Fertile

Nobody wears black or brings a lasagna over when you go on a fertility journey and then let go and mourn the baby you aren’t having. And nobody believes you have a happy ending without the proof, a baby. But I am not in an ending. I am in a life.

We are a certain type of people, those who have prayed for a desire to be removed. I once darted out of a CVS in hot tears after seeing the cover of a magazine boasting Casey Anthony’s pregnancy, having been tried for murdering her first child. I was buying one of dozens of home pregnancy tests. “Please, God, fulfill or remove this desire, it hurts...” on the way to the car.

A donor egg felt creepy and sci-fi. (no offense) I prayed about it, in the woods and on the beach. That always resulted in a feeling of certainty in my heart that another woman’s egg with my husband’s seed, in my uterus, was not my destiny. I already had two of those, not in my uterus, but in my kitchen, and I loved them as my own. I missed the infancy and toddler years with them, but isn’t that a form of winning the lottery?

One night as I soaked in the tub, I realized I was no longer the same person that optimistically started this journey. It had been about four years and I was tired of it. I was dying to myself.

I was dying to a present fantasy of a past dream.

I had been too captured by a culture that hypnotized me into postponing things that don’t keep, like eggs, for things that do, like work. I even kept making albums during the years of medical appointments, mostly as therapy, and wrote Out of Time* to my baby, accepting I may never meet her, but that somehow we will both make it out alive, meaning trusting in God’s will for us.

I had vocal and pitch shifts in the studio because of hormones and steroids. The most healing question during that time was “what made you think you would effortlessly get pregnant in your 40s?” (I did.) That was like spiritual smelling salts. It’s not that I don’t think one can, it’s that I faced having expected a 25 year old’s reality.

I started scanning my reality. I am my husband’s cherished, treasured wife, mature enough to fully appreciate him. I am the songwriter who had the guts face fears, while he brought home babies I get to love now and raise too. I am the pilgrim who didn’t freeze my eggs because I didn’t want to suffer the clinical path that I found myself still on, that night in the tub. I am the persistent ego and personality wanting to have a child. Why? To belong? To prove? To be made whole? I am whole.

My mind drifted to the lemon tree, given to me by my husband in a ceramic pot, when we still believed it would just happen, weeks after we got married. I treasured it, prayed while I watered it, I felt the spirit of the child was represented by the tree. I expected it to be the same height as her when she stands next to it for a picture, smiling on her first day of school. It had just died. After three years of clinics and all the things people who just have sex and get pregnant never have to know. The gardener said the lemon tree died of shocked roots. They recommended that we use donor eggs. Someone else’s roots became necessary, so yes, shocked roots.

But what died, with the lemon tree?

• The self will of living for a future I invented without God

• Eating “fertility foods” while coffee slugging, diet soda chugging and sour candy eating smokers get pregnant every day

• Listening to physicians who aren’t me, in my body

• The gross and utter selfishness of bringing a child into the world so that I may feel redeemed, comforted, or worthy of boundaries in a delicate blended family situation.

Maybe what belongs to me, and all that truly belongs to me will arrive, is something different than what I thought.

Conversations with God produce such breezy freedom. ‘Maybe my big, huge, deep baby dream could become a mere melancholy preference…governed by humble, physiological acceptance…tucked inside the privilege of growing older…in a deeply fulfilling marriage…Maybe I am a mother already in my mission as a stepmama’. I usually left infertility support group meetings early to be home for the kids’ arrival from elementary school. I sure felt like a mother every Sunday night after the kids were in bed and my chores were done. (Plus, my favorite pants are from CostCo.)

It’s been almost seven years since that night in the tub. I have had many God-led experiences since, almost unbelievable to me at times. Like when I offered to take my neighbor’s toddler for an afternoon. She was the age my child would’ve been had the last attempt worked, and she showed up in a lemon tree jumpsuit. I said “seriously, God?” out loud after she left, sobbing in the bathroom. It passed when I felt the gratitude for having needed to connect with Almighty God.

I surrender, again. It is not ever over. I probably walked back downstairs to laughter, because everyone in our growing family is funny. Laughter, and gentle, unexpected moments of sensing my husband’s protection of my most tender territory, have healed me.

Some people just don’t have a baby. I am secure in my awareness that to trust God and love anyway, everywhere you can, is holy activism. We live in an artificial, at-any-cost, have it all, willful world. I resist that; I surrender. That means sobbing with surprise is knowing a storm is a blessing in a drought. Occasionally I land into the moment at a traffic light and stare, utterly stunned about how it all turned out so far. But don’t a lot of people do that?

I believe that if you truly trust God, you remain equally grateful for the blessings and the unanswered prayers. Loss has caused me to become faithfully awake. I planted a lemon tree behind my studio, in the ground, and it is thriving, and big.

And so, to all the women who know this pain, I’m here to tell you what I have learned. You are capable of growing and developing, able to mature. Therefore, you are fertile.

*Out of Time (Appletree Music 2015)

Lyrics:

That past, past, past it just isn’t here no more

We all wanna rewrite it especially when y’hit the floor

You can still chase every dream and trust things are not as they seem

But even that horizon’s sunset shine is a daily grind, ordinary yet divine

Out of Time, Out of Time, out of everything it takes to make a clock unwind

Out of Time but baby I believe we’ll make it out alive

It’s not that bad there in that 11th hour

But not everybody gets to cash in on the lesson when life goes sour

You can hold your breath until you’re blue

But life will not cater to you

You don’t tell your Maker you wrote the script as you see fit, you just act in it

Just when you think you’re all out if life and love

You see all that really matters comes

Out of Time

Out of Time

Out of Time

Out of everything it takes to make a full coat shine

But baby, I believe we’ll make it out alive