WE RENTED A place in a hippie canyon neighborhood off the Pacific Coast Highway. The apartment was an open and ramshackle studio with two tiny closet-like spaces that we used as his-and-hers offices, a loft bed, and a small kitchen set on a platform. Outside was a bathtub with a view of the mountains. From our door you could hike right up into the dry light green hills, walking by yards with horses and skirting snakes on the path, and I did most afternoons before dinner. Our landlord was a Jewish Hare Krishna who lived upstairs, and we had to sneak when we wanted to cook fish. I was making next to nothing, teaching yoga and trying to write. Neil was working on his first book and teaching at USC.
What I wanted more than anything was for us to have a family of our own. A baby, I dreamed. A baby, a baby, a baby. This, my new mantra, was all I could think about. I was only thirty-one and my period was regular, so I never imagined I’d have any trouble, but a friend who had children suggested we start trying anyway. And so I dutifully tracked my ovulation and timed the sex we had, reaching my legs to the ceiling afterward. It took me six months of trying.
When the pee stick said positive, I was elated. But I was frightened, too. Could I be a good enough mother? At an office in Beverly Hills for my first prenatal appointment, I sat in flip-flops, waiting for my turn.
Only there was no heartbeat. The doctor came in to explain about miscarriage. Eight weeks pregnant, or not pregnant, with an empty placental sac in my womb, I registered the comfort of the nurse’s arm as she drew my blood, and felt hollowed out by the after-hours D&C. My baby. I was beyond consolation.
That spring, several months later, I wrote to my mother. It had been almost four years. Experiencing motherhood, however briefly, had made me want my mother. And what did I owe her? I wondered. Over email, I reached out to her about the idea of a relationship in which we might maintain some sort of distant occasional contact. I wrote that I knew she was sorry and that I worried about her. But I was still angry. She wrote back and said she’d seen a counselor who helped her become “more assertive and attuned to my own needs.” She said she had failed me, it was true, but she had also loved and nurtured me. She said her therapist had helped her learn that “I was in some ways too good for this world for I didn’t see how most humans most often act out of self-interest.” What? She wanted to build a new relationship, she wrote, but it would have to be about healing and new beginnings. She couldn’t let me or my anger destroy her.
I understood, sort of, but didn’t write back. It felt completely and utterly impossible. I was her daughter. I was supposed to take responsibility for her now that she was getting older. Only the part of me that should have cared about her no longer existed; this had died, too. I didn’t want her anymore. My anger was all that was left. I had nothing else for her.
But it turned out my mother had something she wanted to offer me. A year or two later, Neil received an email from her. My parents were retiring and selling their house. They’d spend winters in Florida and the warmer months in an apartment in Queens. But first they were cleaning out the Rockville Centre house, including my old bedroom. Did I want what was left of my things?
I had left my parents’ house that August Sunday years before, not realizing I would never once be back. Before the estrangement, I’d been living in a series of cramped and temporary spaces and hadn’t moved my childhood memorabilia along with me. I thought I’d given those things up the day I left. Sentimental as I was, I had mourned the last remains and artifacts of my childhood, but it had never occurred to me to simply ask my parents for them.
Two large boxes arrived in Neil’s office. Along with drama club playbills and posters and yearbooks dating from middle school to Vassar, here were my albums of photographs and the odd scrapbook memento from high school and college and Nepal and Israel. My drama class notebooks were there, too. As were my early attempts at writing, including my first short story. In another notebook were drafts of poems I’d written in high school. A blue three-ringed binder was filled with my college poetry.
Mostly there were stacks of cards and letters from high school and college friends, including love letters from my college boyfriend Alex, and a few ambiguous notes from Ben that I once analyzed to death, along with the blue airmail letters my parents had written me when I was in Nepal and Israel, and from before that, even, during my high school summers away. Then I found my diaries. I’d kept a journal on and off since the eighth grade. The entries were sporadic and skipped some years entirely. In them I’d written about my father and the abuse, and I’d struggled with my complicated feelings for him. I’d also kept datebooks faithfully chronicling the activities of my day-to-day life from ninth grade on. The contents of the boxes added up to a surprisingly comprehensive archive. My parents, whether they realized it or not, had sent me the evidence I needed to understand my childhood and my decision.
* * *
I couldn’t get pregnant again. Not that year and not the next, either. I resisted fertility treatments and instead tried acupuncture and fertility yoga and tinkering with my already healthy diet. By then we’d moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Neil had been offered an assistant professor job at Harvard. I was editing an anthology I’d sold to a publisher in New York about miscarriage; writing for yoga magazines; and teaching a creative writing class at Harvard’s version of night school. We lived in a sunny apartment near Inman Square and adopted a dog, Salem, an eccentric and lovable beagle pointer we took to the Harvard Yard dog park before dinner. But all I thought about were babies. The one I’d lost and the one who wouldn’t come. We broke down and went to Brigham and Women’s Hospital to find out what was wrong. The doctors didn’t know. They gave me the fertility drug Clomid. All it did was fill me with an unaccustomed rage. Next up was IUI—intrauterine insemination. Neil walked his still-warm specimen cup of sperm to the hospital room where I lay in stirrups. When that didn’t work, we said we would adopt instead. We met with social workers, filled out applications, wrote essays, had our home study, sent the checks, and began the long wait for a toddler from an orphanage in India. Adoption made more sense to me than IVF; the process struck me as beautiful. Why make a new baby when already existing children needed homes? Why did I, of all people, need to share blood or DNA with my child? I suppose, too, I was scared that a biological child of mine would turn out like my father.
And then, after a year and a half on the waiting list and an excruciating, heartbreaking struggle over whether or not to accept a referral for a perhaps profoundly developmentally delayed child we didn’t feel ourselves up to taking on, I changed my mind. I decided we had to try. By this time I was thirty-five and had been consumed by infertility for four years. I longed more desperately than ever to be pregnant, to breast-feed, to wrap a newborn in a cotton sling and carry her on my chest. I wanted to experience a mother-child relationship not marked by pain and loss. A clinic in Denver, one of the best in the country, would take our insurance. Neil and I went for workups and met the head doctor and the assigned fertility nurse who would guide us through the process. After the initial trip to Denver, I flew to Tucson, Arizona, for a writing residency, soaking up weeks of quiet mornings sitting at the desk in my cottage, working, and late afternoons hiking in the mountains or taking a yoga class before eating a vegetable burrito for dinner. When I returned to Cambridge, I began the shots and drugs and then Neil and I flew back to Colorado for a cycle of IVF.