October, as a harvest celebration.

I write this to check myself from getting too much on my high horse, too fast into my American bravado-as-pity snit about what the day should mean. After all, Washington is an international city, so for many workers, that Thursday was just that--just another weekday workday rather than any special day of celebration.

It’s not just different national Thanksgivings across different days, then, but wildly different experiences of holiday on the same day--from sidewalk to gas station to rooftop to basement to the wide open air of that chill day, that I need to reconcile. The workers, the disgruntled, the yearning, the unthankful. God bless the latter. I fear there is so little room for this that the whole idea of thanksgiving becomes one more indignity for those at its mercy.

Some of the blogs in the arena of infertility, loss, and parenting (in all its forms) I love most honor the necessary act of gratitude. They capture green cuttings--the meet of the blade with the flesh of the stalk that marks a replanting--those surprise offshoots of our days that, if not recorded and celebrated and tended, through the thanking, are lost and go dry.

But I’m not writing here, sweet ones, about such sweetness and light. I’m writing about mandatory gratitude when you least feel it. The forcing of meaning--of family, togetherness, fruitfulness and bounty--that can make this not a happy, but a hard day for many. Here is the risk of American Thanksgiving.

Not just across the city, but across the country, these are times of great difficulty. A terrible economy, high jobless rates, fledgling businesses hanging on, barely. People are still recovering from storms that set houses to timber, fires that set houses to ash, finding shelter where they can in the most makeshift of ways. One day before Thanksgiving Day as we celebrate it here, violence in Mumbai took people under, shook the bones of survivors in India and, around the world as well as in the United States, of those who survive those killed in the attacks.

Over the past 10 days, my brother has spent his days digging out the ground to try to repair a water main he busted on his property when he decided to fix the fence in his backyard. He’s busied himself with household projects, as he is unemployed and has been for several months, with no good leads in hand. His yard erupted in a geyser; the estimates came in at impossible numbers. Five thousand dollars might as well be five million. He decided he’s got to fix it himself. His bills mount. He can’t catch a break.

Isn’t that how it is? Bad luck feeds on bad luck. The writer Raymond Carver used to use the phrase all the time--in his fiction and reportedly in his life as well--about people who “can’t win for losing.”

I’ve certainly felt that, and I felt it especially at times that were mandated as celebratory. “I’m getting married.” “I’m pregnant.” “I’m pregnant again.” “I got the job.” Don’t all these pronouncements amount to “I’m lucky. Just lucky. Girlfriend, am I lucky. SO lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky.”

Which, if you’re lucky, too, means a shared celebration. But honey, if you’re not…. Well, then those are hard-as-hell things to hear. And the strident, biding, biting hope that one day your luck might change? It doesn’t go away, even if your luck does change for the better. Just hearing someone else’s good news, when it hits right on whatever your own war wound is: it just seems to slide in like an injection of ice into the body--one prick from the outside, then your whole soul gone cold.

November at its hardest: empty, not full; lonely, not complete; desolate, so far from fertile, impossible to imagine what the word could mean. November and then December thereafter. The hard ground that keeps refreezing just as you’re trying to dig your way into repair.

Trust that I am so thankful for what I have. Trust that I know it. Trust that my deepest thankfulness means I will not proclaim it here but keep it private, lest it seem like admonition against those who have something else they felt on that day.

On Thanksgiving Day, before any festivities, I heard noise only because it was a disruption of such quiet. The city bus barreling down the street outside, and then nothing but the sound of the keyboard as the letters got pressed out into words, the scratch of chair against hardwood floor, the swallow down of water and the slight ting the glass made against the desk in the setting down. 

In the hours before I travelled to where I'd celebrate that day, I conjured another gathered table. Here, at this other table's center, is a cornucopia of want and need. Its surrounding leaves, true to fall's succumbing into winter, are the last, last hint of fire orange, taken over by burnt brown. The table is full. It’s a feast. No need to starve. There’s bounty enough for all. But I promise--no one here has to say what she’s thankful for. No one here has to pretend. The meal might be heavy; still, it’s made by loving hand. We know around this table there is need for sustenance no common ritual, no expected rite, will provide. This is no American Thanksgiving in its falsified heart. It’s a holiday stolen back from its bad beginnings and history. It asks you only to come as you are and, if you meet the task, demands not your thanks, but offers you the kind thanks, deep thanks you may need to sustain yourself throughout the hard season to follow.

(Images from Norman Rockwell, Official Website, CMG Worldwide)

On Trying to Not Try to Try

A body knows when it’s in wait--anticipatory or resigned. Combustion like a firework inside--bright lights, the world all possible, and then fizzle into pale night and the usual sky. Show’s over, month’s over, hope’s over.

When a man and a woman love each other, sometimes…
When a man and a woman love each other, and work too hard, and love fiercely the one child they have, and give extra time and love to troubled family and friends around them, sometimes they are too tired to…

The clock is wrong. Or the clock is right, but the eye ignores the time until it’s looped its hands around and around the hours and days, denies the thing until it’s too late. There is lovemaking, sweet or rambunctious, cleaving, important, rushed, slowed, hot and heavy, sideways and on top and on bottom and a few positions in between. But always at the wrong time. In afterglow and at the in-between times, then the clock’s hands catch attention, those heavy black hands that push time forward relentlessly or that hold it back mercilessly, all the while pretending the steady keeping of even measure each day. I know it’s a lie. The clock moves by its own will, and seemingly against mine.

So now I’m fighting with clocks. With calendars. With marking. So much for just seeing what happens. Sex and bliss--that couple’s timing is no better than my couplings.  What luxury the fresh bride has if she doesn’t yet know years of wait and fail, months of loss. In the fairytale, here’s the other story--the old crone, hunched and withered and bitter. The one the reader believes to deserve her bad ends.

