Not Bringing Home a Baby
On Academic Infertility and Miscarried Hope
They don’t tell you, when you start on the long road toward your classics professor career, how much it might cost.
Not just how many years you’ll spend earning your Ph.D instead of building your base salary or 401K, or how many loved ones you’ll lose as you move from job to job. What they don’t tell you is how long it might take you to find a mate, make a home, then fill it with life and laughter — if you do.
They don’t tell you how in your late 20s, you’ll scoff when a friend suggests you freeze your eggs. (I’ve got plenty of time! how could I afford that on my graduate stipend, anyway? I’ll think about kids when I’ve sorted out my career, thank you very much!) Or how his words will come back to haunt you a decade later when you’ve found a job, earned tenure, even met and married the only person you can imagine ever wanting as a co-parent. Your younger self never ranked kids high when there was so much world to see; your older one feared the tax that academic mothers pay. But now, making a person together seems like the perfect seal to your love, a late rose to blossom after you’re gone.
At first, it’s fun charting your cycle, joking about buns in the oven. But slowly, imperceptibly, you get anxious as you wait to ovulate, tense when work or travel slams shut your monthly window. Sex is no longer sexy. Your honeymoon morphs into a 28-day rollercoaster of hope and despair that makes your dissertation feel like a day at the beach. Your younger self had feared accidental pregnancy; your older one is shocked by the thousand things that have to go right for it to work, and how few are in your control. You are such an effective person in the Newtonian universe where cause begets effect, effort makes success. Now you’re stranded in quantum darkness where nothing you do seems to matter and your own inner workings are the alien unknown.
They don’t tell you how you’ll feel when you finally sit down with a fertility specialist to review the single-digit success rates for couples your age, the four- and five-figure costs (not covered by your insurance) for each escalating artifice in this business that profits from hope and fear. How you’ll reel when you learn your ovaries have been shutting down — treacherously, inexorably — all this time you were hitting your scholarly stride, running and biking five times a week, feeling in your prime. You always felt sorry for Greek and Roman girls, married off in early puberty. But in the eyes of modern reproductive medicine, women over 35 are already “geriatric” and your particular meat cage prematurely teeters on the brink of reproductive death.
They’ll explain that you were born with all the eggs you’ll ever have. Their numbers peaked at several million, then began their steep downward march, four months before you left your own mother’s womb. Your whole life, you’ve been both sheltering and shedding primordial seeds of future selves as old as your own, cradled in your mesodermal sanctum like unborn souls in the Underworld. Women’s bodies, you realize, are the true classical tradition: for millions of years, on macro and molecular levels, we’ve done intergenerational labor of preservation, replication and loss that dwarfs scribes’ transmission of a few hundred texts. You never treated your flesh like a temple, those summer afternoons you drank life and mimosas to the fullest; never thought of chromosomal decay all those nights in smoky pubs or long-haul flights. But all that time, you’d been a secret library, tending and discarding ancient ciphers just in case one zygotic codex — like the Veronese manuscript that rebirthed Catullus — might someday burst forth, be fruitful, and multiply.
They don’t tell you how quickly spring can turn into winter: how your heart starts to ache at the scent of a lilac, the baby ducks behind their mother, the vanishing futures that once seemed in your grasp. On the dubious counsel of internet strangers, you starve yourself of coffee, order alphabet-soup enzymes off Amazon, ransack your kitchen of all items that rubbed molecular shoulders with BPA. As you read funeral inscriptions with your Roman civ class, you speculate about Turia’s childlessness— was it low ovarian reserve, or polycystic ovarian syndrome? — while undergrads dewily debate her offer to yield home and husband “to another woman’s fertility.” (As if valuing a woman based on her fecundity is some archaic practice you’re not reimposing upon yourself every month.) On good days, you joke to your husband that he should trade you in too. On bad ones, you marvel that for all your degrees you can’t fulfill the same biological imperative as your average nematode.
