Sometimes I get lucky

Me with Ethan, July 29.2002

My lovely friend Nichole asked me to be a part of a story she was telling over at SheKnows.com this week, in which fourteen moms who “beat infertility” share their tales of success along with the baby pictures to prove it.

In spite of wanting children for many years, I started on the path to motherhood very late, being nearly forty when I married my husband (twelve years ago yesterday!). And so we moved quickly into the whole fertility game after only three months of trying the "fun way."

We were very lucky; our first IVF "took."  We have had so many challenges in our lives since, I don't think back to that time all that often, but those two years between our wedding day and the day our boys were born were hard.  I know others have had fertility issues that went on much, much longer. But also I knew that we were racing the clock, and that things could easily have gone the other way for us (in which case we would probably be the parents of a little Chinese girl instead of a pair of boys).

I have nearly completely forgotten all the public tears I quietly shed, when surrounded by heavily pregnant women in my family friendly neighborhood on yet another day the pee stick showed a single forlorn pink line. I sobbed into my pillow more nights than I ever had over any boy or girl from my youthful days of frequent and dramatic heartbreaks.

It is really true though, how the mind smooths over the rough times as you go forward. And my family keeps me way too busy to dwell on the past much.

But when I do think about it, I am astonished at how lucky we are, and perpetually grateful to the wonders of modern reproductive medical science for our boys.

And I am happy and proud to be telling my success story over at SheKnows. And I am in such great company, as so many of the other moms there are my friends from far and wide (Listen to Your Mother, Special Needs parents, twin moms, BlogHer buddies, etc. etc.) and lovely writers, all.

I hope you get a chance to click over and read all the amazing stories there.

And finally, thanks again, Nichole, for including me in this wonderful cohort. And... good luck to you!

The Dress

I'm clearing out my closets. Trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. Trying to lighten up our load, to dispossess ourselves of some of our excess possessions, the clutter that that has taken over our lives.

I could claim it's the children and all their attendant... things. I could claim it's autism, citing how long we have to hold onto toys Ethan has long outgrown, because Jake has still not yet grown into them, or is so fondly attached to and revisits from time to time the toys of a much younger child. (Thomas, anyone?)

But this would be a big fat lie.

I have always been this way, surrounded by too much stuff. Not quite ready to be featured on an episode of Hoarders, but not quite NOT either. If there were a show called "They're serious collectors and clutterers but CAN throw out paper and trash and WILL donate outgrown clothes to others who can use them" you could sign me up.

It doesn't help that we live in a small apartment, no longer have a storage space downtown, and both my husband and I have had recent parental deaths land a lifetime of memory-filled THINGS into our laps. What we release now is never coming back. There is no ancestral attic or basement for the detritus of our and their (and our grandparents') lives.

There is just one small, overstuffed apartment, that we also need to live in.

Right now I am coming to terms with the fact that I am unlikely to ever again be the size or shape that I was in my twenties and thirties. And so all the clothes in the back of my closet, the stuff that has survived twenty years of previous purges, has to go.

Even lovely favorites, filled with memories... I bought that shirt at my first Sundance Festival... I used to go clubbing in the 80s in that crushed velvet jacket... that's the sundress I wore when I met my husband on Memorial Day weekend at Fire Island, fourteen years ago...

It's too much to hang onto. 

And yet.. and yet... there's one dress I cannot part with.

This:

The green velvet dress I wore to Thanksgiving, 2001.

My parents were in town. We were at my in-laws. And I was in a foul, foul, horrible mood. Just despondent.

You see, I had done a terrible thing that morning, had cheated and taken a home pregnancy test. Even though it was still days before it would be accurate. Even though we had been admonished, in no uncertain terms, to NOT DO THAT by the fertility clinic. We were just 23 days into our IVF cycle, a week and a day since the embryo transfer. Too. damn. soon.

But the box of pee sticks in the bathroom cabinet had sung their siren song of temptation to me that morning. I had been feeling so pregnant, surely there would be confirmation on a stick.

Really, I had been floating on the air of rising expectations for days. There had been signs and portents that yes, the IVF was successful.

And then that Thursday, Thanksgiving morning, I was just plummeted into the black pit of despair. Once more, a lone pink line on the pee-stick.

I lay on the sofa moaning and groaning, in mourning. I barely roused myself in time to shower and dress for Thanksgiving dinner across town. But I made sure to throw on a beloved dress that I always felt good in: the crushed green velvet.

That year, unlike the one just past, I was not spending Thanksgiving with my beloved cousins, but with my husband's family - who I am thoroughly fond of, but much less intimate with, so I couldn't really talk about what was going on.

I didn't even tell my husband what I'd done, as it was so against the rules and I didn't want to admit to being bad, bad, bad. Explaining my mood, I just mumbled something about having an ominous feeling, and that I was starting to think that maybe the IVF hadn't been successful.

I managed to eat my dinner and engage in some minimal, polite conversation. But then right afterward I withdrew and joined my elderly father in the living room as he was taking his traditional post-turkey sofa nap. I don't think I even got up for dessert, feeling thoroughly rotten, thinking to sleep off my funk.

