Unmoored

Slice a third of me off

Leave me hanging in shreds

If I’m not a bastion of safety for you,

then I’m unmoored.

If I’m not the rock onto which

you can grasp and scramble over,

If I’m not the ladder you can ascend

and descend at will,

then I’ve failed you.

I hadn’t realized how blurry our identities were,

the membrane between us invisible and porous.

Our cells intermixed since you grew inside me.

I scramble to make sense of it,

to steer the ship right.

I hold you, guiding us to the lighthouse.

ROI

My next appointment at the fertility specialist was an intake with a nurse who was to run through the intricacies of IVF with me. She was young and crisp, tasked with providing the facts and the timeline. She started with describing the pharmaceutical order, which would be delivered to my house in two Styrofoam coolers. Inside, nestled in ice packs, would be nine different drugs, including:

·        Ganirelix AC injectibles

·        Docycycline capsules

·        Estradiol tablets

·        Methylprednisolone tablets

·        Ovidrel injectibles

·        Crinone gel

·        Gonal-F injectible

·        Menopur

·        Progesterone oil

They would also include two different sizes of syringes (3ml LL syringes 22 gauge and 18 gauge) and a Sharps container for the endless used needles I would produce.

I would be ingesting or injecting all of these drugs throughout the months-long process. I would be coming into the office at least once a week for blood draws, sometimes as many as three times a week, depending on the phase. I would have an egg retrieval for which I would be fully anesthetized, in which a massive needle would puncture my vulva, my uterus, and suck eggs from my ovaries. I would later go through an embryo replacement where the healthiest looking embryo would be placed into my uterus with the hopes that it would survive, implant, and grow.

This sharp young nurse, who looked far too young to have children of her own, kept checking off the boxes on her procedural list, listing out my fate, reading out my doom.

I began to feel hot. Really hot. I started to take off my sweater. The nurse asked me if I was ok, and I told her I was just getting really hot. I started to feel dizzy. I stared at the bland industrial carpet beneath my chair. The room started to unravel and her words started to echo. Then- darkness.

I fainted, fell out of the chair and hit the floor. I dreamed a ten second dream of the most vivid wild universe, where I saw a brilliant rainbow prism. Then the darkness started to recede, and there were all of these people around me- the nurse, the doctor, other staff members. I was utterly confused as to where I was and who these people were. They were asking me questions but I couldn’t answer. They looked worried. They brought me water and propped me up against the wall. Slowly, the room stitched back together again- I was in the same office, sitting on the tan carpet, and I was vibrating with fear.

I couldn’t speak for a long time, but eventually was able to respond to their questions (what month is it? Who’s the president?), enough to satisfy them that I didn’t have a concussion. I was struggling to breathe right, to regulate one breath in, one breath out. The doctor asked me if I had someone who could drive me home. My husband worked about an hour and fifteen minutes from the hospital, and as a school teacher, it wasn’t ideal to ask him to leave his students to come rescue me. My co-worker and good friend, however, worked very close by. I called her and explained that surprise! I’d been going to a fertility clinic and I’d fainted and could she please come pick me up?

I sat on a bench outside the clinic. The sun was shining, and early spring flowers were sprouting from the mulched beds- pansies and petunias, in shades ranging from purple to pink. My friend pulled up in her white minivan and asked me on the drive home, “So you’re trying to get pregnant? That’s exciting!” I wanted to match her enthusiasm, and agreed that it was exciting, but my words trailed off. I was still having some difficulty verbalizing anything, and it felt like my head was stuffed with cotton. I didn’t know why I had fainted, and it was upsetting.

She drove me home and helped to situate me on our soft, grey couch in the living room. She looked at me kindly as I reassured her that I would be fine, then she left. My dogs sat on the couch with me, Olive trying to kiss my face over and over again. She was always so sensitive to our emotions. I wrapped my arms around my chest to try to hug myself, and closed my eyes, waiting for my husband to come home.

When he came home, my husband was nothing but kind to me. He also didn’t understand why I’d fainted, and he was worried about me. We wanted to make sense of it, but it wasn’t clear if it was a physical or mental issue. I called my primary care doctor and made an appointment. A couple of days later at the doctor’s office, they ran some tests including an EKG to determine if there was a medical cause for my fainting, but nothing turned up. The doctor suggested something called Vasovagal syncope, a fairly common condition that leads to fainting. He told me that sometimes your nerves give the wrong signal to your blood vessels causing them to open up, and that your heartbeat simultaneously slows down, which causes your blood pressure to drop. And then you lose consciousness and fall out of your chair at the doctor’s office.

