Theonlything she’deverwanted was to have a family of her own someday. That’s it. Not to be rich. Not to be successful or famous. Just a family, the big loud kind, with Sunday dinners and group texts and matching pajamas at Christmas. She never thought, not for a second, that her uterus would mutiny and shut the entire dream down.
But that was the difference between hope and expectation. Hope was a balloon, expectation was a lead weight.
She’d spent the last year and a half ricocheting between doctors. During that time, Ronnie, who she’d been with for four years, the man she’d thought she was going to marry, left. She couldn’t blame him. She hadn’t exactly been her typical ray-of-sunshine self.
Her regular gyno, Dr. Chen, made a valiant effort at conservative management. When that didn’t work, he referred Poppy to Dr. Singh, a gynecologic surgeon with a reputation for “miracles.” Dr. Singh’s idea of a miracle, it turned out, was that he managed not to make it worse. Then came the reproductive endocrinologist in Sacramento, Dr. Gounder, who was so clinical and upbeat that Poppy left her office both reassured and oddly brainwashed, like she’d been given a pep talk by a robot. And nothing had changed. After that she’d sought out the eastern medicine “infertility miracle worker,” Dr. Hammil, who used a holistic approach with acupuncture, Bao Mai breathing techniques, and herbal remedies but saw no improvement. So as a last resort, she’d shown up on the doorstep of her friend, who she’d trusted implicitly.
Poppy stared at the monitor’s screen, the scrolling words and numbers might as well have been hieroglyphic. She swallowed, mouth dry, and blinked back tears. She would not cry about this. Not again. She would hold it together.
“I know it’s not the news you wanted to hear.” Steph’s tone was the perfect balance of strong, sympathetic, and supportive.
“But it’s not impossible?” Poppy’s vocal cords felt like they’d been replaced with rubber bands stretched thin.
Steph tilted her head to the side, placing her hands in her lap, she hesitated. Poppy knew that hesitation. It was the hesitation every doctor used when they were considering the correct words to choose when delivering bad news. “Not impossible,” she stated before quickly adding, “buteven with intervention, the odds are extremely low, I would say less than one percent. I want to be honest with you because I don’t want you to go through years of suffering and financial and physical stress for nothing. Of course we could try IVF, egg retrieval, or possible surrogacy if you wanted to go that route. However, considering your medical markers, the presence of endometriosis, and the genetic health of your eggs, achieving a successful outcome would be challenging. Maybe even more than what the previous specialists led you to believe.”
Poppy’s phone vibrated in her purse, which was on the counter beside Steph.
“Do you want me to—" Steph started to hand it to her.
“No.” Poppy shook her head.
It was probably her mom or one of her three older sisters, or the guy she’d been seeing the past few weeks, none of whom she cared about at the moment. Her sisters had no clue about any of these appointments. She’d tried to talk to her mom about it, but her mom only cared about Poppy’s health and well-being. She had no idea how much that well-being was affected by being told she may not be able to have children.
“There are other options,” Steph repeated the phrase that had caused her heart to sink faster than a drunk girl’s cell phone dropped in a toilet, but this time Steph meant it in the broadest sense, existential sense: adoption, donor eggs, the rainbow of hope that people kept painting over reality.
Poppy nodded, even as her brain rebelled.
No, she thought.Those options are available for other people.For people with money, or supportive partners, or the ability to withstand another decade of heartbreak.
She was none of those things, just a thirty-year-old X-ray tech with a mother who called twice a day, a pseudo-grandmother who lived in Arizona, four half-siblings, and daddy issues that could be used as an epidemiological case study.
With nothing new to say, she remained silent as she watched Steph’s shadow on the wall. All she’d ever wanted—since she was a child, since she was old enough to realize that families didn’t all look the way hers did—was to have a family of her own. To fall in love, get married, have kids, and make up for all the unspoken awkwardness and missing pieces that had shaped her own childhood. She knew it was cliché, that some people would roll their eyes, or worse, at how basic and “trad wife” her dreams were. But she never thought of it that way. Family was the only religion she ever believed in.
Her mind drifted from the present to the past. It happened a lot these days. Poppy’s life had never felt especially “normal,” not the way it was portrayed on sitcoms. She was the result of an extramarital slow-motion train wreck, an affair that stretched decades and produced her as an inconvenient afterthought. Her mom, who’d fallen in love with a married man after a single tequila-soaked week in Vegas, had never let go. He was in her life, but always as a shadow. He’d show up once a month with a toy from the Dollar Store, spend one night, maybe two, then leave again. They’d have a few hours as a ‘family,’ then Poppy would be left with Miss Carol, her neighbor and now pseudo-grandma, so her mom and dad could have ‘date night.’ Usually, that night was spent away from the apartment in a hotel. Her dad would stop by and drop her mom off in the morning, say goodbye to Poppy, and then disappear until the next month.
There were rules Poppy had to follow that she thought were normal, but now she knew weren’t. She couldn’t tellanyoneat school about him. When people asked about her dad, she had to say he lived out of state, even though he lived thirty minutes away. She was never allowed to tell anyone his name or a have a photo of him. Christmases, Thanksgivings, and birthdays were always just her and her mom. Poppy grew up on a steady diet of half-truths and plausible deniability, learning the choreography of navigating absences just as other children learned how to ride bikes.
Speaking of which, her dad never taught her how to ride a bike, or swim, or drive. He wasn’t there for her middle or high school graduation. He didn’t have a talk with her prom date to tell him to have her home before curfew and keep her safe or else. And he’d never walk her down the aisle, even if he was still alive, which he wasn’t.
He had his own family, consisting of three daughters, for whom he’d done all of those things. They had him for all those occasions. She knew because she’d seen the photos and the home movies and talked to them about it. She’d watched her dad walkall threeof his daughters down the aisle.
“Poppy?”
Poppy blinked and looked up to find Steph standing in front of her. She hadn’t even heard her get up from her stool. She’d been zoned out.
“Sorry, what?”
Steph’s grin was soft. “I’m always here if you need to talk.”
“Thanks.” Poppy’s tone was much flatter than she meant it to be.
“I’ll let you get dressed.” Her friend reached out, squeezed her shoulder, then left her alone to change out of the crepe paper dignity shield.
Poppy exhaled as the door shut behind her friend. She became aware, with some relief, that she had not cried. Not even one tear. She wondered if that in itself was a kind of victory. A sign of resilience, maybe, or maybe just that her tear ducts were as dysfunctional as her reproductive system.
She sat for a long minute after Steph left, feeling the cold air on her bare skin. The crinkling paper beneath her thigh. She could hear the muffled sounds of the main corridor—phones ringing, a baby wailing, someone coughing. She wanted to disappear into her clothes, disappear into the bland, unremarkable anonymity of being just another patient, but that would be impossible because she had to go back to work. She checked her phone and found a text from her mom “just checking in” and a text from her sister Phoebe, timestamped ten minutes ago. The message was a cheery reminder, with excessive exclamation points, of their plans to meet for coffee, letting Poppy know that her sister was in the building.
“Shit.” Poppy totally forgot she was meeting her sister, who had been asking for details about Steve, the guy she’d been seeing for the past month.