Once I was part of a conversation with two colleagues--a man and a woman, both parents. The man talks about his third child being on the way. The woman says, “I’ve wondered whether we’d regret not having a third.” She, with a daughter and son. Just then, I was newly recovering from my second loss--ducked out with quick words of needing to get back to work, all but ran to my office, and cried and yelled, muffled against the hard wood of my battered old desk there. Hated them in that moment for the casualness of their talk. For their greed. Their selfishness. Their cruelty to not know how lucky they were.

Here I am, talking almost daily to them now about their children, about my child. Too blithe some days. I catch myself. I catch myself here, selfish.

To just have made a decision--yes or no--as if it were that easy.

If only to have made a political decision. More than one child is bad for the planet. Even one child is pushing into a crowded world of need. That comfort wrought of solid policy stance.

But even the writer who stands for one-child families-Bill McKibben, in Maybe One--steps back, stressing the need for conversation rather than imposed polemic.  “No decision any of us makes,” he writes,  “will have more effect on the world (and on our lives) than whether to bear another child. No decision, then, should be made with more care.”

He’s right, of course. But so wrong in that he forgets the utter lunacy of having one child in the first place for every reason he argues against two. The planet, water, food, clothing, shelter, money. If you thought about the world, really thought about its calamity, how could you bring a child here to meet this place?

 At some point, there’s no room for reason.

 At some point, if you can't decide, you beg the body to make the decision for you. And when it doesn't, or can't, there's a different kind of lunacy that comes in. Questions. Furious words. The old doubts and superstitions. Everything you'd lived through but tried to live past.

Sometimes, when a man and a woman love each other, they talk and talk and talk until they can’t stand to talk anymore and merely act.  
But here again, consequence.

Not the lucky surprise, an encore of more fire and light. Instead, the dark, dizzied hands of spinning time, the maybes, the might bes, the nos, the possibilities, the aches, the wonders, the foreseen regrets, the worry of last chances, the sadness of the sky, last smoke drifted up and gone, that moment of quietude, the day’s promise unmet and lost, a long month ahead. That kind of wait.

Under the Table

I've got to teach my world to eat better. Right now, it's a wild omnivore. It eats all my sentences, paragraphs. Essays get swallowed whole, but when I go to feed myself, the cupboard bangs shut with a dull echo, empty. My world, it doesn't chew carefully--those ladylike 20 chews per bite, the little bit of food left on the plate for Miss Manners: None of that. My world is an ogre, sloppy-mouthed, grease-fingered, greedy beyond measure.

Any spare letters I have, I give to my daughter, who is coming into full language, and licks her lips for the sound of the alphabet and the way its sings itself back to us in the song we've made for it. 

Being a mother is about being hungry. Wrought out of your former shape, changed irrevocably, slung back into a familiar shape, but then it's all different because of that body that is a child aside you. This goes for mothers whose children came from inside or from outside--whether that's pregnancy or adoption or surrogacy or fostering or any other way that child comes to belong to you. The shape of you, the way you configure yourself out in the world, has to change in accomodation. This is no easy work. No wonder it leaves you wanting.

To this day, my own mother hides treats, away from others' hands, in the top of the pantry or in the back of the napkin drawer. Russell Stover's caramel clusters or creamy hard candies that open out of their small package with a crackle and then melt slowly in your mouth. Beyond sustenance, some furtive indulgence. I'm taking her lesson in part. I'm going to secret away some words here, so I don't go thin and gaunt as a ghost woman. 

No, not a ghost yet--just a traveler in want. Like a hobo, I will share my small stash with a fellow in need. Just give me the sign. I'll take you in, recognizing you, say to you, sister, I know what it is to feel your own belly in want and need. Sit down at this table and share some of this tiny, secret bounty with me. 

  (From Fran DeLorenzo's Hobo Signs webpage.)

Weaning

Almost a year since I've posted--the last time with promises to write here about S's birth and how she got here. But that, it turns out, was as good a fiction as any. Still, I've got to come here without excuses to this place that was created to be about the tangled crossover of beginnings and endings and the stories that spring out of them, whenever they come, whatever form, without apology.

The welcoming hardly starts before you’re saying goodbye. The quick chirps of a newborn impossible to catch by any human machine (because even if you kept the recorder going all day, how could you capture the utter, repeatable surprise of that sound of alchemy of new breath and tiny body and outer air?). The hand discovered at the end of an arm as MINE! (Such joy to a clumsy baby to find this out, that one belongs to oneself). The suckling latch of lip and tongue, the fiercest and gentlest thing there could be, that goes lax, giving way to distracted eye when infant goes over to toddler.

A baby is still. Rolls. Crawls. Stands. Begins first steps to walk. In this, becomes a child.

Call them the stages of human development if you want to be technical. But call them by their other names, the gaining days, the differentiation days, the stand on their own, by god days--each inch they take on their own can feel a distance traveled that's downright irretrievable.

If I am celebrating the one year birthday of my daughter, it is a quiet little fete, in the aftermath of the grandparents’ big noise. It comes long after the big sheet cake with buttercream icing and bright green frosting around the edges and plastic Pooh Bear and Tigger atop the cake and cards and presents (wrapped and then unwrapped) and a mylar balloon and general overwhelm. Mine is a party she doesn’t even attend. Here it is, 12:24 at night, more than a week after the actual date, and she’s in her crib, nuzzled into deep sleep. I am in my study, typing a whole room away from her, separate and feeling it sharply, while so happy for her to be here alive and sleeping that soundly on her very own that I know full well there will never be such words for all of this except to wonder aloud at how it is possible she has been with us for a full, unbelievable, marvelous year.

