FIFTEEN
THE MISCARRIAGE CHANGED me in other unexpected ways, too. On the July day when the clinic doctors cut the dead embryo from my belly, I’d awaited the procedure on a cot in the surgery prep room, struggling to understand the Japanese nurse administering my IV. I had one of those moments where the mind separates briefly from the body and we stand outside our experiences looking in. I can’t believe this is happening, I’d thought. Not because I hadn’t known miscarriage was a possibility or because I believed my story was sadder than anyone else’s. Millions of women miscarried—or didn’t—every year in situations far worse than mine. Rather, the whole experience seemed so surreal. The barren prep room walls. The once-life inside me. The nubby blue curtain pulled around the sides of my cot, the barely decipherable commentary from the nurse. The laminaria sticks made from seaweed that the doctor had inserted into me that morning to dilate my cervix, after which I was told to go home, rest, and come back in the afternoon when the sticks had expanded inside me, hour by aching hour. I imagined the doctors now in the next room, laying out a tray of sharp instruments, waiting for me to fall asleep.
Then another thought slid into my brain, and with it, I slipped fully back into my body. If this is what we have to go through to meet our baby, then it’s where I’m supposed to be. The conviction felt clean, strong, pure.
As I mourned the miscarriage over the next few weeks, that determination stuck, then dug in deeper as the months wore on. With each cycle that I felt my mastery over my body wane, my ability to conceive recede further, my focus grew on finding something I could control. When Toru asked if I wanted to go back to Boston for a break, I told him no. I was committing to Japan full-time now, only willing to go home if I had a month where the doctors told me I couldn’t try conceiving—and then, only for a few weeks.
Although Japanese insurance doesn’t cover IVF, the procedure here costs only about a third of what it does in the U.S., so we weighed what we could afford and agreed we’d either try four more rounds or quit when I turned forty-five in a little more than three years, whichever came first. I grasped on to the plan as if it were a lifejacket in a tide I couldn’t turn. The night after we’d learned our embryo’s heart had stopped, I’d seen Toru shudder and then break with grief for the first time since his mother’s accident, but now he took to reminding me that “no matter what, we are together in always.”
My fears still hadn’t dissolved about whether motherhood would overwhelm me so much I wouldn’t be able to bond with a child. Yet like a runner in a race, what ultimately pulled ahead was that sense our baby might exist in some way or place, be waiting for us. I didn’t know what this feeling meant or how someone who had so little belief in fate or the spiritual could be driven by such urges. But I’d married Toru without understanding in my brain how our relationship worked when we were so very different, when for years I had striven for a life that looked nothing like the one I’d chosen. Maybe I didn’t need to get it; I just needed to go with it. Because the alternative was worse.
While my infertility was challenging my preference for logic over instinct, it also changed my feelings about being in Japan. For the first time, Osaka was a place I was choosing for my own reasons, not because of Toru’s career or family obligations. I knew we could never afford five rounds of IVF in Boston, especially not at my age with my poor prognosis, when insurance would be unlikely to cover any of it there, either. Our setup in Osaka, with me working freelance writing jobs part-time from home and Toru earning enough for me to work fewer hours, would also make it much easier to manage the fatigue of treatments.
At the fertility clinic, the doctors declared my uterine lining too thin for a new embryo transfer. I’d heard that acupuncture could help, so I found a Japanese practitioner of Chinese medicine around the corner from our apartment. Neither he nor his receptionist spoke English, but I muddled through an attempt to explain my situation. First, I tried detailing my predicament to his receptionist, a whippet of a young woman at a high, bare desk. On the wall behind her hung a diagram of a man’s body facing front and then back. He had blue and red dots snaking up and down his limbs and torso and over his skull, each energy point connected by a web of black lines.
“I’d like to do acupuncture. I had a baby inside, but it died. Nine weeks. Soon, I’ll become forty-two,” I stumbled in broken Japanese, arcing my hand over my abdomen to mime pregnancy while the receptionist nodded and smiled and then nodded and narrowed her eyes and said “Aah, so desuka?” “Oh, is that so?” I didn’t know the word for uterus, and I couldn’t remember the one for thin, but I thought the term “narrow” or “skinny” might work, explaining in more broken Japanese, “I do IVF now. But the doctor says my stomach is too skinny.”
