SUNDAY, 9/26/99
Here is what I know. Wednesday the number was good. Friday the number had more than doubled, which is what numbers are supposed to do and what mine have never once done. On October 7 they will look on an ultrasound for a heartbeat. That is eleven days. I am counting them like it's the two-week wait, because it is. It's just a longer one with better news at the front.
Everybody tells you the two-week wait is the hard part. Nobody tells you that after a positive there is another wait, and in some ways a worse one, because now there is something to lose. I have been pregnant zero times in four years. I don't know how to be it. I don't know if I'm allowed to say it out loud yet. I said it to the bathroom mirror at six this morning and then felt like I'd jinxed everything and knocked on the medicine cabinet.
Dan wants to buy one thing. One small thing, he says. A book. A stuffed duck. I said no. He said okay. Then this afternoon I caught him in the kitchen reading the side of a box of saltines like it was a pamphlet from the clinic.
Hope is a four-letter word. I'd put that in a headline if anyone would buy it.
Needles this cycle: 59. The progesterone continues until ten weeks, news Dan greeted with the enthusiasm of a man who has become very good at something he never wanted to learn.
FRIDAY, 9/24/99
Second blood test. It doubled.
I'm going to type that again. It doubled.
Going to bed at 9:30 like somebody's grandmother.
WEDNESDAY, 9/22/99
3:41 p.m. I know because I was staring at the clock on my computer instead of at the fall print ad for the yogurt people. The clinic said they'd call between two and four. At 3:41 the phone rang and it was Nurse Pat, and she said my name like a question, and I said yes and stood up and walked as far as the cord would let me, which isn't far. I ended up sitting on the floor under my desk.
She said positive. She said the number. She said it was a good number for fourteen days. She said we'd repeat it Friday. She said congratulations in the careful voice they must teach them, the one that means for now.
I went into Greg's empty office (Greg is my creative director, who was at a shoot in Queens) and shut the door and called Dan at school. The main office had to go pull him out of sixth-period chemistry. He picked up already saying "What? What?" because in four years I have never once called him at work with good news.
Tonight we had Chinese food on the couch with the TV on. There was a new show about the White House. I could not tell you one thing that happened in it. Dan held my hand for an hour. At one point he said "We're pregnant," and I said "Don't," and he said "Okay. We're positive." That I could live with.
MONDAY, 9/20/99 — YOM KIPPUR
Kol Nidre last night. I have gone to Kol Nidre every year of my life, and every year I'm fine until the cantor starts, and every year I'm not.
I did not fast today. Dr. L., our reproductive endocrinologist, said absolutely not: drink water, take your progesterone. I called the rabbi's office Friday to ask anyway, and the rabbi said guarding a life comes before the fast, and I hung up and cried in the supply closet because a rabbi had used the word life about something that may or may not be happening inside me. So I drank water. I ate crackers in the coat room at noon like a teenager sneaking a cigarette. My mother caught me and gave me a look, and then, when she understood, gave me a completely different look, and went and found me an apple.
Then the Unetaneh Tokef. Who shall live and who shall die. Who by water, who by fire. I have always heard it as a poem about endings. This year I heard it as a poem about beginnings, and I thought about the three we put back on the eighth, and which of them had already been written in which book.
Ne'ilah at sundown, the gates closing. I stood the whole time. Dan held my coat. Two more days.
SUNDAY, 9/12/99
Of all the weeks.
Rosh Hashanah, first day, yesterday. The Torah reading is Sarah, ninety years old, laughing, and then having Isaac. The haftarah is Hannah. Hannah, who wanted a child so badly that she went to the temple at Shiloh and prayed with her lips moving and no sound coming out, so that the priest thought she was drunk. I have heard that story every Rosh Hashanah since my bat mitzvah and never once noticed it was about me. Well. I noticed yesterday. I sat in the sanctuary three days after transfer with my lips moving and no sound coming out, and I think the woman next to me also thought I was drunk.
