by Sara Connell
Two days later, my mother flew home to Virginia.
“Are you sure it’s safe for her to travel?” I asked Tracey.
“Whatever has happened is done,” she said. Now we just had to wait nine days before my mother could take the pregnancy test.
I tried to go about my regular life. I scheduled days of work downtown, meeting my clients at the Cultural Center near Millennium Park. I found the activity in the loop invigorating and I liked watching the stretches of people trudging along South Michigan Avenue. At two o’clock on the Wednesday of the week before our pregnancy test, I took a break and walked toward Lake Street and Michigan, where there was a breezeway lined with restaurants and cafés.
My mother and I had talked by phone every day, but we’d taken the previous day off, ostensibly because we couldn’t schedule it, but really because we both needed a break. We would not know the results of the test for another week, and we found it impossible to talk about anything other than a potential pregnancy.
When I called my parents’ number, my father answered on the third ring.
“Let’s see if she can peel herself off the couch to come to the phone,” he said.
“Is she okay?” I asked, feeling my heartbeat quicken.
“I’m feeling something!” my mother said, picking up the line.
Once my father hung up, she lowered her voice.
“I think your father is kind of freaked out,” she said. “He came in from tennis and found me still sitting in the chair in the living room where I was when he left two hours earlier.”
The skin on the back of my neck pricked.
“Of course I can’t say for sure. It’s been thirty years. But I swear I feel just like the other times. I am so tired I can hardly lift my hand off my leg. And my breasts are sore!” she said. Her voice shook slightly as she spoke. I pressed the phone harder into my ear. I heard Bill’s voice in my head: “Don’t read into anything. Don’t assume anything until we take the pregnancy test.”
I attempted a casual tone, as if we were discussing a recipe.
“I haven’t wanted coffee either.” My mother did not need to remind me of the meaning of the coffee aversion. I threw Bill’s cautions aside. What my mother was describing was beyond what I had imagined. I wanted to hear about every twinge and sensation.
“It’s the strangest thing,” she said. “Like finding myself in a country I love but haven’t visited in thirty years. It’s amazing the way the body or psyche remembers the sounds, the foods, the smells.
Across the street, the time flashed on a digital clock on the side of a bank.
I had agreed to be interviewed at 3:00 PM for a documentary on women’s health and nutrition, the project of one of my longtime clients. The film crew was set up at an office building, just up the street. The clock read 2:55, but I didn’t want to get off the phone.
“I have to go, Mom,” I said.
“Of course—I’m taking up your whole afternoon,” she said.
“I would stay on the phone with you all day,” I said, meaning it.
“I take the first pregnancy test at my doctor’s office here on Friday, the official test Monday,” she said, confirming the schedule we’d both committed to memory. “Tracey said she’d conference us both in to share the results on Monday afternoon.”
Tracey called, by herself, Monday at 2:30 PM, with the results. I could hear my mother breathing on the other end of the line. Bill stood next to me, leaning into my cell phone.
“The HCG numbers are low,” Tracey said. “I’m so sorry.”
I shook my head, feeling confused. The air around my eyes seemed fuzzy, as if static had interrupted my vision. Just yesterday my father had taken the phone after I’d finished talking to my mother and told me that he thought she was pregnant. I’d taken his observations as truth. He was not prone to premature excitability or exaggeration. I heard the words but could not reconcile what Tracey was saying.
“Are you guys okay?” Tracey asked.
No one spoke.
I eventually said, “Yeah,” and we hung up the phone.
Bill walked to the window. “Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit.” My mother was still on the line.
“Huh,” my mother said, after another minute. “I really thought . . . I physically felt . . . Even now, I feel . . . ”
“I know, Mom.”
“Huh,” my mother said again. Her voice sounded like a deflated balloon. We stayed on the phone, not speaking for another few minutes.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
Later that day I received a call from Dr. Kula, who’d heard about the test from Tracey.
“I’m here if you want to talk,” she said, and left her office number. I threw the phone onto the counter without listening further. I’d brought my laptop to the kitchen to see if I could do some work, but I couldn’t concentrate. I pushed the computer back on the counter, scribbled a note on an index card to tell Bill I was leaving, and stomped out of the house.
It was 5:00 PM, mid-February, and bitterly cold. I didn’t care. When my friend’s father died, she lost twenty-five pounds walking for miles a day, making a pilgrimage of her grief. I hadn’t kept count of how many miles I had logged since we’d started trying to become pregnant, how many walks I’d taken when I was unable to bear the stillness of the house, the maddening inability to control our situation.
The sky was already shifting toward dark. I was warm inside the down parka I wore. The year before I’d splurged on a new one from North Face, a brown one with turquoise lining, that came down to the tops of my knees. I turned right on Barry Street and walked toward the lake, taking the same route I’d taken on that warm summer day when my mother had offered to be our surrogate. A harsh wind blew past, numbing my calves and fingers.
For some reason, I was most annoyed about the call from Dr. Kula. In our five years together, Dr. Colaum had never had a psychiatrist call us. My stomach clenched at the thought of being pitied or, worse, having become such a hopeless case that we needed unsolicited psychiatric support.
