The Least of Our Problems
My first grade teacher told us not to overuse the bathroom pass. He stressed: we’d be doing fun things in first grade, things with turtles and books, and if you were in the bathroom, you’d miss out on everything. I took both rules and books very seriously, so I never once left class to go to the bathroom. I developed chronic UTIs and leaked in my underwear. “Leaked” — that’s what the pediatrician called the wetness when, after weeks of it, my mom took me to be diagnosed. As I sat on the cushioned vinyl table my mom stood next to the doctor, who told me leaking could be fixed with an exercise. “From now on,” he said, “When you go to the bathroom, I want you to start and stop, start and stop. Start and stop, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. The doctor thought my problem was a matter of weak muscles, of not being able to hold it in.
With a wink, he turned to hand my mom a prescription for antibiotics. “The good news is, she won’t have any trouble getting pregnant.” He laughed at his joke, which neither my mom nor I understood.
Every time my fertility specialist prescribes a trigger shot, I either have to pay a fifty-dollar delivery fee or drive an hour north of Los Angeles, to the one pharmacy, which sells trigger shots to patients of my clinic. I have no idea why this is the case. I have begged for a closer pharmacy. I have begged not to have to use trigger shots. After all, nothing seems to be wrong with my body. My ovaries are teeming with eggs. My periods are regular, almost to the hour. I am my own trigger shot, I email my specialist. Fertility treatments are about controlling the uncontrollable, he replies, so I put on a podcast and drive north, over the mountains, past the Budweiser plant, to a free standing office building on a flat, busy road.
You have to take a ticket to enter the tiny parking lot which serves no other retailers— a ticket which the pharmacy validates and the exit attendant doesn’t ask to see. The pharmacy on the first floor has not been remodeled since, maybe, 1982. The walls are pink. The signage looks like it was printed from a first gen Apple. The shelves display corn remedies, maxi pads, antiseptic sprays. You show your ID and pay eighty dollars for one trigger shot, which insurance does not cover, and then you head back out, into 2019. Everything about not getting pregnant is a pointless loop through time.
While I’ve been trying to get pregnant I’ve watched my friends get pregnant, give birth, and get pregnant again. Some have miscarried, most in secret, only telling me when I voice my own struggle. Some have had babies too early, others who were sick, connected to machines from the moment they emerged. Some thought their lives were finally, exactly realized, and then, after not sleeping for a year, have sent frantic texts asking for cleaning tips and organizational ideas. They are really asking how to get their partner on their level. They are cleaning and cooking and working full-time and don’t have the money to hire someone to help. Or they have the money, but feel guilty outsourcing. I have done many things poorly in my life, but I know my cleaning products. I tell them to try Bon Ami. Better yet, tell your better half to try it.
“Try different positions,” they offer in return. “Have fun with it! That worked for us.”
Each of our advice is meaningless, but the offering makes us feel better.
I haven’t tried IVF. I don’t want to spend anymore time in clinic, with the Anne Geddes books strewn on the exam room tables like inspirational quotes.I’m always assigned the room with the book with the slender woman in thetranslucent dress. Under the dress, against her stomach, she cups a sleeping newborn. Nothing in these years of infertility fills me with rage like this casual, brutal display of staged motherhood. “I can tell she’s not pregnant,” I have said out loud, voice rising, to no one. “I can hold a kid under a see-through dress, too. Doesn’t mean anything.” And then I pull off my underwear for yet another gnarly, second-day-of-your-period transvaginal ultrasound.
My first ultrasound at the clinic was at our first consultation, when the doctor declared, despite it not being the right point in my cycle, “Why not check everything out!” He invited my husband to stay, and as he pushed the wand up my vagina and around my uterus, he narrated the topography. Fallopian tubes, ovaries, a terrific uterine wall. As he passed some pulsing gray matter, he cranked the wand back, hovered. “Man, that guy’s really working hard,” he said, squinting. He glanced at my husband, “That’s the bowel.”
The real, honest reason we haven’t tried IVF is: a few days after my husband and I bought our first house — the perfect house, bid on a whim, accepted under asking — the TV show I was writing for was cancelled. Hello, mortgage; goodbye, salary. We became very cash poor. We’d already completed two rounds of IUI. Another on a tight budget felt like a waste. IVF is out of the question. So, after unpacking the boxes, there I was, staring at our new house’s nursery, wondering what to do with it.
