ansley
Carter and I found out he couldn’t have children during a visit to Peachtree. I remember standing in my grandmother’s kitchen, dialing the doctor’s office on her rotary phone—it was 1982, after all—my heart beating louder with every click-click-click the dial made as it returned to zero. Devastated doesn’t begin to describe how we felt, but we held it together pretty well. I gained so much respect for Carter, because he didn’t let it wound his pride. He didn’t act diffident or moody or let it make him feel like less of a man. He simply suggested that we go back to the drawing board. We agreed pretty much immediately that we’d use a sperm donor.
I expected to have a hospital stay after my IUI—a term I much preferred to “artificial insemination.” But I expected it to come about nine months later, not in two days. When I started feeling pain in my uterus, I was thrilled. I knew something was happening. I thought that something was a baby, not a massive infection that would soon cause my low-grade fever to spike to almost 104 and make me spend more than a week in the hospital, much of which I don’t remember.
Carter never left my side. And he never said anything about the baby.
I remember crying the night we got home, sitting with Carter on the couch in our living room, feeling as low as I had ever felt. But Carter held me and stroked my hair.
“We just have to try it again,” I finally said. “It will work the next time.”
It was a minor miracle that the infection hadn’t ravaged my insides, hadn’t destroyed my ability to carry a child at all. As stubborn as I was being, you couldn’t help but wonder if a husband who was shooting blanks and a wife who nearly died from an extremely rare complication while trying to conceive weren’t signs to hang up the baby thing.
I’ll never forget the way Carter looked at me, the shock in his face. “Ansley, no,” he said. “We will never, ever do this again.”
And then he began to cry, too, something I’d seen only when his father died. I thought it was because of the frustration, the anger, the lack of control.
But he said, “You have no idea how sick you were. What if I had lost you? No matter what else happens, I can’t lose you.”
That was the moment I realized that what you see in movies, what you read about in books, that isn’t the good part. Not at all. The butterflies make you feel giddy and alive, and that’s sweet. But it’s what happens after that really matters. It’s the time you realize that your love has grown exponentially since that first day, when you discover that being someone’s wife, being in it for the long haul, having someone there beside you day in and day out, is so much better than any roses on Valentine’s Day or any first-date jitters you could ever have.
That was when I was strong again. Because that’s what marriage is. When your partner is falling apart, you have to buck up. Plain and simple.
I wiped my eyes and sat up straight. “These are our options, then, love.” I took his hand in mine. “One, we adopt. Two, we don’t have children.”
Carter shook his head. “This is so unfair,” he said. “We work hard, we pay our taxes, we rescued those kittens from the subway. Why would this happen to us?” He paused. “Option two is not an option, as far as I’m concerned. We are parents. We are supposed to be parents.”
Then he got quiet and looked at his hands.
I didn’t say anything else for a minute. Then I said, “So we adopt. That’s fine. We’ll get on lists, we’ll start looking. Hell, we can probably call some of our doctor friends and skip that altogether.”
“You and I both know that could take forever,” he said. “And then you don’t get to be pregnant. We don’t get to feel kicks and go to doctor appointments. You don’t give birth. We don’t stand together in the hospital room ecstatic and overwhelmed.”
This was one of those times when our age difference really showed. We were practically from different generations. Although private adoption was fairly common then, Carter was definitely still leery of it.
“I am aware of that, Carter, but these are our choices. I’ve already said I’ll try IUI again, but you seem to be against that.”
Carter was always a determined man. He was steadfast and reasonable, but he got what he wanted. And something in his face told me that this was what he had always imagined, and this was what he was going to get, one way or another.
I watched him closely as he ran his thumb over his forefinger. He bit the inside of his cheek and said, “You could get pregnant.”
I wanted to throw something at him. No, in fact, I could not get pregnant, which was why we were in this mess to begin with. I put my arms up in frustration. “Carter, for God’s sake.” I threw my arms down and started to get up, but he grabbed my hand. “We can talk about this later,” I said. “We can think about it some more. I’m just finished with the conversation for right now.”
“Sit down,” he said gently. “I can’t stomach the idea of this, so I will only say it once. I can’t ever know about it. I can’t ever hear about it. You have to make certain that I never do.”
I truly thought the man had lost his mind. One bump in the road, and he had become a raving lunatic. “What are you talking about?”
“You should get pregnant.” He motioned toward the door. “We will continue to try. I will have every reason to believe that it is my baby. We will be the only two people in the world who know this. And even we won’t be sure.”
Now I really looked at him like he had lost his mind. “Carter, you can’t be saying what I think you’re saying. This is insanity. We will adopt, and that’s that. I won’t hear of it again.”
He took my hands in his and said, “Ansley, this is up to you. What I am saying is that I will never know one way or another, and I will choose to believe this baby is mine, no matter what the doctors say.” Then he whispered, “This baby will be mine, no matter what.”
He got up, and I said, “Carter, you can’t know that. You can’t be sure that’s how you’ll feel. What if you don’t feel that way at all?”
He turned back to me and said, “Have you ever known me not to keep my word?”
He walked off toward our bedroom, leaving me feeling cold. He couldn’t believe that I would actually do this. Go sleep with some stranger on the street? Of course not. What about diseases, what if someone found out, and so many things that I couldn’t even process. Carter was the only man I could imagine who would love me enough to actually go along with this scheme. Wasn’t he? I couldn’t fathom getting pregnant with another man’s baby and keeping it a secret.
I couldn’t do that. Could I?
I tossed and turned over that conversation for weeks and actually rethought a lot of things about my relationship in the wake of my husband even mentioning something as crass and vile as my getting pregnant by a stranger.
One night a couple of months later, I was walking home and passed a happy family with one child in a stroller and the other on his father’s shoulders. It made me feel so irreparably empty. It steeled something inside me against Carter’s idea, too, though. Because that was the way it was supposed to be, I thought. Children were supposed to be created out of love.
As if from outside me, as if from another world and another life, another option came to me. And just like that, I knew exactly what I would do.