They don’t tell you how those paradoxically conjoined twins, your sense of failure and lack of control, will contort your self-worth over pre-dawn drives to the clinic. There, in 10-minute slots that allow no time for courtesies or questions, an ultrasound technician who doesn’t know your name or face will probe your privatest parts to measure your follicles’ inadequacy in number and size. You learn to wear skirts and slip-off shoes to expedite the humiliation; your mind wanders to the cows you once saw on a mechanized dairy farm, queuing to be milked, measured, and medicated by robot. You wonder if they feel like you, flushed under hormones that blur your thoughts and vision, bloating like a zeppelin on the winds of foreign emotions. This is your punishment for daring to live a life of the mind; you’ve suddenly metamorphosed into a dysfunctional brood animal, an Io without the glow.
They don’t tell you how anxious you’ll feel when it comes time to schedule the intrauterine insemination; how the unforeseeable timing of your ovulation — like pretty much everything now — crystallizes your utter lack of control. You’ll pee on strips every hour and parse the photos with your best friend from grad school, veteran of years of such treatments, now expecting her second child; you’ll pray that your hard-won oocyte doesn’t wait for a business trip to start its capricious descent. Once you finally detect the appropriate amount of luteinizing hormone, you’ll plead with the nurses not to schedule the procedure during one of your classes, since there’s no one who can cover for you, no one you can tell.
The next morning, precisely 10 hours after your LH surge, 60 minutes before your next class, and 75 minutes after your husband’s own pilgrimage, you borrow his car (because he’s the only one with campus parking) and drive alone to the clinic. There, you fork over half a month’s salary in order to assume your familiar position in the stirrups and receive a few syringed drops of your husband’s centrifuged sperm. What’s effectively a biological stick-up by credit card reminds you of Crassus’ firefighters, their price rising with every passing minute; your ticking clock, too, has been weaponized against you. Though the odds are only about 5% that this gamble will pay off, you think what a story it’d make as you rest as horizontally and unsuspiciously as possible in a parked car, in a public lot before walking over to class. (All those percentages and probabilities, by the way? They’re based mostly on white people. You find out from your own medical research and family history, not your doctor, that African and Asian women may hit menopause years earlier than Europeans.)
So you wait, unhopeful, attuned to every uterine twinge, and as you teach the Georgics you wonder if the universal forces of procreation will pass you by:
Nay, every race on earth of men, and beasts,
And ocean-folk, and flocks, and painted birds,
Rush to the raging fire: love sways them all.
The 7.5 billion people on this planet, the 8.7 million other species, all of us are products of the same instinctive operations; so why is it so hard for you? You know intellectually that many others have shared this struggle, but right now you feel utterly alone, forever a wallflower in the divine dance of life.
… Some say that unto bees a share is given
Of the Divine Intelligence, and to drink
Pure draughts of ether; for God permeates all —
Earth, and wide ocean, and the vault of heaven —
From whom flocks, herds, men, beasts of every kind,
Draw each at birth the fine essential flame;
Yea, and that all things hence to Him return,
Brought back by dissolution, nor can death
Find place: but, each into his starry rank,
Alive they soar, and mount the heights of heaven.
Maybe Vergil, who liked boys, who left books instead of babies, left this as a pharmakon for his fellow chromosomal castaways. You envy his bees their miraculous means of reproduction, asexually plucking children off leaves, and even Aristaeus the clear explanations and directives he receives from his mother Clymene, then shape-shifting Proteus, when his beloved beehives fail. Your own reproductive system remains a mystery without oracles; your spirit animal, the whooping crane, dragged from the brink of extinction through extraordinary intervention and expense. (Humans dressed in bird costumes taught the chicks to eat, fly, even mate.)
They don’t tell you how you’ll feel when, for the first time in a life spent avoiding pregnancy, days after you you’d given up hope, unbelievably, impossibly, because you are not a lucky person, you pee on yet another stick and it reads positive for the pregnancy hormone hCG. You exult in your body’s sudden, miraculous capacity to fashion new life. You give the little bean a nickname. Your husband starts researching station wagons. You both somehow know that it’s a girl. Friends with kids visit and you start practicing, daydreaming, buying ice cream cakes. You become uncharacteristically tentative about scheduling visiting lectures next year. Your mind wanders as you write conference papers for an upcoming trip to Europe; with a secret smile you elaborately disguise your non-drinking from friends and colleagues. For the first time, your ultrasound reveals a non-empty womb, the telltale flicker of a heartbeat. By week 7, the embryo’s developing apace, and your risk of miscarrying — though one in four women of “advanced maternal age” do — is now down to 5%.
When it’s time to fly to Rome, you buy aisle seats for your bladder, pack carefully counted prenatal vitamins and blouses bought to hide your waist. One conference organizer Skypes in because she’s too pregnant to travel; you’re surprised how much you want to share your news, how eagerly you attend accounts of birth and parenthood. You tell a few close friends, and they’re thrilled; they’d been wondering, of course. You confide your anxieties (will they give me parental leave after the research fellowship I fought for? how will I squeeze my baby bump into my winter coat? how long will it take to get back to my book?) and receive not-quite-reassuring answers. Yes, life as you knew it will end, but a new one will begin; you’ll love and lose sleep more than you ever thought possible; it’ll expand what it means to be human.
You join your husband in Florence and fill yourself with wonder and granita. You briefly envy your twenty-year-old self, sipping sunsets and spritzes on your study abroad; this little stranger inside you, site of so much insensible molecular activity, already controls so much of what you do and think. You feel queasy as you thread your rented Cinquecento through winding roads and wilt as a heat wave bakes the Tuscan hills. But the cool air of London restores you, as you hit two more conferences (tired, distracted, feeling isolated and unconvivial between your secrecy and your teetotaling) and head home. It’s all in line with the app you’re using to track your pregnancy; now your fetus is the size of a lime, now your nausea and fatigue cede to headaches and dizziness. Check.
They don’t tell you how excited you’ll be for the 12-week ultrasound: the end of the danger zone, your cue to spread the news and plan for the future. Maybe your mother will visit and you’ll schedule a dinner party that weekend to celebrate with friends. But god forbid the sonographer grows suddenly quiet, hides the doppler, and steps out of the room as you wonder why your lime looks so small. A doctor will come in, sweep your belly again, and tell you gently, with infinite cruelty, that its heart stopped beating weeks ago.
Time will stop. You’ll have no words. You’ll never feel so betrayed by your own flesh. You’ve been walking around for weeks with a dead baby in your belly that your body wanted so badly it never told you something was wrong. You’ll fight to stay calm, ask questions, focus on its likely nonviability til the doctor leaves the room. And then you will lose it entirely. Your husband and your mother will hold you and stroke your hair and drive you home as you sob unconsolably for hours bleeding into days and weeks that eclipse any grief you’ve felt before. Somehow, you clean yourself up to keep a meeting with a Ph.D student, and that will be the best part of this unspeakable day. Then you’ll head across town to meet your OB for the first time, to schedule a dilation and curettage that will crack open your cervix and scrape out your womb like an unripe papaya.
During the excruciating four-day wait for medical closure to your abortive motherhood, you will marvel at all the technological assistance your body needed to get pregnant then un-pregnant again. Whatever your personal and professional accomplishments, you will feel like an utter failure as a human. You’ll envy anyone whose experience of this process felt natural or beautiful, whose sense of their baby’s reality is not inextricably tied with its loss. You’ll finally understand why Hecuba, why Antigone laid down their lives for bodies to mourn. Cocooned on your couch as the sun shines and your inbox fills, you don’t know how to grieve the spectral image you never got to hold, the death of a possibility that forever transformed you. Your husband will take you for long drives in the car where you conceived this collection of cells that grew to hold your world then choked out all the stars. When you catch a rare glimpse of whooping cranes dancing in the wild, you’ll feel nothing but empty.
The time finally comes, and you walk through a waiting room full of glowing moms and giddy two-year-olds for the D&C. Two intubated glass amphorae wait under antiseptic lights to convey the remains of your failed pregnancy to the lab for testing and disposal. You agreed to do this under local anesthesia in your OB’s office, all the sooner to get it over with and start healing. But as your mind floats away from your body during the ensuing invasion — a medieval procedure despite the suck of the vacuum — you regret every second of your consciousness. In the days that follow, all you look forward to is the nightly Ambien that returns you to oblivion; the moon on the lake, the starlit sky only hide the dark matter of unmeasured loss behind every life to reach the shores of light.
