Good Morning Smiley Face

Hello LH surge! I call the office.

The Coordinator of Scraping answers. On Friday I am to come in for blood. "Make sure you eat and drink beforehand. It's a lot of blood."

Check.

They will collect six gallons of blood and also test my hormones to make sure (stupid woman) I actually had an LH surge and didn't hallucinate the digital smiley face, and they will also check my other hormones and see if I have spontaneously developed chlamydia or gonorrhea since last February, which - one hopes - I have not.

Then on Saturday I will meet my friend's new baby, and on Sunday I'll have a bunch of women over for a clothing swap, and on Monday I will lie on the floor in a panic, and on Tuesday at the crack of dawn I will go in and see the Minister of Scraping. But they'll give me a urine pregnancy test first.

Then I will experience "30-45 seconds of discomfort" which will cause bleeding, but not to worry, I can just take a liner or pad from the office and go straight back to work.

If by "straight back to work" they mean "back to the apartment where I will take prescription pain killers provided to me on the QT by my sister in law from her knee surgery and finish rewatching all of Deadwood," then yes, I will go straight back to work.

And then, we wait.

I'm like Bruce Willis before the boxing match in Pulp Fiction, huffing and puffing and jogging around and hitting myself on the head with my gloves, getting psyched up.

Three weeks out, Succotash. You psyching up?

It's Possible

That writing a novel where the main character (who everyone identifies with me) gets surprise pregnant was not the kindest thing I have ever done to myself.

Because I'm starting to revise for my editor right now, and it's a super drag.

That is all.

My period is just about over

And I'm still really sad.

Hiding out in a coastal town, breathing sea air. But still having occasional flashes of inappropriate anger and blooms of despair.

I've started my ovulation tracking pee sticks again. Just one so far. 

I'm not ready to feel hopeful again. I was really unprepared for how disappointed I would be, when this last cycle failed to work.

I really thought I was ready. I thought I could handle it.

I'm drinking wine on the couch and watching a dumb true crime melodrama and hiding from how I really feel.

Bite Me

A new plan forms. My period starts, basically, at least I think it starts. It's slow getting underway - the tale of the reluctant uterus. But it's started, pretty much. So I call the office.

First, call the nurse, who never picks up the phone (and I mean, not once in a year and a half has anyone actually *answered* this telephone). Leave a message saying guess what, it's day one, I'm doing X procedure this month, and I'll need meds called in. Hang up, forgetting to ask her about the possibly infected injection site on your left butt cheek. Awkward. Well, we'll watch it another day. It could be an allergic somethingorother. It could be adhesive allergy. It could be anything. And I'm pretty certain they would prefer it to be nothing, so that is what they'll say it is.

Next, call the mystery person you have never heard of who, you are told, exists only to schedule this procedure. This person answers the phone. Go back and forth with her about what day in your cycle it really is. Write down all the various stages of things you have to do before you undergo this dreadful sounding procedure which, she says as an afterthought, isn't covered by your insurance, so that'll be a thousand bucks when your next IVF cycle starts, thankyouverymuch.

"Awesome," you say.

"And you can't try to get pregnant this cycle," she warns. "We'll be doing a blood pregnancy test before the biopsy, so you should avoid intercourse around ovulation."

Bullshit, you think to yourself. I'm having sex with my husband whenever I fucking feel like it, and if I should happen - against ALL FUCKING ODDS - to get pregnant NATURALLY this cycle from MAKING LOVE WITH MY HUSBAND then that's what I'm going to fucking do, and fuck you and your biopsy and your not-covered-by-insurance.

Obviously I have a very healthy attitude these days.

Anyway. Period's started. Next stop, ovulation kits. And then we see what lies ahead.

Now What

I just got back from a meeting. A work meeting, Succotash, where we sat in a big conference room with laptops and ordered in lunch. My new editor is lovely. Even more lovely was being in a professional conversation for two hours, talking about character and plot and title and voice and revision strategies and release dates, and being taken seriously as a thinking, competent, professional human being instead of a body that has failed.

I talked to Dr. Big Guns. He claims that he is disappointed too. He suggests we try again, same protocol, only with the added benefit of something called endometrial co-culture, which essentially means that any embryos we come up with will be brewed in me-slime rather than lab-slime. But to make the me-slime they have to - hooray! - scrape out my endometrial lining a few days after I next ovulate.

I will refer you to my entry on female pain, below. That, Succotash, is going to suck. And how.

So I'm back to waiting for my period to start. Once it does, I am to call the nurse and also the Coordinator of Scraping to get on the calendar. So. A month off from shots. A month off from hormones that make me exhausted and insane. By a happy coincidence, this will be the month I'm given revision notes. A month for my mind, instead of my body.

