My girls listened. They always listened.
Dr. Rosenwaks had warned me not to take any store-bought pregnancy tests, because they could be unreliable with in vitro. I just had to sit tight (and eat pineapple) until my appointment for a blood test.
But a week before the appointment, Denine and Laura showed up at my house for our usual Monday TV night, and before The Bachelor even started, they pulled a home pregnancy test out of a bag.
"Come on, it can"t hurt," Denine said, brandishing the box. "I just want to see what happens."
I took it to the bathroom, peed on the stick, and then stared hard, watching for something to change. A minute or two pa.s.sed. I could barely see a shadow. But maybe, just maybe.
I ran upstairs and woke up Warren, who had gone right upstairs after work to avoid the girls" night in the living room.
"Is that a line?" I asked.
"I don"t see it," he said, rubbing his eyes.
"It"s here, look."
"Yeah, maybe that"s a line," he said. "But don"t get excited yet."
Too late for that. I felt an unexpected thrill tingling through me.
The next day, I took another test, and the line seemed a little darker. I"m not very good at keeping things to myself, so the news eked out, and my friends reacted with bubbling enthusiasm. We might have been high school kids talking about sparkly prom dresses and fragrant corsages rather than grown-ups considering the possibility of a real baby. Every night that I had friends over, someone brought me a new pregnancy test.
"Try it for me! I want to see it, too!" Jeannine insisted when she popped in on Tuesday.
"Oooh, let us see!" said the women in the knitting group I had joined, a couple of nights later. Melissa and Isabelle each demanded their own proof. By the end of the week, I had taken twenty-seven pregnancy tests. I numbered them all and lined them up and took a picture. Sure enough, the lines got progressively darker.
But even with all that, I felt as nervous as any first-time mother-to-be when I went to Dr. Rosenwaks"s office for the blood test. I didn"t mention my previews, and he promised to call quickly with official results.
The next day, I decided not to go bowling-that seemed risky at this stage-but looking to be sociable, I joined the team for lunch afterward. We had just settled down at the table when my cell phone rang and I saw Dr. Rosenwaks"s number. I grabbed Isabelle and practically yanked her out of her chair. "It"s him!" I whispered loudly as we both ran out of the room.
"Jackie, everything looks good," Dr. Rosenwaks said as Isabelle leaned close, trying to hear. "You"re pregnant. We"ll keep following it closely, and do more blood tests, but the numbers are strong."
"Oh wow, really?" I looked at Isabelle, as stunned as if I had never seen any one of those twenty-seven sticks. Then, turning back to the phone, I asked the doctor, "Are you happy?"
He laughed. "Yes, I"m very happy. Are you happy?"
"Yes," I said, surprised that I truly meant it. "Thank you so much for everything."
I hung up and Isabelle and I began dancing around and giggling like teenagers. I felt like a great success.
We went back to the restaurant, and I knew I couldn"t possibly chitchat right now. "I"m so sorry," I told them, "but I have to leave."
"Are you okay?" one of the women asked.
"Yes, I"m pregnant," I admitted. "Please don"t tell anyone. I mean it-don"t tell anybody at all. Even my husband doesn"t know yet."
They cheered and offered congratulations and one woman got up and gave me a peck on the cheek. Some of these women I hadn"t known long and I certainly didn"t know them well. But circles of support are formed in the most unexpected ways, and since we rolled bowling b.a.l.l.s together down shiny alleys, they ended up being among the first to know my secret.
I called Warren immediately, and by the time I got home, he had rushed home, too. He shouldn"t have been shocked-we"d been previewing the idea for days-but having Dr. Rosenwaks"s confirmation suddenly changed our well-spun fantasy into incontrovertible fact. I found him slumped on the sofa, an emotional mess.
A normal couple would have hugged and kissed in delight, but, gobsmacked by our new situation, Warren and I just stared at each other and hardly said a word. I sank down on the sofa next to him. The elation I had felt with the bowling group now wobbled as shakily as a gutter ball in the tenth string.
When Warren finally said something, it wasn"t what I"d expected.
"I"m exhausted," he said, standing up. "I have to go to bed."
Though it was still the middle of the afternoon, Warren had hit emotional overload. He wanted a baby and had supported me every inch of the way, but the reality was just too much to take in.
So there I was, sitting all alone with my news. I called my mom and her reaction was a noncommittal "Uh-huh." Maybe she was trying to gauge my feelings before reacting too strongly, or she sensed immediately what a weird situation it might be.
"You"re pregnant," she said slowly. "That"s good?"
"Mom, I don"t know."
"How many babies?" she asked.
"I think just one," I said. "I mean, it better be just one."
Dr. Rosenwaks usually implanted three embryos in a woman my age, hoping one would survive. But I had argued for just one. I couldn"t cope with more than one baby. He insisted that he never implanted a single embryo-the odds were too low-so we settled on implanting two. In the next week or so, my hormonal levels were so high that we all began to suspect twins. But no-we quickly discovered that I had one healthy baby growing.
After the first shock pa.s.sed, Warren and I began to talk again, almost unwilling to admit how we were feeling.
"Where will we put the baby?" I asked him one afternoon. "How will we work it out?"
"We have time to think about this," he said matter-of-factly. "We"re going to be okay."
"Do you think I can do this again?" I asked.
"Of course. It will be fine," he said. He had become preternaturally calm and even-tempered.
We both felt a little hope. A lot of anxiety. A bit of excitement. And extraordinary grat.i.tude for what Dr. Rosenwaks had done for us. "You are one of the reasons that Warren and I are still here on this earth," I wrote to him a couple of weeks later. "The day we found out we were pregnant ... Warren and I felt joy. It was strange. We had not had joy in our life for over a year and a half."
Even as I wrote the words, I wondered if we had truly felt joy-or if that was just what I thought we should feel. But the elation I"d experienced during that call at the bowling alley had been real. Joy and uncertainty can coexist, I told myself.
"We actually peeked into the future," I continued. "We had not spoken about the future since the accident because we did not want a future without our beautiful girls. I think that was the best part of this-for the first time Warren and I had hope. Hope that maybe we could have a future. You gave us that hope."
Telling friends and family the news turned out to be even more satisfying than hearing it ourselves. After nineteen long, sad months, I began to feel that the black cloud had shifted. Maybe not lifted-but shifted. Instead of seeing pain and sadness reflected in other people"s eyes, I suddenly got to see hope and happiness and perhaps relief. For all these months, people had naturally wanted to whisper words of optimism-but none came to mind. How could anyone promise hope when the future had been wiped out? Now the miraculous news took away some of the pain everyone had carried.
Emily d.i.c.kinson"s famous poem "Hope" begins:
Hope is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,