You Got Anything Stronger?

by Gabrielle Union

  Dedication

  For Kaavia James and Zaya.

  I am continually awed by the honor and responsibility of raising free Black girls. May you each embrace your vulnerability as your superpower, and may I not falter as I attempt to lead by example.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1. Loved Even as a Thought

  2. Dream Team

  3. Embrace Your Kryptonite

  4. On the Compassion of Strippers

  5. Good Soldiers

  6. Zaya

  7. Freshman Orientation

  8. The Audacity of Aging (with Hope)

  9. Into the Matrix

  10. Fuck Balance

  11. Dance Battle

  12. Power in Numbers

  13. Thanksgiving

  14. The Golden Lady of L.A.

  15. Dear Isis

  16. Escape from King’s Landing

  17. How to Pitch Your Life

  18. The Voice of Wisdom

  19. Don’t Worry, Mommy

  20. Standards and Practices: A Tragedy in Three Acts

  21. Oh, One More Thing

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Gabrielle Union

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  When I published my first book, We’re Going to Need More Wine, in 2017, I opened by saying that it felt like you and I were on a first date. We each brought our expectations, not sure if this was going to go anywhere.

  Well, we’ve progressed in our courtship. And this book is like us going away for that first weekend together. Because just as you think you know someone, it turns out you actually have no idea who a person really is until you’ve traveled with them. That’s when you find out their bathroom habits, and if they’re really the morning person they claimed to be on Instagram. And we also see how much baggage we bring along with us.

  We are going on a journey, and for this, you’re going to need something stronger.

  I spent a long time planning this trip for you. Separately, we looked at the pictures of the house I picked for us to spend time in. “Oh my God, I can’t wait for this trip to start,” we said. And now we are here, and the house doesn’t quite look like it did in the glossy pictures. The beach is farther than the host advertised, the Wi-Fi is wonky, and as we explore the house we find doors that are locked to us.

  Still, we nervously assure each other, “It’s charming.”

  And a few hours in, we realize it actually is. Sometimes the less bright and shiny a home looks, the more it offers. We can appreciate a house for its history—for what it has weathered, and how it’s been lived in. See the places where someone has put love into it, the collaboration and collision of old and new construction. The house has great bones, it just needs tending to.

  By the end of the first day, as if the house has warmed to us, we find the set of keys to those locked rooms. We are let in, trusted to see the photographs on the wall, the treasured books on shelves. All the signs of life and the good-ass energy that people were so purposeful in creating to fill this place. By the end of the journey, around when we really have a sense of the house and each other, this becomes our place.

  As a lover of memoirs and biographies, I have benefited from authors revealing themselves so that, as readers, we can see ourselves. The truths collected in those pages—typed out letter by letter, as they were lived moment to moment—build a community of kindred strangers. I owe these writers a debt, and while I can never repay them, I can at least honor them by sharing my own truths here with you. Readers gather the courage to become storytellers, and the lifeline is passed, person to person, book by book. The message remains, Keep going.

  There are people on the sidelines who will heckle us, lingering on the fringe just long enough to hear half a truth and twist even that into a weapon to run amuck with. I know from fellow readers who found kinship in my first book that efforts to shame me—in comments I probably never even saw—sent the message that it’s too dangerous to be honest. Your story has no value, certainly not when you weigh it against the cost: the emotional toll of telling your truth, or the discomfort it might cause someone hearing it. Better to be silent, and remain alone.

  You are not. We are here together in this moment, and we can have compassion for each other. But of course, that starts with giving it to ourselves. That is an ongoing project for me, one that I have had to continually start over and over again from scratch through the events of my life, collected here in this book. There’s always something that lands you on your ass—even success, which comes with its own challenges. You think, There’s no way I can move on from this. I will never recover. I will never be the same.

  No, you won’t be the same. Life, it turns out, is a series of mini deaths. And, thankfully, rebirths. You have to grieve the person you were before, and I have to acknowledge that I am not the same woman I was when I wrote to you four years ago. If you thought you knew me then, you are not alone. I thought I knew me, too.

  So, let’s raise a glass as we start our trip. Here’s to getting to know each other better.

  1

  Loved Even as a Thought

  So. Where were we?

  Right, you and I left off in October 2017, when my first book came out. The weeks before the release were filled with dreams of loss. Pets dying. My husband leaving me. Babies not being born. My therapist told me those dreams were my soul preparing for my true self to emerge after letting go of my grief. In the book, I had finally spoken openly about my fertility journey. I was having second thoughts—in fact, so many thoughts they were organizing to go on strike. But I knew I had to stay honest because I didn’t want other women going through IVF to feel as alone as I did. I had suffered in isolation, having so many miscarriages that I could not give an exact number. Strangers shared their own journeys and heartbreak with me. I had led with the truth, and it opened the door to compassion.

  But from then on, it seemed every article about me used the phrase I had offered: “I have had eight or nine miscarriages.” This was always followed closely by my age, which at that time was forty-four. At least that stopped reporters from asking the question I got at every red carpet: “When are you and Dwyane gonna have a baby?” But my openness about pregnancy loss led journalists, friends, and strangers at the supermarket to cock their heads and ask a new question. It was presented casually, but not offhand. No, this was a statement, disguised as a question, that people thought I needed to hear right now.

