In third grade, my class took an overnight trip to a nature camp, where we were given an assignment to carry an egg with us for the whole trip without breaking it. We were each given a cup, which we fashioned, with yarn and a hole punch, into a necklace. We could decorate it freely, with stickers and sequins and colored pens, and we were given instructions on how to properly pad it with tissue paper. That afternoon, we walked carefully along stone paths and through the woods, ate potatoes au gratin in somber silence at long picnic tables, and fought for space so that we could set our eggs down while we built a geodesic dome out of plastic rods and packing tape. At the end of twenty-four hours, if our eggs remained intact, we were praised for our delicacy and focus.
But I didn’t leave my egg at camp. I kept it, and on the way back to the city I put the necklace on underneath the baggy cashmere sweater of my mother’s I was wearing, so that I could feel it on my naked skin. A teacher who looked like Sinéad O’Connor led a busful of white kids in civil-rights protest songs while I huddled against the plexiglass window. Back home, I placed the egg cup on my nightstand and the next day nestled it into the front pocket of my overalls. And then, at 3:45 pm, as we bounded toward the school buses, buzzed on freedom, I tripped on the stairs and the egg hurtled out of its little cup-bed and cracked on the floor. I shook with rage as the smell of rotten yolk rose up from the linoleum.
So on day fifteen of my IVF cycle, when my endometriosis flared and immobilized my distended lower half and I wondered why I had done this in the first place, the answer wasn’t hard to grasp: the egg cup. We were bred for this.
My friend Scotty brought a doula to my place for a ceremony to honor my uterus and help guide the right child to me. I loved the doula, who wore high-waisted jeans and had fluffy red bangs and looked generally like a nanny from 1975. After some tender dialogue about how each of us is on our own path toward the divine, she tied a string around my waist and asked me to select some beads from a Ziploc bag to make a talisman. I felt peaceful and sleepy, angry and hungry, annoyed that she wanted me to stand up for the end of the ceremony.
I remember thinking, as I looked at this perfect Berkeley-vibes fertility guru and at Scotty, who was as pregnant as a house, that anyone could be a mother. It even happens by accident. So why, if I craved it so much, would I be denied?
For three years I’d been in a group chat with a few women I knew professionally. It started on the day after Trump was elected as a means to vent and continued as several got pregnant and gave birth. They recommended CBD creams and Epsom salts, night nurses and high chairs. They were sensitive to my situation, but nobody could be sensitive enough, and as they shared pictures of their positive tests and stories of swelling and nausea, I started to feel the disparity between their bodies and mine.
Most of my texts were sent from hospital beds or waiting rooms or, once I began IVF, from my couch, as my stomach expanded from the hormones. I was erratic and needy, one day obsessed with adoption and another dying to locate a surrogate. I detailed my need for bathtub rails and disability-friendly hotels and maybe, if I were in my friends’ position, I also would have questioned the idea of these two realities meeting.
“Being a mother sounds hard to do when you’re so sick,” one said when I announced I’d try to have a baby within a year.
A few moments later, another said, “I’ll be taking some time off this chat to focus on the new baby.”
Lying in a bed at Mount Sinai, I watched them sign off, one by one, and it was hard to believe the chat had petered out simply because of our busy days and sleepless nights. I had been unable to hide my ugliness—my need and my desire, my obsession and my inadequacy. I was the guest nobody wanted to talk to at the party. There was no place for me in polite company. Back, again, to the strangers, who always seem to expect you.
Elsewhere on the internet, women who have had first-trimester miscarriages find one another using the hashtags #miscarriage, #miscarriagemama, #1in4, #mamagrief, or #lifeafterloss. They share sonograms and due dates, note missed milestones and fluctuating hormones, the rage and jealousy that accompany the loss of a seemingly viable pregnancy. They start their posts with phrases like “had to share” and “for those grieving with me today.” They joke and fight, apologize and reconnect, handing their lives over to a set of what-ifs that the modern maze of apps and timers and early imaging makes possible.