So why would I possibly be nostalgic about this dress then, commemorating such a dreadful day?

Because two days later, on Saturday morning I peed on another stick and saw the most beautiful sight in the world: two pink lines, one fainter than the other but definitely, undeniably, there.

I was pregnant.

Very, in fact.

(yes, the twins)

And suddenly Thanksgiving Day was cast in a whole new light...

My mood swings, sudden despondency, near hysterics? Clearly a sign that the pregnancy hormones were starting to kick in, big time.

My need to nap after dinner? That the intense first trimester exhaustion had likewise begun.

So the dress, to me now, has magical qualities, evoking the beginning of my noticeable pregnancy. I'm keeping it. If I can wear it again someday, so much the better (green has always been a good color on me).

But until then? It's going in a box, alongside a photograph of five two-day-old embryos, a pair of tiny blue hospital bracelets with "Baby A" and "Baby B" on them. And a little white plastic stick with two pink lines on it.

What? You didn't think I could throw THAT out, did you?

And, for the first time in a long time, I'm linking up with Yeah, Write because I sorta kinda like this post and hope you did too. (But I'm on the Hang-out grid, not the challenge grid, because I missed being one of the first 50. Because I had to wait 'til the kids were asleep to edit and re-write. Damn my perfectionist ways!)

Z is for Zzzzzzzzzz

Z is for Zzzzzzzzzz

Catching a few delightful zees.

Or?

Asleep at the wheel.

It's how I'm feeling these days, quite often.

A victim of insomnia; though I am also sleep's bully, keeping it from its proper place in my life quite willfully.

For, you see, it's not so much that I can't fall asleep, it's that I won't let myself go to bed. Night-owl Ethan often does not go down until 10 or 10:30. That's when my "me time" begins. And there is so very, very much to be done.

When I do manage to put myself to bed at a decent hour? A nighttime's rise up to consciousness - whether to relieve a bladder or turn from an aching hip - will no longer be a brief blip in my slumbers; will now result in extended wakefulness. If you have gotten an email from me at 3 am? Yes. This.

And then there is unfortunate circumstance: a child's middle-of-the-night projectile vomit; my mother's ER visits, always an all-night affair, occasionally even 36 hours when hospital beds are scarce.

All conspiring to rob me of my rightful slumber.

I used to be a good sleeper, once.

The sandman and I enjoyed an easy, cozy relationship.

Before kids.

Before autism.

Before ADD.

Before peri-menopause.

Before elderly parents.

Before death.

Before blogging.

Aye, there's the rub: I confess I write best at about two am. It's not just the quiet in my household, kids tucked away in their beds. Even though I live in the city that never does, in this mostly residential, very family neighborhood, even though it is, yes, Manhattan, most of the people all around me are fast asleep.

Not all, certainly not that. Somewhere in my building there is surely a teenager chatting away on Facebook, an old man raiding the refrigerator, a new mother pacing the floorboards with her restless babe.

Yet still, it is enough. There is a psychic calm all about. Cars along Riverside swoosh by sporadically. The doormen are ensconced in lobby chairs, struggling to remain alert to the rare late arrivals, no longer jauntily calling out to each other from beneath sidewalk awnings. The brainwave patterns surrounding me are buzzing in the deep deltas of sleep. 

And my words, which serve such pragmatic purposes during the day, find themselves bubbling up from deeper pools in the dark; flowing into channels that delight and surprise me, swirling eddies carrying me along to places I have only glimpsed before, maybe in dreams.

And so, when I awaken at three am, having fallen asleep bolt upright on the couch while attempting to watch a movie on TV with my husband, I don't just pop myself into bed. I sit down at the computer: prime writing time has begun.

There's a reason I'm sleepwalking through my days sometimes, and its name is blog.

And I like this writing life so much, yes I do, that I'm willing to sacrifice a standard good night's sleep to it; catch my z's when and where I can.

And, please note:

Z is also for something really important to me... Zygotes.

Those are the earliest bits of us, what happens when a pair of compatible gametes meet cute, get happy together; existing for four days only before they become blastocysts, then embryos, then fetuses. (And then, eventually, if all goes according to plan: babies.)

I have zygotes on the brain right now because, having just realized that I've never truly told the tale here, I'm busy writing out the story of my twin boys' conception. Not a terribly sexy story I'm afraid, as it was a highly technical affair involving petri dishes, not mood lighting. Yes, IVF. Stay tuned...

This post has been inspired by and linked up to Jenny Matlock's Alphabe-Thursday writing meme, the letter of the week most obviously "Z." And yes, after this she's going to start back at the beginning with "A" again. Join in!

The Other Twins

As everyone knows, ten years ago today, my city, my country, and the world changed irrevocably; all were diminished forever.

This is one of those touchstone moments, that everyone who was alive and old enough to be cognizant knows exactly where they were, who they were with, what they were doing at the exact moment that they heard the news of the planes hitting the Twin Towers, the towers falling.