  “Why don’t you go the surrogacy route?”

  Each time this was presented, I felt the constant, public prodding to acknowledge my body’s failures. “Just let some other, more capable, woman get the job done. Because you’re not capable.” It wasn’t my imagination. In life’s many comment sections, it was clear that I had wasted enough of everyone’s time. The messages were that I had prioritized my career, and now I was too old to have a kid. In fact, I owed that to Dwyane. I had robbed him of this child because I was an older woman—almost ten years older than D—and I had to have known my window was limited.

  The reality is that I had been diagnosed with adenomyosis one year before, with the gag being that I’d had it since my early twenties. It was Dr. Kelly Baek, a freakishly intelligent, no-nonsense reproductive endocrinologist in L.A., who finally, accurately, diagnosed me with what every other doctor had missed. Before meeting her, I had gone through multiple rounds of IVF with leading doctors around the country. When you are in their offices you stare at the holiday cards behind them. Plump babies with beaming, relieved parents. Each baby is counted,
with numbers reported to the CDC and officially tabulated to define that fertility clinic’s “success rate.” For the desperate like me, the CDC website has a handy table showing every clinic’s numbers. Picking one just now at random, I see it says, “Pregnancies: 225,” and then just below, “Deliveries: 177.” Then that gets divvied down to patients using their own eggs, and those using donor eggs. Those success-rate numbers are everything to a doctor, and keeping them up is why doctors don’t always want to work with older women or women with “unexplained infertility.” When a clinic prefers winners only, there isn’t much incentive to find an explanation. We, the worst cases, are simply weeded out.

  But Dr. Baek saw the real issue at the first ultrasound, my uterus up there on a flat-screen in her exam room. “Oh,” she said, “so, you have adenomyosis.”

  “What’s that?”

  She pointed at the screen, right at this little black spot in a black-and-white ocean. “You can see right here—it’s endometriosis of the muscle.” My endometrial tissue, which lines the uterus, had grown into the muscular wall of my uterus. She explained that as the fetus grows, the adenomyosis covers it like a blob. It was also responsible for my low ovarian reserve.

  Dr. Baek asked what my periods had been like. I told her in my early twenties, I’d gotten used to them lasting for a third of the month, passing huge clots, and bleeding through overnight pads. Bleeding like I’d been shot in the vagina. Doctors had prescribed birth control to “regulate” my period, not mentioning birth control is great at contraception, but not so great at treating heavy periods. It causes the absence of a period. What many people mistake for their “regulated” period is just breakthrough bleeding from taking the placebo in the final week.

  Then as soon as I wanted to start trying for a baby around 2013, I was advised to cut out the middleman—nature—and start IVF because of my age. At forty, I had come off the pill, then took a seat on a roller coaster of hormone injections. And then came the miscarriages. It would have been impossible for me to tell if my uncommonly long periods were just my body returning to whatever issue I had before I started using birth control.

  Dr. Baek pointed to the ultrasound again. “So, I would say it started in your early twenties then. It’s pretty pronounced, so I doubt this just arrived. I don’t know how anyone would have missed this.”

  I looked at Dr. Baek. My world was suddenly slow motion. She crossed her arms. I looked at her pearl earrings, her hair tied back. I tried to focus on these details, but I was now adrift in that ocean on the screen, overcome all at once by waves of clarity, relief, and grief. Later, there would be anger that I had sat in the offices of the world’s leading IVF doctors, and all they saw was my age. There was no investigation into any other cause for my miscarriages, and I was never correctly diagnosed or treated.

  The first time we were pregnant, it was All-Star Weekend years before. We called everyone and told my stepchildren, Zaire, Dada, Dahveon, and Zaya. We shared our joy, and then it was snatched away. After me, I would say the kids took it the hardest. Zaire and Dada were preteens, and Zaya was seven. It was brutal, because in addition to loss we also had to explain the concept of miscarriage. They took it as death of a sibling they never met, and they had never experienced the death of anyone close to them. How were they to feel about the absence of someone they never knew?

  After that, we stopped telling anyone when I was pregnant. Which was often. There were times this would happen “naturally,” and times I would get pregnant with embryos implanted through IVF. I isolated myself, wishing I didn’t even have to involve Dwyane. Just deal with the shots and the positive pregnancy tests and the eventual spotting that signaled the beginning of another end. The reason I can’t tell you how many miscarriages I have had is that my life became one long loss. I numbed myself, growing used to the fact that life was not a series of heartbreaks, but an unending feeling of failure and rejection.

  I realized I was staring at Dr. Baek. I looked down. The worst thing about hope is that it remains to taunt you, just out of reach. I still tried everything. Not just IVF, but bargaining with God. What had I done that God decided I was just not worthy? Was this some karmic or cosmic retribution? I had consulted healers, one of whom had told me, “If we tap into your spiritual core, do a clearing, I bet we can get you to a place where you can conceive and carry.” When all these measures failed—rituals, herbs, crystals, full moon chants—when I did all of the things you could possibly think of and none of them worked, maybe that just meant I was a bad person. And bad people were not worthy.

