The Longest Date: Life as a Wife

by Cindy Chupack

  Then I hired a new housekeeper who didn’t know the house any other way.

  I, too, need to let go of remembering the house as it had been. There’s life in it now, and we were hoping to add more life still.

  But every so often, when Ian leaves town, I wander from room to room and tidy up, and organize, and put everything just so. And then I wake up the next morning in my big house, which now seems big for one person, too big really. And it slowly dawns on me: everything will be exactly as I left it.

  I cannot explain how thrilling that is. Unless you’re gay. Or my ex-housekeeper.

  Eggspecting

  I was finally pregnant, thanks to a twenty-three-year-old restaurant hostess in New York City.

  No, she did not seat me next to a swarthy Italian stranger who impregnated me.

  She was our egg donor.

  Most of the time I was able to forget that we had had to use an egg donor. I felt as if the baby growing inside of me was thoroughly mine. I had the same joys and fears and nausea as every other pregnant woman in the world, except when I was annoyed with Ian, and then it was as if I’d been forced to carry a love child he had conceived with some random twenty-three-year-old.

  Only she hadn’t been random. We’d sifted through over 300 profiles to find her. Ian said it was the first time since getting married that he could look at girls online without afterward having to press “delete history.” I try not to dwell on that comment.

  So how did I become my own surrogate? How does any woman find herself asking: “Can I borrow an egg? I’m trying to make a child.”

  For us, after three and a half years of trying to get pregnant on our own (“on our own” being a euphemism for the army of experts we were paying to help us get pregnant), we finally discovered the medical explanation for our fertility problems.

  I was old.

  No doctor actually said that, but at forty-three, I finally realized the gentle suggestions we were getting from friends and experts about “other options” like adoption and an egg donor were not “other options.” They were our only options.

  Of course, women can get pregnant at forty-three. You hear stories about it all of the time (when you’re forty-three), and those stories become a ray of hope and also the bane of your existence, because they keep you from moving on to Plan B.

  The thing about Plan B is that it’s comforting to have . . . when you’re still on Plan A. But when the thick, cushy rug of Plan A gets yanked out from under you (even if that rug involved endless IVF treatments and shots in the ass), Plan B can require a period of adjustment.

  But we didn’t have time to adjust. We’d already spent three and a half years in the effort. And every new road to getting a baby seemed like a long and winding one, so we decided to just get on some road, any road, and adjust on the way.

  In that spirit we headed to Orange County for an all-day adoption seminar. It was sponsored by an organization called Resolve, and our lack of resolve became clear when the first three speakers broke into tears, and we just wanted to break for lunch.

  The problem wasn’t what they were saying about adoption; it was how they were saying it. I have a rule that a person who is speaking publicly should not be more emotional than the people in the audience. I devised that rule when Ian and I heard a woman perform a story about how she had to bake a wedding cake for two lesbian friends who were getting married while her cat was sick, and the story just got more and more painful until it ended with “And then my cat died.” And she was in tears, and nobody else was. I turned to Ian and said, “Not a dry eye on the stage.”

  So, she’s my cautionary tale. Because of her—and her dead cat—I always try to make sure that I am not the only one moved by whatever story I happen to be telling.

  But that was not the case at this adoption seminar. It seemed (to me, at least) that most of the people listening not only were not moved—they were not happy. I think most of them, like us, were still mourning the loss of Plan A, and the result was some displaced anger at the speakers and at one another, which explains why Ian almost came to blows with a guy who cut him off while he was asking a question.

  Now, let me just say I have many friends who have adopted, and they all have beautiful, smart, funny, confident children. And these friends could not be happier or prouder as parents, which is why I always thought adoption would be our default Plan B.

  What I had not realized was that Ian and I would not be able to reconcile our adopted baby. I wanted to adopt from China, and he wanted to adopt from Africa. At this seminar those were two completely different breakout sessions. And all future discussions on the subject left us both feeling depressed and vaguely racist.

  So I finally asked Ian—who had originally joked that if I couldn’t be part of the formula genetically there was no reason to pass on his messed-up genes, if he would want to consider an egg donor. And he lit up. Like a kid at Christmas. Which made it clear that, although he hadn’t wanted to be the one to suggest it, part of him had been secretly hoping I would be willing to try an egg donor next.

  Maybe a better wife would have offered that up right away. “I want to have your baby, honey. That’s why I married you! Forget the egg; the most important thing is your sperm!” But that sounded too sexist to stomach. And it was my stomach that would be expanding, which, to me, always seemed like the least exciting part of the process.

  But once we decided to go the egg donor route, I agreed to carry the baby, because . . . I don’t know . . . it just seemed like I should be involved somehow.

  We began with an egg donor seminar (you’d think we’d have learned our lesson, but at least this one was only a couple of hours long), where we felt as if we’d finally found our people, until one of our people asked if her fourteen-year-old daughter could be her egg donor. And the doctor leading the seminar had to politely tell her that there might be some issues with that, like that it was sick.