I'm not kidding. I say it out loud: one, simple "How?"

I’d have to nudge myself into the high spirits real celebration requires. Because there’s a kind of recalcitrance underneath all of this that I’ve come to comes to understand as motherhood. How you watch, hardly breathing so as to make everything as silent as possible, forcing stillness, stealing just a moment before time takes over everything and the child ventures further out into the world without you.

Of course I couldn’t be more pleased to see Squiggle growing into her strong will and standing, literally, on her own two feet. It’s exactly what I want for her.

But still, this is a week of putting away--outfits she’s outgrown, the dreaded breastpump, the last of my own pregnancy clothes, her infancy. She turns her cheek away from me in daytime, too enamored with the world and its shiny promise to bother with the time nursing takes. She is full of food from jars and yogurt cups and began self-weaning a few weeks ago. Only at night does she come back to me for milk, and each night I remind myself that it might be the last with her for breastfeeding. I am heartbroken in a way there is no word in English for. Every drop of mother’s milk shared between us comes on borrowed time with her, and in the same second I scold myself for being overdramatic, I also catch myself mourning how our bodies get pulled away from one another by the bright world, yet again.

Even before I had her, I was a woman of, according to the medical terminology, “advanced maternal age.” I can’t say whether there will be another child or whether I even want--or dare--to hope for one. Having one baby and working full-time in an intellectually demanding profession has just about driven me crazy, not to mention the trouble and sorrows that preceded my pregnancy with her, this old body and the losses. Most days I can hardly remember my name, dizzied by the clock that spins itself like a fast gyroscope loosed wild from its winding string, at a speed so demanding I blink and lose whole hours in the time it takes for me to sit down, still, at my desk and straighten the stack of work I have before me.

It’s a perplexing thing for first and last to be so indistinct but moreso to feel that I’ve been losing hold on the firsts and lasts and inbetweens. The clock, the year scatters me. I make myself sit in this old green armchair and take back, if not into my hands, then into my will, what I may have packed away too fast. Just be thankful, so thankful for her birth, I tell myself, for this first, a whole year, for the fact that her growing up is a mark of survival. And how I, of all people I do not take this for granted. Because not to see her merely survive but thrive--now that’s the present she gives me in return in the center of May, 2008, here and now and nowhere else. And so it is.

Bless her. As if she’s heard what I’m thinking, she calls out from the crib, hungry. I break from writing this, go to her and find her there, swaying up into her sleep-sit, past groggy, half-dreaming, ready for me. Does she know I need her right now, rather than her being the one needing me for this late-night feeding? She is all arms and legs. She takes up my whole lap these days. It takes some adjusting to get her in place. But once she settles in, latched, in this moment, I know she is still my baby, back to my bird-sweet creature, making that noise of hers impossible to capture beyond what we drink in together--Remember, treasure, keep, know.

Let go.

Arrival

Squiggle arrived, a full-fledged baby girl, six weeks ago yesterday.

You might think it strange that here, the most remarkable thing in my life has happened, and yet I kept it secret from the people I'd been writing to about fertility and pregnancy and birth, the very things that made her. Her delivery over a month ago frankly qualifies as old news, but it's still new to me every day that she opens her eyes out in this world.

I want you to know that it wasn't an intentional hiding, but it also wasn't an oversight. It is about being turned inward and then outside and then back in again, and now, not knowing where and how to wear my skin. 

Infertility and loss struck me dumb. Though, in real life, I am a loudmouth and say things I shouldn't, for a long time I did not speak to much of anyone about what I was going through. I found solace on a bulletin board of women who had known loss, who logged onto their computers at all different hours of the day and even in different parts of the world, and talked silently, only in the click of the keys, to them. I had never before joined an online group like that. The blinkies and icons and avatars had kept me away, because I didn't speak that language. Until I needed to. I joined and unjoined a few boards, dropped them when I found them oddly competitive about who was going to get pregnant next, who could carry a child to term and leave the rest of us behind, but ended up finding one where the women were smart and didn't mind me being smart-alecky or angry or irreverent or emotionally mushy, as the day demanded. Through all of this, I also dallied among blogs, and finally, when I realized I was writing posts far too long for bulletin board hi-how-are-yous and wanted a longer, more sustained conversation with myself and with the world as an infertile woman who'd experienced loss and was trying again to conceive, started my own.

And that was a way of stepping outside into the world and speaking to it unapologetically on my own terms, of coming out of muteness and taking back my broken-down body and womanhood and shaking my fist up in the air and shouting and talking back and asking why and, not hearing anything back (not that I expected anything, heathen that I am), started to own my own skin and self again and give my own answers and push myself onward to ask even harder questions. 

This writing place has never been a sustained narrative space—what other people do so well, with their reporting of each step of visits to the specialist and blood levels and quips from their husbands or partners and recipes that capture the concoctions of life, and with the detailed ups and downs that make a continuous story that readers want to follow and so check up on every day, greedily. Instead, for me, it was a place of the essay—in the lowliest sense of to try, as I did just that, try.

Then when I found myself pregnant after two losses and a chemical pregnancy, the noise in my head clamorous with worry and fret, the only thing to do was to write—put that cacophony out there, out of my mind and onto the page and screen, on those days of ultrasound and dailyness where the pregnancy seemed most threatened or real, to come to terms with that small thing roiling inside, turning and bobbing and stretching into itself—because all I could think was that if I sustained another loss, I might just not be able to make it. I might just die. 

