"Of course I"m up for it," Warren said.
And so we started.
One day shortly after, we woke up to a blizzard that had whipped up overnight. The whole town had shut down from the high winds and hard-driving snow, and Warren and I knew we"d be stuck in the house together all day. With schools closed for the weather and all our friends at home with their children, the only distraction I had was the occasional snowplow grumbling by. Trapped in the memory-filled house, I felt my anxiety begin to rise. As usual, Warren and I started to fight. We had no particular reason-maybe an argument was the only entertainment we could imagine today.
With no other outlet for my tension, I raced down to the bas.e.m.e.nt, my mind spinning and my heart pounding through my chest. Barely able to breathe, I walked erratically in circles, talking like a crazy person, wondering why I had agreed to Dr. Rosenwaks"s plan.
"What am I doing, what am I doing?" I said to n.o.body in particular. "I can"t do this. The whole idea is nuts. Why do I want to get pregnant, anyway? I can"t just start my life all over again."
Warren came downstairs and tried to calm me down-which only made it worse. I continued pacing, arms flailing, mind and words racing at a hundred miles an hour.
"This is crazy, this is crazy!" I ranted. "What are we doing? This was such a stupid idea. Why do I listen to people? I"m not doing this, Warren. I want my girls. I want to see my girls. Screw this, anyway."
Normally, Warren would leave and go outside when my hysteria got too much for him, but with the blizzard outside, there was no escape.
"I can"t take this, Jackie," he said, clutching his hands to his head.
"Oh really, Warren? You promised Dr. O"Brien you could do this. You promised me you could handle it. Now you"re changing your mind?"
"I didn"t know you were going to be a lunatic," he said.
"I"ve got to get out of this house," I said, looking out the window at the raging snowstorm.
"You"re not going anywhere," Warren said impatiently. "There"s three feet of snow outside."
"I"m taking a walk," I insisted.
"You"re crazy!" he shouted.
"I know. I already told you that."
I rushed upstairs and called Bernadette.
"Sure, let"s go for a walk. Great idea," she said, always upbeat. "But how are we going to meet? We can"t take the cars out."
"We"ll meet halfway," I suggested.
I bundled up in ski pants and boots and headed out into the storm. The plows had barely made a path through the middle of the road and huge piles of snow were everywhere. I climbed over the snow, a ten-minute walk that took four times as long. When I finally arrived, Bernadette was rosy-cheeked and smiling as the snow fell on her white knit hat.
"You made it!" she said.
We walked for nearly three hours, climbing the snow mountains, talking, and finally laughing.
"Jackie, you"re doing the right thing with the in vitro and the embryos," Bernadette said, always calm and rea.s.suring. "You have to try this. Nothing"s easy right now, but you can do it."
We went to her house and relaxed over hot cocoa. I felt the warmth oozing through me. She was right. If I could climb over snow mountains, I could cope without my medications.
A few days later, when the weather had improved and Karen and I had gone off on one of our Tuesday excursions, she mentioned that she knew an acupuncturist who might be able to help with my tension.
"Acupuncture?" I asked dubiously. "You must be kidding."
"It"s worth a try," she said.
On a lark, we drove over there and I met the acupuncturist, a lovely woman named Mich.e.l.le. Karen told her my story and she offered her services for free. The next thing I knew, I was lying on a table with needles stuck in my ears, nose, and forehead.
"To help you get rid of the crazy thoughts and calm your mind," she said, painlessly slipping another needle into my forehead. She added a few needles to my outstretched hands, then looked at me with satisfaction.
"I"m going to leave the room now," she said. "Just lie there for about half an hour and relax and clear your mind."
Relax? Me? She must be joking. The minute she left, I jumped off the table and got a mirror out of my pocketbook to see what I looked like. I started to giggle. The thin needles jutting out everywhere looked silly beyond words. But they didn"t hurt. And what the heck? Walks in the snow, giving up antidepressants, trying to get pregnant-like the slim needles currently sticking out of my head, none of it could hurt. At this point, taking new paths was the only chance I had of finding a reason to go on.
Over the next few weeks, Warren sensed that attempting to get pregnant was my last-ditch effort. I had decided that if it didn"t work, nothing more could be expected of me. I could bow out of this life knowing I had made every effort to find a purpose for myself. Reasonably enough, he worried about what would happen if the implantation didn"t work. As the weeks went by and we waited to do the first implant, he got increasingly nervous.
"You know you"re not likely to get pregnant the first time," he said. "You can"t get upset if it doesn"t take right away."
"That"s fine," I said airily. I didn"t add that I hardly expected to get pregnant. I didn"t really care, either. I"d take advantage of the gift, and when it failed, I"d be free to do what I really wanted.
"We"ll try it three times, okay?" Warren asked. "Three cycles. And promise me that you won"t get upset if it doesn"t work right away."
Upset? I"d more likely be p.i.s.sed if I did get pregnant.
Three attempts at implanting the embryos would, with various delays, bring us to June. So now I had a real date I could point to, an endgame for my pain.
By June, I"d be pregnant. Or I"d be with Emma, Alyson, and Katie.
I had the first implantation in February. I felt unbearably awkward lying virtually upside-down on a tipped-back table, fully exposed to the nurses, doctors, and techs who crowded around my bare bottom, their attention riveted on what looked like a high-tech turkey baster.
What am I doing here? I thought as I stared at the ceiling and tried not to feel humiliated.
The night before, fifteen of my friends stopped by for a surprise Getting Pregnant party. They gave me little pink and blue presents-candles, Hershey"s kisses, and colorful frosted cupcakes.
They might have been more excited than I was. As I lay on the table, clutching so tightly to the sides that my knuckles turned white, I wondered if I was the only woman in my (uncomfortable) position who didn"t care what happened. I"d always been a good girl and a high achiever and more compet.i.tive than I realized, so I wanted the procedure to work. But deep inside I was ambivalent.
After the turkey-baster team left the room, I lay perfectly still for a couple of hours, as they suggested, then made my way home carefully. I stayed on bed rest for the next two days. Women have been getting pregnant for a long time, and the folklore about what works goes on forever. My friends had ideas-and I tried them all. I ate a whole bowl of pineapple because someone told me that it helps the embryos stick, and then I chowed down on a bag of walnuts because I heard they have embryo-sticking advantages, too. I stayed off my feet for a full week. I didn"t go running at all.
I told myself that I was just trying to convince people that getting pregnant was what I wanted. I told myself that I already had three children and I didn"t want to betray them by thinking for one minute about having another child. But if I truly didn"t want it, why do all those things? Why pineapple and walnuts and bed rest? My mixture of guilt and pain and excitement and hope was a complex stew that I didn"t fully understand.
Still, I couldn"t help but secretly hope I was pregnant. The greatest joy I had felt in my life was my three girls, and a grain of optimism hidden deep inside me said that maybe I could find some hint of that joy again. I mourned the loss of the girls so deeply at least in part because life is a gift, and it was so unfair that it was taken away from them. With a new baby, maybe I could begin to appreciate the gift again.
Every night since the accident, I had prayed to the girls in heaven, asking that I be able to join them very soon. But the night before the implantation was the last night I said that prayer, asking not to wake up the next morning. Once the embryos were implanted, my nightly prayer to Emma, Alyson, and Katie changed.
Please make Mommy pregnant.