The year of deciding, telling, trying and waiting. Newest entry first; if you want the story in order, start at the bottom.
Current entries | Next: January to June 1999

12/30/98 (Wed.)

Eighteen weeks tomorrow, give or take. Tonight, reading a brief in bed at eleven, I felt something like a goldfish turning over. I put the brief down. I waited twenty minutes with my hand flat and felt nothing more, and decided I'd imagined it, and then it happened again. I said "Hello" out loud to my own stomach in an empty apartment. Then I picked the brief back up, because it's due Monday and the goldfish, whoever she is, is going to have to get used to that.

1998, in summary, for the record: decided; told; chose; tried; failed; tried; succeeded. Also impeached a President, which wasn't me.

11/26/98 (Thurs.), Thanksgiving

Thirteen weeks. I told them today.

I waited until after the turkey, which I now realize was a strategic error, since my father is a much more reasonable man before pie. My brother Avi and Shira and their four came up from Teaneck, so there were eleven at the table and I had an audience, which was a second strategic error. I said, "I have some news," and every adult at the table put down a fork.

My mother burst into tears and came around the table and held my face in both hands the way she did when I got into law school. Shira hugged me. Avi, bless him, said "Mazel tov, Ruthie," loudly enough to set the tone for the room. The kids wanted to know if it was a boy or a girl and whether it could come to Avi's oldest's bar mitzvah in three years.

My father folded his napkin. He looked at the tablecloth for what I'm going to estimate was eleven seconds, although it felt like a deposition. And then he said, to the tablecloth, "Mazel tov." Two words. He got up and went into the den and turned on the football.

My mother says that's more than she expected. I've decided to treat it as an admission against interest.

9/24/98 (Thurs.)

Positive.

I took the test at 5:40 this morning in the bathroom with the light off because I couldn't bear to see a single line in the bright light. Then I turned the light on. Two lines. I sat down on the edge of the tub and read the instructions again, all six languages, in case the Portuguese version said something different. It didn't.

Then I got dressed and went to work and sat through a three-hour negotiating session about sick-leave language for a unit of school cafeteria workers, and argued very effectively, if I say so myself, for an extra personal day. Nobody in the room knew. I kept one hand in my lap the whole time.

It's the week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Days of Awe, when my father believes the book of who will live and who will die for the year gets written and sealed. I've never believed that in my life. This morning, sitting on the edge of the tub, for about thirty seconds I did.

Called Gwen at 7 a.m. She screamed. Haven't told my parents. It's very early. Nobody else knows but you, and you don't count, because I don't know who you are.

8/30/98 (Sun.)

The arbitration is over. We won, mostly. Thirty-eight hospital housekeepers get back pay, and the hospital gets to keep its new schedule, and everybody is unhappy in exactly the right proportions, which is what winning looks like in my line of work.

So I'm going back to the clinic this month. I took the summer off for the case and because, frankly, after June I needed to stop taking my own temperature and start taking my own measure. Gwen says I'm ready. Gwen's paperwork for China went in last month; she's decided to adopt, and she carries a folder of forms everywhere she goes like other women carry pictures of their grandchildren.

Try number two. I'm going to be calm. I'm going to be professional. I'm going to fail completely at both.

6/7/98 (Sun.)

Not this time.

I knew by Friday but I made myself wait for the test anyway, because I'm a lawyer and I don't accept anything without documentation. Negative.

Everyone warns you. The doctor warned me: first tries often don't take, especially at thirty-seven. The books warn you. Gwen warned me. None of it helps, because what they're warning you about isn't the odds. It's the two weeks in between, when you walk around being secretly, provisionally two people, and pick out names in the shower, and then one morning you're just one again, and you have to go to work and sit in a conference room and talk about grievance procedure.

I cried in the car in the garage at the office. Then I fixed my face in the rearview mirror and went up and took a deposition. I was very sharp. The witness cried too, as it happens, though not for the same reason.

My mother called last night, from the phone at her friend Bernice's house, as she's done every week or so since February so my father won't hear. She didn't ask. She never asks. She just said, "So how are you, sweetheart," in a voice that knew.

5/19/98 (Tues.)

First attempt this morning at the clinic, 7:30, before work. I'll spare everybody the details; there aren't many, and it's a good deal less romantic than anything you've seen in a movie, which is to say it's a medical procedure performed by a kind nurse named Bev while the radio in the hall played the traffic report. Then I drove to the office and was at my desk by nine-fifteen.

Now: two weeks of waiting. I intend to be very busy.

4/1/98 (Wed.)

Tonight I went to a meeting in a church basement in Cambridge, of all places, for women who are thinking about having or adopting children on their own. There were folding chairs and a coffee urn and a plate of supermarket cookies, and fourteen women, most of us between thirty-five and forty-five, all of us with the same expression, a sort of defiant embarrassment, as if we'd been caught shopping for something we couldn't afford.

