We’re leaving for Seattle tomorrow, so today is salad week: eat all of the greens in the yard. All the arugula, all of the spinach. Last night I made a spinach and arugula salad with pieces of chicken, dried cherries, and oranges with an orange-garlic-ginger-onion dressing. We have a new stove that broiled the chicken perfectly, and by all accounts the salad was delicious. This looks like a salad in McDonald’s, Rosie said. I looked over at her plate and she was totally right. It looked exactly like a salad in a McDonald’s menu, not just because of the components but because it was a surreal green. That green that they enhance for their menu, the green that never matches the sad salad leaves you get in a plastic container after you’ve ordered. But these greens, picked just before dinner from our backyard in this lush spring season, these greens matched the menu’s photograph.

May 27th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

Steve flattened our backyard, which had once had a slope and dipped in the middle. Then he put down a layer of compost, rich black earth on top of clay. Then he put down $200 worth of grass seed. I can’t believe it cost that much — we just traveled through miles of grass in Ohio, and some of those people didn’t look like they had that much money. We’ve been keeping the dogs off of it, taking them on leashes to the boulevard to go to the bathroom, and taking them down to their friend’s house to play in her backyard.

We woke up the other morning and Steve pointed out the window to what I was sure was just reflection from the trees above, or maybe pollen that had settled. But it was the beginnings of grass. After two weeks of dirt, where it looked like nothing would happen, it was happening. By the end of the day the grass must have grown a half an inch. Growth works that way, in spurts. At first the grass was just thinking of growing, and then in one swoop it all sprouted. It makes me think about this difficult time, how I’ve been hibernating after four years of graduate school and two years of infertility hell. Even grass does that, just thinks for a little bit, then zoom. Same with the embryo, which has to collect all its parts, read through its data on microscopic levels, and then out sprouts two legs from a seed, then two arms, all these parts that were germinating, meditating on their cells invisibly.

May 27th, 2009 | Category: house | Comments (1)

One phenomenol heartbeat, that’s what the ultrastenographer said. Not two, though. Twin A did not grow past six weeks’ size, so three days longer than when I heard its heart beating very quietly two weeks ago. It looked very small in the ultrasound image on the screen compared to the Twin B embryo measuring 8 weeks 4 days, which is exactly the size of a healthy embryo at this stage.

Steve was sad, but I think I was more prepared. I knew the size discrepency last time was not always a good sign, and I had had bad cramping nearly all day a week ago, and last night I was bleeding. And morning sickness had begun and then stopped last week, which made me wonder if my hormone levels had plateaued. All these together did not give me assurance.

At this point there is only a 3% chance that the remaining embryo will miscarry. I am not left with nothing.

And there is no fault in Twin A turning from an embryo into just tissue that my body will eventually absorb. If it had been the only embryo they put in, it would have happened anyway (it’s not Twin B’s fault for stealing more nutrients or anything.) Imagine if they only put in one embryo, how sad I could be right now. And it wasn’t my fault, because Twin B clearly shows me that I’m doing an okay job. It was just a miscarriage, a chromosomal abnormality, which happens after some say 50% of implantations.

And I don’t feel like the twins had much time to know one another, I don’t feel that Twin B takes it as a loss. There was no handholding, as Steve said. Not even Twin B has hands yet. Twin B, who looks on the screen like the size of a hamburger, so enormous compared to the dead Twin A, but which is actually the size of one-third of my pinky finger. All this fuss over something smaller than a grape.

The first thing Steve thought when he heard that there was only one heart beating: at least we don’t have to buy an SUV. The first thing Rosie said when I told her after school: That’s good, right? It’s easier that way. She was surprised I was remotely sad. I was grateful for her logic. Because it’s true, I didn’t want to do the double-football hold while nursing, and I couldn’t picture myself holding two newborns at once downtown in a huge kangaroo pouch. I couldn’t even picture where two babies would stay, and two cribs won’t fit in our bedroom and not even two dogs fit in our bed.

I don’t feel special anymore, though, for some reason. I don’t get to eat for three anymore. The belly I’m carrying around is not now comprised of two growing embryos and a bunch of leftover cysts from the surgery — it’s now mostly cysts and a dead embryo, plus one growing one. I don’t feel like I get to be extra tired or extra hungry or have a greater excuse for why I can’t seem to walk up the stairs when the other pregnant women seem to do it just fine.