But as the pregnancy progressed and the news was good, I suddenly didn't want to be a public voice, even anonymously. My body did all kinds of speaking for me; it is all but impossible not to announce yourself as pregnant once you reach a certain stage—the bow of the back and the way you walk approaching a shuffle, the hips clicking loose in their joints and each step taken, even if in a hurry, with a sense of steadying yourself, determindedly, in relation to the hard ground below you. With so public a body, I wanted a more private mind. What had seemed before like a voodoo against trouble, scribbling down words as a kind of keeping, now seemed like writing that belonged to other people and not to me.

The day I took my daughter, squinting, out into the May heat, past the hospital doors after the birth, there was another kind of public role that took over, that of Mother. When I carry this baby out in the world, people ask all kinds of questions—how old she is, how much she weighed when she was born. They get quickly personal: I've had at least two strangers in the past week ask me whether I was breastfeeding, without the slightest blink that such a question might be untoward. While I'm happy to answer (yes), and while there's a sure sense that comes with breastfeeding, anyway, that one's breasts are no longer one's own, it's still a situation that calls up once again that question of public and private, outwardness and inwardness. What I say—vocally or physically—and what I mean and what I keep, necessarily, guardedly to myself. 

Because there's another factor here: that of the girl herself. She has her own story that's begun. And in the telling of mine, I risk robbing hers and her right to fashion her tale out to the world, especially given the head start I have on her, as she has no language yet other than the simplest peeps, most urgent of cries. The utter insistence of her own tiny body, growing into itself with a flail of muscle that propels an arm, a leg. The tightening of her fist is a word only I can understand.

I suppose this is always the trick of writing: what to give away and what to keep close. A kind of magic stunt--that show of silk flowers brought out of thin air; this puff of smoke that disappears a whole woman in a box—versus what gets kept under the cloak or back in the dressing room, readied for no audience to see. 

So what I'll be doing here in the coming weeks is telling the story all wrong, out of its proper order.  On purpose. Tracing back to her birth and then far back before that. Rethinking beginnings. Essaying, again. Trying a different kind of birth: navigating this question of what and how to tell. How the life that undeniably is has always, also, a second life, covering it as the finest of blankets, worked with the most careful of hands, in the telling about its facts, its truths, its lies, its wants, its coming.

Rattle and Hum

The fact that I have a cassette tape player in my car but no longer have one attached to my stereo occasionally subjects me to fits of nostalgia where I feel the need to dig out those plastic cases and flip them open and pop in music I haven’t heard in quite a while. The first 10,000 Maniacs album. Over-earnest guitar from Tracy Chapman. Old school R.E.M. Lovely, morose Smiths. Even those mixed tapes of the Velvet Underground and Prince and Marvin Gaye and Charles Mingus from old boyfriends that make me smile oddly, surprised at the collections and trying to place what hidden (or not so hidden) meaning each song was meant to convey at the time, all as I drive down the center of the city and try not to get smashed in the make-them-up-as-you-go-along rules of the road here.

Cassettes don’t give anywhere the same pleasure as old records—what you’ll hear music devotees talk about: the sound only vinyl can give; how it truly catches the human voice in the way the synthetic, digital CD just won’t; the loved, habitual acts of sitting down and easing into a whole album side, then walking over, gently to turn the record over, then settling back into the other side with even more satisfaction. Cassette tapes get ratty quickly. They’re unsubstantial. The spools of tape clatter against the frame. They are hardly ever taken care of. The sound quality takes on a low hiss after only a month or so of ownership. 

But that’s what’s somehow wonderful about them. How I can’t quite tell what part of the recording of “King of the Road” is Michael Stipe’s misstep and what part is left over from having left the tape on the dashboard of my first car in the Oklahoma sun. How the music—and the object that carries it--involve an unexpected history, and how, in their imperfection and brokenness, they bring all of that back.

Most of the students I teach at the university are 18 or 19 years old. As I’ve looked out into the rooms over last semester and this one, too, I’ve been thinking about just what goes on in their heads, trying to get back to that place. A few years ago I could do exactly that—remember what it was like to be new to college and to the outside world--but I find I can’t anymore, because I’m so firmly on the other side of things. An adult, a real one, and not the adult even back then I somehow knew I was only playing at as, it turns out, I was.

My school year last year consisted of two miscarriages, the death of my father, several other deaths in my extended family, and the deepest tract of despair that I’ve known. It’s not that my students don’t have their own sorrows; one student nursed her mother through Stage IV breast cancer, another lost her father mere weeks after I lost mine. This year, for them, has included heart infections and suicide attempts. There are fathers diagnosed with dementia; fathers who have locked daughters out of the house for good to get back at cheating mothers; mothers who drink late into the night, and alone. Sisters with special needs who cry into the phone, not understanding why their brothers have had to go so far away for school when there are schools right there, right down the street.

When I stood in front of my students—kids, really—last semester, in the early and perilous early days of a new pregnancy, there was so much I wanted to tell them about my inner life. About why I likely seemed disorganized: how I wanted to answer against this by teaching them about the terror that comes after loss. About getting through the first day of classes while newly pregnant, while having to recognize the anniversary of my first loss at the same time. Trying hard to go in to the classroom and make logical, compelling sense in leading discussion when I’d been spotting the night before and into the morning and was convinced I was about to lose this, pregnancy, too. Teaching the day before my first scan. Turning up late to class the morning my mother called, in tears, not able to face the ashes of my father anymore in her house. Working through the noise in my head to lead discussion in a week I am waiting to hear whether the child inside me has a neural tube defect and will not live to breathe out in the world, as these students do without thinking.

But this was not a conversation I could have with them, even those who knew deep sadnesses of their own; and even if some of them could understand, I couldn’t face the ones who couldn’t, who would just stare at me wide-eyed and off-put. And so I said nothing beyond the normal class material—let them think I’m nervous, skittish, underprepared, even.   

Still, every day I met with them in that hard semester, I thought about telling them—telling it all. But in the next breath I stopped myself. I knew I couldn’t bear the ones who’d use it—for whom it would provide fodder on evaluations, blustering against bad grades no one hoisted on them but that they themselves earned. That moment of openness is too hazardous in a group where some of the students are lashing out at anyone they can, where because I am one of the few teachers at the whole university who knows their names and their lives and their vulnerabilities, rather than come to me in gentleness, this can all backfire rather quickly, and I become the ready target for everything that’s wrong and not what they expected about college and, in fact, the promise and realities of their own lives.

I just couldn’t take on that anger. There was no room for it. Not in my life and certainly not in my changing body. Even as I stayed pregnant and found myself firmly into the second trimester with much less risk of loss, I was filled up with my own anger that could be called up at a moment’s notice. Anger of an adolescent ferocity, about infertility and loss and everything that accompanies that. Anger about the lies that filled up my life, from the doctors’ lips to the unspoken secrets my father, even on his deathbed, refused to tell.

But I learned to keep a tenuous hold on that anger, seeing firsthand how sour and mean it could turn some of my students who did not have the means to face their own tempers. I taught my body to use its weight and leverage to keep that fury at bay. Each day, it’s true, I felt a little less of its rise and push in me. I felt it taming, settling into that hold as its new home, no longer straining, but accepting the cage of my bones for the home it can provide. 

The rattling I hear, then, is not that fierceness pushing against its case, but is instead a wonder about when I will be strong enough to be honest again. When I will not be so afraid. When the brokenness is part of me not just as a hidden, secret thing, but when I can come to talk about it, unafraid it will take me over and undo me. Can I think of a time when I can sing the wrong words and record them, play them back, let people upon people hear them, and I am unashamed? How messy am I willing to be? How real?

I am, remarkably, in the third trimester of a pregnancy I once could not bring myself to believe would last. Speaking of it out loud, trusting in it, was risk and folly. But here I am at 32 weeks of gestation, when the likelihood is that even with an early birth, the baby would survive with minimum complications out in the world. The fact is that I don’t any longer have a choice in what I share and don’t in many regards. My belly is wide and long, and strangers and friends alike ask to touch it. I am visibly pregnant; everyone who sees me assumes I’m going to have a child. And barring any birthing disaster (I haven’t grown so confident to rule that out), I will do just that—have a child.

I've had to come to terms, suddenly, with the notion that there's no perfecting of the soul, no life goals that will be suddenly met in the next eight weeks. I could stay completely contained in my head and say nothing of pregnancy and still I would speak just by walking outside my front door. I have time enough to make sure the crib is screwed together adequately that it won't cave in on the baby’s little, soft head. I do not have time to change my life and make it complete. She is coming regardless of where I thought I wanted to be when I had a child. There's no extension I could beg (unless, of course, she decides to arrive late on her own terms) or new projects that I could launch into with any hope of completion. I could write careful pages of an enumerated birth plan, trying to predict every causality, eventuality, possibility, but I also know that there's little conducting of an actual birth that's going to work in real time beyond what this baby demands in its own moment. I am just like those old cassette tapes I reach for--battered, loopy, and at the mercy of how the music decides to play out.

Each progressive week of childbirth class, I become aware of how messy birth itself is on every count. The teacher warns the partners to pack a change of clothing, given that they're going to be in what she calls “the splash zone.” I read Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth and take in not just the joy of birth these women tell through their individual words and stories, but also the sense of how physical and scatalogical it all can be. How the body just takes over: There is fluid and urine and blood. There is often vomit and shit in the labor process. There's no engineering against the facts of the body and its glorious heave and slosh and push that it takes to bring a baby out into the world.

I suppose this is an essential part of motherhood—setting aside the I-thought-it'd-be's for the here-is-what-it-is's. But this is no moment of giving up everything I am and redefining myself as the mother of someone. It’s more about reclaiming myself for myself in strength and not fear, thinking about what it means to be an adult woman more able to understand the sadnesses around me, face it and help it, but most importantly not take it in as my own. It's about recognizing each person's case and history, how the sun has worn it at the edges, how being out in the world takes different tolls on all of us. To sing loudly and slightly off-key and miss some of the lead-in lyrics, but get to this, and proudly: I’m a woman of means by no means. To screw up the words. To be messy. To be human in a way that I’ve been so, so afraid to be. And to believe, for once, that I can open up my entire body from its center and not break, in the end, into pieces.

A Consideration of P.D. James' Children of Men:

The task before me was to join 15 other bloggers in the "infertility/pregnancy loss/adoption/parenting-after-infertility/assisted conception community," read with them P.D. James' novel Children of Men, and respond to several questions of the group's invention, all with an eye towards conversation about how this book takes on a civilization with infertility at its failing core.

I want to write here about Children of Men, even if belatedly, because this is a rich conversation about beginning and ending, what we hope for and what we lose, and what, in the process we are willing to risk.

"Do you think this was based on James' own experiences with infertility?"

 

A large part of my job as a writer and a teacher of writing is to stand up in front of students and teach them about the nature of fiction. That there is such a thing as invention. Writers really do make things up. Really. Just like that. Not everything a writer writes is thinly disguised autobiography, despite what Oprah Winfrey or many a first novelist might lead you to think. But of course the question of connecting experience and authorship is always, actually, more complicated than quick denial. Writers mine their own pains, listen carefully to others'. We combine stories like alchemy. We bring together small characteristics of 12 different people we know with 4 strangers we've noticed on the bus or buying a newspaper or spitting on the street to build a believable character into the pages. If there were no truth in our fictions, they simply wouldn't work and feel true.