The thing was that the fainting didn’t go away. Over the next few weeks, I was subjected to rounds of injections of hormones, delivered at home by my husband. The first time he had to inject me in the thigh, I passed out at the sight of the needle. I had never before been afraid of needles, but was suddenly so terrified that my brain shut down my entire system. I had to lay down for every injection to prevent fainting. It happened at the fertility clinic too. I went through weeks of blood draws to test my hormone levels and fainted the very first time. The nurses learned quickly that I had to lay down for every blood draw. I tried to joke with them about it, saying, “Can I lay down? I’m a fainter”. But it didn’t feel funny. I just needed to feign humor to get through the stress of each needle. What was actually happening to me was disassociation- the protective trauma-induced response to shut off parts of your brain to keep you from fully experiencing that which is terrorizing you. Disassociation can be a symptom of post-traumatic syndrome (PTSD), or anxiety, depression, or other mental health illnesses. It’s frightening when it happens, but it’s your system’s best defense in the face of that which it thinks you can’t handle.

What did it mean that I was voluntarily participating in a medical process that was so terrifying to my system that I kept disassociating again and again?  Why did I continue to push through it, overriding the very loud and incredibly persistent signals that I was way beyond my boundaries of comfort? The truth is that I wasn’t aware that I was being traumatized appointment after appointment. I was succumbing to the trauma in service of producing a child as quickly as possible because my time was running up. I felt like my future hung on this very thin nail, wobbly in the wall and almost ready to fall to the ground. I’ve always been good at intellectualizing rather than listening to my body, whether that meant landscaping for my dad for ten hour days in 90 degree heat without a proper break or trying to not break my stride at work when dealing with an active migraine. I was excellent at rationalizing that the work itself was more important then my well-being or comfort. So IVF wasn’t any different. There was a problem that we were trying to solve, and that problem was my infertility. Therefore it was my responsibility to solve that problem and get pregnant, no matter the cost.

If I were given the choice to go through it again, I’m honestly not sure what I would choose. IVF was horrible for me- gut-wrenching emotional and physical pain, riddled with trauma and fear- and yet, it succeeded. I did produce a beautiful, wonderous, curious and bright child. I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome. And yet, did I need to suffer that much? Did I need to incur the mounting cost of trauma that would take years of therapy and medication to unravel so that I could morph back into a fully functional human? Was the benefit worth the cost?

Everything was about to change

Sitting on the edge of the exam table at the obgyn, I explained to my doctor that we’d been trying to get pregnant for a long time but nothing was happening. That I was getting worried because the clock was ticking on my fertility, and I felt pressure to do something about it. The doctor listened attentively, her hands resting in her lap under the weight of a gorgeous diamond engagement ring. She told me that she could do a few tests and get me started on the process but recommended that because of my age I go straight to a fertility expert. She had someone whom she could refer me to, an excellent doctor who had helped countless patients from her practice.

I began to feel a little shaky and tried to take a deep breath to regulate my heartbeat. I was nervous about what a fertility expert meant. I guessed it meant a battery of tests which would culminate in some horribly invasive procedure. I was scared. And a little ashamed. I couldn’t seem to get pregnant on my own- wasn’t that my responsibility? Wasn’t it something that happens to women all the time? Wasn’t Mother Nature supposed to be looking out for me?

Still, I booked an appointment with the fertility specialist, my heart pounding in my chest. My consultation was scheduled a few weeks after my thirty-sixth birthday. My body was scared and didn’t want to go through with it, but my rational mind said that I needed to push through the fear and at least get the information.  Then I could make a decision.

The fertility doctor was kind and had a million-dollar smile. White-haired, tanned and naturally handsome, he looked like he drove a Tesla. He had a beautiful gold watch and smile wrinkles encircling his eyes. He made me feel instantly comfortable, cared for. In our consultation, he explained that yes, thirty-five really is the age around which female fertility tends to decline, and that I had made the right decision in pursuing fertility testing. There would be an initial set of tests, and from there we would make a data-driven decision about our next steps. It seemed logical, clear and scientific- totally different from the anxiety churning in my stomach, blocking me from clear thought.

A week after the tests, the results were in. My husband was teaching and wasn’t available to join me at the clinic, so I drove to the office alone. My doctor and I sat in leather armchairs on opposing sides of his polished mahogany desk. I gripped the armrests, feeling a little swelling in the back of my throat- pre-emptive sadness rising. The doctor said that unfortunately the tests didn’t point to any specific issue or deficiency, not in me or in my husband. That ultimately, it was likely that my fertility was declining because I was of “advanced maternal age”. He said softly that my best chance was to go straight to IVF. His office had checked with my insurance, and because of my age insurance would pay for it. He paused and said it would be wise to get started right away, and not wait for so much as another menstrual cycle to pass. Time was suddenly incredibly precious, and pressuring.