I have already informed your would-be father that I would like to have the maximum amount of sex for fun. I would like to remember that my body can bring me pleasure, too.

I choked up during my call with Dr. Big Guns, which is why I'd insisted on having the appointment via telephone rather than in the office. First, as I told his assistant, I'm pretty done with going to the office, thanks. And second, when I started to cry, as I knew I would, I would be home, and safe, and not sitting in front of the great man's office like a scolded child.

He got off the phone in a hurry. I guess I can't blame him.

Then I took myself out. I got my eyebrows done. I got my bangs trimmed so you could see my well-shaped eyebrows. And then I went to the foot massage place.

I'll tell you, Succotash, I don't know what it is, but something about a young ropey-muscled guy digging with careful attention into different specific points in my feet was completely mind-reorienting. I walked in so tense and anxious I was shaking. Raw, ready to cry again, hateful, bitter. I walked out relaxed, positive, hopeful, and excited to go to a party with some friends. Maybe that's fuel for another blog post, or maybe it's as simple as someone - a stranger - making a gesture of care to my body rather than a gesture of intrusion, or of judging.

My hope has persisted into today. I'm ready.

I'm ready to try again.

2 in the morning

I got home from dinner with my friend, which went so late and with so much laughing and good talk and wine (finally) that I missed the brass band I'd planned to see for Mardi Gras, but didn't mind. Walked the puppy, got ready for bed, watched a couple of Youtube videos of guinea pigs snuffling around - this is what I do now, because reading the news makes me insane - put on my eye mask, and shut off the light.

I waited. I usually have to wait awhile, but eventually sleep comes. I take a Benadryl most nights, which horrified my acupuncturist (I am now a woman who has an acupuncturist to horrify), but I would rather have the guaranteed sleep. So I took the pill and I waited.

But instead of falling asleep, I fell apart.

I don't know how long it lasted. I sobbed so hard I thought I was going to vomit. I got up and staggered into the bathroom. I sat in front of the toilet, curled into a ball of horror, mouth open, tears so wet they had almost no salt at all, and I wailed "My baby, my baby, my baby, my baby, my baby."

By 3:30 I was back in bed. The tears would stop, and then they'd start again, pumping up and hot without any apparent beginning or end. The deep and dwelling cramps inside me, the cramps of lost time and emotional energy and pain and possibility, drove me to cry harder.

I got back up, not caring about my body anymore, fuck all the supplements and the fucking acupuncture and the kale shakes every morning and all that shit, that fucking waste of time bullshit nonsense. I cracked my sole secret stash opioid pain pill in two halves, and swallowed one. I went back to bed.

It's interesting, that physical pain and emotional pain operate on the same neural pathways. The half pill did what I asked it to. I got heavier. I felt more calm. Calm enough I could fall into a tight, balled half sleep.

Five or six hours later I woke up sore, like I'd been in a fight. My eyelids swollen. I dragged myself into the kitchen, heated up yesterday's coffee, sat at the computer, and started to cry again.

The dog asked to go out. "Okay," I said. I suited up in boots and coat, face puffy and pink, hair askew, and we got in the elevator, slow and unwilling.

"Good morning," said the elevator man. "Happy Valentines Day."

Negative, Ghost Rider, the Pattern is Full

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed. Or sad. I am both of those things. Though the sad definitely started yesterday, as the vague and nameless certainty of failure reared its head, seized me about the midsection, and dragged me out of the rest of my day. The truth is, I have always secretly, deeply believed that having a kid was just not something that I was going to do. It just didn't seem possible. I had a horror of my pregnant body, for one thing. But it also just seemed.... unpossible. Like flight. I don't have wings, either. After I got married, when people would ask me when I planned to have kids, I would be baffled in the same way as if I'd been asked when wings would sprout from my shoulder blades and carry me into the sky.

So the sadness is real, and the disappointment is real. But if I'm honest, right now I'm feeling a lot of relief. That's pretty fucked up, but there it is. I have learned, in my majority, that uncertainty is very hard for me to take. That I can take a negative outcome much more smoothly than uncertainty. Give me a no, by God. Give me a no and I can move on. Stuff your maybes and your possiblys. A yes is good, yesses can be great, and I've been fortunate to have some pretty spectacular yesses here and there. Statistically impossible yesses. That I should now be faced with a statistically predicable no does not take away from the good fortune that I have already enjoyed.

I have a boat, for Christ's sake.

I can imagine the person my mythical child would be, and I know for some people the loss of that imaginary person is hard to take. But I imagine people for a living. Succotash, God love you, but you are no more real - are in fact, less real - than the protagonist of my first novel, who lived in my mind much longer than you have. She is out there, in the world now, living in other people's heads. I have no control over how they feel about her, or what they do with her. She is remembered differently by different people, forgotten sometimes, hated on occasion. I have a little control over her life now as I would over yours, once you started to encounter the world for yourself.

