Baby Steps (20 page)

Woodstock nurtures the free spirited. Artists flourish and live well here, making albums, writing books, painting, as they have for decades. It's a high-minded and open-hearted community. On any given day, you might drive through the humble little village and see people protesting against one of the wars or some other injustice on the village green. I'm not sure who they think will see them, but they protest nevertheless, because they believe it's the right thing to do, God love them!

Every time I go back there, I'm reminded that we all have a voice and we can all express ourselves in this country. And that's just what my family does, albeit in a less public mode. We gather at the home of my mom's best friend, Nancy, and we drink wine and eat amazing food because Nancy is a gourmet cook. And we talk. We talk about our lives and what is important to us. We relax. We let go of our work and our woes, and we exist there together in a happy bubble. We all feel comfortable in a town like Woodstock. A friend of mine once told me, “Lis, nobody knows who you really are. They think you are this shiny blonde with ice-blue eyes, and you're really just this crunchy
hippie mama.” To a family like mine, full of crunchy hippie types, Woodstock is heaven.

One evening a few years ago, a bunch of us sat around a table in Nancy's home eating her food and drinking her wine; Nancy's dinner parties are raucous and infamous, and everyone was in a good mood. I had been in New York City to meet with a director, and I couldn't go back to California without a visit to Woodstock, so there I was, with family and friends and Easton, only a few months old, asleep in the next room. I sat next to a distant relative I hadn't seen in a long time, and she had just congratulated me on my beautiful baby. Then her smile faded.

“I've had so many miscarriages,” she said, her voice wavering. “Every time I get pregnant, I'm filled with so much hope, and then things start to go wrong. The last time . . .”

Everyone at the table fell silent. As she told her story, I realized many family members already knew. I hadn't visited in a while, so I was hearing about her troubles for the first time. Eight miscarriages.

I listened sympathetically, swallowing the urge to cry. Her eyes and her words were full of grief and longing and heartbreak, but I also remember feeling removed from what she was saying, in the way you might feel removed hearing someone talk about cancer or heart disease or losing someone in a car accident, if those things have never happened to you. I remember thinking,
I don't know what that's like.
I could sympathize with her. My heart ached for her and her husband, but because I couldn't relate personally, I really didn't know what to say.

As she talked, I sensed her hesitation. She was afraid of saying too much, or of not being able to continue. She was embarrassed. She was alone in front of us, even though the house was safe and she was in the heart of her family. The longer I listened, the more I wanted to
rescue her. I felt uncomfortable sitting there listening with a blank expression on my face, as if I didn't really understand.

But I'd never had a miscarriage. What did I know about it?

And then I began to feel a familiar inkling, a recognition. Maybe I did know. She and I had both endured a great struggle in our quest to be mothers. We both knew grief and longing. Both our bodies had failed us. Both of us had been disappointed and disillusioned. Our stories were more similar than they seemed, even if the details differed. How dare I presume that I didn't know something about her pain! As I sat there nodding and smiling with compassion, I began to realize that I couldn't sit there acting like I knew nothing about what she was saying. How could I listen to another word and not tell her that my miracle baby had come out of a test tube? Why was I keeping it a secret?

I knew why. Ron and I had decided not to tell anyone. We wanted to celebrate the fairy tale of the pregnancy and the birth with our loved ones, rather than making it all about a medical problem. We were keeping it a secret, telling ourselves it was nobody's business, that it was a family matter, and that nobody had to know. I wondered what Ron would say if I told her. I wondered what she would think. I felt the same discomfort, at the prospect of telling my own secret, that I read in her face as she told hers, but I couldn't stand to see her standing in the middle of the classroom with her pants down. I wanted to stand up and say, “Okay, me too! Look, everyone! She's not so different!”

And yet, that discomfort, that embarrassment, held my tongue. Why?
Tell her, Lis,
I urged myself.
Tell her. Why not tell her?
Was my privacy worth so much that I couldn't throw her a lifeline? I couldn't comfort her? I couldn't tell her that I'd been frustrated and confused, too? And then, in a moment of clarity, in a sudden impulse of camaraderie, I said it:

“I completely understand.” As I said it, I realized it was true. “I don't know what it's like to be pregnant over and over and have it taken away, but over the last two years, I've been battling infertility and I had to do IVF. Otherwise, I couldn't have had a baby.”

She stared at me. “You did IVF?”

I nodded.

“To have Easton?”

“Yes.” I swallowed and looked around at everyone.

She took my hand, and her sad face softened. “But you're so young!” she exclaimed.

And suddenly, we were on exactly the same page.

The most surprising thing about the whole experience was how relieved I felt, like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I told my secret to do something for her, and without realizing it, speaking it out loud had done something important for me. I felt different.

The things we keep secret, the things we don't say out loud, are really the things that we feel, at some level, are bad or wrong: what we do behind closed doors, or what has been done to us. The things we don't think other people will approve of. The things we think make us freaks, or inferior, or undesirable.

I didn't consciously think about infertility being “bad” until I spoke it that night. That's when I realized I had been ashamed of it all along. And then, when I said it out loud, I realized I didn't need to be ashamed of it anymore. It wasn't something I'd done wrong. And the more I began to talk about it, the more I realized how much I had suffered from the secret. When it wasn't a secret anymore, it was just something that was. It was just a truth.

Every woman has her secrets, and every woman has her own fertility story, whether it's the story of a pregnancy, or of trying to achieve a pregnancy, or of not realizing you wanted a baby, or of not being
ready for a baby until it was too late. Sometimes, our fertility stories, our sexuality stories, and our self-worth stories get all tangled up together and feel wrong and bad, and so we don't tell them. It becomes easy to forget how much all women have in common.

Some of us have stories of early menopausal changes (like mine), or of being unable to hold on to a pregnancy (like hers). Others have stories of losing the ones we love, or of enduring violence, or of medical issues we couldn't possibly control, but that nevertheless make us feel ashamed. Every woman's body tells a story, and whether or not you have been handed motherhood on a silver platter is all part of that story. When the stories of our bodies don't have happy endings, or even if they do have happy endings but only after a long hard struggle, it can feel like nobody knows what to say or how to help. It feels isolating and lonely, and it's easy to decide you are less than a “real” woman. When I tell other women about my story now, and I say that infertility can make you feel like you aren't a real woman, they nod their heads passionately, even if they haven't been through it. Every woman understands that fertility is intimately and deeply linked to being a woman, even for those who decide not to have children. When we
can't
do it the way we thought we could, we feel like less. We feel like freaks. We feel alone.

But it doesn't have to be that way. In particular, infertility doesn't have to be isolating. When someone else has been through it—when someone else takes your hand and says, “You know what? I get it because I've been through it, too, and it's a long road, I'm not going to lie, but if you ever want to talk about it, I'm here,” well . . . those are powerful words.

I've kept some big secrets in my life, and I often didn't realize how much they were hurting me until I finally let them out. One of the biggest had nothing to do with infertility, but like many of the secrets women guard most ferociously, it had everything to do with my body.
When I was nineteen years old, I was in a nightclub in New York. I got myself into a situation that I couldn't get myself out of with a guy I barely knew. He was one of those people I sometimes ran into on the club scene, but as is the case with so many of those people you see while you are out partying and drinking, I only knew his first name. I'd been drinking that night, and I made some stupid decisions, and suddenly, there I was, being forced to do something I did not want to do and was not willing to do. When it was over, I pulled myself together and ran out of the club. It didn't occur to me to tell anyone or call the police—wouldn't it be his word against mine? I just had to get out of there. I had to remove myself from the situation as fast as possible, so I could forget it ever happened. He followed me into the street.

“Hey, do you need a ride home?” he said, as if nothing had happened. As if he hadn't just violated me. I couldn't even answer him. I shook my head.

He hesitated. “Okay. Well . . . do you have a headshot? Maybe I can help you out,” he said. “In your career.”

What? Really?
I remember thinking that he must be trying to make up for what he'd just done to me, or somehow make it “fair.” By boosting my career? Fuck him. I wanted to tell him to go to hell. I wanted to tell him, “You won't be seeing me ever again, just so you know, but thanks for the thought, asshole.” But for some insane reason, I fumbled with my purse and pulled out one of my headshots and gave it to him. I don't know what I was thinking. It was an automatic response, or a survival response.
Just give him what he wants so you can get away,
I thought.

“Let me know if I can do anything!” he said, waving the picture in my direction.

“Okay,” I said, turning away. I looked desperately for an escape route. Thank God, a cab. I jumped into the first one I saw, and I told the driver to take me to Bronxville, where I was going to college. As
soon as the driver pulled away from the club, I felt a huge sense of relief; I was fleeing the scene as if I'd been the perpetrator instead of the victim. But I was so glad to put it all behind me. My body ached and my head throbbed. I collapsed back into the seat, and then I realized I didn't have more than about three dollars in my purse. The fifteen-miles-plus trip to Bronxville was going to cost a lot more than three dollars. It was about four in the morning at the time, and for some reason, right in the middle of Queens, I admitted to the cab driver that I didn't have any money.

“As soon as you drop me off back at my dorm room, I'll run up and get the money for you, I swear,” I said. This was a bad idea. The cab driver pulled into the first gas station and dropped me off. “You don't have any money in your dorm room,” he said. “Good luck, kid.”

“Please! No, wait!” I pleaded. “I swear I'll pay you! I have money!”

He just shook his head and sped off to find a more lucrative fare. And there I was, alone at a gas station in the middle of Queens in the middle of the night. I turned around to get my bearings, and the first thing I saw was yellow police tape around a chalk outline of a body in the parking lot.

Oh my God,
I thought.
Now I'm walking into a murder scene?
I began to imagine what else could happen to me. Would I make it home alive? Terrified, I stumbled into a phone booth and frantically began filling it with quarters, trying to get anyone I knew to answer the phone. I practically screamed when someone rapped loudly on the phone booth door. I whirled around. A man stood outside.” Are you okay?” he said.

I shook my head. I didn't know how to say yes at that point because it was so far from the truth.

“Do you want a ride somewhere?” he said. He gestured behind him to a massive semi-tractor-trailer with a huge, cheerful Wonder-bread logo on the side.

I hesitated. I was nervous to accept a ride from a stranger. It seemed like a rash and stupid thing to do, but I didn't see any other option at the moment. I nodded. I pushed open the phone booth door and he opened the front cab door for me. I climbed in, desperately rationalizing what I was doing. He was hauling Wonderbread. How dangerous could he be?

Just in case, I spent the whole ride trying to sound like the least sexy human being on the planet. I went for “nerd,” talking about complicated books I'd read and referencing philosophers, hoping that would dampen any evil intentions, because at that moment, the whole world seemed threatening. He just nodded and answered benignly. “Uh-huh. Yep. Nope.”

That truck driver, bless his heart, drove his giant Wonderbread semi all the way to Bronxville, right through my posh little college campus and into the driveway of the Tudor home that had been converted to a dormitory.

“Thank you so much,” I said.

“My pleasure, ma'am,” he said, before he backed up and piloted his lumbering vehicle back toward the interstate.