I felt like the wind had been sucked out of my lungs like a balloon leaking air. The lump in the back of my throat burned as I began to cry quietly, my head down, trying not to let my tears reach his leather chair. I knew enough about IVF to know that it would be an all-consuming and painful journey.  I was so scared of it. Of the needles, of the pain, of the constant doctor appointments, and worst of all, of the potential for none of it to work. I could go through months or even years of medical interventions and never conceive a baby.

The doctor handed me a tissue. I was embarrassed. I was crying while he was delivering me an option, a salvation, a possibility to have a child. He was presenting me with a possible bright future. But I just felt doomed. It was extremely sad to me that I couldn’t just get pregnant like other women could. It felt really unfair. It wasn’t going to be simple to become a mother.

My heart felt knotted up with my guts as I wondered if I wanted to be a mother enough to go through with this. I could probably be fine without ever having children. But my husband- what about my husband? What about our agreement to start a family? He was counting on me. And part of me still wanted to have children. There was so much to untwist and untangle- and the pressure was to decide within weeks whether to proceed or not. It was hard to breathe.

I wiped my tears away and apologized for crying. The doctor encouraged me to talk to my husband, and to think about it. Just not for too long. He looked at me with kindness, maybe with pity.

I thanked him and passed through the waiting area quickly so the receptionists wouldn’t see that I’d been crying. I stepped out of the office into the cold March sunshine. Out there, the world was unchanged. It was the same beautiful day as when I’d entered the office. But inside my body, everything was different. Everything was about to change.

The Squirrel

When I think about the squirrel, I close my eyes as hard as I can to try to block the memory from my brain. One beautiful summer day when I was 36, I’d taken my dogs to the dog park, where they leapt over fallen trees and weaved through ferns in an exhaustive race. My dogs Rufus and Olive could have been twins but Rufus hailed from New Jersey and Olive from South Carolina. They both weighed in at forty some pounds and had wiry terrier hair, light brown and curly, with little lion’s manes around their necks.

Olive and Rufus chased each other through the woods, disappearing from sight for several minutes and then bursting out of the underbrush beside me. They ran off again into the bushes and I heard their excited barks trail off through the trees. They raced as I lapped the park, carefully stepping over roots painted hot pink in the trail. 

At the gate to the park, where dogs congregated around dirty water bowls and laid in a perennially muddy puddle, I found Olive and Rufus waiting for me. Olive had something in her mouth.

“What is it, Ollie?” I asked. As I got closer I saw that it was a squirrel. I yelled at her to drop it, and she softly opened her mouth to let the squirrel fall to the dirt. It was still alive, though its tiny grey belly was greatly distended, as if it had swallowed a golf ball. I couldn’t tell if it was sick and vulnerable, and that’s how Olive was able to catch her, or if Olive’s teeth had caused an injury.

I looked for some large soft leaves with which to pick up the squirrel and ripped some off of a nearby tree. I carefully wrapped up her tiny little body, all one and a half pounds of her, my brain racing to figure out how to save her. I had to get out of the dog park so that the dogs couldn’t try to get at the squirrel, who had closed her eyes and seemed to be having trouble breathing.

I hurried out of the gates and sat down on a wooden park bench where I could still see my dogs inside the park. I laid the squirrel gently in my lap on her back and called my husband.

“What do I do? What should I do?” I cried into the phone. I started shaking from the panic that was gripping me, a response that I didn’t understand at the time. He said I needed to try to get her to a veterinarian. I hung up and Googled local wildlife refuges and found that the closest one was about 45 minutes away. How was I going to safely get the squirrel into my car and load the dogs in and keep them from getting to her in the car? I felt hopeless, torn between my obligation to my dogs and wanting to help this tiny creature.

I watched the squirrel in my lap, splayed out on soft green leaves. I watched her breath rate slow down, then stop altogether. Her tiny body relaxed. Despite the golf ball sized abdomen, she had no puncture wounds and no blood on her fur, so she may have been sick and died from the shock. Tears overwhelmed me, a feeling of failure accompanying them. One of our dog park friends had seen the whole incident and came over to me. I showed him the tiny grey baby in my lap. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. He said his house backed up onto some woods, and he would bury the squirrel in a place where his dogs couldn’t get her, if I’d like. I handed her over, and Jack walked away with the squirrel in his arm and his two hound dogs trailing him.

I sat on the bench until I could get it together, feeling humiliated by the tsunami of emotions that had overtaken me. I really dislike being the center of attention or doing anything at all to have people notice me in public. I walked back through the gate of the park to collect my dogs, who’d been watching me through the chain link, confused.