During a deep internet dive (to prepare for writing the letter which accompanies all LA real estate bids, the letter which won us the bid despite not being the highest offer), I’d discovered the previous owners had, one year ago, made both a wedding registry and a baby registry. The wedding date listed on the registry was the same as the baby’s due date. Wedding came and went, baby came and stayed, the garage was converted into a mother-in-law suite. A few months later, LA waded through its wettest winter in decades, the wildflowers bloomed with such determination they were visible from outer space, and the newly-married couple filed for divorce.
The nursery’s accent wall had cheap wallpaper, the contact paper-y, self-install kind. Gray elephants on a light turquoise background. I’d seen rolls of it at Target when buying a bathmat. The opposite wall (can you technically have two accent walls?) was a brighter turquoise, jewel-toned. It wasn’t what I would have picked, but it wasn’t terrible. It also couldn’t exist in a house without a child. I gave myself two weeks before an overhaul. I was in the two-weeks-of-hoping part of my cycle.
You schedule your life around getting pregnant, especially when you’re not getting pregnant. A week of LH strips, two weeks of not lifting bags of soil for the garden you want to plant, a week of bleeding, back to the LH strips. You go easy on the booze, you get your hair cut twice as often because prenatal vitamins make everything grow. You don’t buy new bras, because maybe you’ll have to buy maternity bras soon, and then the first new bras would be a waste. And yes, you try acupuncture. (If one more person suggests acupuncture, I’ll scream.) You confuse a lot of things for being a fetus implanted in your uterus: a burrito, a hard workout, too much sugar, hunger, post-vitamin nausea, sitting too long in one place, wanting to nap in the sun, jeans just out of the dryer, travel, carbs, dehydration, PMS.
Two weeks after we moved into our new house, I was, again, for the fifteenth time, not pregnant. I bought a gallon of Swiss Coffee eggshell interior paint, rollers, sandpaper. I pulled the elephants down. I layered the Swiss Coffee over the turquoise. God, so many layers. That turquoise was a bold, maybe desperate, choice. I arranged all the leftover furniture in the ex-future-nursery, along with the litter box (disguised in the bottom of a fake pot of a fake fern). The effect is very “Cat Library.” It could be worse.
I stopped doing Kegels in high school, mostly because I didn’t want to be known as the girl who peed weird. Around the same time, my aunt told me I was lucky to have hips wide for my frame. Wide hips are good for babies. Since then, almost every cisgendered woman I know has been told the same thing. The ones who, objectively, have narrow hips. The ones with wide-all-over frames. All the other ones in between. Through our twenties, we’re told we’re Fertile Myrtles and in touch with the Earth and so good with kids, wink wink. Even the particular shade of our lips means we’re ready to conceive. We’re all apparently very suited to have babies and have them easily. Back in first grade, my problem wasn’t weakness. With all we put up with, weakness is the least of any of our problems.
Our new yard is large, flat, enclosed, and shaded by a huge jacaranda tree. Our friends with toddlers come over, lie on their backs, and let their kids go wild. We open wine. My husband brings out his lemon bars, made with lemons from the fruit trees out back. He chases the wobbly babies, swings them in the air, parades out the cat. He’d be a good dad. Before me, the mothers in repose look impossibly put-together.
“How are you doing?” I ask.
“I’m not always a wreck,” they say. “What’s your plan?”
“There isn’t one,” I say, with the relief and terror that comes with being honest. “We’ll keep trying, but there is no plan. Thanks for letting us borrow yours.”
Glasses clink, a cheers to the messes we are both in, the messes we want on our own terms, in a world hellbent on telling us how to be.
-Kate Erickson
Originally from Kentucky, Erickson is now based in LA, where she has written for a variety of TV shows including Fear the Walking Dead and Mr. Robot. Prior to working in TV, she served coffee, crewed a Beneteau sloop, nannied, drove a produce delivery truck, ran a community center's after school program, and walked across Spain. Her personal essays have appeared in appear in various publications including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Wellesley Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Santa Fe Literary Review, and New York Press. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and is a member of the Writers Guild of America, East.