It’s a different feeling now. More normal. This is the sadness speaking, because most of me is fine. Twin B looks more like a human than two weeks ago. A whole human. They could measure from crown to rump like they do, and I could see what they meant, where the crown is, where the rump is, and where the legs are poking out. That’s pretty cool.

May 27th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (3)

May 25th, 2009 | Category: house, the baby thing | Leave a comment

I spent too much time today researching vanishing twins. (There’s a stupid origin story for that phrase of a group of doctors who saw in a woman at six weeks a set of beating hearts and then at eight weeks just one. It’s like the other one vanished! A doctor said, and voila. The simplicity of that origin story sticks with me, somehow, that that silly doctor got to have his slightly poetic word made into a term that we can google when so many doctors get little recognition for other bigger findings.)

Apparently when the ultrasound equipment began to be used for IVF patients, doctors began to realize how common vanishing twins are. Some say that 1 in 8 of us begin as a pair, but then, just for the reasons that one-quarter of pregnancies miscarry, one of the twins is absorbed into the mother; the heart stops beating and becomes just tissue. 1 in 80 become twins. I find out on Wednesday morning if that is true for me.

I take it personally, that one twin could vanish. Because I am one of two, and if one of us had disappeared, maybe that means I wouldn’t be. And a big part of my identity is being one of two, so who might this one be without the original two? And I take responsibility for it already. One sign of a vanishing twin is cramping, so when all day Friday I was indeed cramping I lay in bed and worried that it was because I walked too far on Thursday or because I cried the week before hard enough (hormone wife) that I thought I had dislodged my heart.

But then today I went into the bedroom and saw the black dog and I felt so much love for him, just this overpowering love I feel when I look at him. And it was clear to me that I couldn’t be sad with just one, because Moby to me is just one; he’s not one of a set of twin-Mobys, and I wouldn’t love him more if he were.

I was explaining this logic to Steve and he laughed: You can be so complicated and then so simple. I would never think to take responsibility for and have guilt over and obsess over the details that consume you, and then so often your solution involves a dog.

It’s true. Maybe the simplest answers are the elegant kind. For now I feel content with this logic. Just now as I am typing this Moby has bound out onto the porch, completely black silhouette back-lit by the light in the house. He bounds like a floating balloon in a parade: an unreal amount of lightness in his movements compared to his weight. More up than down.

May 24th, 2009 | Category: pet, the baby thing | Leave a comment

There are so many tulips in and around our house. There’s a pretty famous bulb company in town where Steve purchased many of them. The tulips all have names I can’t remember, each one, each variation of color and outer-petal texture. They really are mysterious and coveted. We have books on tulips with photographs of tulips and whole chapters devoted to the tulip. I married someone who loves tulips, but he really loves obsession.

May 21st, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

This blog/debate through the New York Times, “Celebrity Adoptions and the Real World,” is a smart collection of opinions on the gray area in the ethics of international adoption. The comments section has some valuable insights, too.

I don’t want to belabor the theme of adoption in my life, but it is an issue that isn’t resolved. When faced with infertility, it took a long time to accept inside myself that I wasn’t comfortable yet with adoption. I am comfortable with caring for children who aren’t mine, clearly, and I am comfortable with the idea of being the only present mother to a child who isn’t mine by blood — in many ways my life would be easier if I were the only mother for Rosie. But I’m not comfortable with taking a single child out of its environment when maybe the solution is even more selfless than getting someone to love: maybe the solution involves giving money or time to build better schools, acquire vaccinations and cleaner water for a community of people so in need that they surrender their children to survive.

Because I’m not sure why we want children. I have made too many decisions in my life based on saving someone, and I don’t feel comfortable picking a child that I want to save, satisfying some craving for martyrdom in myself that I know I can overuse. I don’t want a child because I want someone to love me, because a love of a child to a parent is complicated, probably more complicated than the love of a parent to a child. When we’d gone through all the shots and surgeries, Rosie said, Your baby better be really thankful you did all this, to which I said, It won’t. Children, aside from Rosie, aren’t known for understanding the sacrifices we make to be parents.

Maybe the reason I want children is because of a wanting to learn, to go through the sacrament of motherhood, to feel what it feels like to use my body and my emotions the way that I am biologically intended to. And also because I think I wouldn’t mess a child up too badly, that maybe, with the mixture of Steve’s forgiveness and strength and my good qualities, we will create someone who can take care of this planet better than we have.