  He didn’t say that, but it was implied when he explained that, if her daughter was a virgin, the procedure might break her hymen.

  Wow. I thought losing my virginity in a frat house was unromantic.

  He also said that her daughter might agree to that plan to please her mother, but she might later regret being the mother of her sister. Based on that disturbing discussion, we decided our donor should be a complete stranger. And that we should stop going to seminars.

  Ian then proceeded to do what any good husband would do: he tried to find an egg donor who looked and seemed the most like me.

  And although that was a sweet sentiment, I said, “What the hell are you doing?! We need to go better, stronger, faster! We need someone with a good metabolism who is wildly athletic with long legs and shiny hair!”

  I became a total boy about it. I was only interested in models and athletes. I didn’t care if they were smart. We could teach our kid everything he or she needed to know, but the gift of hotness, that’s something you’re born with. I found one donor who looked like Megan Fox, and I showed Ian her profile and he asked, somewhat baffled, “What do you like about her?”

  I said, “Look at her!”

  He thought she sounded cold in her essay answers, and she had typos, which was a deal breaker for him, despite my warning that he would have to explain to our future daughter that she could have been a knockout but we wanted her to be able to spell “autumn” instead.

  Then Ian (who is not black, in case there is any confusion) decided maybe we should use an African American egg donor, forcing me once again to feel like the racist who just wanted a white kid.

  I have nothing against black people! I just didn’t see why, if we were going through the trouble of actually giving birth to a child, we needed to advertise to the world that it wasn’t biologically my child. (Which, granted, would also have been the case with a kid who looked like Megan Fox.)

  I know it’s a small world, after al
l, but it’s my uterus, after all, so does everyone need to know it wasn’t my egg? Ian said it was more likely that people would think I had slept with a black man. That’s a sexier version of events, but it was still not the impression I was looking forward to projecting as a family.

  We finally enlisted the help of a friend of a friend who finds surrogates and donors for a living, and she had had twins herself using an egg donor, so she understood what we were going through. She had actually mingled her own eggs with those of her donor, so she still wasn’t sure whether her boys are genetically her own or not. She planned to have a test done eventually, but for the time being, she liked the plausible deniability.

  I thought about doing that, too, but what was the point? I knew my eggs. Their response would have been: “We’re tired. You kids go ahead. Go have fun.”

  She put out an APB to all of her colleagues at ovum donor agencies (yes, in Los Angeles even eggs have agents), telling them we were a great couple and explained what we were looking for, and somehow our perfect donor showed up.

  Ian and I both knew she was The One, which was a strangely bonding experience. We loved everything she had written. We loved her photos. We loved that she had studied abroad and played the oboe and was an artist and was planning to go to law school. It was only later, when it was time to do the embryo transfer, that I went online (to visit her profile?) and realized that she had graduated and was now working as a restaurant hostess in New York City.

  I was worried. What had happened to law school? Ian said that she was probably saving money for tuition. In New York, restaurant hostesses make good money . . . because they’re hot. So we were getting everything plus hotness, he reasoned.

  That Ian—he knows just what to say to a girl who’s about to get pregnant by another girl.

  There were moments, leading up to this pregnancy, when I hadn’t been sure why we’d been jumping through so many hoops to have a baby, and once I asked Ian to remind me why we were working so hard in what seemed like such an uphill battle. Maybe we weren’t meant to have a kid. To which he replied, “We both live life fully. This is a big part of life. We’re not missing it.”

  Vow Now

  The jury is still out on whether it’s the most beautiful or most embarrassing part of a wedding when a bride and groom read their own vows. It’s certainly preferable to somebody else reading their vows, as was the case when my friend Marie was given the honor of reading a male friend’s vows at his wedding. Even the bride would admit that that was just plain weird.

  I’ve heard a groom ask his bride to vow to support the Pittsburgh Steelers.

  I’ve seen a shy, normally stoic policeman whisper his vows when he got too emotional to continue aloud, and even though we couldn’t hear what he was saying to his beloved, it brought most of the guests, me included, to tears.

  It’s too late for me, especially after including my vows in this book, to pretend I’m someone who would whisper them. In fact, I had so much to say on my Big Day that the wedding planner had to tell the caterer to hold dinner.

  And, full disclosure, those were not the only vows I’ve written.

  Ian and I write new vows each year on our anniversary.

  Before you throw up, let me clarify that these annual vows are not all sunshine and roses. We do not quote songs or literature, or write our feelings in verse. Ian can speak in verse on any subject you give him, as I’ve mentioned, but that’s more of a party trick, albeit a party trick that hooked me the first night I met him and the rest is history, a history that has been nicely chronicled, thanks to our yearly vows. These vows are a bit like a Christmas letter that we send only to each other, which is about as wide a distribution as most Christmas letters should get, but again, I’m not one to preach about discretion.

