PLENTY OF TIME… I always said, plenty of time to have children one day. That was my mantra from my late teens to late thirties, from single girl to married woman, divorced woman back to single again. When I actually met and married a man who wanted to start a family at the same time I did, “Plenty of time” turned into “Right now!”
Tick Tock.
Having a child was something I took for granted my whole life, even when I had found myself childless at the age of thirty-eight and into my second marriage with a man 11 years my senior. When the reproductive system lets us down, it can be a difficult road to acceptance, especially when you have spent your life as a type A workaholic. For the first few years of our marriage, we didn’t use birth control, and I assumed (What’s that old saying? Assume makes an ass out of you and me?) we would get pregnant quickly. It didn’t happen. Then came the day, four years after we married, when my husband asked me to accompany him to the urologist.
I thought it was an odd request.
“He thinks he might have some ideas on why we can’t get pregnant” he said reassuringly.
It turned out to be one of those life moments of which you remember every detail. The doctor sat across from us and got straight to the point.
“The bad news is that your husband has prostate cancer, the good news is that we found it early.” He delivered the words with his best poker face.
All I could hear is the C word, and my mind raced ahead to “Is he going to die?”
Somehow you never think a moment like this is going to come so soon, at least not for you. I thought this was something that happened to old people. That C word has great power. It is a pervasive power, one that extends over your whole existence. And because it can come back, long after the skilled cut of the surgeon, you are always dreading the future. Cancer waits in the dark shadows of your life ready to re-emerge at any moment, and take the happiness that you have reclaimed and shatter it to pieces.
My first question to the doctor was whether or not my husband of three years, a man that I considered my soul mate, would live or die. The answer to that was yes, probably, if they had in fact caught the cancer early enough. He answered my second question before I could ask it.
“Of course, once the prostate is removed, there is no ability to create sperm. But prior to the radical – I noted the word radical – prostatectomy, you will be able to freeze your sperm and can have in vitro fertilization in order to have children.” He spoke as though he was telling someone they had a case of common cold. His cool, calm words devastated my world like a bomb exploding in the dead of night. What that meant was that my husband’s prostate would be cut out of his body, which required severing the connecting parts and putting them back together.
Suddenly this career woman who could make anything happen — was helpless.
Tick Tock.
We didn’t have time to grieve. With a radical prostatectomy scheduled for my husband in a few weeks time, we quickly made appointments — the sperm bank for him, a top-notch fertility specialist for me. While he was masturbating to porn videos trying to produce enough sperm to impregnate me, I was having my uterus checked out to determine how efficiently I could be transformed into an egg factory.
I assumed (there’s that assume word again!) my eggs would always be in plentiful supply, like the grade AA large at the grocery store. Then the fertility doctor explained that starting in the late thirties (why hadn’t someone told me this before, or had they and I had been too busy to listen?) human eggs become rarer and rarer, and they become harder and harder to fertilize, until sometime in your mid to late forties they simply dry up.
Dry up? This can’t be happening to me — I never even used my good eggs! In fact, I had spent over 20 years of my life and lots of money trying to keep my good eggs from becoming fertilized! Suddenly the rules had changed!
True to form, I attacked my state of infertility much the same way I had performed my job as a television producer: I did everything the doctor told me to do and then some.
Plan A: In vitro fertilization!
While I was undergoing fertility treatments my husband was undergoing far worse — his cancer treatment. He had his cancerous prostate cut out and underwent 12 weeks of radiation. Although his doctors assured us that his cancer would be eradicated, my nervous system was a wreck. Life became a constant series of hospital visits and procedures for him, fertility treatments for me.
After several months we were ready to go for it. I awaited the results of the pregnancy test, certain of success. I simply wasn’t expecting to hear “Your results are negative.”
Tick Tock.
My age was betraying me. Of course, I thought I could control that fact as well. I refused to accept the fact that nature simply didn’t intend for my body, now forty-three, to reproduce (or at least not easily) any longer. But, hell, there are plenty of things I still did that nature didn’t intend for me to do after the age of forty, like wearing a bikini. Only this was a whole new ball game. To accomplish my goal, I would first have to accept the fact that I would be flying in the face of Mother Nature, and could be in for a long and arduous challenge.
Then I came to the realization that it wasn’t the experience of being pregnant that I was longing for, it was the experience of being a parent. On to Plan B: Adoption!
Tick Tock.
“Who knew that adoption had become the new gold rush?” I said to my husband following a meeting with one of the top adoption attorney’s in the business. This was the big business of open adoption. These attorneys helped couples that had forgotten to have children along their paths to career success.
We were matched right away with a young couple from Arkansas, then decided we had enough history of drugs, insanity and abuse in our own family, and we passed.
Tick Tock.
Another year had gone by. Now, at forty-four, it wasn’t just my biological clock that was ticking. It was a question of whether or not I would soon become too old to become a parent by any means. In the big business of infertility another solution – or hope of one – came to our attention. We could still use my husband’s sperm and implant me with younger eggs from a donor!
At the “Egg Donation Clinic” you are asked to choose from a catalogue of women who look like you, only a younger “Playmate” version of you. We picked a young woman who produced 19 eggs per cycle, and after the procedure I was sure I was pregnant with twins.
Not one egg took.
Tick Tock.
At forty-five, we decide to check out orphanages in Mexico. It broke my heart. We would have taken any of those children, but found out there is a better chance of finding real Prada on the streets of Tijuana than getting a child out of Mexico.
Months pass into another year. Finally my adoption attorney calls offering one last hope.
“Would we consider a Hispanic baby?” Clearly he didn’t know we had been to Tijuana.
The next thing I knew I was on a plane to Phoenix to meet Jennifer Ortega, eight months along.
I’ll always remember our first meeting and how she looked me straight in the eyes as the tears streamed down her face.
“I want a better life for my daughter, and I want a woman just like you to be her mother,” she said as she took my hand.
We went to Babies R Us and bought a heartbeat monitor. I called my husband and placed my cell phone on her stomach beneath her Winnie the Pooh t-shirt so he could hear the heartbeat of our soon to be born baby.
Only it wasn’t a baby’s heartbeat, it was Jennifer’s.
Jennifer was a very good, not even pregnant, just fat, scam artist. She stole our money and our rental car and shattered my faith.
The clock stopped. I gave up.
A month passed. 9/11 happened. As I was watching the second World Trade Center collapse, stunned and horrified, I got a call. It was the adoption attorney.
There’s another birth mother that has contacted us and I believe this one is really special,” he said.
I looked at the heap of metal and brick collapsing, and I thought of the people dying, the families left behind. Somehow I knew it would be the start of my own. At that moment I did not have a choice. The ONLY thing I could do to make a difference in this world was to raise this ONE child with love. That was 9/11. Our son Wyatt was born on 11/09.
There really was plenty of time after all.