Before I’d seen Dr. Kula’s number, I’d been feeling hopeful. Now I tried, through my heavy trudging, to return to that place. When we’d hung up the phone with my mother and Tracey the day before, Bill had reminded me that the way he looked at it, we had essentially started over with this round of IVF—a 33 percent success rate, a one in three chance. After five years of hating statistics, I now found them comforting. I didn’t know for sure if my mother was up for another cycle, but if she was, we could try again.
When we talked the next week, my mother said she was open to trying again but wanted to spend some time walking in the woods where she meditated.
“I was so sure this was an inspired vision, Sara,” she said.
“It still could be,” I said. My first coaching mentor in England always reminded me that just because something is inspired doesn’t mean it comes easily. It was easier to see this for my mother than for myself.
My birthday came at the end of the month, and I asked Bill for an overnight in a small lake town, near the Wisconsin border. I wanted to go by myself and think—or, better yet, not think—and hike in one of the large national parks nearby.
Bill championed my request, sending me off with a Whole Foods bag of snacks and a couple of DVDs to watch on my computer if I felt lonely at night.
I drove to the small cabin I’d rented on a Friday night and woke Saturday to a startling light. Fresh snow had fallen in the early morning, and two feet of white shimmered on the ground. Snowplows had already cleared the major roads, and I found the state park easily, about ten miles west of the cabin. The parking lot was empty. I seemed to be the first and only visitor.
I chose a simple trail about three miles long. The path was feet-deep in snow, and my boots sunk in with each step. I hoped I would be able to see the green stripes that marked my trail. As I walked, the sun rose, and with it came just enough heat that I was
sweating inside my coat by the end of the first mile.
I thought of pausing at a particular tree and asking the Divine Mother for guidance and some kind of sign. But as I stood there in the middle of the empty trail in piles of snow, the gesture seemed empty. I began to wonder if being in the park at all was a sane choice. I cleared my mind, the way I’d learned to do in meditation classes, and walked up a hill, following what I hoped was the trail.
“Please show me if we are on the right track,” I said to the trees and the snow, unable to help myself from asking something of the vast nature around me. I asked, and then again tried to quiet my mind.
When I’d attended retreats in England, the facilitators had taught a technique for looking for signs: “Pay attention to the shape of a particular tree, an animal on the trail, a specific visual image, and interpret the message at the end of the hike. Notice anything that stands out, then allow the meaning to reveal itself through your mind,” they’d instructed.
I heard and felt nothing of note, until I rounded the three-quarter-way point on the trail and caught sight of a dark green marker that affirmed I was on the way back to my car. I was cold again. The sun had dropped behind some clouds, and the sweat from the effort of climbing the hills was now chill and damp on my skin.
“Please show me if we are going in the right direction,” I said. At the mouth of the trail, I saw a single branch sticking up out of the snow. I pulled off the large ski gloves I’d borrowed from Bill and reached for the stick, pulling it out from the top. It was thin and long, made of strong, youthful bark. The branch was a single stalk that opened into two smaller branches; it was the shape of a Y.
My mother and Bill also felt we should try again. RMI scheduled us for a spring cycle in May. My mother was happy that the May start would allow us to attend my cousin’s (her nephew’s) wedding in San Francisco. In early March, May seemed far off. This time, I was the one who wanted to start again immediately. Bill talked me around to seeing the extra time as a gift. We’d used up our insurance coverage three cycles ago and would again need to pay for this cycle, as we had for the last one, with our own means.
Bill took on a new client and sold another series of documentary vignettes. I increased my private-practice sessions and sold a few magazine articles. Thus far, we’d kept current with every IVF treatment, paying cash as we went. For the last cycle, though, we’d dipped into our savings. We hadn’t contributed to retirement in five years. My parents said they would offer us an interest-free loan for whatever we didn’t have by May 1, but I didn’t like the idea of borrowing money.
“Most surrogates get paid for surrogacy,” I said. “They don’t front the money.”
“I know you’ll pay us back,” my mother assured me. “We need to do the cycle this year, and your father and I have the money sitting in a long-term savings account. We don’t need that money right now.”
We agreed to accept whatever we needed to pay cash at the start of the cycle and repay any loan within two years.
“This is it,” Bill said. “At least until we can pay them back.”
“I don’t know if my mother is up for three tries anyway,” I said.
We flew to San Francisco on a Friday in May. The city was sunny and warm. We walked from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Marina and through quiet, gleaming Pacific Heights and Lombard Street.
I felt expansive looking out over the bay and walking up the steep hills near our hotel in Nob Hill. At the reception on Saturday night, we were invited to share a wish for the new couple. The couple had laid smooth stones and Sharpie pens on a table near the entrance to the reception, next to a placard that asked people to write their wish on the long side of the stones.
“What did you write?” my mother asked Bill and me.
“Fertility,” we said in unison. My sister looked surprised. She had been next to us as we’d written on the stones and had seen no discussion take place between us. Bill and I laughed.
“What else would we write?” he said.