  Our annual vows not only help us remember the past, they make “forever” seem much less daunting. How can anyone vow to love someone forever with a straight face? I mean, you do it because not to do it would definitely put a damper on the wedding, but Ian and I decided early on it was much more manageable to vow to love each other one year at a time. We don’t automatically assume we’re in it for the long haul. We hope we are, but every June on our anniversary, we end our vows by actively signing up for another year (which is wildly romantic until someone doesn’t).

  So far, neither of us has terminated our love lease, but some years it’s harder to re-up than others. It’s like a third, fourth, or fifth tour of duty in Iraq. You’ve been all you can be. You know what the enemy is capable of. Why volunteer for more?

  That’s an exaggeration, of course. Every year of our marriage has not been like a year of combat.

  Only Year Five was. Year Five, we were lucky to get out alive.

  Someone recently asked me if marriage was as hard as people say. I think life is harder than people say, and marriage ideally makes it easier to get through the hard times in life. That was the only good news about Year Five. It was not Husband versus Wife. It was us against the world, as I always thought it should be, except the world seemed to be winning.

  I wrote my Year Five vows while I was still reeling, when I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. That’s the most helpful time to write, I think, because how you feel about your spouse during the lowest lows is just as important to acknowledge and remember as how you feel during the highs. Time has a way of putting things in perspective, of assigning meaning. But some years can’t be wrapped up in a pretty little package. Some years are just hard.

  When we got married, I wished we were younger, that we had five years to be just a couple. On our fifth anniversary, I felt as if the universe was laughing like a maniac and saying: “You got your five years! How do you vow now?”

  This is how I vowed:

  Year Five

  I am re-upping for another year, let’s just say that right now.

  But we’ve been through so much in five years. Too much. And I only realized that in the last month, I guess, when everything broke down, and now I just want to watch Top Chef and sleep.

  And yet by some standards, what have we been through, really? Nobody’s dying.

  And by other standards (ours), this thing we’ve wanted, a baby, has been so elusive, and even though I know it’s not my fault, nothing intentional on my part, my role in not getting you this thing you’ve wanted so badly has been tough. I feel like I, and my body, have carried a lot of the responsibility for not carrying, or carrying and losing, two babies.

  I want us to be happy.

  I want us to be done trying.

  I want us to be a family.

  I want us to move forward through this period of waiting.

  Uch, how to begin describing Year Five.

  Year Four ended with such relief and joy and gratitude, and still for some reason the universe saw fit to pull the rug out one more time. In July 2009, after we finally cleared the first trimester hurdle, there was cramping and several visits to our doctor, and then two trips to the hospital in one day—one where we saw the baby move on an ultrasound and were temporarily relieved; a second that was the late-night D&C to ensure that all hope was, in fact, gone.

  What I remember about that first visit to the hospital was wanting to be home, then the cramping getting worse at home and calling the doctor for painkillers, then you bringing me warm biscuits (and me worrying that biscuits, my favorite food, might get ruined forever along with everything else), then going into the bathroom and realizing what was happening and saying Shit Shit Shit. And then you coming in and dealing, somehow, I don’t know how, calling the paramedics, Tink licking my hand as they carried me out of the house, and then the ride in the ambulance with the sun through the back window setting behind us over the beach.

  Is it weird I remember the sunset being bittersweet and pink and kind of beautiful? I think there was some relief that what we were dreading would happen all week had happene
d, and we were no longer waiting for it to happen, but then there was the horrible sadness setting in that it had happened—that was the sunset I saw from the back of the ambulance.

  I remember you calling my parents from the ambulance to tell them the news, and holding my hand. You were worried only about me. For so long, you wouldn’t leave my side.

  At the hospital you told me you ran into that annoying Irish nurse who had said some kind of prayer for us earlier that wasn’t answered, probably because of her thick accent.

  You cried to our doctor at 1 A.M. after the surgery. She was supposed to deliver our baby and instead she had to deliver the news that we had lost the baby because I had gone into early labor. Labor. That’s why I carried our donor egg baby. That’s what we wanted to experience. And now, this experience, I will never be able to share with girlfriends when they tell their war stories. I will think of it, but I won’t say anything.

  That first visit to the hospital—not the second—I brought a bag of all of the good luck charms our friends had given me, at my request, for my birthday two months earlier. Then, at home, a paramedic had to remove my four-leaf clover bracelet in order to insert the IV. He said, “Do you need this?” And I said, “I guess not. I don’t think it’s working anymore.”

  You were there. I was there. It is a place we revisit on our saddest, darkest days, so I don’t need more details here except to remind you and myself that I never felt more taken care of. I joked later that you don’t often get to crash test a relationship, but that felt like our crash test. And you passed. You were better than anyone could have expected you to be, better than I would have been. You were losing everything—again—and you cared only that I be okay. That is love. If I had to define love for myself, I would look to that moment and say I married exactly the right man and he is the best man I know.

  That was in July, such a short time after those bright-eyed letters we wrote about Year Four. So then the healing. You took off work. We were never closer, physically or otherwise, because the pain was like glue. For a month or more we were hard to reach, but we were together in the grief.