  I returned my eyes to the ultrasound. The black dot.

  “So, what do I do?” I could tell Dr. Baek was solutions-oriented.

  “Your best chance for a healthy baby would be surrogacy.”

  I nodded. Silently.

  I was not ready to do that. I wanted the experience of being pregnant. To watch my body expand and shift to accommodate this miracle inside me. Is that what it would be to experience true oneness with another being? I wanted my heart to be in sync with her—to beat for her, and then with her.

  I also wanted the experience of being publicly pregnant. I envied how pregnant people were revered, immediately respected and trusted and loved upon, as a vessel of life. I would forever shake off the distrust society has for women who, for whatever reason—by choice or by nature—do not have babies. I had paid the cost of that for years, and I wanted something for it. I understood the logic that I had embryos ready to implant in a gestational carrier instead of me. There would be no genetic relation between our baby and the carrier; the genes would be solely Dwyane’s and mine. But I still fought the idea.

  I held out for a year after Dr. Baek suggested surrogacy, and instead chose to endure more IVF cycles and losses. Everyone comes to the decision differently. For me—for the person I was then, or was trying to be—choosing surrogacy would be acknowledging an “L.” I was a batter, literally batting zero percent. Couldn’t even get on base, and everyone in the outfield and all the positions was just pointing at me like, “You . . . you’re just striking out. Enough already. Just bring in the pinch hitter.”

  The chant in my head began. “Pinch hitter! Pinch hitter!” It was my team saying it, then everyone in the stands, and even the guy in the parking lot selling throwbacks out of his trunk. Dr. Baek was now leading the chant, but D remained the loudest. He was excited at the prospect of our child. Finally, we could get on a route where we had a really good chance of ending up with a live birth. But I kept trying. With each subsequent loss, I heard, “We’re losing the game, and bitch, you’re getting older by the second. Give it up.”

  Near the end of that year—that hopeful and hopeless year—I had a new plan to take Lupron, which basically quiets the adenomyosis. The strategy was I would do it, then implant our embryo and hope it grew faster than the adenomyosis returned to cover it and snuff it out. I was told it would give me a 30 percent chance of bringing a baby to term. But the side effects of Lupron can be intense: you’re basically throwing your body into early menopause and you can break bones very easily. Still, I was willing to take that risk for a 30 percent chance. Thirty sounds like a lot when you’ve had zero.

  “Lemme go on with this and then circle back,” I told Dwyane. I would rather throw myself in front of home plate and get a hit-by-pitch, I thought, just so I can be awarded first base. Go down swinging before I call in this pinch hitter.

  D was quiet, then said, “You’ve done enough.”

  He said it with the authority of a coach doing the long slow walk to the pitcher’s mound. I shot a look at him. There was a desperation just dripping off him that I couldn’t ignore. A desperation of wanting things to be right with us. His journey was so different than mine. His was wrapped up in guilt and shame and embarrassment. And fear of losing me.

  In 2013, before we were married, Dwyane had a baby with another woman. It should go without saying that we were not in a good place in our relationship at the time that child was con
ceived. But we were in a much better place when he finally told me about the pregnancy. To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience. There are people—strangers who I will never meet—who have been upset that I have not previously talked about that trauma. I have not had words, and even after untold amounts of therapy I am not sure I have them now. But truth matters.

  “You’ve done enough,” he said. I looked at D with an instantaneous white-hot rage. Astonishment, really. I was fighting with my husband about what was best for my body? Did he really think that surrogacy and a baby was our chance to set it right? To rebalance? I said coolly, “You’re going to be the voice of reason now? Really? Really? Is that what we’re on today?”

  He looked me in the eye. “As much as we want this baby, I want you,” he said slowly. “We’ve lost too much in our relationship for me to be okay with encouraging you to do one more thing to your body and your soul.”

  I read those words now and hear them again. I didn’t receive this as concern at the time. It was an acknowledgment of failure. Because at that point I would have sold my soul for a win. To get out of the endless cycle of loss. What was the going rate for souls? What was mine worth, anyway? The experience of Dwyane having a baby so easily while I was unable to left my soul not just broken into pieces, but shattered into fine dust scattering in the wind. With desperate hands, we gathered what we could to slowly remake me into something new. There was no way to disguise where I’d been glued back together, so I was left to hope that the breakage and repair would at least be appreciated as history. A living contradiction of being solid but still broken; stronger and yet painfully delicate. But how do you value that soul?

  The murmurs of the unseen crowd came at me again. “This woman is such a failure. And she has the nerve to be old. And she has the nerve to have a younger husband. And she has the nerve to stick with a guy who had a kid with somebody else.”

  Clearly, my feelings weren’t originating from a healthy place. So much of what made the decision so difficult was that if I didn’t submit to a surrogacy, then I was convinced I needed to let Dwyane go. Even if he didn’t want to, I had to let him find someone who could give him what he wanted.