So, this relief. First, I'm relieved because it means that this cycle is finally over. Good lord, but I'm glad it's over. I hated all the shots. I hated the mindless probing, the digging in my veins. I got to enjoy the acupuncture, lying there watching balls of ultraviolet and yellow blob and morph into each other. But at $125 a pop, and even more needles, I'm ready for a break. I loathed getting up in the morning, dumping $30 a day on cab fare because I couldn't face the rush hour crush on the train, and I wanted to get home fast enough to go back to bed. God, the money, Succotash. I can't imagine how much differently I would feel if this failed cycle, in addition to costing me in emotion and time, had also cost me $15,000 dollars.

One more cycle. That, I can do. Two, max, depending on what Dr. Big Guns says, or what we learn, if we learn anything. So part of my relief, to be honest, is that I am one step closer to the definitive no. A no that I can know, and understand, and accept, before I go on and become whoever it is that I am set to be.

Doubts

I don't know, Succotash.

I guess it doesn't matter how I feel about it, as we'll find out the score tomorrow. I do know that I'm sick of needles. I'm sick of being tired. I'd like to leave the house. I'd like to see art and see friends and go to restaurants and read and think and so far I haven't been able to do any of those things because I have been parked on the couch under an anvil of hormone fatigue.

That's a Looney Tunes reference, Succotash. If you ever come to exist, will you watch Looney Tunes? I loved them. Some of them are pretty racist, though. This is the problem with American culture - everything is racist. My father used to read to me at night when I was a child, which is super progressive for fathers in the 1970s, and he did it because he loved me, and he did all the voices. What's the problem? He was reading Uncle Remus stories. I'm here to tell you as someone who has taught them in a literature class that those stories are racist as fuck.

I can't believe I'm digressing on racism and swearing on my baby blog. Obviously I'm not cut out to be a mother. Right? I mean, come on. If I were cut out to be a mother, wouldn't I be one already? I'm old, Succotash. I'm so old I remember when TV remotes only had six buttons. And only my grandparents had cable. And telephones were objects that sat on the end table. I remember dial tones, Succotash. How in the hell would I even explain dial tones to you? Also everyone I went to high school with has middle and high school age kids now. Of course, for the most part they also don't have careers. I have a successful career. Technically. Of course has my editor sent me the revision notes yet? No.

She might be waiting to learn the beta results too. What does it mean that my life is such that my editor might learn I'm pregnant before my mother does? I have already been in a world where my editor calls on my birthday before my mother does.

There's a writer out there who's famous, who I have never read, because I bristle that his fiction is 1) called "My Struggle," which makes me think of Hitler, which makes me not want to read him, and 2) all about picayune details of his family life, which 3) if he were a woman would not be hailed as groundbreaking contemporary fiction but 4) would instead be marketed as women's fiction with a hazy photograph to two girls on a dock somewhere, leaning blonde braided heads together, possibly wearing galoshes. Just thinking about this author makes me angry, and I'm not usually one to begrudge another writer's success. But the only reason I'm bringing him up is because he's quoted in Publisher's Weekly this week saying not only that contemporary fiction is overrated (agreed, but I still this he's a pretentious ass for saying it) but also that any family with a writer in it is cursed.

I might be a terrible mother Succotash. I'm self absorbed, for one thing, and sometimes cold and withholding. Part of me will be relieved if it's negative tomorrow because I have hated putting my body through this, as I knew I would, which is why I put it off until the very last minute.

I have a tendency to put things off that I don't want to do, which is a human tendency I guess. But then I do it, I rush through the important parts, make mistakes, and then when it doesn't work, and I fail, I can reassure myself that I tried, but probably not as hard as I could. This is called self-sabotage, Succotash, and I've done it my entire life. But now it matters, because my self-sabotage has been you-sabotage. I put it off too long, I didn't want to do it, I wasn't ready, I was ambivalent, and now I'm rushing through everything at the last minute.

And it's not going to work.

I'm going to fail.

I'm sorry. It's a trap, being born. You have no control over who your parents are. I'd be better than some obviously bad ones - I'm loving, I'm patient (older mothers are, on average), I'd develop you and encourage you and I wouldn't use drugs or take off and go to Burning Man leaving you in the care of an underpaid immigrant nanny for a month and a half. People do that, you know. People are the worst. But I have substantial flaws, Succotash, and you and I are facing the consequences of those flaws today. Right now.

Together, or alone, it remains to be seen.

Fever

Started at 99.1. Today it made it up to 99.6. I called the office.

"It could be the progesterone," they said.

"I'm also tired," I said.

"That could be the progesterone too," they went on.

"Okay," I said.

