Bringing in Finn

by Sara Connell

  We did not discuss what we would do if we were not pregnant this time. I felt, though it was not explicitly stated, that this cycle could be our last try.

  My mother’s age aside, I didn’t know how many more rounds of IVF my body could take. I had purposely not counted the number of cycles, injections, and shots I’d subjected myself to. Presurrogacy, each time my mind had reached to make a calculation, I’d forced myself to stop, fearing a quantifiable number would send me into despair. When I focused on one cycle at a time, the regime felt manageable. Logistically, I’d become so accustomed to IVF cycles that I no longer even thought about the medications between injections. I could administer an intramuscular shot into my buttocks with one hand. Still, my stomach and behind looked like the surface of the moon—bruised and indented—and I lost a few pounds with each cycle that I never could quite put back on between rounds, so I had a slightly starved and pinched look about the face.

  As this cycle progressed, we stayed true to our intention and looked for opportunities for distraction and fun. People in Chicago became exhilarated the minute the weather turned warm, rushing outside, flooding restaurant patios as soon as they opened. The path along Lake Michigan was dotted for miles with bikers, runners, and people playing beach volleyball in sand.

  Bill cooked inspiring meals, and we watched Will Ferrell movies and comedies on TV. We found an Italian restaurant that made a macaroni-and-four-cheese lasagna that my mother fell in love with. To her delight, they delivered.

  “I’d better become pregnant this time,” my mother said, “as I am apparently already eating for two.”

  I worked most days but looked for opportunities to go out with my mother. When I could take time off, we went on adventures. We spent a day in Evanston exploring the lakefront and shops and made periodic visits to the Spice House on Wells Street in Old Town (her favorite store). We tried to carry our intention of lightness into Dr. Colaum’s office. We baked cookies for the staff and spent our time in the waiting room wishing for success for every couple there with us.

  Bill seemed relieved by the humor and lack of intensity. He looked more relaxed than he had in several years. My father surprised my mother by flying to Chicago to be with her during the week between our procedures and the pregnancy test. The day of our retrieval, Bill and I urged my parents to go out together. It felt right that we would go on our own: as the hopeful parents, there for the big-bang moment when—we hoped—our child or children would be conceived.

  As profound as we knew that moment to be, we remained true to our intention of lightness on the retrieval day. Bill loaded his iPod with Bill Maher podcasts. We arrived at RMI in good humor.

  The clinic was booked that day, and Rachel told us they’d run out of patient rooms in the back area. “We’ve made up a temporary space for you here,” she said, walking us to the wall across from the curtained waiting areas. The staff had draped a sheet over a hanging rack in front of two black office chairs.

  “We wouldn’t normally ask this, but we thought you two could handle it. You’re veterans.”

  We told Rachel we didn’t mind. She rolled the hanging rack in front of the chairs, handed me the set of hospital clothes, and told us to take a seat. I changed quickly and sat back in the chair. The sheet curtain didn’t quite cover our seating area, and we could see the staff coming and going. I set the paper surgical hat aside and Bill turned on a podcast. At one point I laughed and heard the sound echo across the room. I clamped my mouth shut as Rachel walked a couple into the first patient area, the one Bill and I had been in for our procedures for every other retrieval and transfer.

  The woman of the couple had a round body and crinkly hair. Her partner was a tall African American man in a striped shirt. Before he pulled the curtain shut, I saw him reach out his hand to help her unwrap the gown and scrubs.

  “I can do it,” she snapped, her voice as rigid as her jaw.

  “First-timers,” Bill mouthed to me. I nodded and silently wished them a successful outcome.

  We continued our game of people watching from behind our curtained-off area. While we waited for the anesthesiologist, Rachel stopped by again. She took in Bill Maher playing on Bill’s nano.

  “You guys have come a long way,” she said.

  Within the hour, a female anesthesiologist whom we’d not met before started me on an IV. She had cool hands and stuck the needle into the vein with one try.

