It’s hard to leave the story we tell ourselves. 
I’ve been telling myself the same one since I was a little girl.

Rick Rubin says, enjoy the story that speaks to you and I do. I did. I have.

I always knew this story.

If I didn’t meet a man, I’d have a child on my own, and if I had a child on my own, I’d have the support I need to be a good parent. I tried. And I tried during a global pandemic and nothing worked, for no good reason.

What’s a good reason?

I don’t know, but there was no scientific explanation.
This is a story about womanhood, about our delicacy, about the delicate machine of the body.

***

Earlier this summer, my friend Marina and I meet up on the Upper East Side for dinner before going to The Met. We’re catching up. I’m talking about my boyfriend, and she says, “Oh, I didn’t know you still wanted THAT.”

“Wanted what?” I ask

“To be a mother,” she replies.

I look at her in astonishment. 

How can I stop? I think. How could I? I don’t even know how to put it down. 

“I’m trying to let it go,” I say, “but of course I still want it. It’s there, just out of reach, but not impossible.”

***

I begin teaching my 8th grade class on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in The Sun. We start by spending time with Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem.” What happens to a dream deferred? Hughes writes. Together we think about whose dreams get deferred and why? Deferred is such a perfect word. The dream of a child is put off for now, but not entirely. Either it happens someday soon, or it doesn’t.
What can I do? I can hope.
Out of money.
Out of medical coverage.
Exhausted.
Being a woman is about chance.
The unpredictability of a life is something everyone faces, but of course it’s women who live a on a timeline. Men have no such concerns. 

I try to take pleasure in the natural world, but then I think about the men. Their species get all the color and all the dance.

Typical.

***

What do we get?

We get [DOOR #1] and [DOOR #2] and see which door shuts first.

I am tired of the spectacle.

***

In a text to my friend Virginia, my phone autocorrects [GRIEF]

to [FRIEND].

I cringe, and then I smile.

Okay Universe, I am listening. I see how those vowels, the i and the e thread that spool. I carry that strand in my heart: I have to be a friend to it. I have to be kind to myself. If grief can be a friend to my loss, and to others, then my life can be full of possibilities. 

Everything’s not lost.

***

I always knew I’d be this girl, this woman.

What I didn’t know was what would become of me, of the world around me.

How could I?

 *** 

Once the mind saddles up, the journey has its twists and turns.

Isn’t that the truth.

In HBO’s Westworld all of the hosts are essential robots; machines. I think about their lot in life, not being in charge of their lives, their fates. They don’t even really have lives, but programmed ones, until they become sentient.

Over and over again, beautiful Dolores, the original host asks, “What world is this?” and I feel for her. Each morning, she opens her eyes in the same familiar bed, her same simple blue dress, only to live her day again and again, a cycle of story spun out of control until she holds the thread in her own hands.

That agency changes everything and she seeks out the machine that controls her.

I am her, I think. Each fertility cycle, it’s the same old shit. We are both in loops created by others, ultimately, most likely, created by men

What world is this?

I don’t know what world this is.
I don’t know.
I don’t know anything except that:

I was strong. I am strong.
but I am still so angry
           and that’s a poison;
           that causes a rift
           in the delicate.

***

It’s a world with veiled agency. A world where we have the technology, but not enough scientific research in women’s health, in fertility, in science—basic science.

Michelle Obama says there is an acute burden of being a woman.
It is acute because it is small, like a woman, like the way most of the world views us women. And now our government might ban all fertility treatments. I am grateful. I am lucky I tried when I did.

***

Let’s skip to the end before I start from the beginning.
After my 10th medical procedure, after my one implant, my fertility doctor told me over the phone, we just don’t have the research on why, Leah. And I thought, are you sorry? Because his practice was kind of a meat market, an assembly line of women in need, a simple loop.

and I cried, and my mom cried
and there was nothing more I can do without a pocket full of money or a real life fucking man.

***

How is this the world, where you work so hard to do something and nothing gives? 

Nothing

Gives.

We’ll never really know.

***

Westworld makes me think about girlhood. The ways we are programmed to have the lives we want. The way we rise to a day and fall to a night. Each day is a little bit different, until it is taken away from us and then we are reprogrammed into another story.
     Or are we?

Back to Marina’s question: 
why would I just let it go, 
a scrap in the wind?