Some didn't have to "hear the news" as they were close enough to see, hear, feel the event itself. My friend Peter was working in the towers, his life saved by a forward thinking manager who told his people to get out and go home, in spite of what the building management people were telling him.

I do not know a single New Yorker who did not know someone who lost someone that day, there being way less than six degree of separation here.

I myself, in spite of living in the city, was kept in a bubble, unaware of what had gone down for a good hour afterward. At exactly 8:45 AM, I had arrived for a breakfast date, and entering the Barking Dog Diner, greeted my friend who had taken a cozy dark booth on the inside -- there being two basic choices in seating: cave or greenhouse.

I say I was meeting a friend, but strangely enough, she was someone I was actually meeting for the first time. In 2001 I was just dipping my toes in the water of an online life, and that morning I was meeting my first internet friend IRL. We had connected at a fertility website, back when "interacting" online meant posting notes on a message board site and waiting hours (and sometimes days) for a reply.

My friend had just completed a successful IVF cycle at the same center where I was planning to undergo one, if my September IUI failed (it did - the twins are IVF). She was in town for her first ultrasound, and I was rushing to find out her news. She lived upstate, near Albany, but had traveled down to NYC to do her fertility treatment because of the sterling reputation of the center we were at (Weil-Cornell, for the curious).

Deeply nauseated, she had been worried it might be twins, was hoping she was carrying a singleton. When I arrived she was glowing, happy to have witnessed that miraculous thing: her (single) baby's heart-beat in grainy black and white on the ultrasound monitor.

Unaware of all that was going on in the world around us, cocooned in the glow of long awaited happiness finally unfurled, we talked and dreamed of our futures as mommies. I looked to her and hoped I was seeing shadows of my future.

Finally, it was time for us to leave; for her to head back to Penn Station and catch the Amtrak back North to her husband (who sadly could not come with her this day) and for me to head to work, conveniently right across from Penn station. We were going to catch a cab together.

While she made her way to the bathroom, I went up front to pay and was annoyed to find the cashier/hostess had abandoned her station, was furiously pacing and smoking (?!?) on the sidewalk outside. When I stepped out to find her, she was jumpy as a cat, apologized profusely and added tensely: "It's just I'm so upset by what's going on, I had to have a cig."

I must have stared at her blankly because her look softened. We spoke over each other; me: "What do you mean, what's going on?" and her: "Oh, honey, you don't know, do you?"

She then proceeded to tell me that two planes had hit the Twin Towers, and they were aflame. She pointed me southward to witness the plumes of smoke rising, ominously black in the brilliant blue sky.

Just then a cab stopped smack in the middle of the intersection of York Avenue and 77th Street. The driver rolled down his window and cried out to the world: "The towers are falling, the towers are falling!"

I paid our breakfast bill in a blur, came back to our booth to find my friend and break the news to her. It seemed surreal, impossible. Could that really have happened while we sat and ate breakfast so calmly, so unaware, in this selfsame city, just a few miles to the south?

We were both in a daze, needing to contact husbands and head west. I had it in my head to still go in to work, she thought there was a chance she could catch a train, desperately wanting to be heading out, home.

Miraculously while we were both calling and getting busy signal after busy signal, cell towers vastly overloaded, my cell phone rang. My husband had gotten through. He disabused us of the notion of heading toward Penn Station, told my friend they had already sealed off the city to rail traffic, told me I was in no circumstances going anywhere but home. And my friend, obviously was coming with me.

New, barely knowing each other outside the details of our ovulation cycles, we were abruptly bonded by strange circumstance. Sitting in our living room together, numbly watching events unfold on the TV, we barely spoke, just witnessed.

Luckily my friend had an aunt who resided in the city, and in my neighborhood no less. Contact was eventually made, my friend departed, and my husband and I found ourselves alone, together, un-moored except for each other.

Ahead lay days of nervous baby steps back out into the world; lay our trip to my niece's September 15th wedding in Maryland, making jokes along the way about traveling from one target zone to another; lay contemplating and then going through with our final, ultimately successful attempt to become pregnant, made ever more poignant in this, our post-9/11 world.

But that evening there was only us, walking slowly down Riverside Drive, hand in hand, gazing southwards at the haze of smoke hanging over the smoldering pits where just that morning buildings had stood.

They were not beautiful, those Twin Towers, products of 1970's minimalist uber-functional architecture; but they were ours, and somehow majestic in their dominance of the New York City Skyline.

Ten years is both a short and long time. The entirety of our sons' lives. But also the blink of an eye. Especially for the many who lost loved ones that day, whose time-dulled grief is made knife sharp again each year, as September 11th rolls around.

I cried that day for the shattering -- of lives, of innocence, of an easy sense of all being right with the world that can never return again.

I cried again this morning, remembering; and with the small sadness that my sons will never know that little uplift of the heart that came when flying back to New York from distant shores, of spotting the Twins, those beckoning towers, welcoming you, and knowing you are finally home.


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.