A few of the women had already done it, and brought their kids, who ran around the edge of the room eating the cookies. One little boy of about three came up and leaned on my knee and informed me that his mommy made him "on purpose." I have never in my life been so moved by a preschooler with frosting on his face.

I sat next to a woman named Gwen. She's forty-one, a pediatric nurse, with a laugh you could hear across a parking lot. She's going to adopt, she thinks, from China. Afterward we went for a drink and closed the bar talking. First real friend I've made since law school who doesn't bill hours.

3/8/98 (Sun.)

I have chosen a donor. I'll keep this short and clinical, because it deserves to be both.

The bank sends catalogs: pages of short profiles, then longer ones you can order. Height, eyes, hair, education, health history going back to the grandparents. A handwritten essay. I read them the way I'd read a stack of résumés, with a pencil, and I found I was looking for the same things I'd look for in an associate: good health, a good head, and some evidence of a sense of humor under pressure.

The one I chose is a graduate student in the sciences. Healthy family on both sides, a grandmother who lived to ninety-six. His essay was about teaching his little sister to play chess. He wrote that she beat him in a year and it was the proudest he'd ever been. That was the whole decision, really. That sentence.

I won't be putting his number on this page, now or ever. It belongs to my child, someday, if she or he wants it, and to no one else.

2/17/98 (Tues.)

Eleven days since Shabbos dinner. My father hasn't called. He always calls on Sunday mornings, after shul, to tell me what the rabbi said and ask whether I'm eating. Two Sundays now, nothing.

My mother has called four times, never from the house. She says he's "thinking." She says he's not angry, he's frightened. She says, "He's from a different world, Ruthie, you have to let him catch up," and I said, "Ma, it's 1998, how much farther does he have to go?" and she said, very quietly, "From Poland," and I didn't have anything to say to that. He came over from Poland with his parents in 1938, at five years old, with one suitcase among the three of them. He was the first in his family to finish college. Everything in his life has been about building a family that would hold. And here I am telling him I'll build one my own way, without the part he thinks holds it up.

I understand him. I'm still going to do it. Both things are true, and I'm finding out that I'm going to have to live with both of them for a long time.

2/7/98 (Sat.)

I told my parents last night. I did it badly. For the record, I'd like to note that there's no way to do it well, but I found a way to do it worse than necessary, which is a skill I apparently have.

Friday night, Shabbos dinner at their house in Sharon, candles lit, challah under its cover, my father in his good sweater. I had planned it the way I'd plan an opening statement: calm, factual, a little warm. I was going to wait until dessert. Instead, between the soup and the chicken, my mother asked, in all innocence, whether I was "seeing anybody nice," and I said, "No, Ma, and I've decided I'm not going to wait for him. I'm going to have a baby on my own."

Just like that. Over the soup.

My mother said, "Oh." My father put down his spoon and asked me, very quietly, how exactly I intended to do that. I told him. Clinically. I used the words "sperm bank" at my parents' Shabbos table, which I believe is a first for the family and possibly for the town.

He said, "A child needs a father." I said a child needs a parent who wants it more than anything. He said, "And who will this child say is his father? What will you tell him?" I didn't have an answer that was good enough, and he knew it, and I knew he knew it.

He got up and went to his study and closed the door. We ate the chicken, my mother and I, in silence. She walked me to the car and held on to my coat sleeve and said, "He'll come around. Drive carefully." And I drove home on Shabbos, which, under the circumstances, was the least of my sins.

1/15/98 (Thurs.)

First consultation. The doctor is a reproductive endocrinologist with the bedside manner of an IRS auditor and, I'm told, the results of a miracle worker. I'll take the results. She went over everything: the tests I'll need, how the process works, what the odds are for a healthy woman of thirty-seven, which are not bad and not great, and get worse every year. She said it all without once asking where the husband was. I could have hugged her. I doubt anyone ever has.

Blood work next week. I've put it in my calendar between a mediation and a dental cleaning.

1/4/98 (Sun.)

My name is Ruth. I'm thirty-seven years old. I'm a labor lawyer in Boston, which means I represent unions: nurses, bus drivers, hotel workers, the people who clean hospitals at 3 a.m. I own a second-floor condo in Jamaica Plain with a porch and an oven that runs hot. I am not married, not engaged, and not, at present, seeing anybody nice, a phrase I'm going to hear a great deal about, I expect.

I've decided to have a baby on my own.

I didn't decide it this morning. I've been deciding it for about three years: at every friend's baby naming, every bris, every time I held somebody else's child and gave it back. I kept waiting for the right man, and the right man kept not arriving, and one day in November I sat in a hearing room listening to an expert witness talk about "the declining utility of delayed action," and I thought, that's me. That's my case.

So I'm starting this page to keep myself honest. To write it all down somewhere my mother can't find it and my colleagues can't cross-examine it. If anybody else out there is standing where I'm standing, hello. Pull up a chair. The coffee's bad but it's hot.

Current entries | Next: January to June 1999
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