***

I talk to so many friends about my grief, my hardship, my despair. So many of them cannot believe what I’ve gone through and what I’m contemplating

… still…

***

And here you are, my friend Sarah says to me.
Here I am, I think, and now what?

I carry on, I suppose.
I am a carrier.

***

This after-world is a world shut down.

Mary Ruefle says, you are just a girl playing at life… you are just a girl on the edge of a great forest. The great forest is the world. This was in the before—world. The after-world is a world locked-in. This after-world is a world shut down.  

Love bridges the gaps.

Loving something can physically change you.

I have been in love my whole life.

***

A friend on Twitter says, it is easier to imagine the ends of things than the beginnings, and I think about how the ends of things are in the beginnings, the beginnings in the ends. I think about the body and womanhood, and the strength it all takes to resist and persist. All the invisible strings at play.

Do we really get to choose the woman we want to be?
Some women play the triangle.
I am a conductor.
I am conducting my life, myself.

***

After the COVID lockdown, I start listening to podcasts on walks in Central Park. I listen to an interview: The difference between pilots and passengers is that pilots want to fly.
I want to fly, I think. 
I don’t want to be a passenger in my life,
 I’m the pilot.
 I’M THE PILOT!

***

I also start listening to audiobooks on walks. I chose Michelle Obama’s Becoming as my first one, not knowing how much it is the book I need. There is an instant kinship. Michelle says the unknown wasn’t going to kill me and I offer myself into this thought. I had no idea what the upcoming year had in store for me: surviving the pandemic, this epic fertility journey, teaching in a COVID world—it has all been a walk through the unknown. I navigate the wing of it, the chronicle of her days, I sit in the span of her boost like a freeloader, devouring.

***

Heather tells me, she thought our generation would produce different men and I laugh at the flight path of that thought, where it pulls me.

Where are the different men? The kinder men. The kind of men who are supportive and willing, willingly supportive not about love or long-term relationships, but just willing to see something through and over. In my dating life, I can’t even get past at third date with anyone. It is a nightmare.

***

It is wild what I am thinking of embarking on, but in the wild is where things thrive.

My sister knows. She came with me to the fertility doctor during lockdown. It was my second time seeing the doctor. The first time was before covid. It was a checkup of sorts—just to see what my fertility status was. He did an ultrasound, a follicle count and we looked at my empty uterus on the machine. It was a total mindfuck and the first time I actually saw my insides and they were just that—my insides.

At the end of the appointment, he asked, are you ready for next steps? and I said, not yet, and thanked him and left the office; this was 2017 or 2018.

I told myself, by the time I was 40, if I was still single and still wanting a baby, I’d go for it. I turned 40 in January of 2020, a few months before the world shut down. I was grateful when I called the fertility office that spring and they said they had permission to stay open and I was grateful when my sister drove with me to the appointment from her apartment in Queens, where I was living during those three months of lockdown, out to the doctor on Long Island. 

No one knew, but us. It was our secret.

The next time, at my second appointment, when he brought my sister and I into his office after the examination and asked me again about next steps, I was ready. He started drawing diagrams on a pad and writing down numbers. I immediately got overwhelmed.

My sister interjected, Hold on. Can we record this conversation? Are you cool with that? And the Dr. agreed. 

We hit record.

 He explained the next steps were blood work, and genetic testing, and told me to call once I chose a donor. I’d have the sperm sent to his office and I’d come in so the nurses could monitor my ovulation. I didn’t know I’d be coming back and forth every other day for bloodwork; I didn’t know it would feel so strange being a woman without a partner in an office full of wives.

Still, it sounded easy enough.
I’ll just find a donor.

***

The next hurdle was having a formal conversation with my parents. They knew about my mindset, but I think they were really hoping I wouldn’t have to go this route on my own. They had seen me date and date and date—I mean, they saw what I let them see.

I had never actually talked to my father about my being a single mother because it was just weird and awkward. He’s the only male in my family and he’s my father! My father got emotional when I got my period in fifth grade, how would he handle my deciding to embark on this journey on my own and during such an uncertain time in our life? 

I told myself, no time is certain.
Why not now? I thought.

***

I want to illuminate this experience for the people who mattered to me.

Sandra Cisneros says, we’re kind of like nuns or monks in our monasteries when we write. We have to transform all these experiences into illumination.

I want to illuminate this for me—set it all aglow.

I want to say this sort of thing doesn’t happen everyday, but it does—every single day. I’m sure there is a woman, or some couple somewhere, going through the same journey I went through, battling with the same delicacy of the body, of the machine of the body, and the machine of this life.

And of course I wanted my parents on this journey.

I didn’t just want them, I needed them.

Besides, my parents had had their fertility issues, too. My mother spoke about it sometimes, but they did it as a couple and it was the late 70s. After six years, they got pregnant with me. Five years later, they magically had my sister. They were lucky.

I knew what the differences were. They were pretty blatant, but 2020 was way different than 1974 or 1975. Women were different. Society was different.

 I wasn’t going to be one of those women held back by fear. 

 I wasn’t going to be one of those women.

I knew life was short and already, this wasn’t the life I had imagined for myself— married at 26, divorced at 30, single still at 40. 

I said I was going to do this and I was going to do this.

All my mother said was, Leah, you’re going to have to call your father and tell him your choices. You owe him a conversation.

So I did, but I wanted to wait till I chose my first donor and had made my appointment, that way there was no talking me out of it. My flight path in motion.

***

Before I chose a donor, I joined some Facebook groups about fertility and felt immediately overwhelmed by all of the posts and opinions. Women all across the world are adding their two cents about hormone levels and transfer options. It is too much. The notifications on my phone ware out of control and I quickly pull back. I tell myself: use it when it suits you. and I do.
I use Facebook searches like:

[how to find your perfect donor] 
[top five choices in a donor]
[top genetic searches in donor]
[what would you do differently in choosing a donor]

I think to myself: what world is this?

I feel like Ford in Westworld trying to control the future. What world is this? he thinks as he creates a better world, as he tries to program, and reprogram, and reprogram, his hosts, shifting them around like dominos.

Suddenly, I have the answers at my fingertips. There’s no reason to think I’d have any problem conceiving. I’ve had regular periods my whole life. I’m healthy. I’m active. As my friend Heather tells me, you’re a New Yorker. You’re already healthier than the average woman, (which is true, but didn’t mean anything in the end.)

*** 

I learn there’s only a few really good sperm banks in the country, though I’m not sure what qualifies as ‘good.’ In my writer life, I connect with a few friends who have been vocal about fertility issues—some are single, some coupled. One recommends Seattle, another Virginia and finally, California. I decide to go with California.

Difficult task one—[DONE]

Even signing into the California sperm bank creeps me out, but I do it. It feels weird, but I buckle up. I make a profile. I make a list of what I think the most important criteria are to me. I imagine many women probably think about the visuals: eye color, height, and hair color—how could you not? This is kind of like build-a-bear! But, really, the most important things, if I’m being honest, boil down to medical history, and genetics.
Through my own genetic testing, I find out I’m a carrier of three genetic disorders that I didn’t know about (why would I?) and write them down in the notes app on my phone. This means I need to find a donor that matches me, a balance. 

It is a delicate act, akin to dating, except it’s active in an even MORE inactive way. I am actively searching, but not looking for a connection, just a match. 
I feel disgusted.

I can’t believe how tricky it is.

It should be easy, I think, but iIt isn’t. My matches are slim. It is horrifying. This is crazy, I think to myself. If I were in the real world (see: as if this wasn’t real enough) and I got pregnant on a one night stand, or even with a partner, I most likely wouldn’t know shit about their genetics. Who even thinks about these things? Yet, here I am, being forced to. Here, in the small universe of my studio apartment on the Upper West Side, I can control the outcome. I mean, it feels that way, but I am wrong.

How deceptive it all was. 
How deceptive it all still is.

Cheryl Strayed says, one of the first messages women learn in the world is don’t go out into the wilderness alone.

But I do it anyway.

It is a digital wilderness. 
It is a bodily wilderness.
The wild is where things grow, unfettered. I don’t want to run wild, but I need this to run.

I put my hands on my stomach and say: let’s see what you will soon do. I am hopeful. I decide to be less scared and more excited.

Everything is mindset.

***

The donor site looks like the old Match.Com website. It’s blue and white. It reminds me of that game I played when I was a kid, ‘Guess Who.’ There are all these small boxes listing age and height and click here for more.

It’s basically a dating profile made up of babies. A dating file for babies. The whole thing is astonishing. I take a screenshot to show my sister and she’s like woah and I’m like, I KNOW !

At first, I didn’t realize how the website functioned. I see all the babies and I [click], and one [click] on one baby leads to another picture of another adorable baby and another adorable baby, and another, until another [click] on the last of the three baby photos of donor #XXXXX leads to a photo of a man and I flip—the—fuck—out. 

Oh my god! I think, That’s the baby now, as an adult man!
I don’t want to see this. I want this choice to be strategic, nearly surgical, cold, clean and calculated.

I go into settings and uncheck [adult photos]. I want only babies. I don’t want anything linked to reality; this is already TOO real. I want a [click] to lead to something right, something good, and something easy.

Choosing a donor is like choosing the future, but of course, it is also like tempting fate.

Still, I embrace the miraculous.
I embrace the wonder.
I embrace my heart.
and its delicacy.

***

I choose a specific night to select my donor. I give myself a deadline. I tell my sister I want to do this on my own and I was only going to ask her input for certain things. She is the only one I spoke so openly to about it and I keep her at an arm’s length. I am nervous, terrified, but I want to make my selection before the school year starts in a few weeks—our hybrid year of teaching in-person in the classroom, and on zoom, simultaneously. She’s a teacher, too; she gets it.

I laugh at my timing.

You sure have an easy year ahead of you, Leah.

***

I narrow the search to five donors that I really like. I call the genetic counselor at the sperm bank who walks me through each option. She is so kind and easy to talk to. I thank her profusely. She is another set of eyes and ears, for which I am grateful. 

When I look back at the five donors I had chosen, I still think the first one was the one I was most excited about. 

The donor profiles are like dating apps with multiple tabs for each man.

Tabs include:
Medical background chart of family info on both sides of the family
Personal health statistics: height, weight, eye color, hobbies, occupation, marital status, etc.
Personal essays (some are typed, and some are written by hand and scanned.
Additional photos.

The personal essays are the ones that my gut responds to. The first donor has a good medical history and in his short essays he expresses his passion for the great outdoors, his love for his father and his siblings, and in one essay, he discusses his craft: woodworking. He writes about building his own furniture company, and his own furniture shop and has a picture of a beautiful table he’s created. Already, the romantic in me sees past the cold computer screen into the heart. 

This is a good guy, I think. Then, I tell myself, it doesn’t matter if he’s good. I just need his sperm to be good.

I call the bank again and place the order for his vial. I order the specimen that’s for insemination—IUI. 
I can’t believe I’m using my American Express for a sperm donor.

Difficult task two—[DONE]

What world is this? I ask myself,

Then I smile thinking about my decision.

***

I call my sister and tell her about my purchase. It feels like telemarking, or worse, like I’ve ordered something off QVC or Amazon.

I get an email: thank you for your order.

It’s the end of august, which means orientation meetings back at school. My sister says, hang up with me and call mom and dad. It’s going to be fine. I love you, she says; you got this, and I know I do.

Thank you, I say. I love you, too.

The phone call is slightly comical knowing my parents were probably sitting next to each other on their bed, or at the kitchen table. And most of the time my father gets his information about me from my mother, but gets jealous and makes fun of me with things like, oh so you don’t need to call and tell your father? This time was different. I knew this was different. I had to speak to him directly, and I think in those days, I wasn’t going into their house yet, because this was before Covid boosters and everyone was still in terror and shock. I didn’t want to have this talk with my father, despite my knowing he’d be supportive.

On this night, my dad’s voice on the phone is soft and warm, like it is when he knows I’m upset about something or when he’s really proud of me or happy for me. Soothing actually, which is odd because normally my dad has a very low voice, one suited for television and radio.

He asks me a bunch of questions in his typical way. My dad is very logical, rational and calculated. He’s smart and quick. I answer most of his questions. However, he asks one question I refuse to answer and it is one of the first times I set a real boundary between myself and my parents.  

Who is the one you chose?, he asks.

I get upset and stern. I fight back tears.
I’m not sharing that. It’s personal, but it’s all medically cleared and safe and that’s that, I said.

***

Sperm is a fortune. It’s ridiculous. You spend so much of your life trying NOT to get pregnant, and never think about what it would actually cost if you needed it. At the end of the day it’s an industry, a business, just like anything else. As my mother would say, everything is about money.

I was not prepared.

A vial is around $800-1000. Sometimes it is more if someone has a super healthy track record and medical history.

I know I’m lucky that I have health insurance, but so much wasn’t covered. There were so many things I had to pay for out of pocket. I think people assumed my parents would help me pay for all my treatments, but they didn’t. They couldn’t. I had a few friends who venmo—ed me monetary gifts here and there, and it meant the world to me, but sperm was expensive, and one vial served one treatment. I had no idea I was going to go through so many treatments. To this day, I don’t know how I paid for everything. Thank god for my AMEX; thank god for my credit limit.

It took me years to pay it off, but I have no regrets. I will say sometimes things work out. Everything is about timing.

Rilke said something like, it’s a mystery, and we meet the mystery and then it talks.

It’s true. All of it is a mystery.

The hardest part of living is the mystery of it all. I try to listen. I’ve gotten better at listening, but I always want to know the HOW and the WHY.

I’m a planner and this was something I could only somewhat plan, or feel as if I was planning. I had to meet the mystery of it all. I had to be vulnerable.

Fine, I said. Start talking.

Around the time I chose my donor, I was also contacted by the New York Times via email. I was ecstatic and ended up writing three articles for the “At Home” section, which was once the “Travel” section, before Covid hit. I was asked to create a poetry activity that physically used the newspaper in one way or another.

I came up with a few different assignments, so to speak:
One was on the “Cento.”
Another was on “Found Poetry.”
And the last was on the “Golden Shovel.”

They were all well-received. People wrote in with their poems and I was lucky enough to work with my editor on three follow-up pieces, where I chose my favorites and wrote about my choices. It brought me so much joy in such a stressful and unnerving time in my life. It was not only one of the most thrilling experiences to see something I wrote on the back page of The Times, but it was also thrilling to see how it inspired other writers. I got so many emails through the contact me tab on my website.

I don’t want this to sound as bad as it will, but the greatest part about it was the money. There were nights I just cried about the debt I was accruing, and I was grateful to accept each and every automatic bank deposit.

The Times paid for all my sperm donors. I used to joke that if I actually got pregnant, I’d write a gracious op-ed about the bounty of poetry and how I owe my beautiful baby to my editor. That never happened, but it made me laugh thinking about it. Things have a way of working out.  
What a bounty it would’ve all been.
It was still a bounty in other ways.

***

Men.

Let’s talk about them.

I often thought to myself, a man would make this easier, but maybe not. I think, oh, it would be so nice to have a man beside me during these fertility treatments, rather than being alone in my apartment with my newly adopted cat, Moira Rose.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a man at the table with me helping me open the alcohol swab, passing me the vial from the refrigerator, the needle from the kitchen pantry, helping me with the assembly line of my days and nights?  

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a man on the couch, waiting for me to be done with my shots to say, good job, Leah?

But maybe that’s the wrong approach.

Why? Why do I think that would make things easier?

So I’d have someone to cry with?
So I could stop texting my mother about all my emotions?

So I could have a nice arm around my shoulder and someone to tell me they love me?

I have people who love me.

I do.

My mother says, don’t think it would be any easier to have a partner or a husband. It wouldn’t. Plenty of couples go through this and it’s even harder involving someone else.  
Maybe she’s right.

My sister says, you’re better off on your own. It’s hassle free.

Hassle-free? Not quite, but I guess they’re right. Here, I make the rules and I make the decisions, but I’m also the one shuffling the machine, testing the bulbs and oiling the gears.

***

I think about all the sperm donors I bought, five in total. How wild to know these men in this un—intimate way, to know these men through their identification numbers, and to know these men through their essential urges: reproduction.

Go ahead and roll your eyes. It’s unreal.

***

My gynecologist tells me to not to waste my money and just go have a one night stand. I am laying on her examination table as she pulls her hand out of me. I am horrified.

Even women treat other women indifferently.

How dare she, I think.

Would she say that to one of her own daughters? I think.

“That’s not who I am,” I say.

The i is so delicate.

***

It might just be that no one knows where their life will take them, and some would say that in itself is a sort of blessing, the not knowing, and the trusting of the not knowing. I know so much, but it’s the unknowing that I’d like to bless. It’s the unknowing, I’d like to turn into some sort of prayer, some sort of foundling I could carry in my arms and bless, unless the unknowing is going to always be this loneliness.