Or maybe we won’t. Too many organically-raised children grow up to drink diet coke. Maybe I want children in order to experience that sort of surrender, that a child of my blood could be less like me than a child I adopt. To learn from them — because I think it is true that we are given by however means the children (and pets) that are meant to teach us.

Faced with infertility, I took the path that was unpoetic but that felt like it could satisfy the most inside of us right now. I am still not completely comfortable with my choice. I don’t know later on in life what path we will feel we should then take. Maybe then it will be the right time inside of us to adopt. We said when we chose IVF that it didn’t exclude adoption later on down the road, but at the very least we would donate money equal to the cost of the procedure to help children born into poverty. Why? To assuage my guilt that I made this choice? To ensure through some voodoo that the children born out of me will be healthy and kind? Because, faced with a dilemma, I chose a path that only the privileged could take? One that I can’t talk about with my Catholic no-stem-cell-research neighbors? One that doesn’t make people coo or tsk or look at me more kindly?

These decisions are complicated. I would love to see a blog/debate like the one I linked to where it asked the question not “Is adoption the way Madonna does it ethically sound?” but “Is it ethically sound to choose IVF instead of adoption?” I can’t help but think that hearts would then sway toward Madonna.

But I realize that these moral debates are at play for all of us each day. Our tax money goes towards the war and no one is marching anymore. Children are dying in Darfur and some of us spend our money on plastic toys for our own children without ever seeing the discrepancy. Farmers are underpaid and yet a lot of us choose to buy the bunch of bananas filled with the pesticides and sweat and tears of migrant workers instead of spending a few extra cents on organic fruit. Why does Madonna want a child from Malawi? Why didn’t I buy the organic banana? What is it that I purely want and what is it that I want to save?

May 20th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (3)

Steve worked almost nonstop on the yard for weeks. I would hobble down to see him, out of breath by the time I got there. His shirt would be dark with sweat and he would not stop, not even for a drink of water. He said he’d drink water later, when he was done with this or that big section. Lifting the shovel and sinking it into the dirt even once is difficult. I bought him that shovel, I brought it home in my car and had trouble carrying its weight into the garage. His physical strength seems to me to be mythical, like some god or at least some otherwordly animal like a bison.

I love this photograph of him, surrounded by his dirt, taking a rare break. Something about the perspective. The shovel looks bigger than he does and the wheelbarrow looks smaller. I love the sea of brown — his boots and gloves brown, too — then the clear blue of his shirt. That shovel makes me tired now just looking at it.

May 19th, 2009 | Category: house, photograph | Leave a comment

I spent last week up and down ladders, balancing in a stairwell on a ladder with a paintbrush in one hand, paint in the other, and a huge-expensive ventilation mask on my face. I carried furniture, moved stoves, balanced feet-up head-down in crevices in the kitchen plugging things in awkwardly.

Then I went to visit my family and my mother told me not to lift a beach bag because it was too heavy. I tested it and laughed because it wasn’t. Not to laugh at her, because probably she’s right, but because I haven’t been thinking of myself as fragile at all.

But I walk like I have glass feet — I could break them if I move too quickly. I move so slowly I laugh at myself. And this week I suddenly feel nauseous if I haven’t eaten, but when I eat I only want to fall asleep. I eat so slowly, Rosie and Steve finish and stare at me staring at my daunting plate full of food.

This morning I woke and darted right to the kitchen, my stomach warning me that if I didn’t eat then I would be darting to the bathroom. I scarfed down some oatmeal, showered, walked downtown to teach a homeless writing workshop, walked back and collapsed into my second breakfast of a boiled egg. I could barely make it up the hill on the way back, even worse than before — my lungs, my legs, all parts of me were begging to just stop right there halfway in the soft grass. I slept for three hours, and I couldn’t have not slept. If I were driving, I would have fallen asleep in the car. The curtain of exhaustion fell and only guilt could wake me. I went right to the studio and worked for three hours.

And now everything is too heavy. Our front door seems impossible to open. The door at the co-op requires that I fall into it with my whole body to push it open. I couldn’t open the triscuits bag tonight, nor could I lift the orange juice. I would not be able to lift that beach bag today for sure.

May 19th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment