Baby Steps (7 page)

“You have always skipped the steps, Lis,” she used to tell me. “I think it was because you were a Cesarean birth. You do everything like one, two, three . . . ten!”

But then she asked me to pull out a book she gave me when I was sixteen years old that she knew I always kept nearby:
Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke. She told me to turn to a particular page, and then she read something to me, as I read along. She had it memorized. She said:

“Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple ‘I must,' then build your life in accordance with this necessity.”

“Can you live without this, Lis?” she said. “Because if you cannot live without being a mother, then you have to do it, and you can't let anyone stand in your way. Not even me.”

I had already decided I couldn't live without it, and so my mother gave me her blessing.

Like most daughters, I learned the most from my mother when I didn't even realize I was learning a lesson. I think the most important one will stay with me forever: that the heart can break into a million tiny pieces and flutter and scatter down like ashes, and yet still remain whole.

If they substituted the word “Lust” for “Love” in the
popular songs, it would come nearer the truth.

—Sylvia Plath

 

T
he first lust I remember with clarity was the lust to have a baby. I
was just a teenager, and I was obsessed with the idea that surely I could do a better job of parenting than my parents had done. The first problem with their method, of course, was that they were both involved in the first place, because that had only ended in disaster for everyone. Clearly, they didn't know what they were doing.

I remember thinking very specifically, with teen hubris,
I could be a single mother. I might even adopt a kid. Yep, that would be awesome, just me and my kid, rolling through life.
It was one of those fantasies I had, and although I never became a teen parent, it stirred something in me—a kind of deep longing to fill a void. I lusted for it.

After a lifetime of lusts, I know something about the subject. In fact, it's been one of my personal demons to battle: my lusty nature, which has sometimes served me well, and sometimes gotten me in trouble. I tend to err on the side of lust, and I lust for many things.

I've had lust for men, lust for acting roles, lust to win, lust to power through a workout, lust for a materially rich lifestyle, lust for normalcy, lust to distinguish myself. I've had lust for chocolate, lust for a good stiff drink, lust for attention, lust for life itself. As a teenager, I often lusted for solitude, especially while at boarding school, and then gradually I came to lust for connection. I began to want people. I often lusted for attention. I lusted for renown. I lusted for independence, for separation from my mother, for something that would set me apart. I lusted for beauty, and I lusted to be lusted after. I think this is something I share with other women, especially women who lust after a baby.

Because no lust compares to baby lust, and if you have it, you know exactly how powerful and all consuming it can be. Baby lust can obliterate your personality. It can make you say things like “I would give
up anything to have a baby” and really mean it. It is the pure, potent instinct to procreate.

Baby lust, at least for me, didn't come out of nowhere. It arose out of a long and complex history of lusts woven together into a story that became my own. Over the years, I've come to understand lust as something both motivating and destructive, energizing and frustrating. Ultimately, I believe lust is born out of the urgency to fill a void. At least, it always has been for me. When you feel it, you believe that if you could only have that thing you lust for, you will be happy. Even though that's not true at all. And that's where lust gets tricky.

Whether you think your lust is for a possession—car, home, money—or for someone you can't have—lover, lost friend, parent, child—I've learned that the fulfillment of lust is no ticket to happiness. That object of your desire, once you possess it, might actually coincide with happiness for a while, until you realize that you never actually possess anything. You don't own that lover. You don't own that child. You don't even own that house. Not really. Everything changes and passes away, and then you wonder what you were lusting for, or how that lust could have driven you to the lengths it did, after you are left with nothing. What will you put yourself through in order to fulfill your lust? And what will you regret when you recognize that the temporary relief of lust is not the same as bliss? For me, lust has long engaged in a battle with the quest for nonattachment.

But before I get into baby lust, which specifically drove me single-mindedly down the path of IVF, I feel compelled to look back at a history of my lusts to see how I got to that place where I absolutely knew I had to be a mother. In some ways, the desires in my past all make sense when strung together, like pearls. Lust after lust after lust, adorning the woman I've become, because what we desire defines us.