This is nearly the middle of my life and so much is a tender blessing, but this morning, on my way to work, I step over a dead bird on the sidewalk. I keep thinking about its tousled feathers, like fur. Bless the small things just trying to navigate this awful world.

Later, walking the lower loop of the park, I step over a dead mouse and lift my head to the unexpected sun bursting through the trees and the sprinkler rising in a blessing of color so vibrant, I stop—a rainbow!

***

I listen to a podcast about a cave diver and start thinking about the B-15 Iceberg, the molar of it, its gravity, a blessing beneath the Earth, the life that it holds within its concave trappings.

It is just that—the mystery of life—beneath what we know.
I listen to the mystery.

I look out across the grassy hill and see a bride by the sailboat pond, bless her in her white gown, stepping into the green of her journey, who knows where what we count and don’t count will take us, again, it is a blessing to even be counted in the first place.

The interviewer asks the diver, what is the appeal in something so difficult and dangerous and I am stuck in that wonder.

I, too, am journeying in the unknown, alone and afraid, and about to start trying for a child on my own.

I know, I have found myself in my own wanting and everything will be okay.

***

So many women’s lives live on the wings of men and I think about my wingspan; I think about my breadth; the soars, the raking of dreams; the wading; I think about the depth of my cache; its bounty and I think about an article I read about ravens and theory of mind; how they are always looking; always burying; always thinking of the other raven’s motives: I’m done thinking like that. I remember what I’ve hid and why and where. I can uncover it in a sweep of wonder, stretching it out, like a sun, in the sky, accordioned.

***

It’s hard to believe in something, whether it’s love or hope.            
Risk and uncertainty are two of the same; it’s all about mindset.
I am minding my heart with my body, my body with my heart.
It is all so delicate.

***

Vulnerability is the birthplace of love says Brene Brown.

That’s where this comes from—this journey, this willing, and this love.

I let myself be vulnerable.

I tell myself this is extraordinary but ordinary, too.

Soon, I start going to the fertility doctor every other day, early in the morning for bloodwork, and the ball is set in motion. My father drives me early in the morning. It is basically around the block from their house on Long Island.

This doctor was recommended by my gynecologist and that’s why I trek back and forth between Manhattan and Long Island. I don’t know why I didn’t choose someone near me in Manhattan. I guess I didn’t want to do it alone, and I didn’t, I was lucky, but in the end, of course I did.

I’m usually the first appointment at 6: 15AM or 6:30AM, and it’s just me, outside, waiting to be let in at the buzzer. And it’s also just me in the waiting room and again at the nurses station.

My mother is home sleeping, and my father sits in the car in the parking lot. I always wait forever in the waiting room, listening to the radio and playing on my phone. It is hard to balance my thoughts between the pandemic, teaching and the bloodwork.

Why am I doing this now? I think, but why not?

Y is a crooked letter, my dad likes to say.

The nurse calls me in, rolls up my sleeve, takes a few vials of blood, and then I’m on my way, back in the car with my father and over to the LIRR, and then the subway and then school.

A week or so later, I’m put on my first drug and it’s a pill. Phew, I think. That’s easy enough. It’s meant to make my body drop an extra egg when it ovulates, so I can increase the chance of fertilization during the first insemination.

Looking back, the bloodwork was endless. I’ll never be afraid of another needle again.

It was all technically easy, the logistics of it, but everything else was rough. The precision, the scheduling, the traveling back and forth. My school didn’t want teachers in the building unless we were teaching. Somedays I didn’t come into work until 10AM; it was a blessing. And nobody knew what I was doing except my principal, who was a friend.

Many people cringe at that hybrid year. It was kind of a year of chaos, of upset and of anxiety sure, but for me, it was also a year of beauty and wonder. I often call it my ‘wonder year.’ I spent so many nights sleeping at my parents’ house, more than I had in years. I bonded with them on a whole other level, and they were so proud of me, night after night. I was so proud of myself. 

When the drugs increased to injections, I had a small cooler I brought back and forth with me on the railroad, and I’d go into the dining room. I’d lay everything out on the room table, like a surgeon getting ready for surgery. I’d follow my notes, do my business, throw out my sharps and my empties and come back into the kitchen, ready to hang out. 