The receptionist eyed my torso. She may have even raised an eyebrow. “Chotto-matte!” she said, “Please wait a bit!” then called out, “Sensei!” “Doctor!” A tall muscular Japanese man stepped out from behind a curtain to the side of the desk. My attempts to explain my diagnosis didn’t go much further with him, either, despite repeated hand signals toward my belly and then holding up my thumb and forefinger and placing them a few millimeters apart in an attempt to mime “thin.” How the hell does one mime “uterine lining”? I thought, as I felt my face go hot.
We finally managed to book me an appointment for the following week. I’d made it clear that I wanted to get pregnant, that I was doing IVF, and that I was forty-one, and I figured we could at least go from there. When I got home, Toru wrote a note in Japanese. When I gave it to the acupuncturist, he nodded as he read it, then laughed with his head tipped back, repeating my “too skinny” comment a few times before he pulled out a new pack of needles.
After the clinic finally declared me ready to complete my next round of IVF, I tried not to get my hopes up, despite our earlier good luck. “Keep warm your belly,” Toru would remind me when we went to bed, sometimes adding, “And keep warm your foot.” We told Toru’s father I was doing another attempt at in vitro and now had a new embryo inside me that we were hoping would take hold, and every night at dinner, he would peer at me carefully, then ask in English, “How is your baby?”
• • •
BY 2010, I was forty-two and my third embryo transfer had failed. Late at night, while Toru slept next to me in bed, I’d lie teary-eyed in the dim pool of light from my bedside table and troll online for books about holistic approaches to fertility, particularly for women of “advanced maternal age.” During the day, I mined the forums for advice from other women. I started different fertility diets and then stopped running, walking my four-and-a-half-mile route instead to conserve my energy and “nourish my blood,” although I had no idea what that actually meant.
Where I drew the line, or to be more accurate, admitted an ambivalent defeat, was with “positive thinking.” A lot of the books I read and the women on my Over 40 IVF forum promoted the importance of visualization and happy thoughts. “Love your embies and imagine them snuggling in for nine months!” ran one such commentary. I couldn’t stomach the idea of calling my embryos “embies.” They were invisible cells, not cartoon characters, and even though I longed for the future they might hold, I couldn’t honestly say I “loved” them when they were mere two- or four-unit blobs. What if that’s my problem? I sometimes wondered. Maybe my inability to be a positive thinker was preventing me from getting pregnant. Or my continued ambivalence about motherhood. On one hand, I knew these fears were illogical and ridiculous. On the other, I felt guilty and afraid they were true.
Walking my route around Osaka Castle Park with six hormone patches stuck to my stomach, I seethed over some of the forum comments. One woman, newly forty-three and pregnant, suggested that every single time you went to the store or strolled down the sidewalk, you should imagine pushing your future baby in a carriage. “Never, ever stop thinking positive thoughts!” she admonished, and I imagined her rubbing her growing belly with a triumphant smile. Of course she’s saying that; she’s pregnant! I fumed, my arms pumping by my sides while the patches on my abdomen chafed against my shorts. Above me, Osaka Castle rose on its hill, all white walls and grayish-green scalloped roofs, gilded figurines flashing late-afternoon sun from its peaks. I barely noticed.
When my forty-third birthday and the fourth failed treatment passed, I found myself confined within yet another bubble. In addition to the remove of being an expat in Osaka, I’d become encased in a new kind of limbo. I was the only woman I knew doing years of failed IVF in Japan, while around me everyone else moved on. Like a rough wooden Russian doll inside a collection of nested glass matryoshkas, I could stare out and others could stare in, but each layer separated me further.
By this time, Jodi had moved permanently back to the U.S., and almost everyone else I knew in Japan had young children. Most of my Boston friends were still childless or never wanted kids, and I’d Skype with them sometimes, but they were so far away. Meanwhile, I’d watch my fellow Osaka expats jiggle their infants up and down, and wipe their mouths, and check their diapers, and I felt both bored with their babycentric conversation and removed from the whole group. My energy depleted, I closed down Four Stories in both the U.S. and Japan. Every day became consumed either by where I was in my cycle, hope for the current or next round of treatment, or efforts to positively impact the unknowable workings of my body, as if my insides held a supply chain of eggs on an assembly line that I was stalling each time I tried to fix it. I imagined those eggs tucked inside my organs, once clean, white spheres now going dusty and sluggish.