What can save you to make the argument you want is if you can find the author herself claiming personal history or experience along certain lines. But even with my super-duper express-lane university library access to newspapers, scholarly journals, magazines, and specialty publications, I can't find James talking about infertility, much less how it fits into her own life. I hear her talk about morality, religion, feminism*, the writing process, justice, fascism, and the role of mystery. But about sperm and egg? Only that she ran across a scientific article mentioning a decline in male sperm production possibly being linked to pollution.

So, there's that. A dead end. But this question stirs trouble for me, because throughout reading this book, I couldn't keep from asking myself what the author's experiences were, whether she was writing out of the earned authority of experience with infertility. I'm so well trained not to ask these questions in the midst of reading, to go willingly into the emotional truth of a story, that being almost physically pulled back to those questions section by section caught me by surprise. Despite what I know about writing, what I teach and preach in my classes, it mattered more than it should just who P.D. James really is, out here in the real world beyond those pages she's handwritten (no luck on the ovarian history, but I can tell you with confidence she avoids the word processor and any "machine devised by man" for getting her words on the page)**. I got angry with her—personally—and her portrayal of the "desperate" women engineering christenings for cats and pramming dolls down the sidewalk. I looked for clues in the book itself, found her dedication of the book to her daughters a kind of fertile statement and positioning. I am completely, totally aware this deduction isn't fair. But still I want, I think, to believe she doesn't, deep down, know what she's talking about, because in this case—because I can't separate my own story and way of conceiving other stories apart from the experience of loss—it seems, whether or not it should, that it matters.

A few questions posted by my fellow bloggers focused on the role of sex in the book and in our individual lives: "One of the story's responses to mass infertility was that couples stopped having sex since there didn't seem to be any point in it. How has IF affected your sex life with your partner? Did you have different experiences at different times along the way?" and "In the book...[w]ith the decline of humanity's fertility, there is also a decline in the physical pleasure of intercourse. The State has to actively encourage pornography to get people to 'enjoy' sex. In the novel Theo assumes that because people are freed from the act of trying to conceive, people should be 'liberated' and more uninhibited, yet the very opposite happened. Sex becomes synonymous with comfort rather than physical pleasure-in fact, it's relayed that women associate sex with physical pain rather than pleasure…."

I sat through a wedding where the minister mentioned the "blessings of children" and the "go forth and multiply" idea so many times throughout the short service that I about squeezed all the blood out of my husband's hand to keep myself seated and not storming right on out of the sanctuary. It was as if the whole idea of marriage and building a life and love together were far secondary to the production of a baby. And this, my friends, was a mainstream but supposedly liberated, contemporary church. I was shocked at how steeped religion still is (and I don't think this issue is limited to Christianity), how invested in women as producers of heirs, and that their worth in life and marriage—the very success of the marriage, even—lies with that product. James' book hews close to this idea that without a "purpose" behind sex, desire goes cold.

For me, sex and procreation have usually been uneasy bedmates. All that consternation of whether the pill was going to fail and when my period arrived late (ha! if only I'd known then what I know now, I could have saved myself years of worry) brought an edge of worry to the proceedings. And then, with infertility, came the charting, the watching, the checking, the double-checking, the eventual doldrums of the sex act under the stalking of an elusive egg.

The best sex I've ever had has been when I wasn't concerned, one way or the other, about sex having anything to do with baby.

James leaves little room in her book for the idea of sex as pleasure outside what feel like old strictures of why sex exists for "grown-ups," at least as defined by the Christian scripture. There's a decidedly strange take on homosexuality here—Theo's insistence against his attraction for Xan, the outing of Theo's father, the note about his mentor, Jasper, being not gay, but merely academic—that closes out any discussion of the sex operating outside the bounds of traditional Christianity's strictures about sex. Women "increasingly intolerant and critical of men" turn not to one another but against the very idea of pleasure. In this sphere of James, there are no gay men, no lesbians, no heterosexual couples who find pleasure, in the ways we know humans do, in the acts of touch and of bodies coming together.  While this may serve her storyline's purposes, this dislocation of people and decline in pleasure simply because conception doesn't occur doesn't ring true for the physical companionship we want and need or for the very real range and reality of human sexuality.

And hell, if I knew the world were coming to an end, I would have lots and lots of sex. Good sex at that.

A few other questions focused on children and their rearing, on the privilege afforded the youth: "In Chapter 7, Jasper Palmer-Smith says to Theo within a tirade about society, 'Now, for the rest of our lives, we're going to be spared the intrusive barbarism of the young, their noise, their pounding, repetitive, computer-produced so-called music, their violence, their egotism disguised as idealism. My God, we might even succeed in getting rid of Christmas, the annual celebration of parental guilt and juvenile greed.' … Do you think this has become a true generalization of the youth in America today? If you have children now, how do you plan to raise your children so that this statement does not pertain to them? If you do not yet have children, how would you parent your children so that this description does not fit them?" and " The Omegas are portrayed as cruel, self-obsessed and cold. Do you suppose that's a function of the way they were raised (as the last generation of children) or something inherent in them? Do you think that infertility has an effect on parenting?"