  Rachel walked me into the procedure room, and she and Tracey began to count backward from ten. I counted along with them. By four, I was out.

  Afterward I was groggy but felt relaxed, even chipper.

  “Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” I asked Bill.

  “I delivered my donation,” Bill said. “And Dr. Colaum reported that she retrieved thirteen good eggs,” Bill said. “Nine look strong for fertilization.”

  “Nine is good,” I said.

  Once Rachel cleared us to go, I got dressed and we stood at the edge of the room, waiting for Lorelai or Tracey to take me down in the wheelchair.

  Tracey permitted me to walk from the front door to the car as long as Bill held my arm and we walked slowly. While we walked, Bill told me that he’d seen the man from across the room go and return with his donation.

  “He looked so miserable,” Bill said. “I wanted to tell him that part gets easier. I was sure I would not have wanted someone to say that to me then, though. So I gave him a salute.”

  “You saluted him?” I asked.

  “I did,” Bill said.

  We arrived at the car, Bill assisted me into the front seat, handing me the seatbelt and waiting until I clicked the buckle before shutting the door and walking around to his side.

  In the car, he continued the story.

  “You know my friend Alan, the one who worked on my account at the agency?”

  I remembered Alan, a boisterous man who’d been known as a gunslinger within the agency.

  “He and his wife did IVF a few years ago. And he told me that to keep his spirits up he started doing this thing called the victory lap.”

  “That sounds like Alan,” I said.

  “After every donation, he would run through the office and gave a high five to the entire staff at the clinic.”

  “I’m sure they hoped he’d washed his hands,” I said.

  “Do you want to hear this?” Bill said. I nodded.

  “He made the victory lap every time he gave a donation—I mean, he really hammed it up. On his fourth cycle, though, the doctor came out and stood in the doorway during Alan’s run. He was afraid he’d gone too far and was going to get himself and Cindy kicked out of the practice, but he had to do something to take the pressure off. I could relate. When I saw that guy looking beaten today, heard his wife all cranky and scared, I wanted to do something. I remembered how I felt at the beginning. A high-five lap isn’t me, but a salute seemed fitting. I raised my hand and lifted my chin and nodded to him—in solidarity.”

  I turned in my seat so I could see Bill’s face. Even in profile, I felt as if I could see both the scars and the gifts of our journey. We’d vowed repeatedly through the past six years to let what we faced bring us closer. If what we experienced was going to change us, we would look for ways for it to strengthen, not distance, us. Looking at the square of his jaw, his hands holding the wheel capably and confidently, I felt proud of him. Proud of us.

  The day of our transfer, three days later, dawned warm and bright. Bill, my mother, and I went to RMI together.

  Carli had called the day after retrieval to tell us we had three strong embryos. Our procedure was scheduled for Tuesday at noon. This time, my mother brought her own liter bottle of Evian and chugged the water with devotion as we sat in the waiting room.

  The procedure area was calmer than it had been when we’d come for retrieval, and Tracey ushered us to the first patient area, which we’d come to think of as our own. Rachel had rolled in an extra chair so the three of us could sit together. Bill
stepped outside the curtain while my mother changed into her gown and paper cap and I pulled scrubs over my clothes and shoes. Dr. Colaum allowed me into the room again.

  The procedure room was soothing and tranquil, the institutional white walls and medical equipment fading into the soft glow when Tracey dimmed the lights. Carli appeared in the square window in the door to ask my mother to state her name. Her blonde hair was pulled into a ponytail, and her nails were painted pink. When she saw me, she waved.

  “Are you sure we’re doing two?” Dr. Colaum asked, winking at my mother. “We have three great-looking embryos.”

  “Two,” I said firmly, honoring my promise to Bill and my dad. We’d already filled out paperwork to have the remaining embryo frozen and stored in the RMI lab.

  “Ready,” Dr. Colaum said. Her pink cheeks and light hair beneath the blue surgical cap gave her the look of Mrs. Claus.