When I was twenty, I was best friends with a boy named Devon whom I'd met in a bar during college; a sweet guy who was secretly in love with me and had a deep longing to connect with me. I sensed this, but neither of us talked about it because we were friends. We didn't want to compromise that. Or, at least, I didn't. I cared about him, but I wasn't in love with him. I was in love with the way he was in love with me. I was his object of lust, and that felt good. When I went home from New York to Missouri to spend Christmas with my mother that year, he drove his car all the way to Missouri to bring me my cat. Who does that? A boy in love, that's who.

The night he arrived, he was so charming and cared about me so much that I couldn't resist basking in the glow of his attentions. It's so easy, at twenty, to misinterpret friendship as romantic love, especially in the heat of passion. It's so easy to convince yourself that you should love someone as much as they love you . . . until you learn that you can never convince your heart to love someone as much as they love you. At the time, I was too young and impulsive to recognize that his love wasn't going to be enough for both of us. I thought,
It won't hurt me. He's my friend.
One thing led to another, and we had sex. Just once.

I knew almost immediately that it was a mistake. I remember thinking,
Whoa, what did I just do?
After a few awkward days, we gradually eased back into being “just friends.” I didn't think it could hurt him. Honestly, I didn't think at all. I had lusted for him that one night—my friend who had gone above and beyond the call of duty to do something for me—but it wasn't love, and it didn't last. He left a couple of days later, ego slightly bruised by my insistence that we were still friends but nothing more. Things began to go back to the way they were.

A week went by, and then another week, and then a month, and I still didn't get my period.

One evening when we were hanging out, after I was back at college in New York, I broke the news. “I think I'm pregnant,” I told him, trying to sound casual, like it didn't matter. “I think I need to go to the doctor.”

We went together. My college in New York was just about a twenty-minute drive from the town where I grew up, and the only doctor I knew to call was my old pediatrician. It felt strange going back there, to that little building I'd basically visited every few months through my entire childhood. It held all of my medical memories: treatment for the allergies to the horses and dogs I loved, the various colds and flus, the ear infections and vaccinations. My ophthalmologist was there, and a gynecologist my pediatrician recommended. In my current state, I saw the building as cloaked in a certain innocence and vulnerability that I had just dismantled in myself. I remember thinking,
I do not want to go into this building I've been visiting since I was a kid and find out I am pregnant. This is not the way it's supposed to happen.

The doctor did a urine test, and we all looked at it together. He looked at Devon and me, both tall and seeming more grown-up than we really were. “Congratulations, you're going to have a baby!” he said. Devon and I looked at each other, startled and dumbstruck. I remember thinking,
No . . . I'm not going to have a baby. Not now.
But I didn't say it. We said “thank you” to the nice doctor and walked out of the clinic in stunned silence. I remember putting my hand on Devon's arm and saying, “Hold on a minute, I'm just going to go back in and see if they can recommend a clinic.”

He knew what I meant. He gave me a heartbreaking look, as if begging me not to let go of his arm to go ask that question. I paused. “I'll call them later,” I said.

On the drive back to town, he looked at the road as he said to me, “Lis, I have to say this. I love you. I would love to be the father of
your child. I know it's not exactly the way that you would have wanted it to go, but we are both good and kind and grown-up, so let's do it. I don't want you to have to go through . . .
that.”

I knew what he meant.

But I did go through . . .
that.
I wasn't ready to have a baby and I wasn't ready to settle down. And I didn't love him. I thought vaguely about my teenage longing to be a mother, but it seemed far away and irrelevant to what was happening to me now. I didn't want to say the word out loud: abortion. It sounded like something that would happen to somebody else. Could I really make that decision? Could I really
not
make that decision?

At that moment in my life, I was overcome by a lust for freedom, a lust to be myself and live my own life. I didn't take it lightly. I felt miserable and selfish and overwhelmed with grief, but something in me insisted I was not ready for my life to unfold like this. I could see it erasing me. Little did I know that pregnancy would never come easily to me again, and that I would always regret my decision.

The procedure was awful. Devon held my hand the whole way through, and I spent a lot of that day on the phone with my mother. She was supportive, as always. She thought I was doing the right thing, but she also loved Devon and thought I should give him a chance. Instead of telling me what I should or shouldn't do, however, she gave me the space to reflect on my own behavior, and I didn't like what I saw. I almost wished she had screamed at me. Then at least I might have been able to justify the whole situation in self-defense. Instead, when I woke up in a room with a group of other girls who had all gone through the same thing, I felt terrible. I felt regret.