Exploiting My Baby

So, I’m thirty-eight. I’m arguably “old as fuck,” and my husband and I decide it’s time to pull the goalie. In the same second we decide to have a baby (after much debate, the nature of which I’ll get to later), I also quietly resign myself to being infertile. I am not only “AMA” (Advanced Maternal Age; saw it written on my medical chart once and felt like Grandma Moses) but I’ve also had an STD, thanks to the stand-up comedian I dated for a year when I first moved to Los Angeles.

Before the physical part of this equation, let’s get into the mental part. If you have a horrible attitude, and have made the presumption, like I did, that conception is never going to happen for you, please don’t be conned into thinking your crappy attitude about fertility can ruin your chances of conceiving. That seems to be the conventional wisdom tumbling out of the mouths of crypto-spiritual clowns. They try to shame you into thinking your thoughts either make you sick or heal you. In a way, it would be nice if it were that simple, but my uterus has proven that theory wrong. Way wrong.

Most times I hang up the phone, I generally regret at least one thing I’ve said or neglected to say. When I worked in morning radio, I would spend the entire twenty-minute drive home from the studio each afternoon mulling over something idiotic I had said, like I was jamming a dull scissor into the same spot on my forearm repeatedly. After three years doing the news and being Adam Carolla’s sidekick on the FM dial, this little ritual down Wilshire Boulevard improved exactly none, and even now when I record a podcast, or appear as a guest on Dr. Phil or some other show, I find at least one moment to kick myself in the ass about. I tell you this just so you understand how deeply I question myself, how quick I am to blame myself, and how unlikely I am to let myself off the hook for even a mild or nonexistent transgression. I spend way too much of my life lightly basting in a marinade of shame.

That’s why I’m writing about it, because a bug doesn’t have a personality, nor does it differentiate between nice girls and skanks. Lots of us have caught them, and it certainly doesn’t mean we’re dirty. There was nothing especially whorish about me; in fact, the stand-up who gave me the “lie down” was maybe my sixth sexual partner, all of whom were long-term boyfriends. It would make me feel all mysterious about things if I could spin a dark yarn detailing drunken nights with strangers, but despite the fact that my mom was a Frye boot- wearing, free love-celebrating, Joy of Sex-reading, laissez-faire kind of parent, I have always been kind of old-fashioned about sex. I refuse to feel like a slut even though I had the VD so bad I ended up at the free clinic in Hollywood, which is generally a sign that you are failing at life.

Even if I’d caught chlamydia from the pizza delivery guy, however, that still would not make me a bad person, and while it might rightly make you question my judgment, it seems critical to note just how common STDs are. With an estimated four million new cases of chlamydia alone occurring each year in the United States, there have to be lots of women of childbearing age who have jacked up tubes or worse. Not everyone is going to be completely forthcoming about why they have trouble getting pregnant, so you may not hear much about the clap and fertility, but I’m starting to think lots of us are in the same boat: the SS VD.

I was living down the street from a cemetery in a $385-a-month studio apartment in a building that was basically the Village of the Damned; when people asked where I lived I would either tell them travel east on Beverly until you get scared, then go about three more miles, or I would simply tell them to look for the corner of Purse Snatch and Car Jack.

My neighbors were a glamorous bunch of bon vivants. There was the Asian transsexual prostitute turning tricks in her studio next door to mine. There was the pudgy, middle-age dude who showed me copious poems about his cat, Shadow, his “only reason for living,” and who regularly received Meals on Wheels. There was the baggy pants dude trying to be a choreographer who would play the same eight bars of “Unbreak My Heart” over and over until I wanted to Break His Face. There was the building manager, a guy on disability for chronic fatigue syndrome (Jesus, that man was tired), and there was the elderly man down the hall who rarely left his apartment but blasted every Dodger game from an old transistor radio. So this was life in the fast lane. That is, if your destination was the heart of freaking darkness.

Anyway, as you can imagine, I was uninsured, which is how I ended up getting my privates checked out by a staunch nurse with a tight blond braid at a Planned Parenthood nearby, meaning in the ghetto. She said I seemed fine, and by that, I think, she meant white; she sent me home with some yeast infection medication. Before leaving the clinic, I used the bathroom. When I went to wash my hands, I noticed the soap dispenser was empty and I remember thinking, “No soap? Doesn’t soap prevent the spread of disease, and isn’t that what this place is all about?”

Several visits and Pap smears later, I learned I had chlamydia, which a guy can carry and be totally asymptomatic, so I could hardly blame the comedian, although I might have felt better about the whole thing if he hadn’t “all of a sudden” remembered a cocktail waitress in Charlotte who mentioned something about having something, which didn’t seem relevant to mention until, um, it was.