  “Transferring two embryos,” she said as she wove the tube up through my mother’s cervix into the uterus. I heard a flick and saw the embryos rocket into the uterus. My mother let out a “wow” as we watched the display on-screen. I never tired of this moment.

  The RMI team left the room. My mother and I waited again, in silence at first; then I sang the lullaby chant I’d sung after my first transfers, while we imagined the little life/lives searching for a spot to implant.

  My mother held her bladder until Tracey came to relieve her and escort us outside. Bill drove the car around to the front of the building. We offered my mother the front seat and suggested she put her feet up on the dashboard to maintain an inverted position for the drive back into the city—the same way I had done on our first cycle, when I became pregnant with the twins.

  “I’ll stand on my head if it increases our chance of pregnancy,” my mother said. “I’m going to go right back to your house and into bed. This time, we’re not taking any chances.”

  Two of my mother’s friends drove from D.C. to Chicago to entertain her the following week. They were interested in Frank Lloyd Wright houses and stopped in Ohio to visit a few properties along the way. On Friday, they drove with her to RMI to take the first blood test, and then drove west, to Oak Park, to take a Frank Lloyd Wright house tour there. After the tour, my mother tracked down the walking labyrinth she’d read about at Grace Episcopal Church, a gothic structure on the corner of Lake Street and Forrest Place. Her friends decided to find a café and have an iced tea while she walked to the church. Happy to be alone, she told me, she placed her feet at the start of the labyrinth.

  “I cleared my mind and asked to truly surrender. But I couldn’t. The most honest thing I could do was say that I wanted this pregnancy with my whole heart, being, and soul—wanted it desperately, in fact, which is exactly what’s not advised in any spiritual practice, no matter what religion or philosophy you read. I decided to walk the labyrinth anyway and asked it to tell me whatever I needed to know.”

  She kept her mind poised on the sounds around her, the step of her foot on the grass, the wheels of a car on the road nearby. She tried to push away all thoughts and remain calm as she followed the winding path. When she reached the grassy center, she stopped.

  “I planted my feet in the ground and waited. When a few minutes went by and I didn’t feel or hear anything, I started to cry. I thought for sure I would feel some direction, some sign, once I reached the middle. I looked around to make sure I was alone, and then began talking.

  “We’ve done everything we could do,” she said to the labyrinth, the surrounding trees, and the sky. “My uterus is strong. The embryos were transferred. We’ve come all this way.’”

  Then, she said, a calm feeling came over her, as if a great wind had stopped blowing, leaving her ears and skin still tingling from its force.

  “I heard something,” my mother said, saying the words slowly, watching my face for my reaction. “Not out loud, like regular speech, but inside my head.”

  “What did it say?” I asked, remembering the day in my bedroom with the Great Mother.

  “You’re right where I asked you to be,” my mother said. “That’s what I heard.

  “I wanted to hear, You’re pregnant or receive some kind of affirmation or sign to that effect,” she continued. “But I was gobsmacked that I heard anything, actually. It was an incredible moment.”

  I thought again of that day on my bedroom floor after the twins died. I hadn’t heard what I’d wanted to hear, either. And yet what I had heard had resonated with me as real and sustained me many times over these long three years.

  “That’s my experience of those kinds of messages, too,” I said.

  “I guess the Universe wants us to wait and find out like everyone else, at the pregnancy test,” my mother said.

  The sky had grown dark outside the window of the guest room where my mother and I had been snuggled on the bed. The moon was full and cast white light into the room. I turned to look out the window and attempted to bat away a thought that had been lurking as my mother recounted her experience in the labyrinth, and probably ever since she had made the offer to be our surrogate.

  Maybe the whole purpose of her vision was for us to get to this place, a place of love and appreciation for each other, of unimagined intimacy and closeness. If that was the purpose, it should be enough, I told myself. Bill and I would survive. Even though we wanted deeply to be parents, we didn’t need a baby to live a complete life. I told this to myself, but I didn’t fully believe it.