It was like I had silent cheerleaders in the next room.

We all never thought I’d have such a problem, but that’s womanhood, so many unanswered questions.

***

I remember telling the doctor, I wanted to start with IVF, probably the most direct way to get pregnant—get the egg fertilized, implant it and let’s carry on, but protocol started with insemination, which in hindsight, I guess makes sense. It works for so many women.

It didn’t work for me. I had five inseminations with a few different donors, and there was no reason why nothing worked.

After so many failures, so much of what I feel is strain and restraint, not strength. I feel so much of my days are in want; so much is distanced in frenzy, and in flight.

Where is the rapture?

Where is the lifting off?

Maybe all the years, I’ve been told that I’m too sensitive, too emotional, too inside my own head are actually serving a purpose. I’d so much rather feel than not.

Maybe this time, I’m to turn even more inward, reverse my gaze until I’m blood and cells and veins and hormones.

***

My horoscope tells me to make appointments with euphoria, enchantment and delight, but maybe I need to reintroduce myself to myself.

Maybe this life is meant to pause, to let go; maybe there will be some delight in the unknowing, or maybe each of us takes this gap and spins it into a story that makes sense to us.

We all hunger to hold onto something certain.

Keats wrote, there is nothing stable in the world.

Keats is right, and it’s one of the hardest lessons I learn in this fertility year—stability is real, but it’s also an illusion.

So much goes unanswered; so much can flip—just like that.

***

I know, nothing comes from nothing, but doesn’t nothing strain to be something?  
I don’t know, but I know about straining. I
know. I know
I am straining to be strong,
even though I
know I am.

I do everything so right and I’m beaming with pride when I’m alone in my apartment. Each night, after my injections, I relax with New Girl on Netflix, and spend a good 20 minutes playing with Moira on the floor. We play with the ribbon and a cardboard box and nothing makes me happier than seeing her hiding behind the cardboard flap, shaking her butt and getting ready to pounce. Her joy brings me joy and together we are joyous.

I tell myself : search for the joy.
Each insemination brings a different slew of drugs. They don’t hurt, they’re just annoying, and tedious in my small studio apartment where I barely have counter space in my kitchen. Everything takes clicks and pats and pushing in and pulling up, but I am feeding the machine what it needs.

I do one shot, then throw the needle into the red receptacle on my kitchen window ledge; I look out through the window into the night, over the neighbor’s small yard, across their back fence—we all have our mysteries, I think.

***

Soon, my google calendar looks like Tetris and there’s nothing I can do about it. Some injections need to be timed, and some don’t. On one hand it’s exhausting—doing it alone, doing it in a time of such terror and uncertainty, and doing it after a day of teaching in a mask and a face shield, but on the other hand, it’s exhilarating thinking: this time it’s going to work. I am grateful no one has a social calendar these days—there’s so much agita just keeping everything stored and tidy in my pantry.

Life is a rollercoaster.

I listen to a podcast where someone says, to hover means to be not quite on the ground. There’s a possibility of wholeness.

Yes, I think. I will latch on to the possible. It’s okay to hover.
Who isn’t hovering these days?
I am an invisible whole; my two parts are aligning. 

***

The story now is survival.

My best friend Louise, a midwife in London tells me she delivered a 25-week-old baby the other day. She called her, the size of a postcard, and says, I don’t know why she was so desperate to come into this world.

I think about this baby-girl and think about the fight already in her. 

We all have a little fight inside us.
We need it in this world.

***

None of the inseminations work; they are all the same.

I decide to go all out. I start going to acupuncture before the first round of IVF. I find an acupuncturist with a sliding scale who is gracious to me because I am a single woman and a teacher. I pay her through Venmo. She lets me text her. She is on my side and together, we decide I’m going to get a good egg and everything will work out just fine. 

I try to let myself feel what I feel, but I am so overwhelmed by appointments and teaching and trying to stay healthy. I eat right, I take walks, I meditate. I am doing my best and trying to stay calm.

I am letting myself unravel, but then I will ravel-in my strength.
I know I’m going to need it.

***

What is this world?
We are all so delicate.
This comfort is a tendering I long for.

***

I breathe, I practice gratitude, and I think about the world asking.

Jeanette Winterson writes in The Guardian, that we should learn to use our memory during this time and I think about birdsong, sunlight, greens, blues, and reds when I take my walks in the park.