There was such a sense of euphoria when I was being treated by an actual doctor, with a white coat and everything, that I almost didn’t want to ask if there would be long-term effects, but I did and he told me my tubes might be scarred and I could have trouble having kids later. He said he didn’t think so, and I asked how we would know for sure. “If you try to have kids and it doesn’t work,” he answered.

I take my friend, a mother of two-year-old fertility treatment twins, out for margaritas, and grill her about the entire process, taking down the name and phone number of her fertility specialist. The forty-seven-year-old redhead from Pilates who finally conceived after five attempts at in vitro fertilization, I corner her to get every detail, marveling at her determination (not to mention bankroll). When I run into a pregnant neighbor at the Coffee Bean, I trap her in a fatal talk hold while I soak up tales of daily hormone shots, Clomid cycles, acupuncture, cryopreservation of embryos and intrauterine insemination. I see her eyeing the door as her latte goes cold, but I can’t let her loose.

I’m on a need-to-know basis with every woman who has ever had trouble getting pregnant. Furthermore, the girls who just flat out procreated with no trouble? I need to know their stories, too. Mainly so I can resent them. Mentally, I am socking away money for assisted reproductive technologies. I will need them all, I am certain.

Within just a few days off the pill, I am consumed with infertility and certain that because of my age and my dubious STD history it’s going to be a long, barren haul that may never ever actually yield a baby. Infertility is everywhere I look until I am convinced that no one gets pregnant just like that, and that one-night-stand pregnancies must be an urban legend or the province of teenagers with more youthful vaginas. I walk by the newsstand, and it seems like every actress I see is either having multiples from fertility treatments or hiring a surrogate. When I think of my reproductive system, I literally picture one lonely egg, as if human eggs look like chicken eggs, covered in cobwebs and dust like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. While I’m probably supposed to be making vision boards filled with giggling babies and gloriously pregnant bellies, I’m mainly picturing that egg, decayed, rotting and old as fuck.

I start peeing on those ovulation kit sticks and trying to squeeze through the so-called fertility window. When I calculate that a day is the optimum day, based on half-assed knowledge cobbled together from searching the Internet and reading parts of books and unscientifically polling various women, I pressure my husband into having some very un-fun, desperate, high-strung sex the second he gets home. Afterward, I sit in bed facing the headboard with my legs elevated against the wall for twenty minutes. Someone told me this helps the swimmers succeed in getting to their destination, which may be true, but it makes you feel like a character Meg Ryan would play, bursting with such extreme quirkiness and adorable self-doubt that she’s like a knife in your brain. Every morning before work, before rushing out at the ass crack of dawn to prep the morning news, I pee on a stick to find out my ovulation status. It’s the least romantic, most confusing, clinical, pressure-filled month ever. I detest those sticks, the legs against the wall, the lame, forced sex.

Thus I came into contact with The Secret, the self-help documentary that posits the “Law of Attraction,” the idea that your thoughts and feelings attract events. Ostensibly, this principle is both hopeful and elegant; Oprah did two episodes on it, and I like to live according to her teachings. However, let’s just say you can’t master your negative thoughts. Well, too bad, because you are doing some major “manifesting” of all the disastrous bullshit that crosses your mind, or so says The Secret and all of the New Age-y schools of thought that run parallel.

One friend actually printed out a hundred quotes from The Secret for me, and I folded it and tucked it into my handbag, thinking, it can’t hurt. Unless, of course, I’m found dead and I can’t pretend from Beyond that I was toting that thing around with a sense of irony.

“Whatever is going on in your mind is what you are attracting,” read the handout. “You become and attract what you think,” it further taunted me. “People think about what they don’t want and attract more of the same.” And if I wasn’t already filled with New Age guilt, another quote warned me, “Those who speak most of illness have illness” and “You attract your dominant thoughts.”

Armed with this knowledge, I still could not stop the infertile thoughts, the ongoing calculations of how many in vitro fertilizations I could afford if I sold my condo, the image of that yellowing egg fixed in my head, burned there like an image paused too long on an early plasma TV screen. “Choose your thoughts carefully,” admonished the dog-eared page of quotes. Like I can choose my own thoughts. I have about as much luck with this as I have with betting on horse races or corralling killer bees.

After the first month of unpleasant sex and legs on the wall, I sit next to a woman at a wedding who is both a cardiologist and a new mom. She tells me, “Throw away the sticks. The sticks stress women out and cause performance problems with men. The sticks don’t work. Your fertility window is three days long. Just have lots of sex, so you don’t miss it. Just have Lots. Of. Sex.”

Because I need structure, I ask her how much is lots, and she says every other day, to allow the Mister’s sperm count to recover (I’ve since read this is a myth, and that every day is better, but whatever). This sounds like a plan. And while this petite woman in a fringe shawl daintily nibbling on a dinner salad isn’t my doctor, she is a doctor, and that’s good enough for me.

