Egg Harbor
Spring looms on the horizon.
It’s weeks away still, but every now and then a day blooms before me, fifty or sixty degrees and full of sun, so that it’s easier to get through than the endlessly gray winter days.
These rare springlike days I leave the cottage when Aaron is away and head into town. I’ve discovered a dance studio there, completely by chance—I didn’t seek it out—a small single-story cottage on Church Street that tiny ballerinas move in and out of all day.
The first day I spotted the studio, I saw an empty park bench nearby, which was warm and welcoming, set directly in a shaft of sunlight so that even though it was no more than fifty-two degrees outside, I felt snug, my skin warm from the sun’s generous beams.
For nearly an hour I watched the ballerinas, toddlers mainly in leotards with their hair pinned neatly back in buns. Their little voices were happy and high-pitched, like birds, as they clung to their mothers’ hands, coming and going like clockwork, nearly every hour on the hour.
There was one group in particular that caught my eye. A group of sixteen—eight mothers and their daughters—who arrived en masse around noon, a whole bundle of giggly girls with women trailing behind, women who sipped lattes and gossiped while I sat alone on a park bench, feeling sorry for myself, isolated from society because I didn’t fit in. Because I didn’t have a child.
The women were beautiful, every last one of them, which for whatever reason made me feel dirty, self-conscious and ashamed. I smiled as they walked by, but not one looked at me and no one smiled in reply. They wore peasant tops and floaty skirts; cowboy boots; big, baggy sweaters; hobo bags; while me, on the other hand, I sat wrapped up in a sweatshirt of Aaron’s that had faded and shrunk in the wash, feeling alone, bloated, desperate, wanting for a child.
How different I am from those mothers.
I could never be one of them, one of those women who travel in a pack, whispering secrets about their husbands, their children’s nighttime habits, which little ones still wet the bed. All because I didn’t have a child. Because without a child, I had nothing to offer them.
Because I’m nothing, I easily reasoned then, if not a mother.
There’s no other justification for my life.
I watched them as they walked by, as they closed in on the dance studio. And then, after the women had passed and I assumed the parade was through, I noticed one little girl straggling behind, nearly stagnant on the sidewalk. Struggling to keep up. Too busy examining the buds on the trees. Smaller than the rest, which made me think of the piglet in Charlotte’s Web. Wilbur, saved from slaughter by little Fern. I was captivated by her, holding my breath as she passed by, joining the others in the studio. Only when she was gone did I allow myself to breathe.
And now twice, sometimes three times a week I find myself sitting there on that bench, watching the dancers come and go, wishing one of them, any single one of them—but especially the littlest one, a head shorter than the rest, straw-colored hair and a collection of freckles, whose tiny feet always lag behind so that one day I worry she’ll be forgotten—was mine.
I’ve become an addict really, and the only thing that eases the symptoms of withdrawal is seeing children, is being in the company of children. They are my fix, an antidote for the restlessness, the irritability, the tremor of my hands that is only exacerbated with each passing month that I don’t get pregnant.
The little girl can’t be more than three years old, pudgy arms, legs and cheeks still padded with baby fat that will one day wear away, no doubt, so that she’ll look like any one of the ladies she tags along after, with their long limbs and their long hair and their coffee.
I don’t like the way I feel sitting there on that park bench, eyeing children who are not mine. But I have nothing better to do with my time, and I don’t think I could stop if I tried.
I suggested to Aaron that I look for a job, for some diversion from the long, lonely afternoons while he is away. Aaron isn’t game. He’d rather Inotwork, which makes no sense to me. The financial burden of fertility treatments is steep; we could use the additional income. We’ve begun to argue about things like the cost of ground beef, the cost of electricity.
Aaron and I are monitoring the Clomid cycles, which means for each failed attempt we are quite literally throwing away hundreds of dollars for the medication, blood work and ultrasounds to see whether my body is releasing eggs, and when. Insurance won’t cover these costs because, of course, some high-and-mighty insurance company doesn’t give a darn whether Aaron and I ever have a baby, and so the procedure is consideredelective. We are electing to waste thousands of dollars to try and conceive a baby, while other parents, far less capable or worthy parents, are given one for free.
“You’re under so much stress already,” Aaron said when I suggested applying for a job, and “Why not just focus on this?” meaning making a baby, as if somehow I’d been unfocused, and as if that lack of focus was the reason we were still without a child. I’d been too cavalier about it, too casual, too devil-may-care. He didn’t use those words, not a single one of them, and yet that’s exactly what I heard when he came home from work after midnight that night and, though I lamented about being bored all day, about being alone, he suggested I not apply for a job, but rather focus onthis, with a sweeping gesture toward my vacuous womb.
I screamed at him then. I slammed a door. I locked him out of the bedroom so he slept on the sofa for the night.
Never before have I screamed at him. Never before have I raised my voice.
He didn’t object to sleeping on the sofa. It was one in the morning. He was tired, he told me. “Eden, that’s enough,”he said with a sigh while gathering his pillow from the head of our bed. “I need to sleep.”
I sat there in the bedroom that night, in the dark, propped up against pillows and not lying down. My hands still shook even hours after my fit was through. A headache slunk up the base of my neck and consumed my skull so that every part of my head hurt. My eyes burned from crying and though I tried to blame the medication for this—after all, mood swings and a propensity for crying were both common side effects of the Clomid—I didn’t know whether or not they were to blame this time.
Maybe it was just me.
I felt sorry come morning.
But I didn’t apologize and neither did Aaron. Instead he left for work earlier than ever before and I returned to the dance studio, an addict in need of a fix.
March 19, 1997
Egg Harbor
When Clomid alone failed to work, Dr. Landry suggested IUI. Intrauterine insemination. Placing Aaron’s sluggish sperm directly into my uterus so that they don’t have to paddle through those four inches of mucousy space all on their own, so that they will have an easier time finding and fertilizing my egg without getting lost, swimming in circles in my vaginal canal as they are apt to do. Each month, Aaron and I have quite literally thrown away money, frittered away follicles and eggs, doled out hundreds of dollars on medication and ultrasounds for nothing. My trips to see Dr. Landry have been a waste. It’s time to try something new. Intrauterine insemination will add a couple hundred dollars to our monthly expenditure, but will also increase the likelihood of conception, especially in cases like ours where low sperm motility is to blame.