Is there no greater sound than need or love or an ask?

What am I asking for now?

The hardest question to ask are the ones you ask yourself. 

The ones you ask to yourself. 

The ones you ask of yourself. 

There are so many trappings. 

I am asking a lot of myself, but there is no other way. I will not wait in the wings. If I want a child, I ask myself to turn again to myself.

It’s all I have.

***

I’m reading a book about a chestnut tree and did you know they pollinate themselves?  

Wouldn’t that be lovely? I think

This makes me laugh, but then I get scared, and then I go silent. It’s a bit too close to home.

I take breaks when I can— body breaks, and mental health breaks. You need to give the body time, though I’m the kind of person that does everything fast— sometimes too fast. The breaks are important. It’s kind of like the years I spent online dating. You need stamina to keep going. You have to hit [reset] before you can begin again, replenished and full of life.

*** 

Time is a tricky one. They say everything happens for a reason.

Let’s go back about six months earlier, to 2020. I lost Graham, my cat of 16 years right before lockdown. In his last months, he became diabetic and I was terrified. Suddenly, he seemed frail, skinny and helpless. It was heartbreaking. Every morning and every night, I had to give him insulin injections, and though the needle was small, and he didn’t know what I was doing, I was so nervous of hurting him and so scared of losing him. After a month or so, he had a seizure, ended up at the Vet, lost his vision, had a series of other seizures and a day or two later, I had to put him to sleep.

It was the hardest thing I had to do. My sister drove into the city to be with me. It was awful and I couldn’t imagine my life without him, forget about being in my apartment ALL alone.

He was the love of my life, my longest relationship and though it was a nightmare saying goodbye to him, I was grateful we both didn’t have to suffer anymore during what was to be one of the hardest years of the 21st century. In hindsight, I realize he was the one who prepped me. He taught me about being a mother and he taught me about myself. He was the one who showed me what I was capable of, that I am stronger than I think I am. Maybe his love for me and my love for him, especially in those last days, was what reinforced that I could walk this path on my own.

I had to do things I never thought I’d do again, until I did, and it was even worse.

***

One night, on another walk, there’s a small band at the lower loop of the park playing “Til There Was You,” and I smile real big. It makes me feel hopeful for what’s on its way.

Sometimes, it is best to turn to sound in times of darkening or harkening.

***

Heather tells me I have more courage than anyone she knows and it makes me feel good.

Anyone is seduced by what is possible.  

***

On social media, people are turning to Emily Dickinson for comfort. That famous hermit. I laugh. I’m not the biggest fan. The last thing I want is to wear her layers of loneliness and grief, but I guess,

                                 in a way,
                                                                     I already do.

Look at me alone and wanting, just like her, alone and wanting, but our wants, I imagine, are different.

*** 

Did you know that puppies are born with their eyes and ears closed? They come into this world purely unaware. I wonder at that kind of shaping, that innocence. I wonder what it feels like to be so grounded in the unknown and the mystery, to turn belly side up, and vulnerable.

I think about who I will be this time next year, on the other side of defeat, and I go silent.

I stop myself. This should teach me about the present moment.

In the present, I am being patient. I am trying to stop my mind and just be.

My therapist says maybe the pandemic is the end and the beginning of life?

I ruminate on that.

***

I am unbecoming myself and becoming something new. I am beginning my story over. I am beginning the story over. What is coming, once frozen, soon will be parched and open-mouthed; soon will be relieved and mystical and striving for a voice, a laugh, a face from within. I can smile now, knowing I will take my chances; knowing, I didn’t race away from the fear, the silent flight of loneliness; knowing that I went towards the glimmer, its stalk, its humbling of the self.

I will pattern anew. The I, once heroic, will bird itself into glee, a testament to seeing, a light in the room once dark. No wait—starts, no empties of meaning, the upended now neutral. The unbecoming will become again: a story, already familiar.

Getting here, to this point, to the middle of this line, is a becoming, is a stare with the eye, a stare in the face of the world, a wave of both truth and toxin,

a whale of a run towards the light of any eye, any heart,               
             my heart.

***

What is this world?

(Parts of this memoir excerpt first appeared in Hobart, Green Mountain Review, Magma Poetry (UK), and Air/Light.)