A few weeks prior to the squirrel, my father was planning to sit for the bar exam for the fourth or fifth time. Given his advanced Parkinson’s, he couldn’t drive himself all the way to the testing site in Philadelphia.  My mother, who had never been on board with his decision to attend law school while trying to run a business and being so sick, refused to make the drive again, so I volunteered. As we drove down the Pennsylvania turnpike in the bright sun, we talked about his previous attempts at passing the bar, at his law school experience as a senior citizen student, and about his summer landscaping projects. He always enjoyed gardening, even the mulching and weeding. It was something we often did together. He'd pay me to plant marigolds and geraniums in the front beds, tucking mulch around them in the early summer. What we weren’t talking about was what I was going through that summer. I’d started in-vitro fertilization (IVF) to try to get pregnant, and it was both emotionally and physically painful.

My father knew that I was going through IVF, as I’d told him and my mom when I started the process. I’d called home at the outset of the journey, hoping to reach my mother, as I wanted them to know that I’d be going under general anesthesia as part of the process. It seemed to me a courtesy to let them know, given the potential risks with anesthesia. My father answered. I asked if my mother was home but no, she was out grocery shopping.

I took a deep breath.

“Ok, well, I just wanted to let you guys know that I’m going under general anesthesia as part of my IVF treatment, and I’m sure everything will be fine, but I just wanted to let you know.” I said.

He laughed a little and said, “Spare me the details, Leigh. I’ll let your mother know.” And then he hung up. I stared at my phone. His reaction felt cold and dismissive. He could have been embarrassed by the topic- it was sensitive, anatomical- maybe he didn’t know how to react. What was more likely was that the issue had nothing to do with him so he couldn’t engage with it. My dad was a very self-absorbed person, as are many people with depression and a history of trauma. He navigated the world by his own self-interest, steering away from other people’s concerns, issues, or pain if it didn’t directly impact him. The parameters of his universe were dictated by his own needs and desires, even when it came to parenting. There was a familiar refrain when I asked him for advice: What should I major in at college? Where should I move next? What should I do with my life? The answer was almost always, “Well, whatever, Leigh.”

After that phone call and on our drive to Philadelphia for the bar exam, my dad started to talk about religion. The impossibility of faith was a longstanding topic of fascination to him. He both admired people who believed, and thought that belief in anything beyond this world to be nonsense. He began with his usual diatribe. “The beautiful thing about religion is that people believe that they’re going to see their loved ones again after they die. They believe they’ll meet them again in heaven, and that must bring them so much comfort.”

And the next thing out of his mouth was: “You know, Leigh, someday you’re going to look at your baby, and you’re going to say, ‘Baby, you’re going to die someday’.”

The air was sucked out of the car, sucked out of my body. He was speaking about the baby that didn’t exist yet. The baby that I was suffering physically and emotionally to create. He was thinking about this non-existent collection of cells expiring before it had even begun.

I willed myself to stare at the road ahead even as my eyelids wanted to close to shut it out. I could feel something cold and terrible fill my veins. My chest began to tighten and the tip of my nose began to burn as if tears were imminent. I didn’t reply. I didn’t know how to reply. I just drove. This fatalistic obsession of his was well-documented in our family, but this was a new low. This was a perversion of the deepest magnitude. To think, much less verbalize, the death of a child years ahead of its inevitability, showed the twisted grip that death held on his mind and soul. His words threatened to drag me and my non-existent child down, deep into the depths of the ocean where there was no oxygen and no light.

We passed the remainder of the drive mostly in silent tension. I knew that there was no defense that would help the situation- if I freaked out and yelled or if I calmly told him just how fucked that line of thinking was, he would argue back that death is just a part of life, another common refrain he sang a lot. I wanted to get out of that car as soon as possible. I weaved through the Center City streets, parked in front of his downtown hotel near the convention center, gave him a hug, and wished him well on the exam.

On my drive home across the bridge to New Jersey, I felt a burning start to rise in my chest. It rose up into my throat and my mouth- it tasted like bitter anger. As I rumbled across the river, I started thinking, and what I thought about was protection. I needed protection from him- from his fatalism, from his darkness, from the net that death cast over his mind. He was too far gone, too mentally ill. He was too risky and I was too vulnerable. I was soft and tender, prone to fainting and crying at the fertility doctor’s office in my weekly check-ups. I needed safety from his damage, from his ability to damage me. I had suffered a lifetime of his fatalism, the perennial darkness that had tucked itself into the crevasses of my brain.