Meanwhile, the frustration of not knowing whether we would ever have a child, where my life was headed, made me ache, and a new fear began to haunt me: Will I spend four years in the prime of my life trying to get pregnant and end up with nothing but failure and lost time? I tried to write about my sense of suspension, but I couldn’t call forth any meaning from it. I tried to work more freelance jobs, but I didn’t have the energy.
Toru was sad each time an embryo transfer failed, but he bounced back more easily than I. His outward life had barely changed: he still got up every morning, ate his white toast with butter and milk tea, put on his suit, and took the train to work, slowly advancing in his career at the pace he had pretty much expected. Meanwhile, my life had telescoped until it was hard for me to see much beyond the imagined mirages of what was happening at any given moment in the organs twining through my belly. The whole time, I had a quiet soundtrack looping in my head: How did I become this person obsessed with my ovaries?
One night, Toru told me that his company was considering moving us to San Diego, where his unit had an office. I tried to imagine us starting over in a new place: the relief of trying medical treatment, if somehow we could get sufficient insurance, “at home”—even though San Diego was thousands of miles from Boston. “But what about your father?” I asked.
Over the last year, Otosan’s movements had gotten even shakier, and he now needed a cane to walk. He’d also begun to stutter sometimes, ever so slightly, like the words got tripped up on his tongue for a moment before they resumed their usual course, a stream with a small pebble in its flow. We tried to get him to see a doctor, and after months of shrugs and other quiet resistance, he agreed to go. A series of appointments and brain scans yielded a diagnosis: Parkinson’s syndrome, a kind of degenerative constellation of muscular and nerve failures. The condition looked like Parkinson’s disease, but it responded less well to medication, and it usually progressed more quickly.
When Toru told me about San Diego, I knew if Otosan came with us it would be strange living together with my father-in-law, especially in America. But the idea of leaving him alone in Osaka was worse. I imagined him sitting on the couch in our living room in San Diego watching Japanese TV on satellite, like I did with CNN and Law & Order in Osaka; walking to the corner convenience store, dapper in a thin sweater vest. I saw him tapping his cane to each shaky step under a bright California sky, dipping his head in polite greeting to neighborhood teenagers skateboarding by. “Do you think your father would come with us if we asked him?”
Toru took my hand. “Thank you,” he said quietly.
A few nights later, Otosan came over for dinner. “Are you going to ask him about San Diego?” I whispered to Toru in the kitchen alcove while he grabbed a beer and I tried to finish the stir-fry. But Toru said nothing about the potential move during the meal. Finally, after I served the tea, I raised an eyebrow, and Toru nodded to me. I guess I’m going to have to be the one to broach the subject, I thought. In broken Japanese, I managed something equivalent to “Otosan, maybe Toru’s company moves us to San Diego. If we move, Otosan also wants?”
Toru’s father stared at me placidly for a moment, as if trying to sort through my mangled syntax. He sipped his tea, then put down the cup and turned to his son with a quiet string of words that I knew was a question by the way his tone ended higher. I expected their discussion to last a few minutes and include at least a modicum of emotional expression, especially on the part of Toru’s father as he absorbed the surprising news. I wasn’t holding out for tears or hugs or a frantic hour of questions, but I was bowled over when just a few moments later, Otosan nodded his head once, took another slow sip of tea, and then turned to me, still utterly unruffled. He pushed back his chair, delivered his usual “Gochisosamadeshita!” in thanks for the meal, grabbed his cane, and shuffled to the door.
Toru got up to see him out. I was too flummoxed to move. “Kitte kudasatte arigato,” I called weakly, thanking Otosan for honoring us with his presence. “What happened!” I asked Toru when he returned. “What was that all about? What did your father say?”
“Nothing,” Toru said, reaching for the pot to pour more sencha.
“Nothing? What do you mean nothing? Did you explain what I was trying to say? Did you tell your father about the move?”