A few days ago The Washington Post reported that this generation of young people marks the most narcissistic yet. The article notes that "In an analysis of personality surveys given to U.S.college students during the past 25 years that asked for responses to statements such as 'If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,' [Jean] Twenge and the other researchers concluded that there's been a moderate but significant generational change. In other words, young people today are somewhat more likely to be self-absorbed, attention-seeking and power-hungry." There's a bravado built into being young—a rash risking. A know-everything, unjadeable positioning. An assumption of the world—and so it has always been. But with this narcissism comes, too, a breakability, a deep confusion about their real place in the world once they enter into real adulthood and true thinking—the art of questioning past assumption. I see this every day in my classroom, among those students targeted by Tenge's study. And perhaps those children—because college-aged or not, most of them really are still children and think of themselves in those terms, so closely connected to their parents by cell phone and text message and e-mail and visits home throughout the semester—exhibit it more than others, through their extreme privilege, attending the college now with the most expensive price tag in the country. But I also see young people determined to open up outside of themselves, their own petty concerns, and how for many of them that can be a heart-rendering act. There is kindness and generosity and hope among each generation, no matter the louder "barbarism." If they are worse, it is our job to teach them not to be so.  More than just parents need to parent our children.

The cliché is that the mother and father who have struggled with infertility and loss spoil the child and deny this precious offspring nothing. I have no idea who among my students are IVF babies, voodoo babies, Clomid babies, pray-to-whomever-for-a-miracle babies, IUI babies, injectible babies, adopted babies, surrogate babies….  But somehow I don't think that the line of fertile versus infertile—how that child arrived into this world—is what really determines the child's eventual place in the world.

What do I want for the child to come? Confidence in her world, but not cruelty. The ability to ask the tough question but also to take in the tough answer, no matter how hard it might be to hear at first. Generosity of spirit. Understanding. Strength and conviction with a solid tempering of empathy. A deep love for the very fact of life. How will I teach her that? Only by stumblings, leading, I can only hope, to a surer step. Learning to walk along with her. Letting her teach me how to speak, how to master language. Allowing her to show me how to fall in love with the world. So that when she, too, reaches the age of pushing against the world, believing it means nothing, holds nothing more for her, I can remind her of what she taught me: that this world is marvelous and miraculous, and that it can never be taken for granted, because each day we earn it with our breath and blood. Each day we gain and we lose. Each day we start again, and end. Each day, if we're lucky, we live and live fully. Surely, mother to daughter, to ask her to live and live well, that can't be too much to ask?

6. Would you be able to go through all that Julian went through in order to have her baby in peace and safety?

In James' book, the character of Julian keeps secrets, seeks out help amidst grave danger, insists on a certain kind of birth at high cost to those around her. She seems keenly aware of the fact that no matter how much a child might be wanted in that world, the fact of the birth of a child into an infertile world is a disruption and dislocation that could cause more trouble than one human could imagine. It's enough, as we see here, to betray and, in turn, be betrayed by a husband; to get people killed along the way; and even to topple a government.

My pregnancy, thank goodness, has been much less dramatic. No one, as far as I know, has risked death merely by being in my pregnant presence, and the United States seems somewhat secure in its democracy (I'm holding my tongue here on the current administration's tendency towards fascism…that's for another entry altogether). But now, in my seventh month, there's a kind of fierceness about birth I find myself working into. The past has gotten me here. The trouble and pain—physical, emotional, spiritual—of infertility has built into me an instistence about having this child in "peace and safety." Those months where I buckled over in sudden cramps after going off the pill and the gp doctor could prescribe nothing but a digestive medicine, the rounds of Provera that wanted to send me off the roof, the acupuncture by Madame Pincushion whose few English words amounted to telling me I should "Quit work. Make Baby."

And then, the hospitals. The terrible, terrible hospital experiences of my first miscarriage. The oncologist's registering my father in that long ward, telling us it was for recuperation from infection but telling the nurses it was for him to die. I know better than to believe a hospital is a safe place, and so while I'm choosing a hospital birth, it's a choice I make with both care and consternation. 

Infertility teaches you not to count on anything. It teaches you always to get numbers, data, do research. Never to settle for the unsure diagnosis or the vague lab result. Listen to your gut—literally and figuratively—when it tells you that the treatment isn't right. Infertility welcomes the good doctor and appreciates him or her, but always keep up the wary eye.

It's been a strange thing to turn from one book to another—from The Children of Men to Ina May's Guide to Childbirth. It's no surprise to read in Ina May Gaskin's book of the women who, in similar late stages of pregnancy, ditch their traditional doctors and head down to The Farm in Tennessee to birth their children. I trust my OB—he's smart and wise and, I think, a good man. I believe he will catch this baby in good hands. But every day now I make new, necessary decisions about how to handle and approach birth, how, especially as this may be the only chance I get to experience the act of birthing a child, I want it to go. I have no illusions about any birth happening according to any plan I might devise. If anything, I recognize each day the great dangers of childbirth—cords and bleeding and complications that can happen. But I think the fact of not just trusting the doctor's hands but also taking this birth into my own hands is essential, and I know I would regret  doing it any other way.

I would do just about anything if it meant the safe passage of this child out into the world, and that determination—foolhardy and selfish as it might seem to some—is the other child I carry, conceived and grown from loss in ferocious hope of keeping.

A note from the head honcho of the book tour: "Intrigued by this book tour and want to read more about Children of Men?  Hop along to more stops on the Barren Bitches Book Tour by visiting the masterttp: list at Stirrup Queens: http://www.stirrup-queens.blogspot.com/2007/03/read-along-barren-bitches-book-tour-2.html

Want to come along for the next tour?  Sign up has begun for tour #3 ( The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger), and all are welcome to join along.  All you need is a book and blog."