You did great, they’d told you; you’ll be back on your feet in a day or two, back to normal in four to six weeks. But your body denies the closure you need. Your cramps get worse; your back starts to ache; and seven days later, as you stumble to the bathroom at 3 a.m., the blood finally comes. An ultrasound reveals a clot far bigger than your fetus would have been. They missed a piece of placenta and your body kept feeding it with blood, filling you with pain that doubles you over. Unbelievably, unimaginably, you’ll have to another D&C, at the hospital this time, under ultrasound and full anesthesia.
Your mind goes black. You had no idea things could get any worse. Your days and weeks of trauma stretch ahead like a nightmare. You sob to your husband that you can’t, you won’t. You plead and bargain with a succession of nurses who intermediate with a series of doctors you never meet in person. The one concession you can wrangle is to be squeezed into surgery tonight, as soon as you’ve fasted eight hours. To kill time, you drive through obscenely green fields with your husband, waiting to deliver the clot that’s contracting your frame. You curse yourself for eating lunch and your locust luck for devouring yet more of your health and your time. You go to the hospital early, in hopes of at least a few ice chips or pills to dull the pain, queuing like a sacrificial cow for this latest blow of the ax. Somewhere amidst the thousand pre-surgical tasks that occupy the next four hours, you have to sign a form consenting to emergency hysterectomy. You think of all those ancient women who died in childbirth. Medea would rather face battle three times than give birth once; you never realized how hard it could be not to give birth. In the operating room, as you slip from consciousness into the hands of five masked faces, you wonder if you’ll wake up with a womb.
You might be lucky enough to have a mom who postpones her return to coax you to eat and fill your hot water bottle; friends who send texts or bring over food; a partner who takes off work to hold your hand through the worst (though as weeks wear on he’ll despair of his power to help, and you’ll dread abusing his patience). You might be lucky enough to have few haunting regrets about the way you’ve lived your life (though you might wish you’d never set foot in the fertility clinic, because some forms of knowledge are not power). And you might remember that you can, after all, adopt one of the hundred million kids in this world who need a home, or live a good life child-free; there are other ways beyond self-replication to invest a love that will outlast you.
But they can’t tell you how long it’ll take to stop feeling like Hector’s corpse on its tenth turn through the dust. Or how long your hormones will mock you with their mimicry of motherhood while residual backaches and bleeding pull your mind back into the abyss. They can’t tell you how long before innocent provocations — passing strollers, posts from happy parents, limes for cocktails now neither fun nor forbidden, test results and bills that keep arriving in the mail— stop tipping you over the edge. You think back on all the wines and prosciuttos you didn’t taste, the confidences you have to retract, all the visions you’d cradled (the smell of her head, the crinkle of her nose, the cookies and Christmas trees and first days of school) now flushed out as medical waste. You can’t think about anything else but you’re equally terrified of stopping, because then this marvelous maybe that ruled your life will pass forever from the world as if it never was. And then you’ll cry some more.
They can’t tell you why you had to go through so much for so little; how the world carries on untroubled as you and your husband age a decade in two weeks. They can’t tell you how it feels to be back to square one, but with every month that’s passed, more prone to miscarriage and genetic aberration, even shorter on eggs and time. They can’t guess your chances of ever conceiving again, of next time ending differently than this. Just as fetal DNA still pitter-patters through your bloodstream, you now bear an indelible heartache that will modulate the joy of any future positive. Above all, they can’t say if you were right to wait for love and security before trying to start a family — as if those were two paths that diverged in a wood and one day you checked a map and chose. (Guess what? You were going to be judged and punished whatever you did. Because if there’s one theme to the books you teach or the paintings you saw in Florence, it’s that all women, the Helens and Penelopes, the Eves and the Marys, the soccer moms and superstars, must suffer.)
They can’t tell you any of this, and I hope it goes otherwise for you. It’s been better for some and worse for many. But if you do meet with grief, all I know is to swaddle it in words you can hold and pin down, as Aristaeus wrestled Proteus for the fate of his bees. You might never make an old body bloom with new life or cut the locks of age. But whatever happens, you can share your story, witness mine, help us both feel less alone. After all, children and connection are born from the same mother: we all labor, like Vergil’s rower against the tide, to feel less adrift, less bereft of friends and stars, as our little suns set and the dance goes on.
This article is part of the “Romans Go Home” column
Nandini Pandey sends this one out to all her sisters.