“Pool, Wig (self-portrait)”
Some of them find their way to the world of reborn dolls. Reborns are hyperrealistic baby dolls created with painstaking precision by artists who call themselves reborners. The reborns, which resemble the high-end porcelain dolls that used to be for sale in four installments of $19.99 in TV Guide in the Nineties, can be collected for pleasure or, as is increasingly the case, made in the size and likeness of fetuses that have been lost to miscarriage or stillbirth. The dolls are “birthed” in a ceremony called an unboxing and sometimes played with as if they were real infants, a practice that is either therapeutic or delusional, depending on whom you ask. (There are many YouTube videos of the practice—you can decide for yourself.)
In Keene, New Hampshire, in 2016, a police lieutenant named Jason Short smashed a car window in an effort to save a baby who appeared to be passed out in the summer heat, windows up. In a photo, even her flowery headband looked limp. When the lieutenant attempted CPR, Short told the Washington Post, “I went to put my finger in its mouth and it was all resistance. And I’m like, ‘This is a doll.’ ”
The doll, whose name was Ainsley, belonged to a woman who had lost her son a decade earlier. Ainsley was one of forty siblings.
I learned that none of my eggs were viable on Memorial Day, in the midst of a global pandemic. I was in Los Angeles when I got the call from Dr.Coperman, the slight Jewish man who was my entry into (and now exit from) the world of corporate reproduction.
I hadn’t been expecting the fertilization procedure to take place for another few weeks. My donor and I were still working on our agreement with a family lawyer, a boilerplate contract that basically stated that no matter what happened—if I died in a fiery crash like John Denver or was committed to the state after tattooing the words no boundaries on my face—he would have neither the obligation nor the ability to interfere with how the child was raised. Considering the amount of money I had already spent on this process, three thousand dollars in lawyer’s fees seemed like a steal, and I had only just bragged about it to my mother. “Weirdly cheap,” I said, living in the exact state of delusion that I have been attempting to observe in this piece. After all, nothing is really a steal when having a child is supposed to cost the same amount as an org*sm.
I had awoken that day at 2 pm in a cold sweat with a migraine and had this exact thought: If I had a child, how would this fly? I padded to the porch to smoke. I listened to a song called “Young and Sad” on repeat. I spilled a Mexican co*ke in my bed and cleaned up the mess with one of my nice towels, leaving it wadded on the floor.
I didn’t understand why Dr.Coperman was calling on Memorial Day. I was as surprised as anyone that doctors continue attempting to make vanity embryos during pandemics, much less on national holidays. When he spoke my name with that sympathetic downturn, the apologetic-doctor voice I have come to know so well, my face crumpled in apprehension.
“We were unable to fertilize any of the eggs. As you know, we had six. Five did not take. The one that did seems to have chromosomal issues and ultimately . . . ” He trailed off as I tried to picture it—the dark room, the glowing dish, the sperm meeting my dusty eggs so violently that they combusted. It was hard to understand that they were gone. That it wasn’t like trying to meet a friend for coffee on a weekend and missing your window, rescheduling for the next. It really wasn’t like that at all.
“You’re such a nice lady,” Dr.Coperman said. The word “lady” revolted me. I’m not a lady, I wanted to shout. I’m just a little girl dreaming of my very own baby. What about that don’t you understand?
“We all would have loved to give you a different result.”
He told me that he knew what I had gone through to get those eggs. That he saw how hard it was. That I was a trouper. I tried to believe that there was some value in the experience, in being tough through something tough. But ultimately, it felt like going on Survivor and acting like the camera crew wasn’t there. I had volunteered for the gig, and so the points were false.
Dr. Coperman said that we would have more results at the end of the week and could discuss my “remaining options,” but he knew that I knew that there really weren’t any. The moment in time when I made those eggs was like a rip in the sky. It rained gold coins for a day. We brought out our buckets.
I was wiping my eyes and thanking him again and again. In my head, I was already telling my parents. The only comfort for this failure of biology was biology, the inherent understanding of the people who made me.
It was almost 9 pm on the East Coast and my parents had already engaged in my mother’s “new favorite activity”: falling asleep while it’s still light out. My mother answered the phone, straining to sound alert. Hearing the telltale rise and crack of my voice, the hysterical alarm that has defined their past thirty-four years, she roused my father, who never tries to sound pleased when he isn’t.