“Ya, I told him.”
“Well, what was his reaction? Is he coming with us if we go? Did he seem upset? Or excited?”
“Oh, no reaction,” Toru said, turning for the couch with his teacup still in hand.
“What do you mean no reaction? Or is he in shock? Is that why he didn’t react?”
“No, not in shock,” Toru said. “Just no reaction. Not yet.”
He looked at me, and I shook my head and raised my palms, squinting my eyes as if the invisible explanation might become clearer that way. Toru sighed.
“We don’t know if moving yet,” he said simply. “So no need to really making any plan. I explain to my father, and he’s glad if we want him to come.” But, Toru told me, since this was all still just speculation, there was no need for his father to think too much about it. “We’ll worry the logistics later,” he said.
Over the next few days, I replayed the scene in my head, calling friends in Boston and Osaka to share my shock. “So his father just pushes back his chair, gets up, thanks me for dinner, and leaves without a word!” I narrated, “and I’m going, ‘Tof, what just happened?’”
But the more I thought about it, as I walked my endless loops around Osaka Castle Park, the idea of “worrying the logistics later” seemed kind of brilliant. Imagine, I thought, not trying to sort out future what-ifs until they became present realities. I knew I’d never achieve the equanimity of either Toru or his father; it just wasn’t in my wiring. And I knew just because they weren’t yet hashing out a potential future move—weren’t trying to solve its challenges before it became fact—that didn’t mean they didn’t have feelings about it. They weren’t perfect Buddhas, after all; they were human. But they didn’t need to fix all the angles of a situation before they knew there was really something to address.
There was a lesson here, a counter to my fear that I’d spend four years trying to procreate and end up empty. There would be no way to know what the outcome would be, and struggling against this truth would do nothing to change or solve it. No one can tell you whether your body, in the end, will be capable of producing a child, or whether you’ll regret what you’ve lost in the process. All you can do is try to take care of yourself, to stay as healthy and engaged as possible.
I didn’t require positive mantras envisioning future babies. I just needed to live the life I had now as fully as I could and know that wherever I ended up, I’d tried my hardest in the time I’d been given. For now, I’d just do the best I could and worry the logistics later.
• • •
THAT FALL, Toru and I switched IVF clinics to one nearer our apartment. The new place was more expensive, but I was tired of going back to the old one, where our early good luck had bled into years of failed attempts.
The new clinic had a large, bright café where I could bring my laptop and sip hot rooibos tea while I waited, sometimes all morning or afternoon, for my turn to see the doctor or have blood tests or shots. The English-speaking head physician, Okomoto-sensei, was always dressed exactly the same: white medical coat and white polyester pants that stopped just above his ankles, with thick white socks and soft black shoes, his thinning hair swept sideways across his skull. When we met with him together, Toru and I always traded secret smiles over his outfit.
The clinic’s overriding philosophy called for banishing stress—a futile goal for women undergoing IVF. In one of our first meetings with Okomoto-sensei, he summed up his anxiety-free approach to infertility by describing their post-embryo-transfer protocol: I should remain calm at all times, he instructed; “Of course, you can cook and do light cleaning. But you should stay quietly around the house. And no running to busy department store sales!”
The clinic sold meditation CDs, had their own acupuncture center, and even offered a marine-themed “relaxation room” with large recliners facing a wall-length screen showing calming underwater scenes. Toru and I never went into it, but we liked to peer inside and laugh over the spelling on the door—a Japanese rendering of “reraxation roomu”—and compete over who could come up with the most inappropriate screening for their atmosphere of forced tranquility. Toru suggested Seed of Chucky, I the anti-dolphin-hunting film The Cove, and then we’d cackle about hacking into their AV system while we waited to see doctors who would suck in their breath and clutch my charts, muttering, “So, kana? Do shimashyo?” “So, then, what is there to do now?”
Many women came into the clinic without their husbands but with their mothers, which struck me as odd until I got used to seeing these unlikely pairs. One day, I saw a woman in stilettos, skintight jeans, and a white T-shirt with a black Playboy bunny across the back. I couldn’t tell whether I admired her or thought she was barking up the wrong tree. A little of both, I finally decided.