The next weekend, back in Chicago, a musician friend of mine invited me to a church service where he was performing. We’d met in life-coaching training five years ago, and he now coached musicians on the days he wasn’t composing. I had already taken my seat and was studying the program, when I remembered that it was Mother’s Day. We had begun our new IVF cycle, and if I’d considered the day, perhaps I would have opted not to come.
Scores of children in frilly dresses and little suits and shorts sat primly, extra well behaved, next to their mothers. Behind the podium was a large banner bearing the message WE HONOR OUR MOTHERS. To the side of the pulpit stood a large vase filled with dozens of red roses. After his talk and my friend’s trumpet solo, the minister asked all the mothers in the congregation to stand.
A pocket of pain arose underneath my ribs, spiky and barbed like a briar. The minister waved his arms, encouraging the mothers to rise. As women popped up out of their chairs, the rest of the congregation began to cheer and applaud. As more women stood, some of the men and children began to stomp their feet. The room sounded like a sports arena. I clapped along with them, genuinely honoring these women. But my movements began to feel forced, my face plastic and cold, like a mask. A well of anger churned in my gut. The woman to my left stood while her two young children reached out to touch her arm and cheered, “Mommy!”
I felt an impulse to stand. The words of the Divine Mother echoed in my head, competing with the applause: You have been initiated. The remembrance shocked me, and I stopped clapping. Stand up. The command came swift inside me.
Why not? I thought. The minister hadn’t said, “Stand if your children are living.” Was I not a mother to our twins, and even to the baby I’d carried for just six short weeks? Just because they had died, did it mean I was not really a mother? I stood. A rush of blood to my head muffled the applause that continued, now even louder than before. Ushers passed roses down the rows in baskets, smiling and prompting each standing woman to take one. The woman next to me selected her rose and handed the basket to me. I hesitated over the velvet petals, drops of moisture still resting on some of the folded buds. Standing was one thing, but I didn’t think I could take a rose. I handed the basket to the usher and faced forward, avoiding eye contact with anyone around me. When the last of the roses had been delivered, the minister invited everyone to take their seats.
As I sat, my heart raced and I found it difficult to breathe. The act of standing had depleted me, and I felt as if the sound of the applause were pressing on my chest.
When it came time for the collection, the woman next to me leaned toward my seat and asked how many children I had.
“Two,” I said. Saying it aloud calmed me for a moment and helped distract me from my racing pulse. Then, thinking of the miscarriage, I corrected myself. “Well, three.” Her eyes looked to the seats beside me—looking for the mentioned children, I imagined. “Didn’t stay,” I said helplessly, searching for a nonmorbid answer.
Her eyes widened for a moment, and then she tilted her head, regarding me with curiosity. I realized that I’d confused her. She probably now thought my children had died in some kind of accident or illness, or that I was insane. I regretted having stood up at all.
“And you?” I said, hoping to change the focus. “Two?”
“Two,” she said. “But four total. Two here and two that didn’t stay.”
She understood. I looked at her stunning children, smiling and robust with life, with blue eyes and long lashes that looked like hers. I felt a stab of something dark in my chest. I didn’t want to envy this woman, but I did. She’d had losses but was now mothering the way I wanted to be, while I stood looking at a crevasse I did not know if I would ever fully cross. I wished then that I had taken a rose. I would have pushed a thorn into my finger; the physical pain would have been a welcome distraction.
I walked fast toward the atrium the minute the service ended. I wanted to congratulate my friend on his performance and leave quick
ly. As I exited into the front hall, I felt a hand touch my arm. The woman from my row was standing beside me, her eyes and face wet.
“It would never have occurred to me today to acknowledge all the children I carried,” she said. I forced myself to meet her eyes. I didn’t want her to see my jealousy, or my sadness.
“It really moved me,” she said. I nodded and dropped my eyes. “Thank you,” she said, and pressed her rose into my hand.
By the time I returned home, I no longer felt like sticking my finger with the thorns. Something had been transmuted in the exchange with the rose. I held the flower in my hand. It was beautiful, soft, and just beginning to open. I put it in a small vase in the kitchen next to my IVF medications. I felt emptied out from the service but opened as well, opened up for something good and new.
When my mother arrived for her baseline ultrasound a week later, Bill called a family meeting. We were about halfway through the IVF cycle, roughly three weeks from retrieval and transfer. I had taken my evening injections, and my mother and I were sitting at the island in the kitchen while Bill cooked.
“I’ve been thinking,” Bill said, lowering eggplant cubes into a flour mixture, “that maybe this round we can bring in some lightness. I don’t mean half-assing anything with our medications or appointments. I’m talking about lightening up our conversations and watching funny TV shows at night—that kind of thing. These cycles can feel so intense.”
My mother and I agreed to the new intention. We made a few other family decisions as well.
“This time, I’m going to stay in Chicago from retrieval all the way through the pregnancy tests,” my mother said. We all thought waiting for the ten days after transfer together might feel excruciating, but we wanted to eliminate the variable of plane travel.
“I know doctors say there’s no way travel that early can impact a pregnancy,” my mother said, “but I want to give this cycle every chance of success.”