“Oh, doll,” my mother said. “Oh, lovie.”
I wondered whether that meant something, whether I was getting what I deserved. I remembered the reaction of an ex-friend, many years ago, when I told her that sometimes I worried that my endometriosis was a curse meant to tell me I didn’t deserve a child.
She nearly spat. “Nobody deserves a child.”
If there’s one person less welcome among the IVF Warriors than a new mother, it is a woman who has given up on becoming one. For though these communities were created to support women trapped in the fertility-industrial complex, they hold fast to its founding commandment: never quit, because nothing is impossible. In a culture where some mothers are told that their children’s lives are worth nothing at all, other women—women who look like me and most of the IVF Warriors—are told that no expense is too great to bring another child into the world.
A few weeks after I found out that I would never become a biological mother, I started lactating. It was light at first, leaving subtle wet circles on my shirts, the milk as thin and pale as a spiderweb. When my breasts began to ache, Scotty came over to show me how to express the milk into a mug. It wasn’t much, but when it squirted I felt massive relief, as if a pimple had burst. The doctor didn’t seem as alarmed by this incident as I was, not by the health implications or the poetic ones either, and so I woke up every day for a month and pulled at my breast like it was rising dough, wiping away the streaky tobacco-infused beverage intended for no one.
When I was in rehab, my PTSD treatment required looking at a very specific issue of People magazine that—to use the parlance of our time—triggered me. It had been sitting innocently in the common area, a celebration of celebrity mothers, full of rich, glowing women in cushy living rooms and lush, green yards, surrounded by well-dressed kids playing with high-tech toys. Many of the women were pregnant, standing at kitchen counters in leggings and linen tops, chopping vegetables. One sat in bed with an eye mask, a toddler cradling her growing belly.
“The Waiting”
I told my therapist that the magazine had ruined my week. “What’s the worst part?” he asked. I described how it made me feel physically—the itchy nausea that set in when I thought about the logistics of a uterus stretching, of a vagin* engorging and hips widening. After all, I have had nothing but grief from those parts of my body. Pure grief. I have loved being a woman, but I have hated operating the equipment.
But more than that, I thought of an abstract future in which my ex and his new partner conceived a child. I imagined the paparazzi photo, a loose, long-lens shot from across an autumnal street in our old neighborhood. She has on a camel overcoat. It hangs open around her stomach, which extends like a beach ball under a clean white T-shirt. He is protecting her with one arm, ensuring that their unborn child is not grazed by oncoming traffic. The image—this projected future page of People magazine—is evidence that his journey toward parenthood did not end with me. My story ended with him.
But really, it never started. When I was a little girl, clutching the rotten egg baby in a cup, I had already made every egg I was ever going to have. They were inside me, destined to fail. I just didn’t know it yet. I was another co*cky woman-to-be, sure that I would have what I wanted because I wanted it. Because I had always gotten it. Because the world told me it was mine to take.
It’s wild how far you can drift from yourself in the process of trying to get what you want. What started as wanting to carry the child of the man I loved became wanting to have a child with a man who was willing to help me have one. Soon that became hiring a lawyer to draft a contract for a sperm-donor friend and calling a surrogate who came highly recommended by another celebrity. I was forced to admit just how much of it was about finishing what I started. I tried to have a child. Along the way, my body broke. My relationship did, too. In the process—because of it?—I became a functional junkie. I had lost my way, and a half-dozen eggs sitting in Midtown promised to lead me home.
Instead, each step took the process further from my body, my family, my reality. Each move was more expensive, more desperate, more lonely. I stopped being able to picture the ending. The result was simply that Dr. Coperman thinks I am a very nice lady.
There is a lot you can correct in life—you can end a relationship, get sober, get serious, say sorry—but you can’t force the universe to give you a baby that your body has told you all along was an impossibility. Weak animals die in the woods as their pack mates run ahead. Bad eggs don’t hatch. You can’t bend nature.
The irony is that knowing I cannot have a child—my ability to accept that and move on—may be the only reason I deserve to be anyone’s parent at all. I think I finally have something to teach somebody.
