Dear Succotash

Dear Succotash,

For my first IUI, I was cynical. "You should have a positive attitude," the nurse practitioner said as she prepared the pipette. My feet were in stirrups. There's no inane landscape poster on the ceiling over the stirrup tables, because they get us in and out so fast.

"It's not about positive," I said. "It's just that I understand math."

The odds of IUIs working in women my age are slim indeed, so I was managing my expectations. Turns out I wasn't the only cynical one - by the time I returned from spending the summer writing another book and sailing and not getting pregnant on my own, she had left the practice and I had a new nurse practitioner to call.

I love the ambiguity of "Rodriq left." Did she quit? Get fired? Die? Who's to say. Regardless, now it's Katie I talk to.

For my second IUI, I decided to be relentlessly positive. I felt good. I took my vitamins every day. I stopped drinking. As I lay on the table with my feet in the stirrups, I put in ear buds and listened to Groove is in the Heart. It's dancable. It's happy. It reminded me of being young, and learning I could be beautiful. I listened to it all day.

We're going to groove to Horton Hears a Who.

That's a line in that song. And that's when I starting thinking of you as my Succotash Wish.

For my third IUI, I intended to turn right around and do it all again. But I had cysts. Which explained some of the vague pains I'd been feeling, in the faint hope that it was you, digging a microscopic not-yet-fingernail into my flesh and trying to hold on. It wasn't, but that's okay. We canceled the IUI and I decided to dive in. Why not dive in?

So here we go.

Yesterday your would be father and I went to what I thought of as shots class. They showed a wavery video from around 1993, with a clean-cut white man in a wedding ring mixing ampules of hormones and then injecting them in the haunch of his negligee-wearing wife. Some of the needles are small, but the second wave of them are pretty large. Large enough that I'm going to make your father do them.

The nurse went over at length details about billing. Billing first, then shots. "I've done all this," I wrote in a margin to your father. I am type A. I called the specialty pharmacy already. I have our authorization numbers ready. I have a list of all that's covered. I am prepared. I am also turning into my mother.

In a cubicle after shots class we are given our calendar by Katie, who disinvolves herself when your father and I come to loggerheads about whether or not I can go to the wedding in Colombia in December.

"There's no way," your father said.
"We don't know if we'll get any embryos at all. If we don't, I'm going to Colombia."
Katie smiled, a fake smile, a smile that says This is none of my business.

I got home and entered all our coming schedule of medications and scans into a new, separate calendar. I called it Succatsh Project.

You are my project.

The timing is such that I'll be trying to turn around a novel revision in the next two weeks, and hanging it over - my other baby, one of a few now - to my agent to sell, one hopes, given that I haven't had an income to speak of in a couple of years. Then, while that baby wends its way through its own panel of tests, I will start injecting myself. I will start the You Project.

If all goes according to plan, exactly one month from today I will have my eggs retrieved, and you will be mixed up in a petri dish and closely watched. Your first standardized test.

If you pass, I will cancel my plane ticket to Colombia and you will be sown, like real succotash, perhaps a couple of you, we'll see. Then you'll have to sort it out for yourself. I will promise to make my vitamins and the scary shots - the big ones - and keep you warm and try, as best I can, to remain positive. To bathe you in the water and sunlight of my hope. But it will be up to you, my unknown mishmash of carrots and lima beans. My Succotash Wish.