"If it develops into what seems like a respiratory infection, go see your regular doctor," they continued. "If that doesn't happen, and the fever gets above 100.6, you have to come in."

"Okay," I said.

I ordered soup. It was just okay.

I am lying on the couch. Bored. Uncomfortable. Slurping pink coconut water out of a wine glass, which makes it look pretty and festive.

All I can do is wait and see.

Tea Leaves

I told myself I was going to be very good. I wasn't going to test early. I wasn't going to symptom-spot.

Symptom-spotting, Succotash, is when a woman reads her body like tea leaves, trying to interpret arbitrary patterns of residue as if it holds meaningful codes to the near future. Conventional wisdom holds that symptom-spotting, like tea leaf reading, is a waste of fucking time and energy. On the one hand, any sensations that appear in a body as freshly pregnant as mine might be will be indistinguishable from the symptoms of a coming period, and on the other tea leaves are garbage that should just be thrown away.

I was being really good, I think. Yesterday to distract myself I applied for a writing job at Princeton. Ridiculous, right? I mean, it's the kind of job they only give to people who are famous and on high school reading lists. Or, like, young white guys with five o'clock shadow who have written only one book. Those are the choices - either Jamaica Kincaid, or some young white guy. His book will have come out with Graywolf Press. His author photo will have him in a black t-shirt and lit in a way that makes his eyes supernaturally blue.

But I digress. I was being really good, is what I was saying. I was ignoring my body. I am exceptionally good at ignoring my body. You know the whole Cartesian thought experiment that posits human consciousness is a trick and we are nothing but brains in vats? Of course you don't, because you don't exist, and if you don't exist you haven't had the chance to read Descartes. Suffice it to say, when I first learned about that thought experiment, which is supposed to strike the budding philosopher as absurd, I thought "Huh. That would explain a lot, actually."

So. I thought I had it nailed, Succotash. I was going to completely ignore my body until it was time for our determinative blood test.

That was before I woke up this morning with tender nipples.

Sorry if that's TMI, Succotash.

Now, logic suggests that I ignore this metaphorical clump of tea leaves. That I hold the cup under running water in the sink and rinse out the leaves and take them for what they are - arbitrary.

And yet. My breasts are often sore before a period, these past few years. It never was that way in my twenties, and I can't account for the change, but there it is. They typically get sore. Sometimes too sore to touch.

Not just the nipples, though. It's usually the whole shebang.

DAMMIT. See what I just did? Succotash, what the hell? I'm staring at the tea leaves instead of washing them down the sink. I'm squinting at them, and seeing shapes. Just as I promised myself not to do.

You would-be mother is a hypocrite, Succotash. A hypocrite who lies to herself. What hope can you possibly have, with such a woman for a would-be mother?

Waiting

What I have done:

Opened the monthlong backlog of mail
Paid the various medical bills
Filed the medical bills
Filed the tax stuff for later
Discovered I made even less money last year than I thought
Worried if this means my career is over
Reminded myself that I'll get the manuscript notes any day now, and then I'll be expected to, like, work on them
Worried that the book will tank and then my career will be over
Watched half of Apollo 13
Remembered I hate space
Reflected that it's pretty cool that of all cities on the planet, the name of my home city was the first word spoken from the moon
Wondered why people get excited about stuff like that
Flipped through the monthlong backlog of New Yorkers, accepted that I will not read them, and recycled them
Eyed the Vogue and wondered why I subscribed to that in the first place
Wished for a bathtub in the apartment, because then I could read the Vogue
Wondered if we'll have to turn the den back into a second bedroom if this process works
Wondered how I can pay for turning the den into a second bedroom if my career is over
Walked the dog
Cleaned up dog poop on the street
Thought about how much Poland is pissing me off these days
Wished I didn't have to redo my website before the new book comes out
Wished my career was over
Wondered if I'll get either one of those writing jobs
Wondered if I actually want either of those writing jobs
Wondered if I'll ever have a good book idea again
Gone downtown to meet my sister in law in a bar in the West Village so she can inject me with progesterone in the bathroom, thereby checking off a longstanding 1990s bucket list item of "Shoot up in a West Village bar bathroom" but not in the way I would have guessed in the 1990s
Reflected that I am yet another example of how New York has lost its edge

Playlist

"I have a soundtrack I want to listen to," I said. "Is that cool?"

"Sure. You want to play it out loud, or just for you?"

"Oh, out loud if y'all don't mind."

"Sure!"

I climbed into the stirrups. They shone the lights. Then I hit play, and Dee Lite sang "Groove is in the Heart." We made it through that, and "This Is How We Do It," and then "We Got the Beat," which ended just as they pushed me though the double doors back into the recovery room.

Three little embryos. 9 cells, 5 cells, and 3 cells.

Okay, Succotash. This is how we do it.