One of the clinic’s most popular offerings was their Monday morning “fertility stretch” session, which Okomoto-sensei led himself. On Monday afternoons, a group of women would gather in the café after class, wearing loose yoga wear. They’d push long tables together, pull out their bento box lunches, and eat their onigiri rice balls, gossiping and comparing protocols, I imagined, for hours. I’d sit near them, tapping away at my keyboard on one freelance assignment or another, and wonder about them. I knew that far fewer than half of Japanese women worked after marriage, even if they didn’t have kids, but I was still struck by the idea of spending a whole day at an IVF clinic when you weren’t waiting for an appointment. Then I realized I was a lot like them. This is basically what we did with our lives: sit at the clinic, hope for two blue lines on a pregnancy test. They just did it communally, with rice balls.
One afternoon, I went to pick up my medicine in preparation for my treatment cycle. At the clinic’s pharmacy window, a woman in a white-and-blue uniform handed me a pink envelope. In cursive English letters across the top, it said SMILE, THINK POSITIVE, LET YOURSELF RELAX, AND READY FOR CONCEPTION.
• • •
BY THE MIDDLE of that spring, six months after we’d started at the new clinic, Toru’s company had decided against moving us to San Diego. In the meantime, I’d managed to grow one egg that the doctors removed, fertilized, and froze. I’d produced no more with all the tests, preparatory cycles, and stimulation shots than an average woman would have on her own in one month, and I would turn forty-four in less than half a year.
Just before the clinic could transfer my lone embryo, I woke one morning with burning in my stomach. When the hot spells kept coming for a week, Toru booked me an appointment with a GI specialist. “Ulcers, two!” reported the doctor, after instructing the nurse to bring in Gaijin-san, or Mrs. Foreigner, for an endoscopy. He stuck a camera up my nose and down my throat, Toru stroking my head while I choked and tried not to vomit, tears leaking down my cheeks as the doctor explained eagerly to Toru and the nurse how my “narrow foreign nose” made shoving in the camera even harder. When he found two blisters side-by-side in my stomach, he announced in English, “Kissing ulcers!” seeming happy at the term. Then he scraped the lining of my gut, and a week later, he diagnosed a bacterial infection causing susceptibility to GI sores. The cure: two months of antibiotics and other medications, contraindicated for pregnancy or, by extension, an embryo transfer. Another long delay.
“I worry you,” Toru said again, shaking his head. The bacteria had left me vulnerable to ulcers, but he feared the stress of infertility treatment had also contributed.
I cried over yet another stalled step, each day ticking closer to my forty-fifth birthday and our cutoff date to stop trying for a baby. Then I called the airlines and booked a quick trip home. I hadn’t been back to the U.S. in more than a year. In Boston, I still felt numb and lost, but I drank wine and ate steak and French fries despite my ulcers, and I saw my closest friends.
When I flew back to Japan a few weeks later, I had a fresh plan in my clutches. I knew I couldn’t control the outcome of these years of treatments, but at least I could prevent myself from looking back at forty-five and regretting I hadn’t tried everything to conceive, every single month.
I went straight to the clinic in Osaka. “I want to try naturally this month, even though I’ll still be on antibiotics for another few weeks,” I told the doctor, a woman this time, Noguchi-sensei. She was younger and less authoritative than Okomoto-sensei, but she also spoke a little English. “I want to have ultrasounds to see if an egg is growing,” I explained. She nodded slowly, her straight black chin-length hair shaking in time with her head, then pointed to the room next door, where I got into one of those mechanized chairs—blue, this time—and prepared to be hoisted, splayed, and wanded.
A week or so later, Noguchi-sensei gave me a shot to try to force my body to release an egg. Then I waited at the long white reception counter to pay. The clinic was busy that afternoon, a line of patients building up behind me as I rubbed my stomach where the nurse had injected me with hormones. When I got to the front, the receptionist pulled out my treatment sheet. She tried to explain a handwritten line Noguchi-sensei had added. “Huh?” I kept saying. “Mo-ikkai onegaishimasu?” “Once more, please?” The receptionist’s face began to redden, the crowd behind me shifting restlessly as she continued to repeat whatever she was attempting to communicate, finally blurting out something that sounded like “Timingu! Timingu!” I had no idea what she meant. Finally, I offered the one line in Japanese that I knew perfectly by now: “Shujin wa Nihonjin. Ato, shujin wa watashi ni oshiemasu!” “My husband is Japanese. Later, he’ll explain to me!”