Today was Tashlich, which moved to the second day because the first was Shabbat. We walked down to the river in Riverside Park with the heel of a challah, and you throw bread in the water for your sins. Dan threw his like a baseball. I tore mine up small. I had a lot of them. Envy: every shower, every stroller on Broadway. The things I've thought about my sister-in-law Rachel, who is due in January and has done nothing wrong but be due in January. The things I've said to Dan at 2 a.m. about whose body is broken. A seagull got most of it, which Dan says is theologically fine.
L'shanah tovah. A good year. Please.
WEDNESDAY, 9/8/99
Transfer day. Three embryos, eight cells each, which the embryologist told us is exactly what you want on day three, in the voice of a woman who has said it to people who didn't get eight cells. She gave us a picture. They look like three tiny bunches of grapes. Dan has named them, which I've forbidden, and which he's doing anyway under his breath.
The procedure itself is nothing. You lie there and try to picture something calm. I pictured the ocean at Montauk and then, for no reason, a jingle I wrote for a car dealer in 1994. Luis says that's the sign of a sick mind. Luis is my art director. Copywriters and art directors come in pairs, like socks, and he's the only one at work who knows. He covered for me today and told Greg I was at the dentist. Greg asked if it was a root canal. Luis said, "Something like that."
Home. Feet up. Dan did the progesterone shot tonight with the concentration of a bomb squad. He teaches high school chemistry and treats the whole thing like a lab practical, which is either the most or least romantic thing about him.
Needles this cycle: 41. Blood test on the 22nd. The two-week wait begins. Again.
SUNDAY, 9/5/99
Retrieval this morning, on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, because eggs don't observe federal holidays. Eleven. They put me under and I woke up asking for apple juice and telling the nurse she had beautiful eyebrows. Dan says I also pitched her the yogurt campaign. The lab calls tomorrow to say how many fertilized. I am going to lie on the couch with a heating pad and the tennis on and not think about it, which is a lie.
THURSDAY, 8/26/99
Tara's baby shower was today at four in the big conference room. Tara is an account supervisor, 29, and she got pregnant, I am told, "by accident, on our honeymoon, can you believe it." I can believe it. I believe it every time.
There was a sheet cake with a stork on it. There was a game where you guess how big around her belly is with a piece of ribbon. There were tiny socks passed from hand to hand, and everybody said "oh" at each one. And because I am the copywriter, they asked me to write the card. Four drafts. The one they used says Welcome to the world. Your mother's been a great account to work on. Everybody laughed. Tara hugged me. I meant every word, and I also went into the ladies' room afterward and sat in a stall for ten minutes with my forehead on the door.
At seven I went back in with my little kit for the Gonal-F. (The Lupron is still mornings. Two needles a day now. I am a pincushion with a 401(k).) You mix the powder into the water and wait for it to dissolve, and you stand there holding a syringe in the last stall on the 23rd floor, listening to somebody from media fix her lipstick. There is no ad for this. Nobody is writing the jingle.
I brought home the leftover cake. Dan and I ate it at midnight standing up. It was very good cake.
Needles this cycle: 21.
TUESDAY, 8/17/99
Lupron, day nine. For the uninitiated: every morning I stick a very small needle in my stomach to switch my own body off, so that next week they can switch it back on with a different needle, louder. It makes me hot, then cold, then weepy at a commercial for long-distance phone cards. I have written commercials for long-distance phone cards. I know exactly how they're built, and they still get me.
The morning shot happens in the office ladies' room, because by the time I'm dressed I'm late, and the Lupron rides to work in my makeup bag with the alcohol swabs. There's a woman from finance who is always in the next stall at 9:15. I'm fairly sure she thinks I'm diabetic. I've decided to let her.
Everyone at work is watching the Regis quiz show. "Is that your final answer?" Luis asks me this about headlines now. No, Luis. Nothing is ever my final answer. I'd like to phone a friend. I'd like to phone a friend who has a baby and doesn't mention it.
Needles this cycle: 9.
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