By the time I pulled into my driveway I began to see that my relationship with him had been pulled too taut, the fibers shredded and frayed. I couldn’t maintain a relationship with him, not while I was going through IVF, at least. I had to let the fabric rip, let space and silence exist where there was once connection. I wouldn’t speak to him, visit him, text him- I wouldn’t entertain any contact with him. I would build myself an exoskeleton, plate by plate, until I was fortified, impenetrable. That would protect the bundle of raw nerves I had become. In order for me to conceive this child and build a new family, I had to rip apart a bond with my own family.

Jovan Musk

Every morning my father would shower, shave, and splash liberal amounts of Jovan Musk on his neck. The smell was sharpest in the morning, but I could still catch it when he came home at night and wrapped me in a hug. When I was little, he would dress every day in slacks, a button-down shirt and loafers, and tuck a handkerchief in his back pocket. My father had started two businesses in a couple of years- a Burger King franchise, and an independent home video rental store. His video store was one of the first in the area, a real entrepreneurial accomplishment. As a businessman, he dressed and smelled the part.

As the years went on, competition heated up for his video rental store, primarily a newcomer called Blockbuster Video. They opened shop a couple of miles up the road, and their store was larger, brighter, and had a wider selection of videos to rent. My father still dressed and smelled like a businessman every day, though fewer and fewer customers were coming to his store.

Eventually, he had to close his video store. He couldn’t compete with Blockbuster. And his Burger King, once a wildly successful franchise, was weathering the storms of a fickle economy. Where he’d once been able to hire professionals to help with the maintenance of a high-volume fast-food restaurant, he started to take on some of that work himself. He started coming home smelling of French fries.

My father bought a set of navy blue Dickies workwear and a pair of steel toed boots. Some mornings after he showered and shaved and put on his Jovan Musk, he’d pull on his Dickies and boots to go down to the Burger King. He had to do the administration and accounting of the restaurant, but he also had to sling fry baskets and build Whoppers sometimes. He had to kneel down on the red tiled floor to scrub the grout, and bend over in the parking lot to pick up cigarette butts. My father had planned to get rich by opening multiple franchises in the area and run them as a high level manager.  Now he was a part-time maintenance man, working alongside teenagers who had no respect for him. I don’t know if it was more humiliating for him or for us.

By the time he sold the Burger King, his Dickies had become everyday wear. And when I hugged him at night, the smell of the deep fryer obscured his Jovan Musk.

Portrait of my father

Mom’s Mink

He took us to see the houses he grew up in- a small but proper house in Morristown, the huge pink house on Loantaka Way in Madison. They moved to the big house after the war, when GIs were buying cars in droves and the dealership was making profit hand over fist. They were able to buy whatever they wanted: a beach house on Barnegat Bay, a boat named “Mom’s Mink”, a 4 carat diamond ring, a full length fur coat. Every single photograph of my grandfather from that time shows him with a drink in his hand. Even while driving the boat.

The Squirrel

When he was young, his friend took him shooting with a .22 rifle. He killed a squirrel with that gun and felt so terrible about it that he decided he would never shoot a gun again. After college he joined the Marines.

His bartender

He was the valedictorian of the Madison High School class of 1958, he would tell us proudly, even though he didn’t often go to class. He didn’t even need to study, he’d say. His mother was salutatorian, so he came from intelligent stock. He went on to study Eastern religions at Princeton but dropped out after two years, joking that the only person who would miss him was his bartender.

The Flag

In 1964 the World’s Fair came to Queens, NY, and he and his friend Charlie worked the Tropicana orange juice booth. They stole a massive World’s Fair flag. It is folded neatly in my mother’s basement like a military souvenir.

Deep fryer

Sometimes I woke to the smell of coffee and cigarettes in the kitchen, and that heavenly combination equaled joy. It meant he was home with us. Not gone for days on end, working or otherwise unaccounted for. I would race down the stairs and jump into his lap. Later, after he quit smoking, he would come home smelling of French fries, after spending all day in his Burger King.

Starfish

We’d rent a beach house on Long Beach Island that we affectionately called the Little Red House. One night after a big storm, hundreds of starfish washed up on shore. He collected them and pressed them under heavy books on the picnic table in the backyard. We were disappointed that the starfish wouldn’t lay flat. Their little arms kept curling upwards to the sky. We threw them all away. Our one souvenir was a horseshoe crab, which he told me to give to our science teacher.

Heroes

His heroes were Hemingway, Johnny Cash, and Van Gogh. He took us to see Les Miserables twice on Broadway. He cried both times.

Autumn

Every autumn, he would look out the bay window and sigh. “I hate fall, because it means everything is about to die.” He died on the winter solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year.