The receptionist nodded, looking like I’d just handed her a jug of water at the far end of a sweat lodge. Then she ran my credit card, handed me the sheet, and hastily bowed me farewell.
That night, I showed the paper to Toru, who laughed. “What?” I asked. “What does it say?”
“It says tonight we should have fuck!”
I realized what the receptionist had been trying to say: “Timing,” for “timed intercourse.” On the sheet Noguchi-sensei had worded it more medically, of course, than Toru. But I imagined that, with the long line of patients behind me at the desk and the receptionist’s increasingly panicked attempts to explain, the effect at the clinic that afternoon had been barely more discreet than my husband’s.
A few days after I finally finished my last antibiotic, two weeks since seeing Dr. Noguchi, I woke around five a.m., my abdomen heavy. I went to the bathroom to check for blood. Then I went to the closet where I kept my tampons, razors, cosmetics, and pills, rifling through the contents piled in plastic boxes.
Five minutes later, I flew into the bedroom, an early pregnancy test in my hand. It was positive.
• • •
TORU MADE a clinic appointment for me that same day. Neither Okomoto-sensei nor Noguchi-sensei was available, but there was one more doctor who could manage some English, another woman. Yamamoto-sensei was older than Noguchi-sensei and had a more forthright manner. She ordered me a blood test “to make sure pregnancy is . . . real,” she said haltingly.
I spent the next hour and a half in the café, unable to concentrate on anything, trying not to dwell on the doctor’s use of the term “real.” Women filtered in and out, the glass doors opening and closing, little trays of tea or coffee in their hands, but it all felt underwater to me. Nothing penetrated the cottony feeling in my mouth and the thrumming inside my chest.
When Yamamoto-sensei called me back into her office, she tucked a cowlick of hair behind her ear and smiled, pushing some test results toward me. She told me I was due March ninth, almost four months after my forty-fourth birthday.
My head continued to feel underwater for the next few days. I had no ambivalence about being pregnant now, only a happy kind of shock. Toru walked around with a quiet smile on his face, but still, he told me, “We should stay cool.” That weekend, we wandered around Umeda’s enormous underground in the center of the city, moving slowly through the anonymous crowd, as if speed might somehow dislodge the tiny cells growing in my abdomen. I felt a spike of awe-tinged joy, thinking, It’s the three of us here, walking around together.
I had a day or two of slight nausea, when the smells at my morning café made me clutch a handkerchief to my face. But then the feeling started to wane. I went home and took another pregnancy test, my heart pounding so hard in my ears I could feel it thump while I tried not to stare at the stick until three minutes had passed. When I looked, I still saw two blue lines. But was one even fainter than it had been before? I couldn’t tell.
The clinic put me on so much medication to prevent another miscarriage and protect my ulcerated stomach that we told Otosan I was pregnant again, though naturally, not with our frozen embryo, Toru explaining while I laid out my series of pills one night after dinner. Otosan smiled wide, his eyes bright, but then he turned pensive and asked Toru a question in Japanese.
“What did he say?” I wanted to know.
Toru shook his head at me, and I knew once again his father had annoyed him. Otosan was never judgmental about our doing IVF, but he didn’t really get what it was all about. Toru rolled his eyes like he did when his father couldn’t figure out how to turn on the computer, then said, “He wants to know, which baby do we want? The one in your stomach now or the one in freezer?”
The next morning, my nausea still seemed on the wane. I was scheduled to go in for another blood test in a few days, but I texted Toru at work. “I think I should go back to the clinic now, as soon as possible,” I told him when he called back. “I took another test this morning, and I really think the line looks fainter. It’s still there. But faint.”
I saw Yamamoto-sensei again, and she sent me back for a second blood test. I spent another hour or so in the café trying not to cry, flipping listlessly through a Japanese magazine from the waiting room, seeing nothing. When Yamamoto-sensei called me back into her office, she had another sheet of test results in front of her. She pushed them toward me again, but she didn’t meet my eye.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Tracy,” she said, “but your baby is not growing up.”