  Just like my mother at the labyrinth, I could not totally surrender my desire. I shrugged and smiled at her, and we went downstairs to see if Bill wanted help with dinner.

  On the morning of the official pregnancy test, I drove my mother to Dr. Colaum’s. Bill had a preproduction meeting for his next shoot and would be in a suburb of Chicago for most of the day.

  “It’s probably better that I’m not there,” he said. “I’m so jumpy.”

  My mother didn’t look anxious. She held a small water bottle in one hand and a banana in the other. There was no trace of uncertainty. My heart pumped hard as we turned onto Ridge Road and pulled into the RMI parking lot.

  I turned away as a new nurse on staff administered the blood test. I restrained myself from double-checking the vial to ensure she’d accurately marked my mother’s name and date of birth, our phone number. In the last regular IVF cycle we’d done, I’d had nothing to eat or drink before the blood test and had been shaking so forcibly that even Tracey had had trouble getting any blood out of my vein. I looked to see if my mother was having any difficulty and realized my own hands were shaking.

  “Cell phone or landline?” Rachel asked me, not needing to go over any other protocol for the day.

  “Cell,” I told her and rushed out of the office with my mother, my hands and body still trembling a bit.

  It was only ten o’clock. I hadn’t scheduled any work for the day, and we had hours before the results would be in.

  “Let’s go to Jerry’s,” my mother suggested. Jerry’s was a hipster lunch place in Wicker Park that I’d taken her to once before.

  I had practice waiting for pregnancy tests, I told myself. This was just one more. I’d committed myself to walking through this day with calmness and courage. But I grew more anxious each mile south that we drove. It was as if a giant clock were ticking in my ear, slowly counting down the minutes before someone from RMI called. My throat and breath felt tight and I fought back tears. I parked the car and brushed the corners of my eyes. My heart fluttered the way it had after the twins died. The sensation was not comforting.

  We walked through a few boutiques, and I ran my hands numbly over the clothes, commenting on one or two dresses my mother held up.

  “It’s going to be okay, Sara,” she said, pulling my arm into the curve of her elbow. I knew ultimately it would be. I repeated what I had so many times to myself on the day of these tests: Bill and I could keep trying. We could pursue other options. We would not live or die by the results. And yet I felt the
steel wire of that tightrope, plummeting space on either side.

  We walked toward Jerry’s. The sun had reached its height and the day was warm, seventy degrees with a breeze. Most of the tables were full of people eating avant-garde sandwiches and salads out in the sun.

  My mother stopped me by my arm again a few feet from the entrance. “I have a good feeling, Sara,” she said.

  I did not have any feeling aside from mounting anxiety. I had refused to be hopeful about any pregnancy symptoms my mother might feel, not wanting to repeat the false expectations from the previous cycle. Whatever would be would be when Tracey or Rachel or the whole RMI team called with the results.

  I knew in some part of my brain that a positive pregnancy test did not mean we would for sure have a baby. But I also knew a positive test was the only chance we had of having one now, and in the moment, every mental faculty I had was focused on the results of that test.

  When our lunch arrived, I pushed the food around my plate, poking cucumber slices with my fork. My mother seemed to be relishing her turkey Reuben, eating the sandwich in long, savoring bites. I had no idea how she could be so calm. She glanced at a tray being delivered to a table next to us.

  “Those sweet-potato fries look good,” my mother said. “Will you have some if I get us an order?”

  “I don’t feel hungry,” I said.

  “Well, I am having a lovely lunch,” my mother said. “I am feeling extra hungry today. Ravenous, in fact.” She pulled a piece of turkey from the sandwich and took a large bite. Ignoring my silence, she continued the conversation in monologue.

  “Maybe because of all the activity of the transfer,” she said, staring me in the eye. “Or maybe because I feel so pregnant.”

  “Mom!” I said again. I could not believe she was being so flip.

  “I’m trying to hold on to my sanity here,” I said.