Reference: The song “Ladies In A Line” by Sara Bareilles (lyrics quoted below).
My first guitar teacher, who I will not identify because he has a very distinctive name, once spent half a lesson talking about his obsession with Sara Bareilles (SB). I didn’t mind, really, it gave me a reprieve from playing an F chord (still can’t), and as luck would have it a few years later he wound up marrying someone named Sara, who bore a passing resemblance to SB.
SB has a new album out, all about grief, and this may be a blog about finding joy but the truth is that the other side of joy is often grief. I’m not sure you can have one without the other. Like, can you grieve something or someone that didn’t once bring you joy? In contrast, there is a Portuguese word, saudade, which is more about longing for someone or someplace that is absent. I thought about this word a lot while we were trying to have a baby, when I felt like I was missing something that I never actually had, but maybe could down the line? I’m probably mangling things, since my Portuguese started and ended with obrigada, but it was a weird time in my life.
These days I’m too busy and tired to remember much of that time, but SB’s new album has a song called Ladies In A Line that all too vividly brought back those days of doing IVF. I’d leave our house early, driving through the windy roads of Concord and Lexington, past Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, and past old battlefields in misty morning light, fog just starting to lift and burn off. Every other day I’d make this trip, just to have vials of blood taken, and then some days an ultrasound (the not fun kind, if you know/you know). This was all preceeded by thousands of dollars of medication showing up at our door on ice, shots two or three times a day, one in particular that burned like a bee sting, another one an actual drug used to treat cancer. I still can’t quite believe they put me/my husband in charge of giving me shots. A nurse at the IVF clinic gave Erik a quick tutorial, but honestly his stint as a veterinary assistant was more helpful.
Ladies in a line
Waiting for the fine-tipped needles
Craving just a tiny piece of good news
Doctors have ideas
Tell you nothing is for certain
That medicine′s amazing
But it isn’t perfect
It isn’t perfect, as we discovered. The house we were renting at the time had a spare room, painted in wide pink and white stripes, and I had visions of bringing a baby girl home to that room. During our first round of IVF I had horrible insomnia, and would often wind up in the spare room watching Doc Marten, of all things. It’s a long-running series, and so by the time we knew that round of IVF had failed I was only about half-way through. 11 years later, I still can’t go back to it. And ironically, about a hot minute after I finally did wind up pregnant our cats started catching mice in the kitchen on a daily basis, so we moved out of that house anyway.
Empty arms
With lists of names
The cruel truth
Of starting late
Life was asking
Other questions ′til now
Starting late was definitely part of the problem (some other issues indicated that I probably couldn’t have gotten pregnant without IVF anyway, even when I was younger). I spent my entire childhood making lists of names I would give my imaginary kids, fathered by whatever crush of the moment I happened to have. Always a long name first, and no short names, and no alliteration — ie, no first names that started with the same letter as the last name. (Ironically, decades later I would break two of those rules, giving my daughter a short first name and a long second name.) But then, as an adult, doubt and fear crept in. My mom always told me that if I had a baby I would lose it, and I never played with dolls so maybe I had no maternal instinct anyway? And I was terrified, TERRIFIED of actually giving birth. Despite my doubts, I ended an engagement in part because my then-fiance was adamant about not wanting children. Years later I would wind up in an ER in I-don’t-even-know-where Tennessee, and they thought I was pregnant. I was so relieved that I was not, that I realized the relationship I was in was probably doomed and I started plotting my return to Maine. Sometimes I used to wonder what would have happened if I had been pregnant, but now I am fairly confident I would have wound up a young widow trying to support said imaginary child by myself. Bullet, however sad, dodged.
And then years of being single, asking other questions, mostly wrong questions. Spending my weekends reading and sewing and hiking. Alternating between being content and being filled with angst about not having a family of my own. Watching everyone else I knew marry off, have kids; some on their second marriages already.
The depths of this are changing
Reminds me of the ocean floor
Just swimming where they tell me to
‘Til I can’t swim no more
The thing that keeps me going
Is a quiet kind of faith
That what is meant to find me
Will find me anywhere I am anyway
The depths…I endured some incredibly painful procedures, some really hard conversations with doctors, and then the unexplainable anguish when it didn’t work. In the midst of all this, my dad dying of cancer. And yes, you do as your told: here’s your plan, the schedule, the medication dosage, you just live by the list of instructions because you’ve paid way too much money to question anything now.
I’m not sure I had much faith by the time we did our third round. I think I was resigned at this point – either we would have a baby, or not. We made some hard choices that time, but it worked, and when our daughter was born I did come to see quite clearly that what (or who) is meant to find me, will find me. And then, years later, my other two children would find me, albeit in quite a different manner. Ironically, after all those years of dreaming about names I didn’t even get to name my two youngest!