I tried to keep my voice as steady as possible, swallowing hard and glancing around the stark walls before I worked up the nerve to look near her face. In the end, I only managed a shaky question about what to do after the inevitable miscarriage. “I mean, I know we still have the frozen embryo,” I croaked out. “But if that . . . if that one doesn’t work either, can we try naturally again?”
Yamamoto-sensei tucked her black hair behind her ear again, then looked straight at me. “It’s a miracle you even got pregnant naturally at all,” she said, her English sounding perfect just this once.
Six weeks later, after I’d miscarried, I had my last embryo transfer. It failed, too.
• • •
“FOR GOD’S SAKE, you’re not going to get pregnant, Tracy.” My mother—never one to mince words—tried to level with me a few months later over Skype. She worried we were wasting precious time. Toru and I had stopped the IVF treatments, but I insisted we still try every month with ultrasounds and hormone support from the clinic, plus new twice-a-day injections of a blood thinner for a “clotting disorder” the clinic had diagnosed, which they claimed could cause early-state miscarriage. My stomach bloomed with red and purple welts from all the shots, but I was undeterred.
“Why don’t you just adopt?” my mother demanded. My eldest sister said she cried for me, she was so sad that I wouldn’t have a child with Toru, but she also couldn’t understand why we didn’t “just adopt.” “I mean,” she said, “if you’re still not willing to do egg donation.” Both she and my mother pointed out that with adoption, too, we needed to hurry, since many agencies had age cutoffs.
Then my mother took to telling me about her friends whose daughters had used surrogates. “I can’t even produce a normal egg, Mom,” I said in frustration. “How is hiring a surrogate going to help?” To Toru, I complained ungenerously that, as usual, my mother thought hiring someone would solve the problem. “As if she doesn’t even realize how expensive having a surrogate would be in the first place!” I said, my eyes fixing him with annoyance meant for her.
“Poor Charlotte,” Toru said, as he usually did when I complained about my mother. Then, “Poor my love.”
I worried about Toru holding in his own sadness and frustration, but when I tried to talk to him about it, he insisted he was “okay.” “Sometimes, a little sad,” he admitted, when I pushed, telling him how I’d read that men often think they need to stay strong for their female partners during infertility treatments. “It’s not fair for you to have to always be the strong one,” I said.
But I remembered how he never liked to talk about his mother after she died, how discussing painful things proved harder for him than staying silent about them, despite all my Western psychoanalytical beliefs in the dangers of repression. I thought about the Japanese tendency to show love and support not through words but with actions that increase interdependence. I adored Toru’s father, but our bond was built on hardly any conversation: I cooked for him and he helped me with my Japanese, teaching me new words and reading directions and filling out forms I couldn’t decipher. Now, with Toru, I tried to make his favorite foods or run a nightly bath for him, or insist he go for a shiatsu massage after every failed fertility step or night where his father was especially unsteady on his feet. Eventually, I found comfort in these simple, practical actions. I knew Toru’s heart hurt for me, and he knew mine hurt for him, and we didn’t have to pretend words would fix anything.
As for my mother and sister’s advice to “just adopt,” I saw on the IVF chat boards and from friends or friends of friends that the adoption process is frequently as heartbreaking, as filled with delays, false starts, and disappointments as medical treatment. Often even more so. Despite their good intentions, when people urged adoption as the obvious Plan B, I felt angry. If they are so proadoption, with their brood of biological offspring, why don’t they go ahead and adopt? I thought crabbily. Moreover, I was suspicious about this Plan B concept. It seemed potentially belittling to both adoptive parents and children. Many parents who adopted, I saw, did so because they longed to adopt, to become family with a life already in existence, not because it was the second-best choice.
Still, I knew people on the IVF forums who were fine giving reproductive technology one or two tries and moving on to adoption. I also knew women who were willing to put their marriages at risk to become parents. They would spend life savings, leave their husbands or partners if they couldn’t agree on options like egg or sperm donation, or adoption.