*P.D. James on whether she considers herself as a feminist: "I am a feminist in so far as I want a fairer deal for women, equal opportunity, equal pay, a more just society. And I have a great attraction for members of my own sex. But it seems to me that some radical feminists today are against men, and they dislike being women, and I can't go along with that. The truth is that there are no easy answers to some fundamental questions: we are biologically designed to bear children, and the children have great need of us, especially in their early years. This makes it more difficult for women to pursue careers on equal terms with men. Paradoxically women today have a much harder life than had our mothers and grandmothers, although there is more equality between the sexes. In the past, women had extended families, and good reliable nannies. Today we don't have such help, and careers are open to women at the very time when it is difficult to pursue them without risk of damage to their children. As a result women are stretched physically and emotionally, working hard to hold down a job and have a family. Somebody has to run a household, and the woman is the heart of the family, however good the husband may be at sharing the chores. It may be that women have to make difficult choices, give up work and stay at home for a few years until the children go to school. So often this so-called independence means that you are paying someone close to do your work--you go out to work in order to earn money to pay the woman who is looking after your children. She is enjoying your children instead of you!"--P.D. James in an interview with Shusha Guppy, Paris Review Summer 1995, Vol. 37, Iss. 135, p. 52.

** Notes on her writing process are from "A Conversation with...P.D. James" by Lewis Burke Frumkes, The Writer, June 1988, Vol. 111, Iss. 6, pp. 17-20.

Book Tour: Children of Men

I'll be posting within the next day or so about the Barren Bitches Book Brigade Tour, spearheaded by Mel over at the Stirrup Queens blog and tackling a book--and film--I'd actually avoided for its infertility premise: PD James' Children of Men. While you wait for my brilliance (better known as--while I try to cobble something half as intelligent as the wise folks who've already contributed to the conversation), check out the other queries and answers and provocations by fellow brigaders. 

What Women Know (And Are Telling the World All About)

The National Advocates for Pregnant Women held their great conference in Atlanta this week. Listen to the smart people who attended, writing about central issues of women's bodies, risk, doctoring, political tensions, midwifery, reproductive rights, and social justice at large, especially Bitch PhD, who writes about pregnancy not as a choice but as a fact of life and the realities of our bodies' lives, and Angry Black Bitch, who asks necessary questions about how American society typifies "legitimate producers" of children vs. those who are considered with "no business" having children (but, strangely enough, held that much more accountable) and, here, about just what constitutes a "good birth"--discussions and debates raised by the content of the conference.

All of these conversations echo for me in Mel's post over at the excellent Stirrup Queens blog that asks "But what about inside of our body--is a system that is almost entirely outside our control truly our responsibility? If my body is mine, am I by default part of this blame or celebration?"

Just what, as women, as beings fertile, infertile, or somewhere in between, is our relation and responsibility to our bodies--and our bodies to us?

Every day of this pregnancy I'm more aware not of the ease and any kind of "rightness" of womanhood--even at the moment when I'm supposedly most physically and socially expressive of being a woman--but how very much it connects me to larger social justice issues of femininity and feminism, of the shaky place of womanhood out in the world. By no means easy. How very much time we waste, as women, fighting with each other over what's natural or right or true, how we beat up on ourselves and each other, and for what?

Showing, Not Yet Telling

My mouth tastes of metal, but not the kind of general tinge that pregnancy brings to your tongue. This is blood, from my gums, which are swollen and bleed at slight provocation. My teeth might be a match for the skin of the apple I have after dinner, but when I slide the skin down and bite, the inside of my mouth cannot push back, but gives in. There, against the pale yellow flesh of the apple, comes the red of my own blood.

It’s meant everything to me not to have spotting after the sixth week into carrying this child, so much so that the blood from my mouth, or the occasional nosebleed, all the ways the body’s membranes are just more sensitive now, seems an altogether separate physical response. It does not portend loss but tells me instead of keeping, of the way my body is filling up, of how my belly has grown to a hard roundness while the rest of me goes softer.

I’ve been softening, susceptible, for months now. All my strength slackening, the way I could not think of myself too much in my body, because it was too much a risk, for fear that it betray me once again. My head’s been in a muddle. The first trimester drowned me in sleep, pulled the bones straight down into exhaustion. During the day, I rigged up my chair a foot away from my office mates’ to curl up and sleep for the 30 precious minutes I had between office hours and classes. I had to work so hard just to think that in pushing through the fatigue, it took all I had to stand up in a classroom and speak, much less to work into the night to grade (and to judge), that I had nothing left of the hardness teaching needs—that command of the classroom, the being in charge, in control. I had none of it. All the hardness has had to go into making the body take the shape I’m in now. The shape, and fact, of a pregnant woman.

When I left work at the end of the fall semester in early December, I was still covering myself up. It wasn’t hard to do. I teach writing, after all, and we follow the official humanities dress code—often rumpled and not quite put together. We might start off the semester pressed and fitted, but by the nearing of exams, we are as weary as our students, and we fall into wrinkled, comfortable clothes that leave the shape of the body undefined and, itself, loose.

But when I come back to the university hallways on Tuesday of next week, unless I walk around in my heavy winter jacket all day like a homeless person, when I stand there, in my job, there will be no denying the frame I find myself cast within and the way my very shape has changed.

This body announces itself, carries its news out to the world despite what I might be willing to admit to otherwise. Over the past few weeks it's been mostly strangers who've received it, watching me out of the corner of an eye as they walk by on the sidewalk and reading the story my shape tells. And my husband, who each day takes me in as I dress in the morning and change out of my clothes at night, and announces to me that I'm pregnant, he, seemingly as astounded as I am.

My colleagues will know. My new students will see me and greet me as full-fledged pregnant, knowing me no other way.

For a few more days I am secret. In a few more days, told on by no one else but my self.