Not only will X-rated movies increase your husband’s enthusiasm for the conception process, it may also increase his fertility. In my duties as a “news” reporter, I once did a story about an evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia who found that looking at pornographic images of men and women together can increase the quantity and quality of a man’s sperm. According to this study, watching another male having at it with a female creates a perceived “competition,” thus inspiring faster, more motile swimmers. Yes, this is the kind of hard news I brought to the FM dial.

It comes to me, having never actually watched porn, that I should spearhead a “let’s watch porn” campaign with my husband. I had interviewed lots of porn stars while doing morning radio with Carolla, and I always thought they were sweet girls—super molested and broken, but sweet. The porn stars and their agent-boyfriends were always handing out free product, which I dutifully took home because I can’t turn down free stuff, even Sinner Takes All.

Just about every man likes porn, and if you think yours doesn’t, you are probably wrong. I once read an article in Cosmopolitan magazine suggesting there are four things that are true of every male: He wants to earn more than you do, he wants more oral sex, he would rather hang out with you than his buddies, and he consumes porn, whether you know it or not. Yeah, I just quoted a Cosmo story, which neutralizes the Great Expectations reference I dropped earlier, but I must say I have found those four things to be universal when it comes to guys.

So we delve into my stash of free DVDs. Wow. I don’t know if you realize this, but there is an angry, aggressive, extreme trend in pornography right now. The drooling, spitting, pierced, tattooed adult actresses of today do lots of deliberate gagging, uncomfortable cursing, and submitting to sexual positions that can’t possibly feel good unless your uncle fondled you and destroyed your ability to create personal boundaries. These girls are all penciled-in eyebrows and dry stripes of bleached hair. They are hard. And more to the point, they don’t look like they are having any fun, which makes me wonder how any woman watching them can have any fun. Like a virgin having bad sex for the first time, I wonder what all the fuss is about. This is a multibillion-dollar industry?

These foxy gals have their real boobs and the films have enough of a plot to keep me interested, ’cause I need a little something to hang my hat on, you know? Sorry to be a cliché, and I don’t need it to be The English Patient, but I do require some kind of context for why these folks are having sex. And while I’m sure they are also molested and broken, the ’70s chicks seem so much less wrathful about it. In fact, you almost get the idea most are just legit actresses working porn on the side to supplement their waitressing tips. Unlike today’s jagged, crystal-meth-addicted porn stars, the actresses of yesteryear are maybe on a couple of Quaaludes, but they genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves. Feathered hair, bell-bottom jeans and round figures make them even more irresistible. We experiment with some ’80s films as well, and while the production values are lower and the lace glove quotient is higher, at least you won’t see today’s female-boner-killing spitting and gagging.

We decide to subscribe to a service like Netflix, only for porn, which allows you to rent any two films at a time and exchange them for new ones through the mail. Then we hit the jackpot: At a hotel, we stumble across our first so-called parody porn, a graphic reimagining of The Brady Bunch, in which Jan engages in girl-on-girl action, Marcia pleasures herself with a dildo she keeps under her pastel bed and Alice has sex with Sam the Butcher, played by Ron Jeremy. The sets, costumes and sound track are so true to the original, you almost don’t mind when an actual laugh track punctuates the dialogue. Depending on when you hit puberty, you may have had sexual thoughts about Greg or Peter, and now you get to see the whole bunch in a variety of X-rated situations, all of which manages to seem like innocent family fun. This one was so excellent, we went on to rent parodies of Gilligan’s Island, and Happy Days, worth seeing for a three-way with the Fonz during which he points to graffiti on the bathroom wall that reads, “Sit on it.” Surprisingly, much care is taken to avoid anachronistic tattoos, and even the lingerie is true to that era. Extra points to the casting director for finding an amazing Mr. Cunningham (he doesn’t do sex scenes) and getting Ralph Malph to dye all of his hair red. Aaaaay.

If you’re squeamish about pornography, this is a good place to start, and there are now parodies of Seinfeld, The Cosby Show, The Office and others. Porn parodies of hit movies have been around forever, but the sitcoms are a new twist. More laughs, more tension breakers, more Fonz.

The Secret is all fine and good until it blames you for a little—okay, an excessive—amount of worry. I feel for couples who can’t conceive, who go through months and even years of expensive, grueling invasive treatments that make them feel like losers, and I would hate for anyone to truly believe their own gloomy thoughts are the cause of their troubles. That’s why I tell you that while I am a statistical sampling of one, I have personally debunked the Law of Attraction insofar as it pertains to the functionality of reproductive organs. It doesn’t matter what the hell you’re thinking; if you are having lots of sex and there is nothing medically wrong with you, if your body is ready, you can’t think your way out of a fertilized egg.