“A therapist once told me,” a woman wrote on my Over 40 forum, “that if what I wanted most in the world was to be a mother, then I would be one; I would find a way, no matter what.” The writer found deep comfort in this truth, and when I read her post, I admired her, but I knew that wasn’t true for me.
What I wanted most in the world was to be with Toru, and then to have his biological child. Before marriage, before babies meant anything to me besides a frightening threat to one’s freedom, I’d always thought in an abstract way that adoption was one of the loveliest choices a person could make: to decide to become family with another little person. I’d never put much stock in genetics. After all, my sister Lauren had found more comfort and safety with her foster family than she’d ever found with the parents whose DNA she shared. Even when my friend Jenna, who’d adopted her son, told me that the ideal of the adoptive parent “was total bullshit,” that people who adopt do so because they want to, not from some innate altruism, I still secretly harbored admiration for parents who welcomed a lone little one in from the wide open world.
Yet when Toru told me that he wasn’t open to either egg donation or adoption, I felt an unexpected relief. Since adoption in Japan is so rare, I wasn’t surprised by his stance. But after we’d begun the process of trying to have a baby years before, I’d realized that my own growing longing to parent our biological child didn’t necessarily translate into a yearning to be a parent in general. Wanting to have your biological baby isn’t the same as wanting a child in general.
By now, the experience of going through years of treatments had confirmed another surprising truth to me: just because you think you are open to certain possibilities in the abstract—such as adoption—you never know where your true limits lie until you’re faced with actual, lasting choices. Rational or not, I felt safest in my gut with the idea of a baby who was half Toru. I believed it would be harder for me not to bond with, not to love a child whose every cell contained half of him. And if Toru and I couldn’t make a baby together, I’d still rather be together and childless than a mother apart from him.
Sometimes I wondered if that made me less deserving of parenthood, or of mourning its elusiveness. I didn’t know the answer, but I knew the whole issue of my fertility would become obsolete soon, with my forty-fifth birthday looming just past summer. Most major studies don’t even consider women giving birth at forty-five or beyond, when the average chance of someone having a baby with her own eggs drops below one percent. The latest U.S. National Center for Health Statistics report defines women of childbearing age as between fifteen and forty-four. I’d already entered the territory of a statistical nonentity.
• • •
A FEW MONTHS LATER, just days before my forty-fifth birthday, I lay curled in bed past midnight, sobs shaking through me. Toru lay beside me, wiping strands of wet hair from my cheeks. “You know,” he said, locking his steady eyes to my teary ones, “if we can have baby, that would be like miracle. But it will still only be like dessert, because you will always be main course.”
I couldn’t believe we weren’t ever going to meet our baby. It felt both so obvious and so inconceivable. How I could mourn something I’d never even had, grieve the loss of something that had never actually existed? The tension between my fear of parenthood and my longing to have Toru’s baby began to transmute now into a new emotional torsion, a swirl of missing and nothingness, numbness and nostalgia.
But as my birthday came and went, I reminded myself of my enduring good fortune in other ways, and I knew it was crucial to remember such a fact. The previous January, Toru and I had celebrated our fifth year of marriage, and we’d laughed when we remembered my original “three-year nuptial plan,” long forgotten once I’d gotten over my initial nerves. The night of our anniversary, sitting at our favorite Italian wine bar, bubbles rising in clear flutes, we’d toasted each other, and then Toru had turned momentarily serious. “Thank you for marrying with me these five years,” he’d said, and once again I couldn’t believe my luck that somehow we had found each other across cultures, continents, and half the world’s wide curve. I hadn’t been able to have our baby, but I’d still been given one of life’s rarest gifts. I’d already gotten my number-one desire: to be family with Toru.
I thought back to him saying we were “together in always.” I had no idea where I was in my life, how I would start rebuilding after fixing my existence on a dream that never came true, how I would emerge from the limbo of the past four years. But I realized now that those years wouldn’t be wasted—and I wouldn’t even choose to do them differently after learning where they’d led—because they would remain a testament of our love for our baby, even if we never got to meet that baby. It was a testament that felt precious to me, despite the failures that accompanied it. Really, there was no better place to be, I knew, despite the sadness in my chest, than together where we’d been, and now where I was still, with Toru in always.